Category / Bat Segundo

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Brent Spiner

Brent Spiner appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #233. Spiner is most recently a producer and performer on the album, Dreamland.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Ducking his head and dodging paranoid crooners.

Guest: Brent Spiner

Subjects Discussed: Natural reverb, conversational limitations, co-owning a recording studio with Dave Way, being a control freak, the shaky profitability of the music industry, self-distributing a CD through Bellarama, David Byrne’s DIY article, the lack of response from magazines and newspapers vs. the response from blogs and online sites, being restricted by self-production, the distribution for Ol’ Yellow Eyes is Back, getting mechanical rights for the songs, merging “I Love You” with “Nice and Easy,” the difficulties of getting Cole Porter’s “Let’s Fall in Love,” DJ Giagni, tap dancing and footfalls, sound effects, maracas that appear on the left speaker, arguments for and against the older man-younger woman musical trope, certain elements that are holding back Dreamland from being transposed to a live performance, the belting quality of Spiner’s voice, wrestling, Spiner’s extraordinary claims as an opera singer, Mark Hamill as a figure to help smooth over the rancor between two popular science fiction franchises, growing up in Houston, the demolition of the Shamrock Hilton in June 1987, Cecil Pickett and the brothers Quaid, Randy Quaid and Actors’ Equity, Spiner’s complex feelings for Rutger Hauer, Hauer and Whoopi Goldberg, taking umbrage with YouTube commenters, working with Maude Maggart, signing on for a six-year contract for a show that rhymes with “car wreck,” committing to a project without knowing when it will end, Threshold, negotiating the limitations of television, the relationship between art vs. commerce, why Spiner moved to Los Angeles, Superhero Movie, living like a college student vs. an adult lifestyle, and the trappings and consistent struggles of being an actor.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I should observe that you grew up in Houston.

Spiner: Yes.

Correspondent: Of course, for a long time, the Shamrock Hilton was there.

Spiner: Right.

Correspondent: And what is rather unusual is that it was demolished in June 1987, which almost exactly coincides with your big break on the show that shall not be named. I was wondering if you ever contemplated this connection, and whether the hotel [in Dreamland] may have jumped out because of this. Why did you choose the hotel? And what of the Shamrock Hilton?

Spiner: You know what, Ed, I’m not sure what the question is really. And I’m not even sure you know what the question is.

Correspondent: No, no, I’m just throwing associations at you.

Spiner: Yeah, you know what?

Correspondent: I figured that you can handle this.

Spiner: Let me say, and I will say the word, I did Star Trek purposefully because of the demise of the Shamrock Hotel.

Correspondent: Yeah. I knew it.

Spiner: There was no other reason that I took that job. When they told me…

Correspondent: …that Houston was dead to you.

Spiner: Yeah, Houston was dead to me once the Shamrock Hilton was gone. But let me just say this. How do you know about the Shamrock Hilton?

Correspondent: I just am curious.

Spiner: Are you from Houston?

Correspondent: No, I’m not. I’ve never actually been in Texas, aside from, I believe, a layover. But I just knew about it. I knew that big people came through there.

Spiner: Yup. Oh! Please.

Correspondent: And so I figured you hung out there.

Spiner: I did.

Correspondent: When these big people made their way through there.

Spiner: I once saw Mel Torme at the Shamrock.

Correspondent: Really?

Spiner: At the Shamrock pool. Walking fast. And even more importantly, I once saw Jock Mahoney doing chin-ups outside by the Shamrock pool.

Correspondent: Did you talk with these folks when you were there?

Spiner: You know, I didn’t. I wish I’d talked to Jock Mahoney, which is another story altogether.

Download BSS #233: Brent Spiner (MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Sarah Manguso

Sarah Manguso appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #232. Manguso is most recently the author of The Two Kinds of Decay.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating fifty-five additional states of decay.

Author: Sarah Manguso

Subjects Discussed: David Markson, sentences that originate in other formats, fan mail, whether a paragraph is truly a paragraph, problems with typesetting nomenclature, remembering personal moments at 1,000 words a day, word arrangement units (”WAUs”), themes vs. timeline, organic vs. inorganic writing, unrecognized planning mechanisms, thinking of the reader, Adam Thirlwell’s The Delighted States, syntactic barriers and foreshadowing meaning, mosaic tiles, the goofy perils of being called a poet, incidental metaphors, the engine of intelligence getting in the way, the uncertainty of employment, the solipsistic degrees of writing, stumbling upon a cohesive idea of what the universe entails, other memoirs of illness, categorization and after-the-fact marketing, reading fiction while writing, John Cheever’s Falconer, surveillance and paranoia, the alphabetical pursuit of hobbies, and the identity of the famous writer baffled by the idea of a hobby other than writing.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Manguso: I thought of the pieces as an arrangement in two phases. The first phase was completely chaotic and the second phase was orderly. And during the chaotic first draft phase, the project that I set myself was really just to try to remember everything I could remember about this nine-year period in my life. Just everything. Every individual memory that I could bring up. And after my latest revision had lasted seven years, after that time, it really did seem that the memories had become particulate. Like there really was just one memory that espoused the insertion of the first central line in my chest. And it really did seem to have hardened in my memory into this item, this thing, this chunk of this chapter. And so while I was first writing the book, I didn’t think about chronology. Mainly because I had no idea how to write a book about one thing. I’d never done it before. And I didn’t know anything about narrative or what should come first. I really just wrote the pages all as individual files. And once I couldn’t remember anything else, I printed them all out and tried to notate based on memory and based on asking people what months and what year each thing had happened. And then I just put them in chronological order.

Correspondent: Well, there’s specific phrasing for some of these “thingies.” Pardon my…

Manguso: Let’s call them chapters now. I think that sounds more professional.

Correspondent: These particular word arrangement units. WAUs. Wows?

Manguso: Wows.

Correspondent: We’ll call them wows. Or waz.

Manguso: I’m going to call them chapters. But I like wow.

Correspondent: You often have text within text. With this italicization. But you have a particular timeline. Because you often use “the day before the decision I wrote” or “I wrote this three months after the diagnosis.” And so it seems that not only arranging these wows into themes, but also into a timeline. I’m wondering how you place prioritization upon a theme over a timeline. Were there certain circumstances? Was this entirely an organic process? Or was there just a lot of tinkering around with order and with rhythm? The way we were talking about this, it almost seems like this quarto of some sort.

Manguso: Well, I wish I knew. I’m not really sure how to differentiate an organic process from an inorganic process.

Correspondent: Okay. Let’s just say blindly intuitive vs. carefully planned and calculated.

Manguso: Well, at the risk of sounding difficult, I’m really trying my best to remember what it was like to write this book. But I made the thing. And the thing is a result of my guiding intelligence engaged with my memory. And I don’t know if I can really distinguish between the decisions that were more intellectual than intuitive. Or more intuitive than intellectual. I wish I knew. It is true that, after the book was done or after the final draft was done, it does seem that there were themes that had been inserted or injected into the book by some planning mechanism that I didn’t really recognize. But I think that’s kind of a familiar recognition to have after you make a thing. It makes sense in ways that you weren’t exactly planning. I’d rather not say that the whole thing is mysterious to me. But I think enough of it is that I’m hesitant to say, “Well, I meant to this, this, and this.” I don’t know what I really meant.

Correspondent: Well, I mean, how much should we be really dwelling upon dichotomies?

Download BSS #232: Sarah Manguso (MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Paul Auster

Paul Auster appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #231. Auster is most recently the author of Man in the Dark.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Opening himself up to explanation.

Author: Paul Auster

Subjects Discussed: Starting a novel from a title, the advance titles contained within The Book of Illusions, the working title of The Music of Chance, Mr. Blank, the relationship between Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark, shorter baroque novels vs. longer naturalistic novels, the use and non-use of quotation marks within speech, the writing history of The Brooklyn Follies, the political nature of ending novels, the 2000 presidential election, parallel worlds, the death of Uri Grossman, didactic novels, the comfort of books, the Auster eye-popping moment, the party scene in The Book of Illusions, violence, reminding the reader that he is in a novel, emotional states revealed through imaginary material, Vermont’s frequent appearance in Auster’s novel, Virginia Blaine as the shared element between Brill and Brick in Man in the Dark, magic, The Invention of Solitude, memorializing memory, Rose Hawthorne, website archives, Auster’s relationship with the Internet, having an email surrogate, Auster’s concern for specific dollar amounts in Man in the Dark and Oracle Night, Hand to Mouth, Auster’s reading habits, the 8-10 contemporary novelists Auster follows closely, being distracted, the intrusive nature of the telephone, diner moments in Auster’s most recent novels, perception and stock situations, summaries of books and films within Auster’s books, and intimate moments in great movies.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about something that I’ve long been interested in your books, and that is your concern for specific dollar amounts. Again, it plays up here in the Pulaski Diner, where everything is five dollars. And I also think about the scenario with M.R. Chang in Oracle Night, in which there’s the whole situation between the ten dollar notebook and the ten thousand dollar notebook.

Auster: Right.

Correspondent: And again it becomes completely, ridiculously violent. But there is something about the propinquity of the dollar amount that you keep coming back to in your work. What is it about money? And what is it about a specific figure like this?

Auster: It’s funny. I never, never thought about that. Wow. Well, listen, money’s important. Everyone cares about money. And when you don’t have money, money becomes the overriding obsession of your life. I wrote a whole book about that.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Auster: Hand to Mouth. And the only good thing about making money is that you don’t have to think about money. It’s the only value. Because if you don’t have it, you’re crushed. And for a long period in my life, I was crushed. And so maybe this is a reflection of those tough years. I don’t know. I don’t know.

Correspondent: Or maybe there is something absurd about a specific dollar amount or something. I mean, certainly, when I go to a store and I see that something is set at a particular dollar amount or it fluctuates, it becomes a rather ridiculous scenario. Because all you want to do is get that particular object.

Auster: Yes, yes, yes. But often in my books, people don’t have a lot of money in their pockets. So they have to budget themselves carefully.

Correspondent: Well, not always. You tend to have characters like, for example in The Brooklyn Follies, people who have a good windfall to fall back on and who also offer frequently to help pay for things, and their efforts are often rejected out of pride by your supporting characters. And so again, money is this interesting concern. But I’m wondering why you’ve held on to this notion. It’s now thirty years since the events depicted in Hand to Mouth. I mean, is this something you just haven’t forgotten about?

Auster: I guess I haven’t forgotten about it. (laughs)

Correspondent: Do you still pinch pennies to this day?

Auster: No, no, no. Not at all. No, I’m not a tightwad at all.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Auster: I’m generous. I give good tips. It’s just — the way I live my life, ironically enough, is: I don’t want anything. I’m not a consumer. I don’t crave objects. I don’t have a car. We don’t have a country house. We don’t have a boat. We don’t have anything that lots of people have. And I’m not interested. I barely can go shopping for clothes. I find it difficult to walk into stores. The whole thing bores me so much. I guess the only thing that I spend money on is cigars and food and alcohol. Those are the main expenses.

Correspondent: Not books?

