The Beiderbecke Affair

A large, grossly sinister rodent gnawing its way upon agile minds, understandably mistaking the fierce lobes for Swiss cheese.

Book critics are people too.

I am now lying on a bed looking through blankets of billowing wool to where I am told there is a world beyond the bed. But that’s only because the dubious winds of news have breezed along a strange tendentious trajectory after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Book critics are people too.

And it’s all because I haven’t visited Zimbabwe and met some starving young black boy telling me he wants to write. Why did the healthy glow of cheerleading practice sort of stick out in this section? It certainly stuck out for me. I mean, these are, for the most part, durable little machines.

Book critics are people too.

Such is not the case here in New York, which seems to fear the vox populi getting their grubby little fingers on an obscure tome. In such circumstances, there is only one recourse: bring out the cat. But since this is the film medium, there’s something fundamentally more surreal going on.

Book critics are people too.

A brief goose-step from deadline dancing for some afternoon discoveries. Yes, later in the afternoon, there was the slush and the pungent marshmallow smell of decay that penetrated even my clogged nostrils.

Book critics are people too.

I will ask them if they know anybody in Zimbabwe and they will tell me to either buy something or fuck off. I’m not sure what this exercise says exactly, except that the guy who keeps up this place is a relentlessly curious and cantankerous bastard who drinks too many martinis, doesn’t sleep enough, and has some political empathy. Which is probably pretty close to the mark.

Book critics are people too.

Hell, when was the last time that book critics met up for bowling or mini golf? I was stunned by this. Is it the same type of person who would replace vanilla extract with white-out on Free Ice Cream Day? Because this isn’t just about the glorification of ignorance, but the glorification of people who refuse to accept anything but their ignorance. If we continue to accept such rampant stupidity without protest, at this rate, we’ll be queuing up for Ass: The Movie in a lot less than 500 years.

[The preceding has been a work composed entirely from the contents of Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant. Previous installments in the series can be found here.]

How dare the readers think for themselves?

How dare they fail to recognize the Grand Importance of the New York Times Book Review? This is a matter of delicacy and urgency. All I have to say is thank heavens I’m wearing pants right now. Mailer was so insecure, so arrogant, so unwilling to listen, that he took out advertisements in newspapers that panned his work. Oh, Derek, Holier Than Thou! Don’t deign to call me emotionally immature when your own ponderous sentiments show all the wisdom of a braying skeletal cow about to be shot by a gaunt farmer desperately plowing dry land. If it makes you feel better, you can piss on my grave when I croak. There, happy? Mailer who never listened to anybody but himself. I can only presume that you prefer to jerk off to your dull and vitiated solipsism rather than something suitably pornographic—the way that most people living on the planet I inhabit do. What did Mailer give us? What was his chief contribution to letters? Mailer as King of the Universe. Mailer as knowing egomaniac. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to dissent. And it sure as hell ain’t civil. I’ve been called an egotistical asshole, a hero, a Buddhist (at least twelve times!), a “troubled young man,” and many other things, both pleasant and minatory. But the idea of talking to Mailer was like being trapped in a closet with an insufferable narcissist. Let’s get a room, baby! Don’t worry. I’ll be gentle. I merely dust the floor with your crusty husk.

[The preceding has been a work composed entirely from the contents of Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant. Previous installments in the series can be found here.]

