Condition of Mr. Segundo: Stepping away to preserve his dubious legacy.

Author: James Lipton

Subjects Discussed: Lipton’s balance between writing about Inside the Actors Studio and writing about himself, throwing actors out of the Actors Studio, whether or not Lipton is still perfecting aspects about the show, the 1970s talk show environment of tables and chairs vs. the contemporary environment of desks separating interview from guest, scraping the set together in Inside‘s early days, why blue cards are used, training with Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, cross-examination and interviewing, sense memory, the emotional unpredictability of interviews, preparing for an interview, the imposition of talking points, comedians possessed of genius, Robin Williams’s five minutes of improvisation, James Lipton the interviewer vs. James Lipton the actor, being mocked by comedy shows, Will Farrell, Conan O’Brian, Lipton living to mock himself, working on Bewitched, screenplays and John Cusack, whether actors exploit Lipton to get recognition and win Oscars, booking major celebrities at the expense of character actors, how actors are booked, the built-in audience of Inside the Actors Studio, the public coming to see stars, the practice of Bravo green-lighting guests, Bob Kerrey’s assault on the Actors Studio, the overarching (and overreaching?) common theme of parental loss among guests, the relationship between academics and television, staggering into things, self-consciousness, and whether Lipton cares about what other people think.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I’m also curious as to why you’re fond of describing throwing many of these people out. I think I counted at least ten times where you describe throwing Spielberg out, throwing Hopkins out. That kind of thing. Do you get a sort of perverse pleasure from throwing people out?

Lipton: No! What I was trying to demonstrate at that point was that this school, and the forum, the seminar that the public knows as Inside the Actors Studio is nothing more nor less than a course in the masters degree program of the Actors Studio Drama School, and that these people generously come. They get paid nothing. They’re not there to plug a movie. They come there solely because I say in my letter, “Will you come and teach our students?” And that is such a hypnotic experience for them. Such a mesmerizing experience. To be face-to-face with those masters degree candidates, who are very smart. Who have been picked by us out of thousands of candidates and come from all over the world. ‘Cause we’re in 125 countries with the show. That they become so obsessed with the process of teaching the students. That’s the last part of each show. That’s the last part of each evening. For an hour or two, the students ask questions and the guests answer them. And all I was trying to demonstrate was that they are with me for five or six hours and that, literally, if we would let them, they would stay all night. And of course, the students would too. Wouldn’t you? To be with Barbra Streisand for a long, long time. Or Spielberg. Or Billy Joel. Or Tony Hopkins. Or Dustin Hoffman. All of whom just kept going. Until finally at 12:30 in the morning, I said, “Look, these kids have to go to class in a few hours. Get the hell out of here.” And this wasn’t — there was no perverse pleasure in throwing them out. It wasn’t trying to exercise any authority, or command over them. On the contrary, I’d just stay there all night if we could have. But there were limits!

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Heckled for peanuts.

Author: David Michaelis

Subjects Discussed: The connection between Charles Schulz’s emotional reticence and his Minnesota childhood, Peanuts characters who aren’t explicitly reflected through Schulz’s life, the connection between Lucy and Schulz’s first wife, names borrowed for Peanuts characters, balancing probing into Schulz’s life and examining the comic strip, the kite-eating tree and the psychiatric booth, Bill Watterson’s review, the difficulties of compressing biography, exploring happiness, the connection between Jefferson Airplane and Peanuts, Peanuts as a prism for all ideologies to see their messages represented, Robert Short’s The Gospel According to Peanuts, conditions set by United Media, Charlie Brown’s hurt stomach, Michaelis’s intuition and conjecture in drawing conclusions about Schulz, Charlie Brown’s head shaped like a baseball, deflating myths about Schulz, why Michaelis’s endnotes were not clear for the reader, the Tracey Claudius affair and Michaelis’s reliance upon Claudius’s subjective veracity, the Fantagraphic books, and Schulz’s late efforts to lay down a legacy.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Michaelis: This is a guy who was terrified of what’s happening, and happened, in the world. Baseballs aren’t baseballs anymore. Ice cream cones aren’t ice cream cones. There’s something wrong. And that’s a recapitulation to me of that whole period of Charles Schulz’s life in the early 1940s where his mother died and he went off to war. Is that Charles Schulz’s idea when he drew it? I can’t say. But I do know that when he talked about those strips and that particular sequence, he always identified it as being his favorite, and that came out of somewhere. He never would say where. But there was something important about it, and he indicated its significance.

Correspondent: All this is fair enough. But you were mentioning earlier about this being conjecture. And yet this has received a good deal — you’ve been actually on a lot of fire by the Schulz family. You told New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen, “Did I get the story right? Absolutely. No question.” And so what I’m wondering is is what is the difference between ferreting out or confirming a fact, and this kind of more speculative approach. I mean…

Michaelis: Well, I bring the speculative into an intuitive sense of what the art is saying, and sometimes one has to merely place dates beside the strips to see and recognize how they’re related to the life. I’m absolutely scrupulous about the facts as I can — near as I can get them. There’s going to be a mistake here and there. I have noticed one or two since the book was published, which pains me no end. A misspellings here, a misunderstanding there. There’s no question that a book will be corrected in its final months before. I tried very hard to make sure things were right. I do feel in a very strong sense that the story, and the point I was making to Patricia Cohen, of which there was only a quote that remained, was that a biography has two points at which accuracy are vital. It’s vital to be accurate about the facts, as close as you can be. It’s also vital to be accurate about the story. And that’s what I mean by “Did I get the story right?”

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating the end of The Bat Segundo Show.

Author: Naomi Wolf

Subjects Discussed: James Madison’s prescient statement about the American republic in 1829, the end of America, despotic blueprints, on the prospect of Americans taking up arms against the government, closed societies, the staging of “Mission Accomplished,” the efficacy of protesting, Nancy Pelosi’s ineptitude, the American Freedom Campaign’s failure to adopt impeachment as a position, Andrew Meyer and John Kerry’s failure to react, paramilitary forces crushing democracy, Blackwater, the Defense Authorization Act of 2007, the failure to restore habeas corpus, enemy combatants, what’s coming six months from now, the TSA watchlist and citizen intimidation at airports, Andrew Meyer remixes, the confiscation of cameras and laptops, fear and denial, Victor Klemperer, father metaphors for the President, the justification of torture, Page Six libel, Abu Ghraib, the PATRIOT Act and Barbara Lee, the possibilities of a transparent election in 2008, Hillary Clinton’s waffling, the assault on lawyers, whether progressives and the Daily Kos adequately question the Democratic Party, the abdication of paper ballots, and the Democrats raising the war debt ceiling.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Wolf: It is so important for us to look at this blueprint, because when we see all these pieces fitting together, we realize that we are in an extraordinary crisis point where we have to rise up. I would not say rise up with arms, but certainly take to the streets and press representatives and confront the abusers, like other democracy movements.