Auster: No. Because our library in the house is so bursting, we have no more room. We have things on the floor. And books come into the house at the rate of — you see, three came today for example. I’m pointing to them on the table. So we’re just inundated with books.

Download BSS #231: Paul Auster (MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Segundo Distribution Update

If you are a program director interested in airing Segundo, please note that the first 230 shows of Segundo are available in a one-hour format, with the shows all running just under an hour. While the running time ranges from 23 minutes to 58 minutes, if you are looking for a literary program that you’d be interested in stripping during a post-midnight slot and you have an automated system that can fill in the remaining gaps with short segments, please email me and I’d be happy to discuss arrangements.

A half-hour syndication package, involving a more scheduling-specific 28:30 format, will be available in a few months.

I was as surprised as anyone to learn that the entire Segundo oeuvre now runs close to 10 gigs in MP3 format. (About 98% of these shows fit on two DVD-ROMs.) Because of this, I’m going to soon be releasing twelve torrent packs for these shows that will be uploaded to The Pirate Bay (with the older ones repacked), so that Segundo can be disseminated further.

For those who simply want copies of the shows on DVD, so that you can simply copy the shows over to your iPods or MP3 players without having to download them all, I plan on working out a scenario in which you’ll be sent the first 225 or so shows on two DVD-ROMs for a reasonable price.

In the meantime, the August pledge drive is still on. We’re still short of our goal. So if you haven’t donated, your support will help us continue the show. We’ll have more news on all this later, as well as another podcast up very soon. Thanks again for listening.
















by Edward Champion

Save Segundo Update

First off, thanks to those who have pitched in, both with kind words and dollars, to the August pledge drive.

For those who missed out on the Save Segundo Campaign, here’s an update on where we’re at. We’re still working hard to line up advertising for the show and have had a few kind leads and nibbles (nothing firm yet), and we will be stepping up our efforts big time in the next few weeks. We have also scheduled as many interviews as humanly possible during the time we have left, which is roughly around mid-September. (We’ve just released two more shows, and we’re planning on releasing a very special show, which involved a considerable amount of reading and preparation for a forthcoming guest whose time we certainly don’t want to waste, later this week.) The hope is to keep Segundo going uninterrupted for the next few months. However, we’re still facing a shortfall for our pledge drive. And if we can’t raise these funds, which represent a stopgap between the present and a future time in which we will have advertisers in place, then we’ll be forced to abandon Segundo for a month or longer while we scrape together the money to stay afloat. And if that’s what needs to be done, that’s fine.

But we’re hoping that we can continue to keep Segundo on the air without interruption. There are many authors coming through in late September and October who we’d like to devote our energies to. Your continued support of the show through this pledge drive will help us to carry on at the pace of eight shows a month.

So if you’ve enjoyed Segundo, or found any of these conversations valuable, feel free to chip in a few bucks to keep the joint running. If you can’t, no harm, no foul. We’re going to try and keep this operational as long as we can.

Thanks again for listening.
















by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Jenny Davidson

Jenny Davidson appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #230. Davidson is most recently the author of The Explosionist.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Investigating the veracity of explosions.

Author: Jenny Davidson

Subjects Discussed: Coincidental run-ins, the necessity of war, Edmund Burke, philosophical asides, a novelist’s use of argument, Agatha Christie novels, John Buchan, ending chapters on cliffhangers, early 20th century British adventure fiction, alternate universes, Tolstoy as theologian, research undertaken years in advance of writing a novel, forgetting things one makes up, world-building as you go along, Michael Moorcock’s Hawkmoon, thought experiments, rationality vs. emotions, historical plausibility exemplified by electric kitchens, junk science, lie detectors, spiritualism vs. organized religion, Arthur Conan Doyle, Herbert Sidgewick, radios talking to ghosts, post-9/11 sensibility, danger of terroristic attacks in public places, narrative serving the needs of the world, novels as problem-solving exercises, tradeoff between security and civil liberties, fiction as a means of addressing political issues, productive forgetting, contemplation hindering the creative process, the internal responsibility to finish a trilogy, Margo Rabb, YA and genre categorization, voracious and eclectic reading, the difficulties of writing a good book, John Banville, cynical motivations for writing genre novels, freedom afforded by academic institutions, meaningful distinctions between YA and adult fiction, Philip Pullman, Garth Nix, whether authors should worry about book marketing, leaving publishing concerns to the experts, Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head, Sigmund Freud broadcasting via pirate radio, possible references to The Man in the High Castle and Brave New World, suicide booth trope in Golden Age SF novels, inventions by Alfred Nobel’s father, seals trained to drag bombs on ships, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Sherlock Holmes, exclamation marks, italicized words, exclamations as metaphor for genre writing, cockamamie explanations in the exposition, nostalgia for British children’s literature, ratio for invention and ambiguity, classroom scenes as an acceptable setting for fiction, reclusiveness, the enthusiasm and passion of boy characters, tension between female school roommates, Muriel Spark as a “great novelist of a small group”, sociological interest in dynamics of schools and boarding houses, Scottish dialect, peculiarities of diction, willful delving into uncomfortable territory, standing by sentences, emotional ethical questions about truthfulness, relationship between style and ethics, when writing is “too showy”, Thomas Paine, self-pity as antithesis to good writing, blindness to self-justifying elements of prose, Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels, Ernest Hemingway’s style, David Foster Wallace as self-parody, David Copperfield, the purity of the unwritten sentence.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Well, going back to one of the many questions that I just asked you about the idea of concocting this alternative universe, was it a matter of working within a loose world here? I mean, in a way, this book reminded me very much of a Michael Moorcock alternative history, like the Hawkmoon books that he wrote, which have only a few existing elements which suggest what may have happened. But it’s largely an excuse. This particular book gave Moorcock the freedom to explore this notion of ideas that have spun off into other terribly mutated forms. And I wanted to ask how this idea of worldbuilding relates to this idea of exploring ideologies, of which I plan to ask you more about.

Davidson: I think that’s a really fair description. And I find in my academic writing, as well as in my fiction writing, I’m strongly right now in a counterfactual mode, where it’s the thought experiment appeal. If this was different, and the thing that you make different — like, in this case, what if 1930s Scotland was still really being run in a way that was consistent with the ideals of the Scottish Enlightenment. No swerve into the 19th century and these different snails of thought. What if we really went back to those core ideas of rationality and the emotions? That was my most fundamental counterfactual for this novel. The set of questions that came up around that. And what if you were a teenage girl growing up in a country that was being run along those principles? That was at the core of my interest in the topic and what made me want to write the book. So the other stuff is for fun, and the stuff that comes up around that once you start thinking that way. But I guess in a sense, I’m not so much writing alternate history as a novel of ideas type thing. Where the premise of altering something in the past allows me to get a clear grip on some idea like that. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know how we categorize these different genres anyway.

Correspondent: So you’re saying in the end that where it’s set, or when it’s set, really does not matter because it is a novel of ideas? Is that what you’re suggesting here? And that the world, or the alternative universe, is more of a fun component towards entering the story?

Davidson: Well, I think the sense that you get — at least I hope the sense that you get — I’m clearly a writer who is in love with densely realized and realistic particulars that are historically plausible in some sense. So that, for instance, the storeroom with the electric kitchens, and all the sense that electricity is transformative and the way of future — that’s very realistic. I mean, that was a real feature. And a lot of the things in the novel that seem slightly fantastical, I drew from historical sources. I don’t mean so much to say that it’s a novel of ideas, as I mean to say it’s more like regular historical fiction than alternate history. Because, in fact, in very many particulars, the world of Sophie’s 1938 Scotland is like the world of real 1938 Scotland.

BSS #230: Jenny Davidson

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Ross Raisin

Ross Raisin appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #229. Raisin is the author of God’s Own Country (UK title)/Out Backward (US title).

(Please note: This discussion deals at length with many of the Yorkshire terms that Mr. Raisin uses within his novel. Please consult this lexicon if you’d like to know more.)

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Abdicating to a helium-impaired fill-in host.

Author: Ross Raisin

Subjects Discussed: Schizophrenia, designing a particular voice and the relationship to environment, talking in a peculiar way, reference books, snickets, the relationship between topography, reference books, and reality, looking through books, cookbooks, foreshadowing, talking with animals, verbs transferred to nouns, subconscious immersion into language, the third-person origins of God’s Own Country, the rhythmic origins of the lexical voice, “gleg” vs. “gawp,” the frequency of words for specific meaning, the Yorkshire vernacular, working as a waiter vs. working as a writer, nouns from specific regions in England, trunklements, the etymology of “bogtrotter,” crammocky creel, jarp and Easter, Nobbut a Lad, ferntickles, “upskittled” and ninepins, nouns transferred to verbs, “normaltimes,” “gleg,” and “chuntering” — the most frequent words in the book, snitter, references to Dracula, the concern for backsides within the book, The Butcher Boy, literary attempts to understand the monster, being ransacked by Raisin, Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, separation between style and content, tankards and chalices, the historical cycle of gentrification within bars and restaurants, and stools vs. metal buffets.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: There are a number of Yorkshire terms in which you take a verb meaning and you transfer it into a noun. And so everything is inverted. Even his communicative methods with the animals, as well as his particular idiosyncratic way of talking to the reader, which is presumably the only person he has to talk with aside from his parents and the like. And how this notion of inversion essentially announced itself. Was this more of a subconscious immersion in language on your part? Or a conscious decision to take a verb and transfer it to noun form and the like?

Raisin: The whole thing with the language being in that peculiar idiomatic language didn’t come about immediately. It came about as a result of thinking about character and wanting to think about a character who was very much inside their own strange little world. And one of the main ways you can achieve that is through language. And so I started experimenting with different ways of working with language. And that’s how it turned into a first-person book. Actually, it was initially third-person. Okay, some of the language in it. Most of it is a real Yorkshire language. Sort of a different melange of different parts of Yorkshire, to be honest. And a lot of it is invented. It actually came more out of rhythm — it began with rhythm — more than actual lexicon. And so I got a real feel for this rhythm of the landscape, and the way that transposed into the voice. And then through the second draft, I suppose, I started inserting all these words. And a lot of them are verbs actually. Like glegging and blathering and all these kind of blunt Yorkshire, quite masculinized words that he peppers his language with.

Correspondent: But “gleg” comes from the Scottish noun. Alert and quick to respond.

Raisin: Is that right?

Correspondent: That’s at least what I discovered. And I’m wondering where you transformed it into more of a verb. And also the difference between “gleg” and “gawp” as well. Because he gawps at some points and glegs at others.

Raisin: Well, a gleg is more of a brief look. It’s more of a glance, I suppose. And a gawp is a more of staring. But that’s quite an interesting point actually. Because when you’re writing the book, you become so observed with it. And I’m convinced that these words that I’ve researched, they’re Yorkshire words. And I hold them very preciously. They’re Yorkshire words. And then you tell them to somebody else, and they say, “Oh yeah. We use that word.”

BSS #229: Ross Raisin

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Ethan Canin

Ethan Canin appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #228. Canin is most recently the author of America America.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Examining his miserable relationship with America.