There are many nonoverlapping sights that catch my attention:

And since it’s a Monday, I think it’s safe to say that a little NSFW interspecies erotica is in order. Chipper Jones pops the ball. It looks like it’s going to be your garden-variety line drive. Her jeans slip down her waist, forming a sharp hyperbolic ellipse that reveals the beginnings of a paunch and the top portion of an oval tattoo close to vulva. I honestly don’t know. I’ll have more to say on this, and other matters, in about two weeks, when I’ll be making a major announcement here. But I truly believe we are in a serious convergence. It’s an Aristotlean plot structure unfolding in seconds. Hyperbolic curve revealing hidden hyperbolic curve clipped by the denim demarcating line. Maybe it’s because Pessl is attractive and I’m just some average-looking thirtysomething going bald. Maybe it’s because Pessl doesn’t like to consort with my kind. Stephen Elliott, in this case, is full of shit. When I offered a few unusual perceptions of her book, it was apparently incompatible with her absolute authorial intentions. A balletic burst, the flicker of tendrils, just to get that improvised third out. With its wholesome-debauched dichotomy, it reminds me of the Beriln Wall. False Manichean dichotomies such as print vs. online, flyover vs. bicoastal, n+1 vs. litblogs, John Freeman vs. Edward Champion, and the like aren’t going to get us anywhere. Apparently, Keen’s ontological tipping point arose because of O’Reilly Media. He was one of the authors I read in my early twenties who taught me that politics and history were as rich in American tradition as our cultural lifeblood. It all goes down in a blink. I also believe we can put last week’s fracas behind us and concentrate on what we all do to soldier forth into the literary future. Flying forward like the dangling entrails of a muskrat punctured by an interstate semi.

[The preceding has been a work composed entirely from the contents of Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant. Previous installments in the series can be found here.]

Up until Wednesday night . . .

. . . I didn’t believe in the afterlife. I asked Foer if he considered stabbing himself because of his youth and his wealth, pointing out the slam-dunk posterity advantages of an early Sylvia Plath-like literary death. My Wiccan friend (whom I shall refer to in these pages as “Broom Hither”) pushed me down onto her bed, tied me up with several painful strands of tight rope, carved a pentagram into my chest, and then demanded that I bark like a dog. (And if you haven’t guessed already, I’m one of the former.)

I’ll confess that music is important and that I listen to a lot of it.

While we’re always interested to see Tanenhaus experiment, we’ve long tired of Sam Tanenhaus’ hollow promises on the fiction front. Having a supporting argument is one of those nifty things that maintain due process and keep a good subject matter convincing. But my concerns rest not with mortality, which is inevitable, but the more troubling question of enduring legacy. To say that I am mortified does not even cut the mustard.

Since Sittenfeld, who single-handedly launched the war between literary authors and chick lit authors, is content to call any woman who writes outside her own literary sensibilities “a slut,” and is incapable of writing an essay without broadcasting her own furies and sexual frustrations (does she smile much or is she mostly humorless?), the time has come to attempt to understand Sittenfeld.

No. Because reading has taken neither a positive or a negative impression.

You mean to say that if I go into a Universal Unitarian church with an iPod strapped on and start talking with some slinky blonde that I’ll take her home and ensure her at least six orgasms? Wow, who knew? Probably has a good deal with the way I was brought up (which was without a whole lot) and my overwhelming need to know things.

I just wrote an extremely long post about a post on another litblog. But it’s lost.

We applaud this in the most strenuous manner.

[The preceding has been a work composed entirely from the contents of Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant. The first installment in the series can be found here, the second installment here, the third here, and the fourth here.]

I remain very much an adolescent . . .

. . . albeit one with a few irons in the fire of maturation. The Galloping Gourmet has nothing on my ass. What books can you best jerk off to? I can’t speak for others, but since the NYTBR is often misconstrued as the flagship weekly newspaper book review supplement, it’s disconcerting to see the Review regularly come across as a particularly crass frat boy spilling a keg of beer over the upholstery of a Rolls Royce on his way home from a stag party. Unless, of course, you confuse platform heels with a list of positions.

It is Smith’s inability to pursue the import he clearly wants to depict that cripples his film. She’s left to offer doe-eyed entropy when not making out with O’Halloran. It doesn’t help that she wears a T-shirt reading, “Mrs. Hicks,” which further highlights her thespic incompetence. Also, Colson Whitehead hates ice cream, which is a very sad and possibly more troubling thing than damning a writer exclusively on a phrase.

