The Abbeville Manual of Style

Ed Champion is a book blogger and host of The Bat Segundo Show, a popular literary podcast featuring long-form interviews with assorted contemporary authors and artists. His gonzo writing and performing style (often inseparable from that of Mr. Segundo, his alter ego) combines a radio DJ’s gleeful scabrousness with a passionate reader’s sensitivity to the printed word. In an only lightly censored interview with The Abbeville Manual of Style, Mr. Champion revealed the origin story behind his unique career, his unexpected penchant for Victorian literature, and why loganberry mint juleps just might save the publishing industry.

AMoS: You have a very distinctive last name. What, if anything, are you a champion of?

EC: If you must attach embarrassingly quixotic correlations to my surname, I am a champion of the misunderstood voices that nobody wants to hear, the dangerous and necessary ideas that are overlooked in our sad and mad rushes to gulp down the latest unnecessary comforts, and any mechanism or individual who lives to expand and distort our understanding of the bountiful world before us.

AMoS: Describe the path that led you to literary blogging and The Bat Segundo Show. Feel free to throw in picaresque embellishments as necessary.

EC: I was holed up in an unpleasant job, attempting to cheer up many unhappy co-workers and biting my tongue and putting the vise on my four lobes too many times every day. As anyone working an office job is well aware, there is a good deal of energy devoted to pretending and disguising. This is not particularly healthy for American innovation. But those are the facts, and we put up with this. (This is why The Office has remained such a television hit.)  Be yourself and you will find the HR manager sliding of box of Kleenex across a desktop as you ponder how you can survive on your severance pay and what you’re going to tell your family.  I needed an outlet.  And I also needed a simple way to wrangle together book news. (Keep in mind that this was back in the pre-Cambrian days before podcasts and before Twitter. There were maybe ten to fifteen book blogs that I was aware of.) I revived my blog under a new name, Return of the Reluctant.  For some reason, people paid attention and were amused with what I had to say. I was truly astonished to learn just how many people in New York I had pissed off for telling the truth. To this day, I go out of my way to check my stats infrequently. If I know how many eyeballs are watching me, I can’t tell the truth. So I have made it deliberately very difficult for me to access. 

The Bat Segundo Show came about as a shameless excuse to interview David Mitchell, one of my favorite contemporary authors. I had some primitive audio equipment and had heard about this new thing called podcasting that the kids were talking about. So I arranged the interview and was stunned to learn that I could actually talk to cool people if I called and asked. With neither a studio nor a clue, I somehow developed this show out of nowhere through trial and error. Publicists began contacting me. More books arrived than I could possibly read. I did this all with heavy research, vigorous preparation, and without any pre-interviews, feeling that the best conversations involved working without a net. I created a deliberately obnoxious character to introduce each show and was stunned to learn that people actually liked him. To this day, people still ask me if I do all the voices. Half the people love it. Half the people hate it. I receive lots of love mail and lots of hate mail. Story of my life: I have the appeal of a cult audience—a small but loyal following.

AMoS: The publishing industry is currently at a technological crossroads. Where do you, sir, stand on the issue of the e-book? Do you prefer it to the print book? Prefer different formats depending on the kind of book in question? And why?

EC: As someone who has tried to be an early technological adopter, I think it’s foolish to thumb your nose at valuable developments like Twitter and the e-book. One of the primary reasons the publishing industry is in trouble is because it continues to ignore present developments. Conversely, and this is my own easily elidible self-interest talking, I believe it’s essential to keep your distractions to a minimum. It’s too early to make a call on e-books. They don’t even have a 1% market share just yet. Personally, I prefer print. The technology has not caught up to my own particular and peculiar reading habits and I’m extremely troubled by the idea that e-ink has made text impermanent. I’m probably one of the last guys who actually prints off what he writes and marks it up with a pen, and I am always deeply suspicious of my own writing when I compose without printing it off! Having said that, I’d be a goddamn fool not to jump up and down about having numerous books available in one thin container, or to not get giddy about the cross-referential possibilities. This will be the future, once someone figures out price point and studies precisely how the iPod became big. But right now, it’s mostly a lot of hype. Why are we so willing to trust Amazon when they haven’t disclosed their stats to us? While I don’t presently have an e-reader, I am going out of my way to investigate any that I run into at trade shows and post my findings on the site. But even if e-readers hit a majority of the market share, you’ll have to pry my paper books from my cold dead hands! (Does this answer your questions?)

AMoS: Tell us your favorite fiction book, nonfiction book, and—just because, to our knowledge, no one has ever asked you this—Victorian novel.

EC: How absolutely terrible of you to make me choose like Styron’s heroine! That’s like asking a swinger to choose who was the best lay, or beseeching a gourmand to tell you ABSOLUTELY what the best restaurant in the world is. YOU JUST DON’T DO IT! It’s an impossible choice subject both to subjective view and vagaries of the moment. It doesn’t do justice to ALL the great books and the wondrous writers toiling out there.  However, you deserve a less cheeky answer. So I can say that the books that have most RECENTLY knocked my socks off (emphasis on RECENTLY; not ABSOLUTE FAVORITE) are Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement (fiction) and Michelle Goldberg’s The Means of Reproduction (nonfiction). The latter is particularly important for people to read right now, especially after George Tiller’s terrible murder and because reproductive rights as a whole are little discussed. 