Author: Ethan Canin

Subjects Discussed: Neil Diamond’s “America,” the stuttering titular impulse, the Corvair, journalists as heroes, intentional vs. unintentional symbols, the reporter’s instinct, “the ingenuity of the working man,” ideology, the politics of generosity, didacticism in fiction, writing a novel from the point of view from Karl Rove, the four things it takes to be a writer, the declivity of politics during the past thirty years, economic opportunities, philosophy and fiction, print vs. blogs, journalists exploited by big money, Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick, Mike Gravel, Lyndon Johnson’s body language, Robert Caro, Ed Muskie, Corey Sifter’s possible alternative history, the Washington Post revisiting the Condit-Levy affair, playing with the public record, the first draft of America America, the risk of reading books while writing, speeches and autopsy reports embedded in the text, playing with names, David Duke, names serving as placeholders, John Updike’s review, subconscious references to the exchange of information, Geoffrey Wolff’s spoiler review in the NYTBR, Ed Muskie’s tears vs. Hillary Clinton’s tears, the emotional connection of narrative, drawing from reality vs. drawing from objective data, authenticity, and writing short stories vs. novels.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Canin: I wish I could act as if there was something more intentional. I’m a little tired here.

Correspondent: Oh, that’s okay.

Canin: Perhaps there was a little more intentionality on my part, but there really wasn’t. But that was just one of those things.

Correspondent: I hope this conversation is intentional. Or unintentional.

Canin: Yeah, it will start to get intentional.

Correspondent: Okay, let’s go into greater ambiguities. This is quite a pasture that you have in this book. The protagonist, Corey Sifter, he writes repeatedly about operating on a reporter’s instinct. Likewise, you have Liam Metarey and the Senator frequently invoking the ingenuity of the working man.

Canin: Right.

Correspondent: And yet, it seems to me that all parties — both these two parties — don’t understand these ideologies that they inhabit, or that they endorse in some sense. And so it seems to me that this particular book is almost this interesting glimpse into ideology. I wanted to ask how much ideology was encroaching upon you during the act of writing or…

Canin: Could I go back? Just stop a sec.

Correspondent: Oh yeah.

Canin: Because that’s too many ideas for me to hold at once.

Correspondent: Oh sure.

Canin: But the first thing you said was probably the thing that motivated me to write this book. And then when I get through that, I’ll be able to grasp the other question.

Correspondent: Sure.

Canin: I think writing a book is asking a question. It’s not answering a question. At least for me. And one of the questions that evolved as I wrote this was this history of public-minded, empathetic — what are supposed to be called liberal-minded politicians. And my own term, that I’ve been using during the past few days, is the politics of generosity. And there’s a history of them. From Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Ted Kennedy. Great liberal public-minded people who are also unquestionably from the land of gentry. And the central question — there was a reviewer in the Washington Post who said something very interesting, I thought. Which was that the book boils down to the narrator wondering whether he’s been helped or used.

And that’s right. That’s what it felt like to me. That’s what I was writing about. A narrator wondering whether he’s been helped or used. Whether these great public-minded political figures are, in fact, public-minded or self-serving. Or whether that even matters, as long as they’re public-minded. And how far that public-mindedness goes. I’m enough of a realist to think that everybody is self-interested. And we have to just use politicians who are at least generous in their interpretation of self-interest.

Correspondent: Yeah. But there is this notion of ideology that all the characters seem to cling to. Particularly the antipodean ends that we’re talking about. Of the working-class journalist-to-be vs. the Senator and this monied family in this particular town. And this makes me want to ask you about the idea of didacticism in fiction. It’s almost as if you’re skirting around that by exploring these questions in this particular book in a manner that leaves a sliver ask these broader questions without necessarily being didactic. And I’m curious about the element of didacticism in this particular book. It’s not overtly didactic. But the irony, such as Glen driving the Corvair and the like, certainly cause one to think that this is essentially a dialectic involving ideology in this particular book. And I want to ask you about this.

Canin: I was reading last night at the Upper West Side. And somebody asked me if I could write a novel from the point of view of Karl Rove.

Correspondent: (laughs) It would be interesting.

Canin: (laughs) Well, I actually think I could. I don’t think I could do anything. But I think I would be interested in doing that. You know, I don’t know what succeeded and what didn’t in this book. And I never will. But I do know that I certainly intended every character to be a mix. I certainly intended every character to be part good, part bad. From the heroes to the obvious villains. Those are the books that I like. I don’t like movies with heroes and villains. I don’t like books with heroes and villains, which is even worse. I think empathy is the thing.

It takes four or five things to be a writer. Decent prose style.

Correspondent: That’s one. What are the other four? (laughs) I want a list here, man.

Download BSS #228: Ethan Canin (MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Kathryn Harrison

Kathryn Harrison appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #227. Harrison is most recently the author of While They Slept.

Condition of Mr. Segundo:: Grappling with death and emergencies.

Author: Kathryn Harrison

Subjects Discussed: Opening the novel with a stark transcript of a 9/11 call, exchange incongruities, differences between text and spoken word, lack of annotation, true crime as a writing choice, the Keddie murders, not being a journalist, Binky Urban, impetus for writing about the Gilleys, Random House contractual obligations, voice of reason versus “gut-level” response, Jody Gilley’s memoir attempts, compartmentalization, investigating other people’s lives, a “blow-by-blow” account of murder, depending on and reconstructing other people’s memories, boundary issues, having “the same painful interview over and over again”, similarities to police officers and lawyers, Jody’s severing of her previous life, constructing a linear timeline, index cards versus notebooks, repeated viewing of traumatic events like 9/11, collating differing accounts to create a “master version”, letting the reader decide the final word, credibility with regards to interpretation, Billy Gilley’s continued appeal of the murder conviction, prison interviews, underwire bras, advice about what to wear to prison, weird overtones, Thad Guyer, fear that Billy wouldn’t see Harrison after she drove to prison, writing about things “not discussed in polite company”; sitting in a prison visiting area, Billy’s loneliness and lack of contact with the outside world, not letting him get off-topic, her husband not relishing continued correspondence with Billy, dishonesty about feelings with regards to his little sister Becky, evading direct questioning, Becky as a “wet bar of soap” in conversation, depersonalizing murder victims, Harrison’s theory of the murders, Billy’s volcanic rage against his father, Harrison mixing in her own story, The Kiss, misconception about revisiting hot-button subjects, the unnatural prospect of Harrison “getting over” her incestuous relationship, breaking lives into two pieces, seeing aspects of herself in the Gilley children, fantasies about killing her father, memoir/true crime hybrids, the conceit of the first draft, Harrison’s personal experience as a “hook” to tell a story of 20-year old murders, the process of narrative and what it can do, truth and subjectivity in memoir, the mutual exclusiveness of facts and story, James Frey and Augusten Burroughs memoir fiascos, self-mythology in A Million Little Pieces, memoir as a narcissistic process or digging around in the muck, emotional truth, Peter DeVries’ The Blood of the Lamb, ethical issues of Harrison giving money and magazine subscriptions to Billy, potential for compromised content, Jody’s bookishness and craving Harlequin romances, Flowers in the Attic, reading voraciously and defensively as a way to escape reality, The Brothers Karamazov, using romance novels as a means of finding out how normal people treated each other, reverse escapism, the disconnect between Jody’s current accomplishments and what is inside her head, balancing the Gilley murders with Harrison’s family life, unwitting parallels, family as salvation from becoming a monster, obsessive work habits, burdens sliding off her shoulders.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Harrison: I worked from a number of documents and sources. And I didn’t feel that I could do better than to begin with that exchange between Jody and the 911 operator. Because it really showed so much about who she was. The level of her diction. Her way of saying what had happened. “I think my father’s killed my parents and my sister.” And the 911 operator’s conversely saying, “What? Did he not like them or something?” And she’s saying, “Well, I guess.” It was an economical way of introducing a number of things that would come up later in the book. And it’s pretty compelling, I think.

Correspondent: Yeah. I was actually going to ask you about that exchange, where he brings up, “I guess he didn’t like your parents.” It just struck me as so — where did this come from? It’s as if he couldn’t process what had happened.

Harrison: Yeah. That, and just the incongruity of it. It had that sort of immediacy and authenticity that spoke for itself. Not the kind of thing that you could — I couldn’t have synthesized or summarized anything as eloquent as that tape from the 911 operator. And it really just introduced what the book was about. This is also a story about a family being murdered.

Correspondent: Was it also a case too — I mean, text can only go so far. Is there something that may be missing because we aren’t hearing the actual audio transcript? Like even without that exchange that we just talked about, are there inflections within Jody’s voice of just being in shock or being in catatonia?

Harrison: Oh, I’m sure. That would be true of the written word as opposed to the spoken word. It does have annotations about points in which she starts to cry and she hesitates. I think that some level of panic and disorientation comes through. But it’s never going to replace the sound of the voice.

Download BSS #227: Kathryn Harrison (MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Scarlet Fervor

I’m placing my energies into muchas ollas right now. Lengthy dispatches and bulleted bundles will return at their regular frequency just as soon as I take care of a few things. But I wanted to thank everyone who has contributed to the latest Segundo pledge drive. I have had to refund a few offers because of the conflict of interest policy, and I’m looking into the possibility of anonymous donations. Alas, short of a masked bagman in Midtown answering to the name of Emmuska Orczy IV, Paypal does not appear to have an option along these lines. This may be just as well. I’m still pondering the precise ethics of this.

Nevertheless, if you can throw in a few bucks to help us secure operations through the early fall, it would be much appreciated. (And remember, $10 gets you a chapbook!)
















Thanks again!

by Edward Champion

The Save Segundo Campaign

First off, I want to thank all of the people who have written with their concerns and kind words about The Bat Segundo Show. I have received messages from listeners all over the world — including France, Sweden, Japan, and Norway. I was also extremely honored by Colin Marshall’s kind writeup at The Sound of Young America blog — especially humbling, given that I’ve greatly enjoyed both Sound and The Marketplace of Ideas — and Carolyn Kellogg’s post at The Los Angeles Times. This has all stunned me. The upshot is that, while my stats have reflected a solid audience of roughly 5,000 to 10,000 listeners per show, it appears that more of you may be listening to this show than I’ve realized. I’ve learned from some of you that podcasts downloaded from this site have recirculated. MP3s have been burned onto CDs for road trips. Files have been swapped onto other computers and MP3 players.

Because of this, I believe we are in the position to not only set a major precedent for a web-based radio program, but at a juncture where we can ensure that these interviews keep on going.

Here is what we have done. There have been talks with a number of parties about how we can sustain Segundo. And we’ve come up with a few ideas. We intend to carry out a three-prong plan that, if successful, will keep the show running through the end of the year at a rate of eight shows per month. Should this plan work, I believe that we can make Segundo self-sustaining, increasing both the program’s frequency and its range.

But before I reveal the details of our campaign, I have some news. There have been a few conversations with radio stations about distributing Segundo. While talks remain ongoing with a few of these outlets, I’m happy to report that, on August 2008, Litstation will be airing the first 230 installments on a nightly basis over the next year. The show will air at midnight. Some of the shows — meaning those that run over an hour — will be slightly modified to fit programming needs. But they will more or less be airing as they originally appeared here. Shortly after I finish with this project, I’m also going to be splitting the shows up into 28:30 blocks. The idea here is to have syndication packages ready for both one hour and half-hour formats so that the show can be distributed in many forms. If you are a radio program director interested in distributing Segundo (the perks include custom intros for your station and a few other frills), please email me and I’ll be happy to discuss the details.