Correspondent: I suggest the rise up in arms with a certain degree of hyperbole. Because people are going to Washington. They’ve gone there to protest the last couple of weeks about the war. And there are people getting arrested for reading the Constitution on public property, on a place where they are supposed to have freedom of assembly. So given this, and given the fact that, well frankly, Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to proceed impeachment actions against Bush, so what then can we do?

Wolf: What can we do? You know, this is a very sad conversation in a way, although it will end hopefully. Because I’ll reach the answer in a minute. When I wrote this book, I thought it would be very controversial and that people would be saying, “Come on. Not America.” On the contrary. What I’m finding is that Americans across the political spectrum are already there. They know something very serious and dangerous is going on. And they’re saying what you’re saying, which is: We tried it all. We tried democracy already. We tried the marching. We tried emailing our Congress people. Things are shifting into overdrive. And you’re right to notice that. I mean, there’s this horrible phase in a closing democracy, when leaders and citizens still think it’s a democracy, but the people who have already started to close it are kind of drumming their fingers waiting for everybody to realize that that’s not the dance anymore.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: He knows his first name is not Steven.

Author: Steven Pinker

Subjects Discussed: The Starbucks coffee cup size hierarchy, L.A. Story, “divorce project” and unusual noun phrase connotations, perceptive illusions in language, connotation and denotation, polysemy, campus slang and being hip, euphemisms, the unpredictable nature of words and terminology, the origins of “spam,” the absence of specific terms, locative elements of verbs, meanings and brute memorization, “giggle” vs. “Google,” profanity, offensive language, the difficulties of the surname “Koch,” groups adopting pejorative terms, Lenny Bruce’s infamous routines, dysphemisms, whether the Internet truly reflects language, Overheard in New York, William Safire’s columns, linguists being forever behind the language curve, the origins of “not” (from Wayne’s World) and “my bad,” Jerry Fodor’s extreme nativism vs. reductionism, cultural colloquies vs. cultural status, George Lakoff and language as metaphor, the inevitability of metaphor within certain occupations, language and politics, the brain as a computer, the Declaration of Independence, syntactical memes just under the radar, spatial elements and morphemes, memorization, rigid designators and Saul Kripke, given names that are already in the human continuum, and causation within language.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: You respond to many of Jerry Fodor’s cognitive theories and you compare his approach to a trampoline. And you respond to his extreme nativism by observing that language can be arranged in more reductive units than he actually allows for. But actually, I wanted to ask you how reductive can one get with language? Does it go back to suffixes? Letters? I mean, is there a point where one can get too small? Or what?

Pinker: Well, you can’t just keep going, uncovering layer after layer after layer. And eventually I think you reach some sort of bedrock. We do know that language thrives on combinations. Like the Starbucks coffees again. Where sentences are composed of phrases, are composed of words. Words are composed of vowels and consonants — well, first, of morphemes, which are composed of vowels and consonants. Vowels and consonants are composed of features, like voicing. The difference between /s/ and /z/. Voicing probably relates to features of motor control. That is, whether you raise the root of your tongue, whether you start your vocal chords buzzing. So that would be pretty much as low as you could get while still finding something lawful in language. Now we’ve known that for a long time. The question is: Can you do the same thing with meaning? Are there meaning elements in the same way that there are sound elements. Namely phonological features. In the book, I argue, contra my former colleague Jerry Fodor, who argued that there are no meaning elements. Basically, every word is a meaning element. So the meaning of “kill” is kill. The meaning of “carburetor” is carburetor. The meaning of “trombone” is trombone. But there aren’t constituents or components of a word that are basic elements like features in pronunciation. I argue against him and say that there is evidence for meaning elements like “cause,” “change,” “goal,” “act,” “be,” “place,” and that many verb meanings can be decomposed or analyzed in terms of these more basic atoms of meaning.

[PROGRAM NOTE: For background on this podcast, see this post.]

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating mathematical positions.

Author: Danica McKellar

Subjects Discussed: Whether the relationship between prime numbers and monkeys is equitable, metaphorical criteria, factor trees, teenage girls and shopping, “fun and friendly” math, relying upon teenage memories and teen magazines to communicate with girls, testimonials as a form of empowerment, the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem and its mathematical applicability, settling upon middle-school girls as a reading audience, middle-school “confidence,” speaking in front of Congress, promotion vs. education, the “proof” that math makes you smarter, textbooks vs. magazines, being “happier while you’re looking fabulous,” the conflation of sexy and smart and “pendulums,” comparing the preparation for a math test with a bikini wax, hair issues, writing a “populist” book, Lawrence Summers’s remarks on women, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, jewelry and makeup as a “universal” quality for women, and feminists and Nazis.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I’m curious, would you call yourself a feminist?

McKelalr: Different people have different interpretations of that word. In terms of the interpretation that says, I believe in equality of men and women, of course, absolutely.

Correspondent: What definitions would you quibble with?

McKellar: Well, there’s so-called Nazi feminists out there that give them that name. That try to say that, you know, women are better than men. And there’s just some of that out there. It’s the good old pendulum they’re trying to swing the other direction.

Correspondent: Well…

McKellar: I really think that men and women are completely fabulous creatures in their own right and very different from each other.

Correspondent: Who are these Nazi feminists? I mean, Rush Limbaugh, of course, coined the term “feminazi.” I’m curious as to who would fall into that particular camp.

McKellar: That’s not what we’re going to talk about.

Correspondent: You’ve alluded now many times to the passage at the end of that chapter, which I would describe as the American Pastoral moment. I’m very curious as to how that came to be, the particular doors, through the wrong end of the telescope…

Russo: I’m sorry. Which?

Correspondent: The three paragraphs where you have him describing all the doors that are open at youth and then not open.

