“An illustration with the Up Front column last Sunday was published in error,” reads a correction in this coming Sunday’s edition of The New York Times Book Review. “The Howard Hampton it depicts is the leader of the New Democratic Party of Ontario, not the reviewer with the same name who was profiled in the column.” The 50-year-old reviewer with the same name lives in Apple Valley, California, and was the rare recipient of a biographical blurb at the front of the NYTBR, pointing to his assessment of Heavy Metal Islam by Mark LeVine.
Briefly noted was critic Hampton’s growing up under the influence of Greil Marcus, Pauline Kael and Lester Bangs. As reported in today’s National Post, the outgoing provincial NDP leader —who is on vacation and thus could not be reached for comment — is reportedly more partial to the Rolling Stones, Ella Fitzgerald and Buena Vista Social Club. The sketchy mix-up was noted just as finished copies of the July 20 Book Review rolled off the presses over a week beforehand, reports the reachable Hampton, allowing for a corrected online caricature prior to last Sunday. While running the risk of producing more editorial effluvia about this honest mistake than the 220 words that accompanied it, an email to Howard Hampton, USA posed the simplest of questions: how does it feel?
“Amenable enough, though my reaction can be pretty much summed up in, or as, a shrug. I'd like to say I felt a Borgesian tingle up and down my spine when I was informed — well in advance — of the mistake, or at least that I heard The Twilight Zone theme in my head, but in reality I just chalked the whole thing up to the Age of Google. The perils of sharing a name with someone who is much photographed and yet unknown in the US.”
“I have to admit I wish I'd been mistaken for someone a little less whitebread — times like this, I envy my friend Charles Taylor, the critic who shares a name not only with a most eminent philosopher but the ex-Liberian dictator. Now being mistaken for an African strongman, or at least a Funkadelic guitarist, that would have really been something.”
The aforementioned Charles Taylor wrote about Hampton’s anthology Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses for the Los Angeles Times in December 2006. And given how this weekend marks the last week the LA Times will run a standalone book review section, it seems anyone still left aspiring to write them for major American newspapers need all the publicity they can get. This marked Hampton’s second byline in the NYT Book Review — last year, he reviewed Ingrid Bergman: A Personal Biography.
Hampton was the recipient of his own heavily mixed NYTBR ink, courtesy of reviewer Dave Itzkoff, part of a “Pop Culture Chronicle” roundup: “At a time when the alternative weekly is about as relevant as the nutritional-content panel on a cereal box, it’s worth asking, Is there anything about the institution that’s worth keeping alive? The writing of Hampton, a critic whose work has been a staple of papers like The Village Voice and City Pages, and of glossier publications like Film Comment and Artforum, typifies a style that the alt-weekly once pioneered and that I hope really is in its final throes: the juxtaposition of high and low art for no discernible reason, and the layering of reference upon reference upon reference until the writer’s intent can be understood by no one.”
But a dash of recognition amongst those Ontario residents still seduced by the overpriced lure of a dead-tree Sunday New York Times should merit Hampton his due over at Regret the Error.
And where does the non-NDP Howard Hampton place himself on the political spectrum?
“I’m a lapsed anarchist,” he writes, “leaning toward laissez-faire socialism in my uninsured middle-age.”
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