However, I believe that the Web is Segundo’s predominant home. It is the Web that I plan to prioritize first. The biggest problem in getting public radio interested in Segundo is the show’s rather eccentric format. And I believe that the show’s strengths will be better served if Segundo remains fun, passionate, informed, and slightly idiosyncratic. In other words, on the Web.

I’ve also made a few cosmetic changes to the Bat Segundo site so that it’s a little less cluttery and easier for you to subscribe via iTunes.

I have set up a few more interviews for August, ensuring that eight shows will be aired this month. This should take us up to Show #234 before the end of the month. In an effort to keep the Segundo schedule more consistent, I will be putting up at least one new show every Friday, with the week’s second show (or, in some cases, a third show) appearing at some random point in the week.

I am currently in the financial position of keeping Segundo going through the end of August and through a good chunk of September. My operating costs essentially entail enough money for me to pay my rent, keep up the hosting costs, and a few other comparatively meager expenses. (Pedantic expenses such as ConEd and the like.) Over the past year, I have made enough freelancing money each month to keep Segundo going. I still intend to carry on freelancing as much as I can and as long as the editors will have me. But I also realize that, because of recent newspaper developments, it is no longer tenable for me to rely on this shaky income. I am not too proud to take up a full-time job. But if I do become employed on a full-time basis, I will not have the time I need to produce these shows with the same frequency and quality that I have in the past. There was a point when I was putting out Segundo while also working a full-time job. But to do this, I nearly drove myself insane. There were far too many nights in which I would stay up mastering until 4 AM or so, finish a podcast, and then wake up a few hours later to go to work. These considerable demands have become greater over the past year. As the show’s demands upon my life have increased, I do not believe that sleeping three hours a night is a tenable scenario. Each podcast now involves some twenty to twenty-five hours of work, and often considerably more. This time goes into reading, research, booking, production, post-production, et al.

For those who have full-time jobs and compare my creative life to that of a bum’s, I assure you that I am not a loafer. I have continued to work 90 to 100 hour weeks as a freelancer and a podcaster, frequently starting my day at around 6:00 AM and ending it sometime in the evening hours. This is hard work and I do my best to keep things as fresh and vibrant as I can. Some friends have informed me that I live a rather preternatural existence. But I also realize that I am not entitled to this existence and I hope that the product of my considerable labor will permit me to carry on doing this. While I can certainly see Segundo continuing as an intermittent series of specials, I feel that this program is important enough to warrant its continued rate of production. Judging by your emails and support, I believe that you feel similarly.

So here’s the plan:

1. Sponsorship. Because Segundo reaches a very specific niche audience, and because nearly every existing survey I have consulted concludes that listeners don’t mind a 15-second advertisement before a podcast, we plan on initiating an unobtrusive form of advertising along these lines. At the beginning of each program, we’ll feature a quick 15-second audio advertisement. Like old time radio, each program will feature a sole sponsor. For less than the price of a business card advertisement running for a week in the Brooklyn Paper, you’ll get a reasonably priced form of radio advertising that (a) singles out a more targeted demographic, (b) doesn’t have to compete with other advertisements to grab the listener’s attention, (c) permits your product or service to stand out in a way that is unlike any other, (d) treats the audience intelligently and respectfully by not overstaying its welcome, and (e) gives you radio advertising that you don’t have to pay a $2,000 minimum for (believe it or not, that’s the standard cost for a local radio station advertising bundle).

Here’s a look at some advertising rates with other podcasts.

Blogger & Podcaster: $450 for a 30 second ad. (Claimed audience: 20,000)
Blog Talk Radio: $350 per 15 seconds. (Claimed audience: 5,000)
Colorado Hockey Insider: $200 per show. (Claimed audience: 9,000)
Geek News Central: $1,000 per show for 30 to 45 second ad. (Claimed audience: 18,000)
Small Business Podcast: $500 per show to be mentioned in the podcast. (Claimed audience: 3,500)
A Very Spatial Podcast: $250 per show, 10-15 seconds. (Claimed audience: 1,500)

After looking at these figures (and it’s worth noting that all of these podcasts, to my knowledge, were able to obtain advertising at the rates they offered), we concluded that $350 per show would be a very fair market rate to start out with. We took some of the excellent advice and honesty given by podcaster Michael W. Geoghegan about operating as an independent podcaster and set to work on a media kit.

We’ve now prepared a media kit that offers a program overview and includes many details about sponsorship. If you’re interested in setting up the deal, feel free to check it out. You can contact me if you have any questions.

If you’re an advertising agency or a third-party individual who would like to set up advertising for us, I should note that we’re offering a 25% commission. (The standard commission rate given to ad agencies is 15%. And in light of what they do to support big magazines and the comparatively picayune amount we are asking for, I have decided to up the percentage. If you can get one client to sponsor a month of Segundo, that’s $600 that goes directly to you when the deal goes through. If you can do that in about four hours of time, then that’s $150/hour.) However, a few volunteers will be approaching potential advertisers in a very pro-active manner during the next few months. Our goal is to get five of the eight programs set up for sponsorship during August. If we can do this, and maintain a sufficient momentum, then we’ll keep on doing this. And we’ll report on the progress of this experiment as it happens.

There is one stipulation. Because Segundo is a program that strives to maintain its journalistic integrity, we will not be accepting advertising from publishers. We want to avoid anything that resembles a conflict of interest. (Historically, the shows have gone out of their way to include an eclectic mix of publishers, both large and small.) Segundo is what it is because it remains fairly autonomous. And we’re hoping that we can keep things this way. This is not to say that we’re ruling out companies that provide study guides, notebooks, or fancy pens, or those who host book fairs and trade shows, et al. But we do want to run the most ethical ship we can under the circumstances. And, besides, one mistake made by newspaper advertising departments has involved the failure to consider that book people do indeed go to restaurants, shop, travel, et al. We’re going to try and atone for this mistake. And we’re also going to reach out to smaller companies.

I should also point out that, unlike radio, we’re also open to individuals who wish to pay for a crazed message. And if you’ve been having trouble getting a particular kind of ad on television and radio because these networks and stations have cold feet, well then, why not try podcasting?

2. Donations. Of course, we realize that it may take a good month or two to set up advertising. We’re under no illusions that any of this will work. So we will simultaneously be launching a new pledge drive in August for a sum of $1,600. Should we obtain this modest sum in the next three weeks, this will permit us to stay alive during the next month and conduct numerous interviews in September and early October with many important authors in the fall. We’ll also be placing some of this money into a low-cost marketing campaign that we’ll be carrying out in August and September to increase the show’s audience. I can’t yet tell you the details of this marketing yet, but I can say that no podcaster has tried what we’re doing and we believe that it will be successful enough to increase our audience. This audience increase, in turn, will make us more attractive to sponsors. (After we carry out this marketing, in the interests of total transparency, I will report on its degree of success.)

Like our pledge drive from last year, if you contribute $10, we’ll send you a chapbook which contains a special message from Bat Segundo, an excerpt from Humanity Unlimited (my novel in progress), and an excerpt from Wrestling an Alligator (a play I wrote and directed a few years ago). If you’ve already received a chapbook and you choose to contribute again, we’ll be sending a supplemental chapbook that contains an excerpt from a noir novel that is also in progress.

If you’ve enjoyed Segundo over the years and you’d like to see us continue, feel free to donate.
















I should also point out that the conflict of interest clause also involves donations. If you are an author and I eventually do interview you, then I’ll have to return the money. (In full transparency, we had one author who contributed last time. But we avoided a conflict in ethics by having somebody else interview this author.)

Now because our previous posts on the near demise of Segundo have resulted in a few donations, we’ll be including them in this $1,600 figure. Fair is fair. So the tally that we now have to beat is:

In the event that donations and sponsorship don’t yield the results, this brings us to Point #3.

3. Reading Fundraiser: I’ve contacted a few authors who have generously offered to give up some of their time for a Segundo fundraiser sometime in the fall. We’re currently looking around for possible venues. (If you have any ideas, again, please email me.) But what we have in mind is a reading fundraiser that would be hosted by Bat Segundo. (As our most recent podcast has made clear, Mr. Segundo was not, contrary to the events depicted in Show #199, shot to death.) Those attending would pay an entrance fee. But if the authors reading at this fundraiser aren’t enough of a draw, we’ll also be handing out CDs, which will contain a selection of the best Segundo episodes (along with a bonus or two that isn’t available online). In addition, should we find a sponsor who is willing to underwrite this event, we could waive the entrance fee and simply hand out the CDs.

We should have more on this fundraiser once we’ve managed to organize.

I realize that this is an elaborate plan that will require a good deal of hard effort. But I firmly believe that together, we might be able to do something quite amazing.

As my advertising rates indicate, I’m sure as hell not doing this for the money. My aim with Segundo has been simply to attempt something a little smarter than other radio shows who talk with authors.

I am being as transparent as I can with you because I do recognize that we’re trying to do something here for community. We’re trying to do something here for democracy. We’re trying to do something here for integrity.

This experiment may work. It may not. But it’s certainly worth a shot. And however it turns out, I’ll keep you posted on our efforts.

Thank you again for listening. And thank you for supporting us.
















MEDIA KIT:

Bat Segundo Media Kit

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Mike Edison

Mike Edison appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #226. Edison is the author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go.

Condition of the Show: Reinvestigating the purported death of Bat Segundo. (See also Show #199.)

Author: Mike Edison

Subjects Discussed: Writing a memoir predicated upon shit-talking, sticking with the details, the lack of composite characters, compressed chronology, Heeb editor Josh Neuman vs. Screw art director Kevin Hein, Tom Cruise’s ass, The Passion of the Christ, the ground rules for satire, Martha Stewart, being married to ideas, High Times‘s Steven Hager, reality TV vs. YouTube, patience and publishing, the Chronocaster, Tommy Chong, attempting to assemble the film High Times Potluck, marijuana bribes, the cult of personality, sexual harassment, being in the gutter with Al Goldstein, the roots of High Times, editorial backstabbing, the appropriate conditions in which to get stoned, Robert Altman, stoners and color separation, Ozzy Osbourne, Edison’s career trajectory, working for a beer and soft drinks magazine, dropping out of Columbia and working as a porn novelist and getting burned out, on being bored easily, the business of High Times, magazine readership, early ambitions, Bill Hicks, the Beatles and John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, Ringo Starr’s first album vs. Steve Miller, and the unpredictability of life.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: First off, you have a lot of critical things to say about a lot of people.

Edison: I name names, brother!

Correspondent: Yeah, I know. But there’s a lot of shit-talking going on.

Edison: You think?

Correspondent: And I’m wondering if this book was written out of revenge or what?