Russo: Oh right.

Correspondent: Yeah, we’re talking through the wrong end of the telescope. And so on.

Russo: Yeah.

Correspondent: So I’m curious as to where that moment, which seems to me the more American Pastoral moment, came from exactly. How that came to be laid down.

Russo: You know, it’s funny. That particular metaphor of doors, of walking through doors closed behind you, and then having fewer doors to walk through and choose between, was the metaphor that I used to use when I was teaching to describe how plot worked.

Correspondent: Interesting.

Russo: When I was teaching my undergraduate and especially my graduate students. Plot is a very difficult — they say, how do you come up with a story? How do you know what happens first? What happens next? All of that. And I was trying to explain to them that the best stories, the best plots, are the ones that end up kind of paradoxically, you want to be surprised. But after the surprise, you want a sense of inevitability. Like that’s the only place the story could have gone. Those two things, that’s why a lot of books are disappointing. Because that’s a very hard effect to achieve. How can you surprise somebody even as, after they register the surprise, they say, “Oh, of course. This is the only way it can go. This is the only way it could have gone.” Those two things are antithetical. And yet the best books always have that. That coming together. So I was always looking for a metaphor to explain that to people. To my students. And I’d say, all right. Think of it this way. You’ve got a thousand doors. You choose one. You walk through it. Now you’ve got five hundred doors. You walk through that. You’ve got two hundred and fifty doors. Every time I started explaining that to students, that there were fewer and fewer doors, that was going to provide the inevitability. But there was still the surprise. You didn’t know. Every time a character makes a decision, it seems that there are so many other possibilities. So it’s a series of surprises that ends up with a sense of inevitability. But as I explained that to my students, and as I was writing this book, it occurred to me that’s also a description of life and destiny.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Russo: (laughs) So I had lectured my students and then that lecture had provided a metaphor for this — the most complex of my novels.

Correspondent: Wow. So I guess the more representative a book is of life, the more that you can grapple onto teaching metaphors. (laughs)

Russo: (laughs)

[Richard Russo has also offered an essay at Powell’s, in which he describes his own “lazy” writing impulse.]

Wow, folks, I’m truly stunned. Thanks very much to all the donors whose donations came overnight. It looks like I’ll be sending out quite a number of chapbooks next month.

We are now about 70% of the way there towards making the $800 pledge sum happen. And I’m convinced, based on this remarkable turnaround in within less than twenty-four hours, that we can meet this $800 goal. (And once we do, I assure you that the PBS-style braying will cease.)

As I stated previously, the plan was to keep going with this if we had reached $600 by the end of this week. Well, it looks quite probable that we’ll get here before the end of today. But we’re not out of the woods just yet.

Again, if you’ve enjoyed the podcasts and want to see them continue quite prolifically throughout the end of the year, please feel free to donate. Those who donate $10 or more will receive a chapbook containing a Bat Segundo history, an excerpt from the play Wrestling an Alligator, and an excerpt from the novel-in-progress Humanity Unlimited. And remember, a donation is the only way to learn about Mr. Segundo’s mysterious history, which has only been alluded over the course of these podcasts.

Thanks again to everyone.

Here’s where we’re at. $243 has been raised so far — a little more than 30% of the goal.

Many thanks to everyone who was kind enough to contribute today. I will keep the donors’ names anonymous out of respect for their privacy. But for everyone who has donated $10 or more, they will receive a copy of the special Segundo Chapbook sometime in late November. Again, all we’re shooting for here is $800. So if you’ve appreciated The Bat Segundo Show and want to see it flourish through the remainder of the year, please take some time to contribute.

The deal is this: if we can generate $600 before the end of this week, I’ll keep the pledge drive going through next week until we hit past $800. If we can make this happen, this should permit me to carry forth with the interviews. (And for those who have emailed your concerns about what I will do in lieu of this cash, don’t worry. I have several backup plans now in the works.)

Thanks again.

In almost four years of running Reluctant and two years of running The Bat Segundo Show, I have never openly asked for money on this website. Sure, there’s been a donation bar on the side, and some of you have graciously pitched in. I thank those of you who have. There’s also been some advertising, which has likewise helped. But this website has largely been run on my own dime. I’ve done my best to stimulate conversation and to make this a place for the literary community to connect.

So it pains me to make the following announcement. I’ve always tried to be self-sufficient here, ensuring that I can provide you, the readers and the listeners, with free content about the literary news and developments of our time.

But here’s the cold hard truth: Due to an unforeseen development on the advertising front, I’m out $800 this month. I’ve made some calls and spoken to a few people, and it appears that this is $800 I may not see for a while. The specific individuals responsible for collecting these monies have as much interest in performing their duties or informing me of their progress as the CIA. While I’ll be all right next month for income that has nothing to do with advertising, in the meantime, I’m now facing a shortfall that I’ll have to make up in the forthcoming weeks.

Understand that I don’t believe that the world owes me a living. But what this means is that, if I do not find a way to make up this shortfall this week, about seven Segundo interviews with some of today’s leading contemporary authors I had set up for the next three weeks will have to be canceled while I find immediate work elsewhere. (There are two interviews scheduled for this week and I plan to go ahead with these. And there are also some exciting interviews in the can that I hope to release once this financial setback has been resolved, including a provocative conversation with Steven Pinker and a two-part interview with Tom McCarthy.)

Now I don’t want to have to cancel these interviews. Trust me on this: these are all extremely interesting people. But if I cannot get $800 by the end of this week, I’m going to have to.

Here’s where you come in. As an experiment, I’m seeing if you — the readers and listeners who have been coming here — can help make up this $800 shortfall through donations. I’m not asking for a yearly salary like Jason Kottke once did and I certainly don’t want to make a regular habit of asking readers for donations. Nevertheless, in the grand scheme of things, collectively speaking, this is not a lot of dough.

I’ve produced 145 of these podcasts so far and made them available over the past two years for free. And I would like to continue devoting my time and energies doing this. As we all know, the number of outlets for in-depth literary interviews is shrinking. And I’ve been doing my best to fill in the gap with questions not usually asked of authors, careful reading of the books, and vigorous research.

If at some point, you’ve enjoyed any of the podcasts or any of the content here, please take some time to click on the Donation button below. If even sixteen of you contribute $50, then we’re back in business. Even if you can contribute $10, $5, beer money, it all helps. Let’s see if we can’t conquer this shortfall together. When I’ve raised around $800, I’ll remove this post and continue with business as usual.