[The preceding has been a work composed entirely from the contents of Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant. The first installment in the series can be found here, the second installment here, and the third here.]

One Step Closer to “Assfuck”

Powell’s Chris Bolton, who declared Scott Smith’s The Ruins, who raved about the book earlier in the year, sets down his thoughts in full-length review form. What a crock of shit. Even if Jhumpa does live in Brooklyn. All this is a great inconvenience and it means that the hours I have set aside to relax this weekend will instead be spent contending with maintenance men. Vollmann notes that the death of his journalist friend (chronicled in Rising Up and Rising Down) was an act of war and that “he has no hard feelings toward them.” Calls have been made and, at least for today, my shower was creatively taken, with deft acrobatic movements across dry areas of the floor birfurcated by an orange bucket and a sporadic downpour.

They are adhering to some dubious cinematic mythology comparable to the Lord of the Rings movies. If this Puritanical move is what it takes to get fired, to (in PBS’s words) “undermine her character’s credibility with our audience,” current American society is about as unenlightened as the Dark Ages. One thing I would absolutely recommend to those who are just getting into Boyle, or have only read his novels.

I respond:

There are lots of interesting points to respond to.

[The preceding has been a work composed entirely from the contents of Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant. The first installment in this series can be found here, the second installment here.]

Postings are going to be light and then heavy.

But whatever the format and timing, they will be comprehensive on the other side. To address all of this, I should start by saying from the offset that I view “summer reading” as a load of poppycock. Beyond that, it’s about as coherent as an athletic piglet leaving an unauthorized orgy, and I couldn’t describe it in any reasonable terms. It is, in my view, something of a predictable train wreck to experience, but it does offer a bit of structural prowess in chronicling a four year period.

Frankly, I’m more interested in panties that are worn on ladies and, if the mood is right, slid down sinuous legs, ideally with a soul attached. All this is the aftermath of a remarkably repressed upbringing, in which the very mention of sex was enough to cause melodramatic pronouncements of surprise, if not flames to spontaneously burn onyx sppors through my bedroom. Interrogation is to be expected from a jealous character during such an pivotal interruption, but there is nothing here in the dialogue which suggests or even insinuates Larry’s sense of remorse or following up on the news that Larry has just confessed that he has slept with a prostitute.

The whiff of self-delusion’s overwhelming.

At the risk of postulating neuroses writ large, I have slept seven and a half of the past seventy-two hours.

At the risk of coming across as a jejune generalist, Butler didn’t just demonstrate that science fiction wasn’t the exclusive territory of white male writers, but she proved more adeptly than most writers that issues of race, environment, ideals in a dystopic state, and the like were the stuff of Fiction. Period.

[The preceding has been a work composed entirely from the contents of Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant. The first installment in this series can be found here.]

The thin reddish fuzz . . .

. . . the sad balance of my forefront follicles, resembled the collection of pubic hairs I had just seen in the men’s room after micturating into the urinal. Of course, like every blogger, I check my Technorati rating every ten minutes. It may permit us to understand the instinctive impulses from a binary perspective, which should in turn shift paradigms. It had left me impotent. I don’t know about you folks (and perhaps some of the more genre-blind participants might want to offer a few words here), but I find it extremely interesting when this happens. It is mimesis, rather than transmutation. Generalized castigations sans examples. It’s all the ooze that’s fit to squint. My feeling is that Boyle, despite a lumpy midsection, eventually figured out a way to fuse his penchant for troubled humans (and certainly Peck Wilson comes across as a farcical foe) with a gripping cross-country thriller. Fact: Andrew Baron has a large cock. It’s bigger than mine. I know this because we both dropped our Dockers and it was Andrew who whipped out the ruler. It often clouds his better judgment in matters of the heart. Then any decent poetry critic must divagate within this territory.

My in-house randomtade.

[The preceding has been a work composed entirely from the contents of Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant.]