Edison: Absolutely not. I mean, you know, I feel sorry for the people who weren’t nice to me in the last twenty years of my career. But, no, this was not written from a point of view of malice. That’s not a place to write a book from. The book’s a celebration. And, of course, a few people crossed me over the years and I do kind of take joy in sticking pins in them now. I’d be lying if I didn’t say that there weren’t. But success is the best revenge. And history is written by the winners.

Correspondent: You consider yourself a success? You’re writing your own history here?

Edison: I’m on your radio show. I think there’s no greater sign of success than that.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Download BSS #226: Mike Edison (MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Peter David

Peter David appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #225. He is most recently the author of Tigerheart and the Incredible Hulk novelization.

Condition of the Show: Investigating claimed nemeses of Goliath.

Author: Peter David

Subjects Discussed: On being prolific, producing work quickly, writing stories set in expansive universe, reacting to a universal construct, working with mythos, the Fallen Angel universe, the Star Trek: New Frontier books, Joseph Campbell and Star Wars, Willow, fundamental tropes in storytelling, whether or not all stories are derivative, retinkering the Peter Pan formula for Tigerheart, the advantages of pastiche, James Barrie, Don Quixote, the Great Ormond Street Childrens Hospital’s litigious actions towards Peter Pan adaptations, emulating Barrie’s voice, the unproducable nature of Barrie’s Peter Pan play, the advantages of dream narratives, the conversational nature of the comic book script medium, cameo appearances and throwaway side characters in Tigerheart, verisimilitude, managing numerous characters in a universe, story elements that originate from the protagonist, speculative double entendres to George Bush, adjusting comic storylines as sales figures come in, spicing things up in Fallen Angel, keeping a comic book marketable and other commercial demands, David’s twelve-year run on the Hulk, boosting sales, the role of the comic book editor, David’s exclusive Marvel contract, Tennessee Williams, unique stories and salable stories, and coordinating storylines on other comic books.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I’m wondering though if there has ever been an instance in your comic career, in which an editor has come to you and said, “Hey, Peter, the sales for this particular title are flagging. What can we do to raise things up?” Has this ever an influence?

David: Sure. Of course it’s an influence. I mean, look, when it comes to — particularly my work-for-hire material — my job at the end of the day is to do two things. As far as the publisher is concerned. This is purely my job as far as the publisher is concerned, okay? Number one: Turn in a publishable script. And number two: Do everything that is within my power to write a book that will sell. Okay? Because I could turn in absolutely kickass scripts that aren’t going to sell for crap. But I feel to a certain degree that part of my job is to try and do everything I can to keep the book marketable. I’ve been doing that my entire comic book career. When I was writing Hulk, during my initial twelve-year run, I regularly had access to sales figures ahead of time. Three, four months ahead of time. Because that’s how far ahead we were soliciting. And they were incredibly instructional. Because what would happen is, I would be aware of a sales drop months ahead of time. Months ahead of time. So that I would have the Hulk in a particular incarnation going through a particular series of events. If I saw sales starting to flag, I’d say to myself, “Okay. That incarnation of the Hulk seems to be running its course. Time to come up with something else.”

So if you want to have an idea of when sales were starting to drop during my twelve-year run, at any particular time, look to a point where the Hulk undergoes some kind of transformation, backdate yourself about six months and that’s when I was looking at the sales figures, going, “Okay. We have a drop.” The problem nowadays is that we don’t know sales figures until after the book is already on the stands. So instead of having a three to four month early warning system, so that I can course correct ahead of time, we are always behind the curve by three to four months. Because we don’t know the sales numbers until at least two months after the book has come out. I mean, you know, we see the sales numbers on ICv2 or whatever it is. That’s when I see the sales numbers. We see those sales numbers come out two to three months after the book is on the stands, plus we’re soliciting three months down the line. So you can find yourself in free-fall before you’re aware of the fact that you’ve got any kind of attrition problem. Because every book’s always going to have attrition. Every book. Every book. There’s no stopping it. There’s always going to be. You’re going to get a build. And then it’s going to level off. And then it’s going to start to drop. Always. No matter what the book is. Always. The thing I was able to do on Hulk is, when I saw it start to drop, I would say, “Okay. Time to do something different.” And I could come up with a new angle on The Hulk that would boost sales. Because we’d have people going, “Oh, they’re doing something new and different with The Hulk? Let’s see.” As it is, I can’t course correct. And it’s incredibly frustrating.

Correspondent: But I’m also wondering if some of the stuff that you do with, say, Fallen Angel — I mean, you had a post on your blog recently in which a gentleman couldn’t purchase it from his neighborhood comic store. Because he was the only person purchasing the issue.

David: Buying it, yeah.

Correspondent: So for something like this, is Fallen Angel more of an unfettered territory to write in?

David: It’s unfettered territory. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see sales be brought up.

Download BSS #225: Peter David (MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Faye Flam

Faye Flam appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #223. Flam is most recently the author of The Score.

Condition of the Show: Attempting to contend with gender generalizations.

Author: Faye Flam

Subjects Discussed: Boot Seduction Camp as the prism with which to approach evolutionary science, the Mystery Method, crude philosophical rules vs. scientific rules, the SRY gene, masculinity’s backup gene, genetics and the delineation between gender, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, bonobos and bisexuality, biological pair bonding, Alan Alda and testosterone poisoning, the decline of macho actors, oxytocin, Andrew Sullivan’s testosterone injections, certain oversights Ms. Flam made from John Tierney’s article on the correlation between shorter men and money, Alfred Kinsey and the human heterodoxy, Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow, Dr. Peter Hurd’s studyon finger length and aggression, the differences between humans and sparrows, Rachmaninov’s hands, evolutionary science and other species, homosexuality and “sexually antagonistic selection,” risk-taking behavior and attractiveness, biological clocks, young men and very older women, and whether scientists or cultural pundits set the terms for human behavior.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: But not every man, Faye, is going to sit down and slap thousands of dollars wanting to get laid like this.

Flam: (laughs) No.

Correspondent: I mean, this isn’t the archetypal man. It’s almost as if this is an extraordinary, almost cartoonish construct on which you respond with science and examples with other species and the like. So I’m wondering why this was the one. Why you couldn’t just have some schlumpy guy in a bar who isn’t paying thousands of dollars?

Flam: I guess so. Well, these classes are pretty popular. There are a lot of guys who are into this. And The Game was a bestselling book. So it was a pretty big phenomenon. And it was a little extraordinary, which is what made it interesting. I wanted to start with something that was human and yet not totally mundane. And it caught my interest. It did sort of reflect this idea of the male sex working at just getting sex. Women will put a lot of effort into their hair and makeup, but not really to get sex. I mean, You can walk into a bar without makeup and still get some guy to go home with you.

Correspondent: Depends upon what types of bars you frequent.

Download BSS #223: Faye Flam (MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Bat Segundo: Technical Issues & Some Developments

Because IE and Safari users were having difficulty accessing the Bat Segundo site, I’ve temporarily disabled podPress. I’ve tested the site on Firefox, Seamonkey, IE, Safari, and Opera, and you should be able to stream the files during this transition. The podPress developer had pledged that he would fix the “Operation Aborted” problem by Sunday, but, sadly, he still has not offered an update. And regrettably, due to my failure to backup the database when caught up in the geeky excitement of upgrading, I cannot downgrade from WordPress 2.6 to 2.5 to make the current version of the plugin work.

The show is still appearing on iTunes, and you can play the shows and still download them to your iPod. But we’re not going to have specific metadata available until either (a) podPress is updated or (b) I adopt an alternative. I have momentarily activated a barebones Audio Player plugin so that those who listen to the show on the main Segundo site will be able to hear it.

For any podcasters who are currently using the podPress plugin, my advice is to not upgrade to WordPress 2.6 until the podPress developer has worked out the kinks. And for any WordPress user who is upgrading in general, be sure to make a backup of your database before you upgrade. WordPress 2.6 is experiencing problems with its image editor and several Flash-related plugins cannot operate under the current code. Since many of the plugins originate from hobbyists who are doing all this all on their free time, this creates a situation in which one must be especially cautious.

I’m going to have some additional news about the Save Segundo campaign in a few days. I am making efforts right now to keep the show running through the end of the year at its current level of prolificity. I also managed to squeeze in another eleventh-hour interview before the hiatus, which I am trying to cut down from unspecified months to a few weeks at most. The interview relates to the lexicon unveiled yesterday.

In the meantime, you can now access the show directly at http://www.batsegundo.com. I’ve also made the site W3C complaint. There will be more this week. Bear with me.

by Edward Champion

Bat Segundo and IE/Safari Users

A few listeners have informed me that they are having difficulties accessing The Bat Segundo Show site using Internet Explorer and Safari. Unfortunately, the podPress plugin used to stream the programs has proven to be incompatible with WordPress 2.6. (And had I known this, I never would have upgraded.) I would downgrade to WP 2.5 to solve this, but then that would mean using an old backup of the database and losing entries. And the gentleman behind this plugin has yet to release a new version, although he has promised one in the next few days.

So we essentially have to wait this out until this programmer, who is working a very time-consuming day job, can find time to fix this.

However, after a bit of code tweaking, I’ve made everything operational under Firefox. So I would recommend using Firefox for the time being.

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Nam Le

Nam Le is the author of The Boat. He appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #222.

Condition of the Show: Attempting to find classification within the media industrial complex.

Author: Nam Le

Subjects Discussed: On writing about panna cotta before experiencing it, plausibility and aesthetics, subjectivity, the dangers of autobiographical connections and personal experience perceived by readers and critics, why fiction needs to be influenced by strangeness, place and topography, “Meeting Elise” as an inverted New Yorker story, when the bludgeon of language falls apart, Nam Le’s comic impulses, on not being published in the New Yorker, the relationship between artistic frustrations and the short story infrastructure, making stories succeed on their own terms, bouncing around the globe and using different tones, being perceived, writing without being restrained, political discourse and infantile reductionism, Nam Le’s concern for plant and tree life, getting things wrong, prioritizing descriptive details, the risks of not providing all geographic details, readers who don’t look things up, spelling things out vs. not holding a reader’s hand, elemental meaning within place names, fixed location vs. transitory location, the surrender of identity in relation to how people attach themselves to community, the natural topical limitations of a writer, smooth description, not trusting the veneer of the self, the many references to the body within the stories, the body as an epidermal buffer between the soul and the environment, authentic dialogue and ground rules established for vernacular, the decision to capitalize “Child,” the ethics of writing, and looking in sentences and paragraphs with a sense of aesthetics and ethics.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Le: First of all, I think that place names are — I mean, you’d be a fool not to use them in many regards. Because they’re such charged and resonant words. Because they carry the connotation of all of the expectations and assumptions, and all of the misconceptions, as well as all of the history and culture of the place. So a word like Cartagena has such layers and meaning, and also has references to — for example, to be wanky again, Carthage. But there are elements that are simply embedded into a name like that. And with Hiroshima, for example, I mean, geez, can you think of a word or a place name that is more loaded?

Correspondent: Auschwitz maybe.

Le: Exactly.

Correspondent: I’m waiting for that story from you.

Le: (laughs) You know what I mean? I mean, that was a particularly calculated title.

Download BSS #222: Nam Le

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Grandmaster Flash & Karen Abbott

Grandmaster Flash and Karen Abbott appeared most recently on The Bat Segundo Show #221.