And, as an added incentive, for those who contribute $10 or more, I’ll throw in a homemade chapbook containing an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Humanity Unlimited, an excerpt from my play, Wrestling an Alligator, a brief history of Bat Segundo’s sordid past, along with a few other items. The chapbook is only available through a donation.

Thanks very much for your time.

Correspondent: It seems very extraordinary that it was only three drafts to get this. I mean, because the prose itself, it has this really illusory speed to it, in the sense that one reads it, thinking, “Oh, well, this is a rather brisk read.” And then you introduce the detail, like the weird guy at the bar. Where did he come from? I don’t remember him being referenced earlier. And yet this often happens, in terms of [the protagonist’s[ perception. So in terms of playing with readers’ perceptions, was this very much in place early on?

McCarthy: It fell into place really early on. I mean, as soon as the guy’s voice came, and it came early, because he’s not an intellectual or an artist. He’s just a very average — he’s a Joe Schmoe. He’s some bloke. He doesn’t even have a name. He’s kind of an everyman. As soon as his voice was there, it just picked up its own rhythm and then the set of modulating repetitions and the phrases that come back, they just suggested themselves. It’s like pinball. Once you go into multiple mode, they kind of stay up there for a bit, you know what I mean? And it just seemed to happen with this book.

Correspondent: So the momentum in this book, in writing it, came from these repetitive phrases. These incantations?

McCarthy: Yeah, exactly, there’s a sort of incantatory logic to it. A neurotic repetitiveness. And once that gets going, it kind of auto-repeats. It goes into auto-pilot mode of self-repetition. Like the classical model of neurosis in Freud or whatever. You can see that playing out rhetorically in the writing, in the text of this book, I think.

Correspondent: I actually wanted to ask you about the time period in this book. You make a few clues that it might be the late ’90’s. You have the rising telecommunications stock.

McCarthy: Yeah.

Correspondent: You have the Propellerheads song from 1999 or somewhere along those lines. You have the airport security being particularly lax. And I’m wondering why the late ’90’s time frame seemed to be the best to set this particular narrative.

McCarthy: It’s pretty much when I wrote it. I wrote it from 2000 to 2001. In fact, I finished it just about a month before September the 11th. So it’s kind of ironic. This book has been interpreted as an allegory of September the 11th or reviewed as foreign policy. The hero starts out the victim or some sort of calamity and he ends up the perpetrator of other calamities, which is kind of what the U.S. has done.

Correspondent: Yeah.

McCarthy: But it’s entirely accidental. I mean, it was all written before that. But no, you’re right. It did come out of that. I imagine that it’s set sometime during 1999, 2000, as the stock market bubble was going up and then spectacularly bursting at the end of the book.

Correspondent: Well, you even have the notion of this company, which is Time Control UK. I wanted to ask you about this. I mean, did this come about from the notion of — all you had to do in that time period was essentially write out a five-page prospectus and anyone would give you money? Or were there actually specific companies that you based Time Control UK on?

McCarthy: Oh yeah! These concierge companies were just emerging in the UK, who would more or less do anything for you. They live your life vicariously, or they stretch your life for you. Which I just find kind of fascinating. I mean, it’s quite kind of metaphysical really, you know, you outsource your godliness. You outsource your autonomy, even though obviously you’re paying them. And the stock market, I just found it really fascinating. This bubble and these companies that were just making paper millionaires out of people that had virtually no premise. Like eSolutions. I mean, what on earth is that? I read this article about the South Sea bubble of the 17th century — or was it the 18th century? — where stocks were going so high that people would throw their money at anything and there was a company called A Very Good Idea Yet No One to Know What It Is.

Correspondent: (laughs)

McCarthy: And, of course, its shares sold out in a day. And, of course, it went bankrupt six months later. But in this book, the movements of capital are very much tied in with the movements of everything else. So this idea of speculation, which has an astronomical meaning as well. Contemplation of the heavens. And my hero spends a lot of time just looking at constellations of dust suspended in a stairwell. And they’re either going up or down. And the shares are doing the same thing.

(A two-part interview with Tom McCarthy, the author of Remainder, is coming soon to The Bat Segundo Show.)

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating memories in a pizzeria.

Author: Jeff Parker

Subjects Discussed: Growing up in Florida, working in a pizzeria, John Sheppard’s Small Town Punk, the working class in fiction, setting the book in the early ’90’s, unexpected parallels to current events, music references, Desert Storm, alcoholism, work ethic, Post-It notes, unusual character names, linguistic affectations, food stamp scams, hidden economies, purple underwear, grenades, two dollar Huffy bikes, diligent fact checkers, small town civil projects, menacing occupations, Richard Linklater’s Slacker, television blaring in the background, tattoos, and literary symbols.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Parker: You know what? I took a writing workshop — well, I took many writing workshops with this writer named Padgett Powell, who’s one of the contemporary — I mean, he’s one of the few pure contemporary stylists in American fiction. Like him and Sam Lipsyte are kind of on the same page. And you know, he just always says this thing about repetition. You know, he says, writing well — all you have to do to write well is repeat yourself well. And so, sort of my strategy really is — I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t be saying this. Because it undercuts the possibility for meaning in the omnipresence of nipples throughout the book. You know, to make it supportable, if you — where else would I put the scarification? It had to be on the nipple. Because it had to sort of reflect the third nipple. It just had to be basically a reiteration of it for, like, the thematic unity of the work. So I see it as a craft point rather than a thematic issue.

Correspondent: So your suggestion to anyone writing is essentially just like: Come up with a vaguely literary metaphor, repeat it multiple times throughout your novel, and, hey! Your critics will love it. It will go down with the readers. And there’s novel writing for you.

Parker: Well, okay, I don’t mean to be so cynical at all. But what I do believe is that, you know, if you have a lot of things going on — that is, like, you’re paying attention to the language and you’re generating, like, complicated real characters that hopefully you can, you know, establish some emotional connection or the reader to. And you have other things going on, you know, then the repetitions, regardless of any meaning you might want there — I mean, the repetitions, like, accrue meaning of their own. You know, that’s the nature of literary art, I think. So, in a sense, yes to your question.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Empathizing with surnames.