As for Victorian novels, you have unexpectedly hit upon a subject that I don’t believe I’ve written about—something that may explain certain facets of my personality that may or may not interest your readers.  When I was a teenager, I wolfed down tons of Victorian novels.  They were big and they were classic. And when not absorbed in the mammoth narratives and the doughty language, I somehow intuited that you had to behave like this.  Being of a rather shy disposition, I began to adopt a certain gentlemanly manner patterned on Dickens, Thackeray, the Bronte sisters, and Sir Walter Scott. And then I met some punks and theater people who took me off the straight and narrow.  The result is the somewhat odd person that I am now. But the Victorian novel that probably had the most positive effect on me during this time was Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers.  It isn’t his best book, but it was the novel that demonstrated just how funny Dickens really was. Here was an author who not only got the reading public excited, but who was both astute and theatrical about human behavior.  It was thanks to The Pickwick Papers that I became extremely obsessed with 19th century tort laws at the age of eighteen, and developed, as a result, a much looser idea of relationships—both literally and figuratively.

AMoS: Of all the authors you’ve had the chance to interview, which do you most admire in terms of their literary output? Who has made for the best discussion on the show?

EC: Similar to my previous answer, you’re asking me to choose favorites. But now that you a mention it, there’s probably a very good reason that T. C. Boyle is the only guest thus far to appear three times on The Bat Segundo Show. I very much admire the way he’s written so many different novels over the course of several different periods.

AMoS: We ran into each other briefly at BookExpo America this year. In your mind, what was the single most pleasant surprise and the single biggest disappointment to emerge from the event?

EC: The most pleasant surprise was that you, Austin, actually existed! You were not some spambot or an intricate automaton, but a living, breathing soul! (Please don’t tell me that you’re not! I’d be terribly disappointed.) The biggest regret is that I only got to talk with you for about five minutes. Sure, that’s long enough for you to register in my memory. But it’s not enough for me to develop any lasting impression BEYOND those five minutes! That was my biggest disappointment, and I take all the blame! No calumny attached to you, sir! I am at fault! And when I am finished typing your questions, I shall beat my elliptical head against the lintel and sob for somebody important.

AMoS: You’ve made no secret of your fondness for the twin joys of literature and intoxication. When you curl up with a good book, what drink do you like to have on the table beside you? Bonus points if it’s somehow literature-themed.

EC: Good Christ, you make me sound like William [-------]* Styron! Look, I enjoy drinking. But it’s not something I obsess over. I can neither read nor write with a cocktail in hand. Despite my raucous disposition, I need complete and total clarity when I approach the written word. I am secular by nature and I suppose this vaguely monastic insistence on sobriety for something I love should settle the matter. 

What I can offer is a drink—as yet unmade—that I extracted from a World War I cookbook found through Google Books. I recently became very interested in mint juleps—largely because the mint juleps came to me. I attempted to make two mint juleps at a party not long ago, feigning my expertise, and the seltzer blew up in my face like a silent film comedy routine, forcing me to stick with bourbon. And then I read about the mint julep controversy in Mark Kurlansky’s excellent new book, Food of a Younger Land.  From here, I located this recipe for the loganberry mint julep:

   1. Soak a bunch of fresh crushed mint in bottled loganberry juice for two hours; then add as much sparkling water as juice.

   2. Strain, pour into a glass, and serve with a marshmallow, a loganberry or raspberry, and quite a bunch of fresh mint.

   3. If this is not sweet enough, strained honey to taste may be added.

What is bottled loganberry juice? Here’s what you can use. There’s a company called Crystal Beach that markets canned loganberry (and even syrup!) in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.  Works very well with gin, I’m told. But I’ve yet to attempt to make the drink. And due to the regrettable class snobbery in the five boroughs, you can only obtain the loganberry in upstate New York. However, if enough people express interest, perhaps we might be able to figure out how to save the publishing industry over a loganberry mint julep party. I’ll hunt down the Crystal Beach. Who’s with me?

It’s very possible that the loganberry mint julep may be a girly drink, but I’m willing to put my masculinity on the line to revive a forgotten drink.

[*The omitted word rhymes with "ducking" and was intended to convey a sense of heightened excitement, not to suggest copulative activity (although Mr. Champion is fond of both). Because of the mixup and the possibly profane associations dictated by Abbeville policy, Mr. Champion insisted on appending this small note of clarification in lieu of washing his mouth out with a bar of soap. Cut the man some slack for being unflappable. -EC]

It was a pleasure meeting Mr. Champion at BEA as well, and we look forward to trying his recommended drink. We’re a little concerned, though: will a combination of mint, berries, marshmallow, and strained honey really be sweet enough for our liking? Just in case, we’re thinking of dousing the whole thing in chocolate syrup. “To taste.”