Grandmaster Flash is most recently the author of The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash (with David Ritz).

Karen Abbott is most recently the author of Sin in the Second City.

Condition of the Show: Marinating in urban culture.

Authors: Grandmaster Flash and Karen Abbott

SUBJECTS DISCUSSED: Using “adventures” in a book title, cutting, rubbing and scratching, finding obscure records in a digital age, turntables vs. mashups, time-coded vinyl, illicit methods of obtaining equipment, Sylvia Robinson, the risks of entering into a deal without an attorney, Flash’s problems with “The Message,” Ray Chandler, “Getting Everleighed,” bawdy verbs in desuetude, research and literary associations, the swank decor of the Everleigh Club, the legendary attorney Colonel MacDuff, determining reliable sources a century later, Clifford Roe and Ernest Bell, the danger of writing a history with clear-cut protagonists and antagonists, the white slavery scare, maintaining high standards in prostitution, balancing the pursuit of the facts with the writing an entertaining book, the reformist tendency to slum in the Red Light District, Ike Bloom and graft money, filling in the missing pieces of the narrative constructed by the Everleigh sisters, the Everleigh sisters’s idiosyncratic grammar, whether Abbott portrayed Vic Shaw in a fair light during her final days, Bathhouse John Coughlin — the buffoon and poet laureate of the Levee District, Clement Moore, the early days of Al Capone, the rush of reformist regulation before the 1920s, Jack Johnson, needless persecution under the Mann Act, the lack of coordination between federal and local authorities, the early days of the FBI, the 1908 bombing of the Coliseum, speculation on why the wondrous debauchery of the First Ward Ball were stopped, the downside of advertising a brothel, insular zoning, and prognosticating on the motivations of reformers going after the Everleigh Club.

EXCERPTS FROM SHOW:

Corresponent: If you listen to “The Wheels of Steel” today, as I have actually a couple of times, you can actually hear your hands on the turntables, whereas you can’t always hear someone who is just doing a mashup. You don’t hear that analog quality. So I’m wondering how things have adjusted for you in light of this. How do you keep the analog part of things legitimate? Real? How do digital tools help you as well?

Flash: Okay, first of all, I’m a scientist before I’m a DJ. So pushing the envelope for new technology, I’m always with that. Because I was ahead of my time thirty-three years ago. So now that it’s become things like Serato, Torq, FinalScratch — Traktor Scratch, which is what I use — you still have to drive it in the same fashion. Meaning that if you were a great mixer, a great DJ, in the analog world with vinyl, you still have to drive it the same way in digital. So if you was wack in the analog world, you will be wack in the digital world. So the real fact of the matter is follow through how you play your songs and what songs you play. That still separates the boys from the men, and the ladies from the women. So the modern technology has brought in convenience. You can put 15,000, 20,000 songs on a hard drive, and carry those. Where at one point, we as DJs used to have three or four guys who used to lift our boxes. That isn’t the case anymore. I carry less vinyl and I have more in my laptop.

* * *

Correspondent: It’s interesting that something like “Everleighed,” as well as “decentized,” which you point to later in the book — these are verbs that didn’t quite make it in the 21st century.

Abbott: “Decentize.” I’m surprised. You’d think that some reformers today would have latched onto it.

Correspondent: You’d think in light of the fundamentalist furor that is going on as we speak. But how much of your research is oriented around these associations? Because obviously, this is a very literary approach in a certain way to the facts that exist. There’s a lot of fanciful language that you use that really gets us into this atmospheric context. I’m wondering. Does something like this originate from the facts? Or does it originate from a phrase? Or does it originate from a verb as we sort of suggested here?

Abbott: You know, I think a lot of the phrases that exist in the book were already in existence. The characters sort of latched onto them. I’m kind of ashamed to admit that I spent two days researching the etymology of Susie Poontang.

Correspondent: Really?

Abbott: Of where “poontang” might have come from.

Correspondent: Well, did you come up with any conclusions here?

Abbott: It was a Chinese phrase that had to do with prostitutes. And I think she had to latch onto that for herself. It’s sort of a chicken and the egg question. But I’m sure that she probably appropriated it for herself to get to America.

(Please note: Due to current incompatibility between PodPress and WP 2.6, I have had to institute a workaround. If the player button does not work, then try the direct link to the MP3 below.)

BSS #221: Grandmaster Flash & Karen Abbott

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Mark Kurlansky

Mark Kurlansky appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #220. Kurlansky is most recently the author of The Last Fish Tale.

Condition of the Show: Moving forward after unexpected losses.

Author: Mark Kurlansky

Subjects Discussed: Mark Kurlansky’s wonderful dog, coming into Gloucester from an outsider’s perspective, possible solutions to global fishing problems, the close parallels between bottom dragging and the decline in fish stocks, ineffective methods of government subsidization, bycatch, intercontinental arguments over fishing, the problems with regulating fisheries, trying to find uses for excess fish stock, Gorton’s, bureaucracy and other political problems in Massachusetts, the clash between environmentalists and fishermen, the Elise vs. Bluenose race, downtown zoning and fishing, careful hotel development, chowder recipes, Moby Dick, Portuguese linguica, fishermen going out to sea without being able to predict the dangerous weather, the history of the schooner, various fishing technologies, oceanography, Howard Blackburn, Gloucester newcomers, ethnic groups and the granite industry, the Luminists and Fitz Henry Lane, Emile Gruppe, non-native Gloucester residents and art, Kurlansky’s illustrations, Motif Number 1, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s cut of Gloucester passages, balancing non-specific details about interviews with primary sources, and Kurlansky’s journalistic approach.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I’m wondering if it’s a matter of this obdurate Gloucester character that you allude to many times throughout the book. In fact, I was curious about the whole Elsie vs. Bluenose race. You actually write that essentially, they didn’t have time to deal with this great defeat. That they were more concerned with fishing. And in a desperate effort to determine whether this was true, I was digging through the New York Times archive and I found this particular quote from Captain Marty Welch in a 1921 article. He basically says, “I’ve no excuses. The larger boat won. The Elsie is as good as the Bluenose is, only she’s smaller. Give me a vessel of that size and I’d like to race her every day in the week.” So this seems to me either a sense of Gloucester bluster or perhaps a notion of some kind of pride. What is this exactly?

Kurlansky: Well, in that particular case — and it was a different era — you have to remember that schooners were invented in Gloucester. And they were invented as fishing boats. And so fishermen had this tremendous pride that they were the masters of schooners. And they became yachts. Today, the only schooners around — except for in a few museums — are yachts and for racing. So fishermen — and it’s the same thing with the environmentalists. “These aren’t real men of the sea. These are just rich guys who are playing around on these boats. We’re the guys who know how to handle a schooner.”

Correspondent: And then, on top of everything else, the Canadians decide to put the Bluenose on their stamps, their dime….

Kurlansky: On everything.

Correspondent: My girlfriend’s Canadian and I asked her about the Bluenose. And she gave me a slight grin. So I’m like, “Come on. Give the Gloucester guys something.”

Kurlansky: Well, Bluenose visits Gloucester. There’s a new…

Correspondent: The Bluenose IV. Yeah, I saw that.

Kurlansky: But one of the unusual charms, I think, of Gloucester is that it is very determinedly a blue-collar place. And it takes a tremendous pride in its blue-collarness. And it’s a community in which there are a number of extremely wealthy people. And they all get along pretty well. At least, they socialize. In a way, it is the classless society. Except that there is this tremendous awareness of class and the ethos of working-class people. You have to be aware of that if you want to deal with Gloucester.

(Please note: Due to current incompatibility between PodPress and WP 2.6, I have had to institute a workaround. If the player button does not work, then try the direct link to the MP3 below.)

BSS #220: Mark Kurlansky

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Thomas M. Disch

Thomas M. Disch appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #219.

The late, great author committed suicide on July 4, 2008. This was his last face-to-face interview before his death, conducted on June 25, 2008 at his apartment. For more on Disch, start here. His most recent book was The Word of God.

Condition of the Show: In memoriam.

Author: Thomas M. Disch

Subjects Discussed: The difficulties of declaring yourself a deity, truth and memoirs, authenticity, James Frey, Disch’s takedown of Whitley Streiber, Democrats and evangelism, Reverend James Dobson, the unexpected reaction to Disch declaring himself an atheist at a North Dakota convention, Clifford Irving, the fun of footnotes and annotation, fundamentalists, writing books in which the ground is always shifting, Emerson and the trinity, Algis Budrys, Thomas Mann, the taboos of simulacra and alternative realities, war and commandments, the fantasy of having different parents, griping about editors and agents, the American literary tradition of celebrating con artistry, L. Ron Hubbard, Disch’s religious acolytes, Michael Moorcock, asking for blurbs without any of the blurbers reading the book, Philip K. Dick’s 1972 letter to the FBI, Camp Concentration, pulp fiction and literary posterity, “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” and Clement Brown, whether or not literature (and civilization) will survive into the next century, maintaining a LiveJournal, on not submitting poems to magazines, Samuel Johnson’s maxim, poetry and the New Yorker, editors or critics who hate Disch’s guts, being ignored, being snubbed by Stephen Donaldson, ridiculing enemies, nonoverlapping magesteria, having Catholic friends, cowboys, literature as a religion, Disch’s efforts to read The Tale of Genji before death, the reading of “approved classics,” Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Jane Austen, Disch’s strong love of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, writing Amnesia and building a model of Manhattan within the text adventure game, literature as a constantly changing medium, inhabiting the now and obsolescence, silent film, and poetry as Disch’s “one good horse.”

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to also ask you about A.J. Budrys, who I know you — I saw your LiveJournal where there were many caustic remarks directed his way. But I should point out that when I received this galley well before June 9th, when he died, you referred to him as “the late Algis Budrys.”

Disch: (laughs) Yes!

Correspondent: I’m wondering if you had some inside dope or if this is another example of your divine powers.

Disch: I guess so. I mean, I never know what my divine powers are going to do often, until they’ve done it. And this is certainly a case where I had picked the right horse without even knowing.

Correspondent: Well, I mean, why did you type “the late” so early on? I mean…

Disch: (laughs) Well, for one thing, I didn’t know.

Correspondent: You didn’t know he was alive?

Disch: Yeah. I sort of figured it was likely that he was dead. And wishing it to be the case, I just wrote it that way.

Correspondent: Or he was dead to you in other words?

Disch: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if I had my druthers, there he is.

Photo credit: Flickr

(Please note: Due to current incompatibility between PodPress and WP 2.6, I have had to institute a workaround. If the player button does not work, then try the direct link to the MP3 below.)

BSS #219: Thomas M. Disch

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show, 2004-2008?

The Bat Segundo Show is going on indefinite hiatus. Which pretty much means that it’s over, unless some magical sponsor or benefactor can appear at the eleventh hour to save the show. But I doubt it.

I tried to keep the show running as long as I could, supporting it with my own money. A typical show took me about twenty to thirty hours to produce from start to finish. Segundo was a full-time job for which I received nothing but generous donations, including many of you who kindly chipped in during last year’s pledge drive. The hell of it is that the money required to keep the show going was peanuts.