Author: David Peace

Subjects Discussed: Why it took so long to set a book in Japan, stereotypes, research, the occupation period, the effects of serial killers, language and repetition, dissociation, Japan vs. the UK, Zodiac, police investigation, the difficulties of style, comparing the Red Riding Quartet with the Tokyo trilogy, driving editors mad, Mark Danielewski, typesetting, abandoning a 80,000 word draft, defying predictability, Kabuki metal and silence as an aid to writing, Japanese symbols, women and children as victims, melding fact and fiction to get to an emotional truth, working off a nonfiction template, Eoin MacNamee, Gordon Burn, Don DeLillo, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, “practicing” passages, and the publishing industry’s obsession with “originality.”

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Could it be said then that you’re attracted to subject matters that lend themselves more to dominantly masculine takes?

Peace: I mean, you know, this isn’t a cop out. But I was raised in West Yorkshire, which is not the most liberal place to be raised. And then I live in Japan, which again is not the most liberal place — you know, it’s not. And I’ve chosen to write about places where I don’t think that, if I was a woman, I wouldn’t be moving out to those places.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Peace: But that does not mean I am like, you know, a sexist or a misogynist. Or…

Correspondent: No, no, I wasn’t implying that!

Peace: And I know you weren’t. For the record.

Correspondent: No. I guess I’m just fascinated by — why do writers choose the subjects that they choose? Whether it’s conscious or not.

Peace: Well, this is the — the terrible thing about book tours is that you like — I’m not really big on self-analysis. You know, I write the book. And to some extent I don’t know where they come from. Or I don’t want to know where they come from. And then when you go — like this is like a three week tour of just talking about yourself incessantly. You know, some writers end book tours with nervous breakdowns. And it’s because they’re being forced to confront things that possibly they wouldn’t want to confront.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Dwelling on legal inconsistencies.

Author: Katha Pollitt

Subjects Discussed: The pragmatism in learning to drive, being lazy, observation as a strength and weakness, “webstalking” vs. Googling, responding to Toni Bentley’s review, what a feminist is supposed to be, whether or not Susan Salter Reynolds has a sense of humor, on writing life stories, Deborah Solomon, the book vs. the person, the politics of writing, whether or not “men are rats,” double entendres, inflammatory reactions, the specifics of sentences, being picked apart in The Nation, reader interpretation, meteorological solecisms, humor and sadness, observation, driving with other cars on the road, Saul Bellow’s “departure mode,” the creative destruction of New York, landmarks being torn down, Coney Island, individual writing vs. community, parental secrets, public information, self-analysis, structuring, poetry, women cast under a spell, Anais Nin, dropping romance, “sperm sisters,” and writing stories.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Pollitt: Well, this is the great thing about writing. You don’t have to give everybody a vote. You are not the community board. You’re you. I write what I think. And if somebody else feels differently, they can write their own story. Now in the real world, the people who didn’t like Coney Island won. They won.

Correspondent: I know.

Pollitt: And the people who do like Coney Island lost out. And I think that they tend to lose out. They tend to lose out. Because I think kind of a mass and corporate development is really zooming ahead in a way that, I think, is very sad.

Correspondent: I’m going to come in here with a raging burst of optimism and say, yes, the Coney Island thing, I find that personally sad. I find many things about the world extremely sad. But one must have some sort of optimism, I guess, in order to kind of carry on. One must believe in something, believe in some sort of good to at least kind of carry on in the face of a lot of terror.

Pollitt: Oh sure!

Correspondent: So I guess I’m wondering why this was not so pronounced. You actually say in this particular piece, I’m going to come across as one of those “Back in my day” kind of people. So why not go for this more all-encompassing reality of what it is to be alive?

Pollitt: Well, I think that’s in other stories.

Correspondent: Okay.

Pollitt: I think that the piece, the book as a whole, does not convey the sense of a world-weary person.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Objecting to snobbish Manhattan types who use three names.

Author: Brian Francis Slattery

Subjects Discussed: Matt Cheney’s “leap of faith,” paranoia, the advantages of writing in Guatemala, secret economies, food as cultural shorthand, the underground world of Darktown, H.P. Lovecraft and other fictive antecedents, disparate relationship models, writing sentences without many verbs, locative and temporal fugue states, writing to African music, polyrhythm, disorienting the reader, Square video games, dialogue, ellipses, em dashes, William Gaddis, quotation marks vs. dashes in dialogue, sticking in one’s hometown, attempting to classify the book, coming to New York vs. coming to America, Spaceman Blues as a “systems novel,” sentences, not casting judgment on characters, cockfighting, warning the reader of weirdness, on not knowing the ending, apocalyptic novels, hyperverbosity, resisting the 9/11 card, Don DeLillo, and Pynchonian character names.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Slattery: For a while, I thought that I would have those scenes take place in a specific neighborhood in New York. And I spent a long time thinking about, well what group would I want to focus on and where would I want it to be? And then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I kind of wanted to talk about the immigrant experience — generally. I didn’t want to have to tie it to a specific group. And in some ways, I wanted to talk about the ways that the various immigrant groups, when they get here, will tend to work together. There’s such a thing as an immigrant community. And I wanted to be able to talk about that in a sort of cool and engaging way, and also to really get across the point that that’s this full network that you don’t see. You know, it exists here. But you have to know where to look in order to find it.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Finding uses for his Kleenex supply.

Author: Chimamanda Adichie

Subjects Discussed: Young novelists and ambitious war novels, horrible Nigerian critics, the novel as the ideal prism for the Biafra conflict, A Woman in Berlin, the advantages of small details, J.G. Ballard, twins, the advantages of narrative dichotomies, adultery and monogamy, relationship fidelity vs. national fidelity, sensuality, specific sexual positions, serial adultery, the skin metaphor, jumping around in time periods, High Life music, the faults of education as a revolutionary galvanizing point, the ethical vacillation of Ugwu, whether sparse details convey the complexities of war, Toni Morrison’s reluctance to write about sex in detail, the advantages of teaching writing classes, names, whether Half of a Yellow Sun is a political book, an unexpected digression concerning Ms. Adichie’s cell phone, and sermonizing in fiction.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to actually talk about the violence in this book. You describe if often very sparsely. The bodies are decapitated. The people are massacred through brutal racism. But you don’t dwell on really elaborate detail of these particular — of this violence. And even Ugwu’s finale — near the end, I mean, his choice at that bar, it’s only like a half page of ethical vacillation. So I wanted to kind of ask you about that. Do you feel that stopping short sometimes really conveys the complexities of war? Was this an issue for you? Or is this more about the narrative than it is about depicting war?