But now that most of my freelancing income sources have dried up — in some cases permanently — I’m looking for a full-time job to make ends meet. And I only have so much time and energy to go around.

I feel tremendously sad about all this. I know that for some authors, Segundo was the only place they had to discuss their books. But I see no other option but to fold the show under the current economic circumstances.

Thanks to all the authors who took the time out of their busy schedules to talk with me. Thanks to all the publicists who went along with the crazy concept. And thanks, most of all, to the listeners. For four years, we offered a bona-fide alternative to the mainstream. And I’m extremely disheartened to abandon this. I never felt entitled to a living from this. But I do feel as if I’ve drowned a baby.

There are about nine shows left to be released, with a few more interviews I’ve set up that have yet to be conducted. I’ll be putting these shows up in the forthcoming weeks.

In the meantime, if you need a guy to write for you full-time or wait tables, please feel free to email me.

[UPDATE: I’ve added a question mark to the post’s title, since it seems possible to carry on the show in a severely reduced capacity. Perhaps through a seasonal special or two. Last night, I left a comment in the accompanying thread outlining some of the options. I conducted an interview this morning. Lots of laughs. Knowing that it would be one of the last ones (at least for a while), I appreciated it more than I usually do.]

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Andre Dubus III

Andre Dubus III appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #218. Dubus is most recently the author of The Garden of Last Days.

Condition of the Show: Plagued by decaying verdure and intrusive catering managers.

Author: Andre Dubus III

Subjects Discussed: The propinquity of Roman numerals after surnames, Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist, Heinrich Böll, books being categorized as post-9/11 novels, on letting a book go after publication, political novels, writing longhand in cars, Tobias Wolff, the car as shared confessional experience, Flannery O’Connor, writing as a dreamworld, verisimilitude, getting an approximation of an outsider’s character or experience, “White Trees, Hammer Moon,” prison, capitalism, serial description in a declarative sentence, considering the reader, realism vs. postmodernism, self-indulgence in writing, Blaise Pascal, the dangers of the author pleasing himself, taking twenty-five years to write a novel, Dubus’s beverage motif, whether or not specific details in a novel are symbolic, the advantages that come from confined and sustained narratives, sensuality, writing in short sustained bursts, vicarious moral outrage, poems and Books on Tape, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, an interruption by a catering manager, Dubus’s early life bumping around, the responsibilities of a novelist, honesty, novelists who impose endings on books, fiction as a pack of lies vs. fiction as truth, Picasso, sincerity, characters who become truer than real people, and the absence of fathers and husbands in The Garden of Last Days.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I had to remark on the beverage motif throughout this book. We open this book with, of course, April having a plastic coffee cup with her legs. And then two hundred, three hundred pages in, we see the cop with the #1 GRANDDAD mug. And then we also have Virginia heating a cold cup of coffee in the microwave. So…

Dubus: Ho ho! This is brilliant, man. (laughs)

Correspondent: But the concern for coffee in this is rather extraordinary! Because coffee is almost this life force of good versus the drinking one sees from the antagonists in this book. All the antagonists tend to drink. Or they resist drink in order to be good. And so…

Dubus: Oh, this is fascinating.

Correspondent: So there’s a certain coffee-alcohol axis I had to ask you about.

Dubus: Well, God, it just sounds like a weekend in my life.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Dubus: Drink Friday night, drink coffee on Saturday morning. Fascinating. Wow. I hadn’t even known that. Listen, I do believe that we live in our bodies. Even those of us who live very ethereally from the chin up. And I truly believe that these central details shape us and guide us. You know, I had this experience a few years ago where my wife and I had a little spat over money the first thing in the morning. My coffee was cold, gone cold during the fight. I get in the car. It hardly starts up. And I’m worried about money and can I fix this clutch. I drive off. A guy cuts me off in his truck. And I’m telling you. If that car could go fast, I’d go down the road, rip him off the truck, and beat on him.

The next day, my wife and I were fine. We weren’t having a spat. My coffee was delicious. It was the perfect cup of dark French roast. Black. That I like. And it was just the right temperature. I had a little cup, driving cup. And it wasn’t spilling. The car started up. I pull out into the word and another guy cuts me off. And this time, Ed, I said, “Go in peace, my brother. You should be careful. You might hurt someone or yourself.” I had all this good will. And it had to do with my coffee being good. (laughs)

Correspondent: But I’m wondering how this…

Dubus: This stuff isn’t unimportant?

Correspondent: It’s important. But I’m curious. You have to be aware — since there is so much coffee in this book — that you’re repeating this symbol over and over again. So readers like me say, “Well, coffee. Might be a symbol.” Or as we’re suggesting here, it may not be a symbol at all. It may just be some aspect of the world you’re drawing from that just happens to repeat itself.

Dubus: But, Ed, man, I really believe that the reader tends to know more than the writer. At least, certainly in my case.

BSS #218: Andre Dubus III [ 37:53 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Rachel Shukert

Rachel Shukert appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #217. Shukert is the author of Have You No Shame? Incidentally, she’ll be appearing at the July 17th installment of the In the Flesh reading series.

Condition of the Show: Contending with tenuous widows and the mysterious circumstances of Mr. Segundo’s death.

Author: Rachel Shukert

Subjects Discussed: Whether Ms. Shukert is still on the Viacom blacklist, the soul-crushing aspects of temping, working odd jobs in Amsterdam, Anne Frank as a constant in life, the holy similarities between Northw__t and G_d, plane crashes vs. car crashes, airlines and gods, the legal system and divine repercussions, lawyers in Nebraska, talk show hosts who come from Nebraska, Montgomery Clift, the relationship between Jewish identity and location, Omaha vs. New York, the notion of stretching out time, writing truthfully about scatological topics, placing a parental advisory warning, expanding the limitations of personal experience, on being perceived by others, limits on confessional writing, room for the persona to grow within annotation, elevated prose, abandoned sets of footnotes left out of the book, David Foster Wallace’s “Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko,” David Macaulay’s Motel of the Mysteries, Will Self’s The Book of Dave, Newt Gingrich, writing letters vs. email, using all caps in print vs. online, grouping people into taxonomies, Fred Savage and Jason Priestley, first crushes, being published as a paperback original, The Anorexic’s Cookbook vs. The Anarchist’s Cookbook, and performing pieces in front of a crowd.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Shukert: Jason Priestly and Fred Savage were the two guys on TV who I had big crushes on as a child. I had a picture of Fred Savage in my locker that I cut out from the newspaper. I remember that he was holding a candy box. Like a Valentine’s heart box. And I would pretend that he was holding it for me. And then when I got a little older, I thought Jason Priestly was the handsomest man I had ever seen. I mean, when I say “a little older,” I mean ten. But I had a big poster of him in my room too.

Correspondent: Who was the first crush you had?

Shukert: Gene Kelly.

Correspondent: Really? And he’s not referenced in the book.

Shukert: No. That’s private. (laughs)

Correspondent: Not anymore. It’s public now. But this is an interesting distinction. Are you slightly ashamed of these crushes?

Shukert: No, I’m not ashamed. But there’s a difference between being ashamed of something and just having something close to your heart. (laughs)

Correspondent: Wow. Well, I’m curious. How much does a crush linger over the course of one’s life like this? I mean, you can be safe with Jason Priestly and Fred Savage, but…

Shukert: I don’t have crushes on them anymore.

Correspondent: But you still have a crush on Gene Kelly.

Shukert: Yes, but he’s dead.

Correspondent: He’s dead. The dead people are the ones to really lust after the best.

Shukert: Yeah, I think that that’s true.

Correspondent: Because there’s no way that you can possibly consummate it.

Shukert: I also loved Paul Newman as a child.

Correspondent: What are you going to do when he dies?

Shukert: I’ll be sad. I’ll mourn like a widow.

The Bat Segundo Show #217: Rachel Shukert [ 49:24 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Mort Walker

Mort Walker appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #216. Mort Walker is the creator of Beetle Bailey. A volume of the first two years of Beetle Bailey is now out.

Condition of the Show: Observing fifty years of development.

Author: Mort Walker

Subjects Discussed: Walker’s drawing pace, the Beetle Bailey production cycle, filtering through the gags, rejected strips sent to Sweden, Beetle’s early days as a slacker in college, the military as the common experience, Walker’s relationship with the syndicate, the curly hair look of Buzz and Lois, portrait-like illustrations of women, early attention to background, the shrinking space of newspaper comics, Berkeley Breathed and Bill Watterson’s fights for space, appealing to the greatest number of readers, the development of Sarge’s girth and teeth, Plato as the only other character carryover, covering the eyes of characters, Dik Browne, Beetle’s early square form and perpendicular limbs, Walker as Lt. Fuzz, Lt. Jack Flap, African-American characters in comic strips, being confronted by editors by Ebony, Colin Powell’s approval of Flap, code numbers associated with the comic strip, writing a military-based comic strip without reference to Iraq, General Halftrack’s skirt-chasing and later sensitivity training, the circumstances that will cause Walker to change his strip, why Walker hasn’t included women soldiers, aborted cliffhangers, and characters staying the same in the Beetle Bailey universe.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Here we have a military strip. But there’s no reference to Iraq. And I wanted to ask you about this kind of balance.

Walker: I try to avoid anything controversial. Because if you do something pro-Bush, fifty percent of your readers are going to get mad, fifty percent of your readers might like it. But I’m after the whole broad spectrum. So I’m really avoid those things.

Correspondent: But to talk about the broader audience, I mean, Bush’s approval rating isn’t exactly the best in the world. It’s under 30%. So you have 70% of the audience if you were to play around with this kind of thing.

Walker: Yeah. Well, anyway, I try not to get too topical or controversial. That’s why I’ve avoided the war pretty much. I don’t mention Iraq very much. Very seldom.

Correspondent: Even though this war has lasted longer than World War II? I mean, doesn’t it seem…?

Walker: But there’s so many people that are angry about it that I’ve got to be really careful about how I treat it. Mostly, I just ignore it. People say, “Well, when is Beetle going to go to Iraq?” I said, “Jesus Christ. I hope never!” You know, I don’t want to send him there because it’s very difficult to deal with. I’m just keeping him in basic training. It’s the common experience that all soldiers have. If I take him out somewhere and specify into some particular kind of work, I’ll lose a lot of my readers there. They won’t be interested or they won’t understand it. But everybody understands basic training. That’s where I keep him.

Correspondent: I mean, you had this similar situation with Jack Flap. That’s why I present this as well. I mean, that didn’t hurt you. In fact, that got Beetle Bailey more attention, you know?

Walker: Yeah, but it was a common experience. Anyway, that hasn’t hurt me.

The Bat Segundo Show #216: Mort Walker [ 28:34 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Christian Bauman

Christian Bauman appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #215. Bauman is most recently the author of In Hoboken.

Condition of the Show: Contending with contentious Midtown diners.

Author: Christian Bauman

Subjects Discussed: Defining a rock and roll novel, writing an ensemble novel with Hoboken as a character, references to paper storms and 9/11, chronological foreshadowing, using real-life Hoboken locations vs. invented locations, the Hoboken-New York rivalry, playing the rube vs. genuine sincerity as a reflection of irony in the 1990s, balancing real-life incidents and invented narrative, the benefits of vaguely knowing someone, whether or not a particular city is important to a narrative, writing about the worker hierarchy, writing about characters who live cheaply, socioeconomics in literature, locative contexts that make novels different, trying not to anticipate the next novel, songwriting phrases, reconfiguring essays and other pieces into a novel, and the modified omniscient voice.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: You have this particular rock ‘n’ roll novel dwelling upon Hoboken, as well as Mona Smith, who is this Erica Jong-like figure, who is the mother of Thatcher. But I wanted to ask you about this. Because it’s very fascinating to me. I have the belief that if you write a rock ‘n’ roll novel, there needs to be some additional element. Some additional hook. Because if you dwell too much on rock ‘n’ roll music, well, it’s going to possibly be something of a circlejerk. So I wanted to ask you. Was this a consideration in setting this book in Hoboken? The Hoboken aspect came first? What happened here?

Bauman: Yeah, I think the Hoboken aspect came first. Well, first of all, I should point out that everyone keeps calling it a rock ‘n’ roll novel. It is actually a folk novel. So we should just be clear here. There’s a lot more Woody Guthrie here than anything else. But it’s a good point. You know, the whole thing I wanted to do, in as far as I wanted to anything and it didn’t just happen the way it happened — I was trying very hard this time to do two things. One was to write about a place. A very specific place to the point where the place became one of the characters in the book. And of those places where I’ve either lived or been alive in my life, Hoboken was one of them that stood out as a good place to go. And the other one was that I really wanted to try and write an ensemble novel to the best of my ability. And I kind of failed in that aspect.

The Bat Segundo Show #215: Christian Bauman [ 36:51 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Ralph Bakshi

Ralph Bakshi appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #214. Bakshi is the director of such films as Heavy Traffic, Coonskin, and American Pop. There is also a recent book, Unfiltered: The Complete Ralph Bakshi, now out that collects his work.

Condition of the Show: Caught in a musical daydream.

Guest: Ralph Bakshi

Subjects Discussed: The role of music in Bakshi’s films, making good films without a lot of money, emotionally correct songs, daydreaming, Bakshi’s record collection, the original idea of using Led Zeppelin for Lord of the Ring, Leonard Rosenman, Bakshi’s relationships with composers, Andrew Belling’s Wizards score, the “Maybelline” sequence in Heavy Traffic, artistic freedom, why Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” was the final song in American Pop, the relationship between writing fast scripts and revising in animation, the ending of Heavy Traffic, subconscious symbolism, the use of long shots and extended takes, Sergei Eisenstein, Aleksander Nevsky, giving Thomas Kinkade his first big break, on Fire and Ice not being a Bakshi film, using imagination with pre-existing visual elements, rotoscoping, getting the little artistic details, Edward Hopper, designers vs. montage, operating in the present as an artist, being honest, The Last Days of Coney Island, the impending collapse of America, Barack Obama, burning out, American avarice, and Bill Plympton.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about music in your films. It’s certainly important in American Pop. You pilfered from your record collection for that, as well as the “Maybelline” sequence in Heavy Traffic. And there’s “Ah’m a Niggerman” from Coonskin, which you wrote. I’m wondering if you did this because you have an aversion to Carl Stalling-style orchestral music.

Bakshi: First of all, I love music. I’ve always loved music. And I’ve loved various kinds of music. Music is part of our lives. It’s part of the soundtrack that what we all grow up with. Especially in my day. I don’t know today. There’s so many things going on. I’m talking about yesterday and my day, which are the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Music is so emotionally important to the movie. It’s just as important as anything else. If the song is emotionally correct for a scene, the scene plays better. Or the scene plays better than it would have with a different song. So music is so critical to movies. I chose songs that I knew emotionally worked with these scenes that I wrote. Because whenever I listened to music while either driving in a car or sitting at a bar or listening to Coltrane or Billy Holiday – you daydream. If you don’t daydream to music, then you’re not listening to good music.

(Lengthier excerpts from this program can be found here and here.)

The Bat Segundo Show #214: Ralph Bakshi [ 43:33 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
by Edward Champion

Helter Skelter

Vincent Bugliosi is having a hard time trying to book interviews for his book. Well, if Bugliosi comes to New York and Vanguard goes to the trouble of sending me a copy of the book to read, Bugliosi is welcome on The Bat Segundo Show.

Of course, despite the purported “aggressive Internet campaign,” I haven’t received a single email or phone call on the book. Perhaps the problem here is that the publisher and the publicist on this book don’t seem to understand that this isn’t so much a question of mainstream and alternative. Or could it be that they assumed they would get on all the “big” shows and that they failed to contact the “small” ones? Did they put all their eggs in one basket? Was it hubris or ignorance on their part? Bugliosi’s inability to get on the air reflects the current journalistic shift from legitimate intellectual inquiry to frivolous celebrity gossip. In other words, this isn’t 1974 anymore. Unless, of course, you go online.

I’m firmly convinced that if Bugliosi wrote a book called The Prosecution of Paris Hilton for Carnality, he would have no problem getting on The Daily Show. (Conversely, a book with that title would have a difficult time getting on The Bat Segundo Show.)

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Steven Greenhouse

Steven Greenhouse appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #213. He is the New York Times labor reporter and the author of The Big Squeeze. My review of the book can be found here.

Condition of the Show: Reporting upon the darker truths of America.

Author: Steven Greenhouse

Subjects Discussed: Whether economic factors of the 1970s or Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous maxim caused the current strife between corporations and workers, the social contract that came from 20th century labor negotiations, why workers settle for less, temps exploited by HP, being treated like dirt, mock memos circulated to cope with downsizing, The Office, why workers aren’t revolting, Bowling Alone, The Pursuit of Loneliness, how what we do for fun has transformed in the past few decades, the worker-friendly company policies of Patagonia, prodigious cafeteria options for workers, the shocking disparity of parental leave policies in different nations, tracking the lunch hours of workers, computers vs. martinet managers, call center workers, workers who slack off vs. a robust economy, Cooperative Home Care Associates and the benefits of workers on the board of directors, independent contractors, job security, the New York Times hiring freeze, Neutron Jack Welch, The Disposable American, companies who display “too much loyalty” to workers, workers who “get used to” hard and immoral company tactics, climbing the Wal-Mart ladder, the workplace as a cult, unrealistic American dreams, billable hours, the allure of promotion, Greenhouse’s proposed solutions, and a living minimum wage.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Look at Jennifer Miller, who is this woman who worked at HP for ten years. She didn’t have to work as a temp for that long. She could have easily cut out. She could have gone and demanded more from the HP managers. So I would argue that the workers who have allowed themselves to be placed in these particular conditions are perhaps just as responsible as these businesses and these corporations that are trying to squeeze out more profits and also trying to combat the influx of low-cost imports.

Greenhouse: Again, Ed, you ask a good question, and it’s hard to say. Jennifer Miller was a worker at HP. High school graduate. Very little college. She started as a McDonald’s worker. She became a McDonald’s manager. She got tired of that. Then she got a permanent job at HP. That job was sent overseas. So she was kind of bought out. Then a few months later, she was approached. “How would you like to return to HP as a temp?” She thought it was going to be a two-month gig. And as I explained in the book, she was there for ten years as a temp. She said that the job was good. It used a lot of advanced skills. She was often treated with respect, but she said the bad thing was she was a temp and didn’t get the same benefits as HP workers. She didn’t quite get the respect. So you ask why didn’t she quit?

Correspondent: And I should point out that she was even barred from the company parties. I mean, this is a key indicator. In my view, I would say, “Well to hell with this. I’m going to find someone who I can be on staff with.”

Greenhouse: It wasn’t just she. But all temps were barred from the company — you know, they might create a wonderful new piece of software, created a wonderful printer, and all the regular permanent employees could go to the party and celebrate and go for the two-day ski holiday to celebrate. But the temps who work alongside the regular workers in a crazy situation, they weren’t invited to the parties. So yeah, for someone like Jennifer, there was some eating humble pie there. So the question is why didn’t she quit? She said, “For me, Jennifer Miller, a mere high-school graduate living in Idaho, that was a terrific job. I was making $30 an hour. I was really using my brain. I was often working alongside terrific people. Sort of semi, somewhat treated as an equal. But on the other hand, no.” And she said, considering what else was out there, going back to McDonald’s working as a manager, which isn’t such a bad job, but she said working at HP as a temp was better. Her argument was HP was good in many ways, but there was this one big negative. That she was treated as a temp.

BSS #213: Steven Greenhouse [ 46:55 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Fiona Maazel

Fiona Maazel appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #212. Maazel is the author of Last, Last Chance.

[LISTENING NOTE! Please note that this show contains numerous grinding noises. We have endeavored to remove as many of these as possible, and reduce the noise where possible. Alas, SOME aural residue remains.]

Condition of the Show: Considering the niceties of superplagues.

Author: Fiona Maazel

Subjects Discussed: Being under observation, the relationship between kosher chickens and superplagues, rich WASPy girls, individual vs. societal ironies, keeping the protagonist’s name somewhat secret, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, on not reading Camus for protective purposes, Panic in the Streets, the anxiety of influence, opting for a more realistic plague narrative, using humor to cantilever a dark narrative, devising multiple historical voices, pawing around in the dark, reincarnations, Groundhog Day as the essence of reincarnation, thongs and corporeal elliptical themes, the dangers of reading too fast, perceived titular homages to Nabokov, reviewers who are “certain” about books, auctorial intentions, moving around and setting a portion of the book in Texas, wanting to be T.S. Eliot, pursuing the grit, the pervasiveness of television, revolting against cultural media, Nordic tales, developing a conscious understanding of a deity, Stanley as a barometer, and agitprop.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: If one looks at more lower brow choices, like Stephen King’s The Stand or The Andromeda Strain, or any number of superplague television series, like The Survivors and things like that, one tends to find a narrative that begins with the decimation of humanity. Yours is not that particular book. Again, going back to this question of inversions, I’m wondering if you made a particular choice. You had to have known about The Stand.

Maazel: Sure, it’s true. But I didn’t think it was an inversion. I thought it was credible actually. I did a lot of research about plague and also about the CDC and bioterrorism. And just how unlikely the scenario I proposed is. It’s extraordinarily likely. This isn’t an alternate reality kind of novel. It didn’t seem likely that someone would unleash a plague and actually wipe out all of humanity. That’s just not credible. I wanted to come up with a credible scenario. So I guess from the perspective of someone writing fiction or reading fiction, one might expect something like a terrific slate wiper to come along, as we’ve seen in so many of these movies and books. But I actually wanted something that seemed really realistic. That only 3,000 people would die and the fact that they put a stop to it. For instance, when we had this little anthrax outbreak or even bird flu, people are dying, but they’re still containing it. I was more interested in the anxiety, the terror, the foreboding of what could happen. Might this thing wipe out a hundred million Americans or a hundred million people? That was more interesting to me than watching this disease tramp across the country and actually kill off half the United States.

BSS #212: Fiona Maazel [ 39:45 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download