Adichie: I think it’s about both. I do think that, in much the same way that details work better when you’re writing about something huge. I also feel that if you’re writing about something difficult, violent, that less is more. You know? And that sometimes you run the risk of having it become pornographic. I didn’t see myself — I didn’t want to, quite frankly, describe those bodies over and over. I sometimes feel that one tiny detail is enough. I remember reading something about Toni Morrison, where she said, for her, sex scenes were — she tells the reader, a man is on top, the woman is underneath, and she leaves it there, you know. And I remember reading that and thinking — and she lets the reader and she thinks that’s enough. All you need to know is who’s on top and then you make up the rest. I don’t share that when it comes to sexuality. I sort of want to tell you what happens. But when it comes to violence, I think I do. You know, I want to give you a tiny detail and then — I just don’t want it to get…I think that it’s very easy to go overboard with violence and it makes me uncomfortable. And I think that it also might have something to do with the fact that I was always aware that I was writing about something that really did happen to people. And there’s a kind of — I don’t know if it’s respect. Maybe it’s community that I wanted to bring to those scenes of violence.

Correspondent: I can totally see what you’re saying, but doesn’t this kind of get in the way of pursuing the truth further and really getting at this…?

Adichie: No, I don’t think so. I actually think that sometimes it might make it closer to the truth.

Correspondent: In this title essay, you write, “Observation is my weakness.” And in the second essay, while you openly confess to stalking many of the…

Pollitt: Oh, you know! I’m sorry.

Correspondent: Oh, well…

Pollitt: I didn’t mean to interrupt you.

Correspondent: Well, go for it. Go for it. I’ll jump in.

Pollitt: I was just going to say, I was wondering, if I had called that story, instead of calling it “Webstalker,” if I had called it “Googling my Ex-Boyfriend,” would people have been so horrified by it? I really don’t understand this. Maybe you can explain this.

Correspondent: Well…

Pollitt: This is something everybody does. And yet somehow, it’s, you know, I have been called in reviews — maybe she’s insane, why would she reveal such a terrible thing about herself, maybe she needed the money. I mean, I can’t believe it! I thought I was sort of like, well, here we all are and, in fact, in the story — in the story, I have a young friend who introduces me to this word, which I had never heard before. And she was surprised I didn’t have a whole file on my boyfriend, which she had on hers, with a social security number and everything like this. I get the feeling that there are a lot of people that are very suspicious of their mates.

Correspondent: Yeah?

Pollitt: Which I never was. All I did was I sat at my computer and I Googled. And for this, I am being pilloried as if I was a crazy person. I just don’t understand it.

Correspondent: I would think that people are possibly objecting to the fact — they seem to pinpoint precisely, like you guessing the password and wondering what it might be. And hacking someone’s email. Maybe it comes from doing casual Googling, which everybody sort of accepts. But even your friend having the social security number, well there, we get into invasion of privacy issues. So maybe that’s probably the touchy thorn that’s caused…

Pollitt: Well, you know, I hope that that story and the other ones are written in a humorous way. I not only did not manage to get into my boyfriend’s email system. It was really basically a joke. I would be the last person in the world to be figure out how to do that.

[RELATED: In today’s Salon, Rebecca Traister offers a lengthy article about the hostile reception that has greeted Katha Pollitt’s Learning to Drive. (via Bookslut)]

PROGRAM NOTES: (1) Our Young, Roving Correspondent claimed that Milton Friedman supported the New Deal. Naomi Klein claimed that he did not. As it turns out, both Our Young, Roving Correspondent and Klein were wrong. In an October 2000 interview, Friedman professed his support for the parts of the New Deal that involved providing jobs and relief for the unemployed. This was the “very exceptional circumstance” that Our Young, Roving Correspondent referred to. Apologies on our end for failing to clarify. (2) For more information on United States suicide rates, here is a solid overview. If suicide is, as Klein suggests, linked explicitly to an economic downturn, what explains the slow rise in suicide during the Roaring Twenties — a then unprecedented period of prosperity? While it is certainly true that the suicide rate rose during the Great Depression, the point worth considering is that suicide is not completely linked to economics. (3) While Klein did not provide a supportive endnote in her book for the post-Solidarity Polish journalistic label “shock therapy,” here is a helpful reference point for those looking for more information: No less an authority than Jeffrey Sachs, who Klein identifies as one of the chief instigators of the “shock doctrine,” observed how “shock therapy” came to be in a 1994 lecture delivered at the University of Utah. Sachs believed that the journalistic label “shock therapy” played into the Eastern European belief that a drastic alteration of the economic system would produce results. While Klein is right to point out that this was a term in use, it remains our belief that it would have been more helpful to outline the specific points of causation.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Abdicating to journalists.

Author: Naomi Klein

Subjects Discussed: Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago school of shock economics, polarization of the superwealthy, consumer boycotts and “market democracy,” the New Deal, Augusto Pinochet, the good things about Friedman, Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust, the damage from economic ideology vs. innate business corruption, writing an “alternative history,” relying too much on the “shock” label, Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell, post-Solidarity Poland and “shock therapy,” quibbling with Klein’s footnotes, whether suicide rates can be exclusively linked to economic factors, Israel’s defense export economy, Margaret Thatcher’s England, and whether reduced inflation or the Falklands War boosted Thatcher’s approval rating.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Klein: I’m not sort of just projecting Chicago school ideals onto a country. I’m talking about specific places where key graduates of the program…

Correspondent: Well, I’m not disputing that.

Klein: …came to positions of power.

Correspondent: I am not disputing that there…

Klein: I’m just not quite sure where IBM fits in.

Correspondent: Well, what I’m saying is is that it’s not exclusively this Friedmanesque ideology that is causing these particular factors. I mean, what I’m wondering is — is I present the IBM scenario as, well, here’s a case of, in my view anyway, clear unethical business practice and yet it has nothing to do with Friedman economics. Just as, I mean, yeah, there are plenty of examples you give. The various leaders who are listening to lectures on tape and, of course, all the Chicago Boys, and all that stuff. I’ve definitely read the book. I’m just asking, where does Friedman depart from some of the unfortunate shock treatment that you describe to various…?

Klein: Well, I think the key thing to understand is that I am not arguing that this group of people, that they are the first people to employ these tactics to advance their political goals. And I, you know, I piss off people on the left by quoting Mao and Pol Pot and all these, you know, Communist figures of the past who shared a similar desire to use shock and crisis to push through their agenda, dreamed of societies being a blank slate on which they could build their ideals. I also draw…I also talk about fascism and Nazism and you know, I think that, the reason why I’m focusing on this group of people of the past thirty-five years, as opposed to the book just being a history of everybody who’s ever used shock is that I’m trying to present an alternative history of how we got to where we are. I’m trying to present an alternative history of the ideology that is the dominant ideology of our time, so dominant that we don’t see it. It’s the air we breathe. And I think that we have been living with a fairy tale version of history.

Correspondent: I have to ask you about the fact that every character in this book is sleeping with somebody else.

Adichie: [laughs]

Correspondent: And there is no monogamous marriage exemplar in any of the characters, in any of the major characters. This struck me as kind of interesting. It’s a very sensual book, certainly. But it’s not just that. It seemed to sort of suggest to me that one could not be loyal in one’s relationship; therefore, one could not be loyal to any of these causes that were actually occurring in Nigeria at the time. I was wondering if you could, sort of, describe how the relationship and the loyalty in the relationship, or the presumed loyalty, depending upon what sort of arrangement you have…

Adichie: [laughs]

Correspondent: And how you got permission. But that’s a whole ‘nother side track. Sorry! I’ll shut up. Go for it.

Adichie: Okay, now, that’s really interesting. I’ll have to think about that. The parallel between the relationship and the cause, I don’t know. I think what I wanted to do with that was simply to say human beings are flawed, were hopelessly flawed, and also in some ways to — so my parents were telling me these stories about the war and often I would be thinking, wondering how much it changed their relationship. And when I would ask people questions or read things about the war, and there’s a lot of people sleeping with each other, as there is everywhere I think, it made me wonder about how relationships changed. When you have a relationship and everyone’s happy and your life is comfortably middle-class, and you’re sort of having cucumber sandwiches. And then suddenly, you’re reduced to this place where you are thinking about eating lizards. It has to do something to the way you have sex! You know? That’s what I’m thinking.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Adichie: And I guess also just to show the ability to forgive. How in war, horrible things are happening, but then you’re finding yourself forgiving the person you love, who’s hurt you, who’s betrayed you. You know? And I sort of saw them as — it’s difficult for them to be loyal to one another, because the struggle to be be loyal to this big thing, this cause, this faith in something bigger than they are, and I think there’s a part of me that’s hopelessly romantic. And I just love the idea of believing in something. You know, standing up for something. And we don’t have that in Nigeria anymore. And it depresses me.

The whole of this interview with Chimamanda Adichie will appear very soon on The Bat Segundo Show.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Finding creative ways of using Photoshop.

Author: Antoine Wilson

Subjects Discussed: Tonal beacons within The Interloper, Martin Amis, stifling the Nabokovian influence, frisbees and sex, conformist thinking, allusions to Sisyphus, technical writing, emotional candor, psychological experiments, generic establishments, reflection vs. invention, thong underwear, Roman mythology and Southern California, the relationship between Don Quixote and Knight Rider, technological being, Photoshop, Owen and Luke Wilson, prioritizing events, writing fictitious letters vs. writing narrative, how The Interloper made the rounds and ended up at The Other Press, and paperback originals and satirical novels.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Wilson: Maybe some of the more classical allusions came from the fact that I was reading Don Quixote while I was writing the book.

Correspondent: Oh, okay.

Wilson: And also had only recently realized that Knight Rider was a recapitulation of all those knight errant stories. So I was sort of interested in that kind of thing and…

Correspondent: But, wait, Knight Rider, you say?

Wilson: Yeah, the TV show.

Correspondent: Yeah. The relationship between Knight Rider and Don Quixote.

Wilson: Yeah. Knight Rider, Michael Knight, is a knight errant.

Correspondent: Yes.

Wilson: He roams the countryside looking to perform acts of chivalry for various people on his trusty steed, KITT, and then he’s got his patron, Devon, and then his woman is totally desexualized — well, she’s sexy, but she’s not sort of in a sexual relationship with him. The other woman on the show.

Correspondent: Bonnie was Dulcinea? Jesus.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Not suffering scoundrels riding on past television achievements.

Author: Gabe Kaplan

Subjects Discussed: Why those duped by email wanted to be included in Gabe Kaplan’s book, celebrity stature, celebrity auctions, Scientology and John Travolta, television ratings, Dick Clark Productions, sixty-year-old celebrities fighting each other, Sioux City, Iowa and parades, the art of composing email, X-rated rap songs, Letters from a Nut, career-planning, Gabe Kaplan merchandising tie-ins, how Radar was duped by fake Stalinist history, Wilt Chamberlain, the ethics of duping people, Jerry Falwell’s refusal to be included in the book, why so many standup comics end up being cast in positions of authority, and television high-school teachers.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Kaplan: They picked me and I was, I think, the first person who they did a sitcom about, basically, their standup comedy. I would talk about being in a school with the Sweathog type of guys, and growing up in that kind of New York City school system where they always put you in the class with people who were as brought as you were. And this was my act. So we just translated it into a sitcom where the only fictitious character is Kotter. Everybody else was based on someone I had went to school with.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Responding to the recent allegations concerning Bat Segundo and Vanessa Hudgens.

Author: Marianne Wiggins

Subjects Discussed: Fictive alter egos, Philip Roth’s The Counterlife, James Frey, Kurt Vonnegut, Hemingway’s screenplays, Edward Curtis, ephemera, patriarchy, W.G. Sebald, 20th century photographers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, truth vs. legend, “book time” vs. real time, photo manipulation, the similarities between Photoshop and Soviet propaganda, Abu Ghraib, novels as news source, literary antecedents, Absalom! Absalom!, disclaimers, dialogue, long em-dashes, the difficulties of writing novels in London, California geology, the exhaustion of writing measured prose, Las Vegas and Hunter S. Thompson, and bathtub symbols.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Wiggins: One interviewer said to me that he thought I wrote in the equivalent of jazz improvisation. And fortunately, given the luxuriant elasticity of the English language and our grammar, you can make all these elliptical riffs. You can put a dash in a parentheses and keep a whole thought going seamlessly, if — I mean, I hope the reader doesn’t get lost midway through the sentences and say, What? (laughs) Where is this going and what is this about? But my mind moves in that, with that rapidity. So it’s almost a musician’s notation more than a grammarian’s.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Puzzled by cyberspace.

Author: William Gibson

Subjects Discussed: Coats, blankets, and carapaces in Gibson’s fiction, textures, characters with shaved heads, on not having technological issues, the Apple Store, cell phones and the natural street state, obsolete technology and thrift shops, ZX81s, VR, sitting atop the technological anthill, the internal combustion engine, how to escape being handcuffed with a piece of a ball point pen, the origin of Blue Ant, color taxonomies, Belgians, locative art, rock ‘n roll novels from the 1960s, the downsides of sitting in a SFWA suite, Bobby Chombo, cigarettes, Cory Doctorow, GPS plausibilities, celebrity deaths, Philip K. Dick, Milgram and Dr. Stanley Milgrim, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, ghostly connections between Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, tripartite plot structures, writing while not knowing what was in the suitcase, extra-terrestrial artifacts in Baghdad, how to confuse John Clute, the historical record being determined by Wikipedia and Google results, Google Maps and street view, lonelygirl15, YouTube, Japanese behavioral protocols, responding to Ed Park’s theory about the old man and Win being the same character, unreliable narrators, and Iain Sinclair.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: We were talking about the nature of blankets and coats that are in your work, that often protect the characters’ bodies.

Gibson: Warmy blankies in the work of William Gibson! Well, did you notice that a lot? Is it just that book? Is there something I’ve been…?

Correspondent: It’s also in Pattern Recognition, with Cayce and her — the blanket that she actually shifts with as well.

Gibson: Well…

Correspondent: That industrial. And then she eventually goes back to natural blankets near the end.

Gibson: Could this be — could this be the 21st century equivalent of rain-soaked neon?

Correspondent: It could be.

Gibson: The warmy blanky? Maybe so. Maybe so.

Correspondent: Well, maybe it goes back to Neuromancer. Cyberspace back then was very much a matter of being plugged directly in the Internet, before it was known as the Internet.

Gibson: Yeah, but it was never envisioned as a warmy blanky! (laughs)

Correspondent: No, but we’re talking very much about sort of this whole idea of the body protected against things. I mean, you also have a lot of side characters in your books that often have shaved heads. And there’s actually the moment in this where Milgrim actually gets a haircut as well.

Gibson: That’s right.

Correspondent: I’m wondering how these textural elements relate to some of these, I guess, more corporeal ones.

Gibson: Well, not consciously. I mean, not that consciously. I think you’ve moved into the area of unconscious expression on the artist’s part. I mean, maybe, for twenty-five years, I’ve been working up my nerve to shave my head.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Gibson: Not yet, but soon. But I don’t know. Those are truly, you know — usually when people say they have questions I haven’t been asked before, it’s not true. You’ve actually managed to do it.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Denied a toasted bagel with cream cheese.

Guests: Megan Sullivan and Matthew Sharpe.

Subjects Discussed: Post-apocalyptic novels with a sense of humor, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, allegorical representations of Jamestown, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, Afghanistan, parallels to Iraq and other military blunders, creation and transposition of vernacular, people named John, Buckaroo Banzai, the Bruces Monty Python sketch, reluctant communications officers, Ed Park’s review, the origins of the Internet, communicating into the void, mishearing things, the dangers of writing, New Journalism and the bus ride, As I Lay Dying, Susannah Meadows’s tone-deaf review, on excluding certain reader sensibilities as a writer, and the plausibility factor.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Sharpe: It’s been pointed out to me quite a number of times that mine is one of a spate of post-apocalyptic novel to hit the stands in 2006, 2007. And the only one I have read is The Road and I actually just read it a couple of weeks ago. There is really one very funny bit. There are a couple of funny bits. I actually do think that Cormac McCarthy has a wonderful understated sense of humor. But it’s not a laugh riot. I think — I suppose I have a number of predecessors or influences, when I don’t know if they’re necessarily apocalyptic novelists, but they are certainly war novelists, who I think are very funny. And Vonnegut and Joseph Heller are two obvious ones. Haruki Murakami, I think, has a great sense of humor. Donald Barthelme’s. I don’t even think I would consider them war novelists, but he — I’ve been influenced by the way that he writes about history. Even in short stories like “Cortez and Montezuma.” And then Susie-Lori Parks, I think, also is somebody whose hilariously funny and scathing about history. So I suppose these are my novels more than apocalyptic novels, per se. I guess Philip K. Dick has written a number of futuristic novels — again, not a hilariously funny guy. So I guess I’m not a terribly well-read person in areas of science fiction or even historical fiction. So I guess I’m deeply underqualified to be entering the genre. But I try to make up for it by being somewhat of a clown.

(A co-production of the Litblog Co-Op and The Bat Segundo Show)

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating his biographical legacy.

Author: Kate Christensen

Subjects Discussed: First-person vs. third-person narration, Hugo from The Epicure’s Lament vs. Oscar in The Great Man, dead men, dying women, being obsessed with death, the sex lives of older women, the difficulties of writing third-person without planning, stacked sentences, Richard Ford, over-the-top observations, MFK Fisher, what food says about people, kosher diets, whether or not an octogenarian can be spry, emasculated men, painting nudes, on being labeled a feminist writer, antipodean biographers, populating a novel with twins, poetry, the many ways of appreciating art, the difficulties of female writers being taken seriously, writing visceral messes, the origin of the fictitious New York Times articles, how unexpected character qualities are discovered, on making Oscar contemptible, and seducing your best friend’s wife.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Christensen: You can say he has certain things in common with Claudia in In the Drink and Hugo especially in The Epicure’s Lament, in that he can say whatever he wants and he’s sort of a loose cannon in a way. He has a lot of opinions and he’s a man of excess appetites, like all the earlier narrators. And he was successful and therefore not interesting to me as a first-person narrator. My first-person narrators tend to be losers. They’re the kind of people whose heads I like to get in and who I like to have take over my brain. That entertains me deeply.