Condition of Mr. Segundo: Fleeing the Bolsheviks.

Guests: Katharine Weber and Levi Asher

Subjects Discussed: Fibonacci spirals and Sierpinski triangles, Fibonacci sidewalks, the unknown etymological origins of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, interview transcripts and excised questions, designing the Esther and Ruth Zion vernaculars, colloquies within the novel, .edu addresses that have been duped by counterfeited transcripts, Ian McEwan, Ruth Zion’s character makeup and academia, MacArthur genius grants, the authentic requirements of contemporary novels, approaching historical events from a contemporary vantage point, James Frye, fact vs. fiction, intrusive footnotes and reader obedience, “based on a true story,” the 2003 Station nightclub fire, comparisons between the Triangle fire and the World Trade Center, children’s books about the Triangle fire, Henry Botkin and Gershwin, Thanksgiving and other American traditions, on seeing too many patterns in life, “crackpot magpie” research, not having a high school diploma, and being an autodidact.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Weber: It’s not just that she’s been speaking English for fifty years, but she’s been speaking the language of the Triangle fire. She’s been telling the story and telling the story. So what interested me wasn’t just developing her use of English, but her developing and mutating over time relationship to the story, and how it stuck to the story, and how she wandered off the story and got details wrong over time. We all get details wrong over time. If you now had to describe to me every moment of a car accident you were in thirty years ago, even if you think that’s what happened, it might not match the police report. And you may have changed it because someone saw something that you didn’t actually experience, but now you’ve incorporated it into your experience. And it becomes part of your telling of the story. I’m interested in how we tell our stories, the agenda we bring to the telling of the stories, but also so much of the novel is about the agenda we bring to the listening of stories. We ask our questions with agendas as much as we tell stories with agendas.

SPECIAL PROGRAM NOTE: I had arranged an interview with Katie Roiphe because I felt that she might be misunderstood. Ms. Roiphe had laid down some interesting ideas over the years that had pissed more than a few people off, including the notion that women were primarily responsible for date rape in her tract, The Morning After. Extraordinary claims, of course, require extraordinary evidence. And it was because of this that I wanted to determine how much of Ms. Roiphe’s personal ideology influenced her views. Late in the interview, Ms. Roiphe grew contentious when I asked a personally reasonable question and quoted a specific passage in her most recent book, Uncommon Arrangements, in relation to an affair initiated between Harry Andrews and Winifred Holtby, which can be found on pages 282-283 in the hardcover edition:

They slept together, one spring, when she had taken a cottage by the sea. This was entirely her doing: she had decided to abandon pride and convention and push their romantically charged friendship to a crisis.

Ms. Roiphe at first denied that she had written this passage, until I found the page and showed it to her during the course of the interview. She then claimed that the meaning I had averred, that the woman is solely responsible for a sexual liaison, was wrong. Without passing the same judgment on Ms. Roiphe that she appeared to cast upon me, I leave listeners to make up their own minds as to whether the phrase “this was entirely her doing” reflects an instance where Ms. Roiphe’s personal ideology influenced her scholarship, or whether Ms. Roiphe was being needlessly belligerent. But then I’m not the one with the Ph.D.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Abdicating to dubious journalistic principles.

Author: Katie Roiphe

Subjects Discussed: On whether the state of a marriage can be judged exclusively upon letters and notes, inferring from perspective, Phylis Rose’s Parallel Lives, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, avoiding 21st century relationship terms, “marriage a la mode,” Radclyffe Hall, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, the relationship between class fixations and subject choice, interconnected aristocracies, the difficulties of obtaining divorce in the United Kingdom and the Marriage Act of 1949, contemporary pressure on women in thirties to get married, the influence of Jane Austen on married life, the theatrical nature of Ottoline Morrell’s philanthropy, the influence on Roiphe’s ideology upon her scholarship, relying upon books vs. relying upon empirical evidence, on being allegedly misquoted, and Roiphe’s unchanging ideology.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Roiphe: Anyway, I’m actually out of time. Um, you can have one more question.

Correspondent: Well, I actually wanted to ask you a question about The Morning After.

Roiphe: Okay.

Correspondent: If we revisit that, do you still feel that the word “survivor” is bandied about too much in relation to date rape or — and if the term “survivor” is still unacceptable to you, how do you expect someone to cope with a legitimate psychological grievance?

Roiphe: I’m actually interested in talking about this book and not my previous work. But, yes, I stand by everything that I said at the time that I wrote that book.

Correspondent: Okay. I mean, you know, don’t you — doesn’t your ideology change in any manner?

Roiphe: As I say, I stand by everything I wrote in this book and I’m right now interested in talking about Uncommon Arrangements.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Smitten with literary Kates.

Authors: Katherine Taylor and Mindy Schneider

Subjects Discussed: The similarities and differences between Taylor the person and Taylor the character, declarative dialogue, MFA programs, the degree of arrogance taught in classrooms, Ben Kunkel, chick lit, the problems with literary influences, conversations in New York, writing out of revenge, writing for money, vignette-based narratives, on being the face of Diet Coke, stalking Denis Johnson, summer camps, taking narrative liberties with memory, camp anecdotes, combining multiple characters within memoirs, creative nonfiction, thirteen-year-old misfits, being a television addict, non-kosher food at Jewish camps, growing up in a spendthrift family, the importance of good shoes, camp songs, psychological evaluations of campers, softball, on being the best and worst athlete, an ice cream delicacy called the Icky Orgy, being bombarded with nostalgia, and South of the Border.

EXCERPTS FROM SHOW:

Taylor: A writer, I don’t think, becomes a writer because they get an MFA or don’t. It was helpful to me because I needed to learn some rules. I was so incredibly arrogant that I needed a couple of teachers to sort of reign me in and tell me what I could and couldn’t do. Which was helpful, because now I know what I can and can’t do. And it’s — well, it’s helpful to have those rules, as Peter Carey said, in order to break them. I’m actually a big fan of the MFA. Mostly because I think Americans throughout their educations are taught to be incredibly arrogant. And it’s good to have someone tell you…

Correspondent: Wait. You actually think that?

Taylor: Oh absolutely!

Correspondent: Every form of education? Maybe some schools. But I mean…that assumes…

Taylor: Maybe I just went to the schools where they tell you to be incredibly arrogant.

Correspondent: I never took Hubris 101.

* * *

Schneider: I am fortunate in that I was able to remember a lot of people’s quirks. And then, to try and help safeguard their privacy to some degree, I combined people. So I mean, one year, there was a girl in my bunk who walked and talked and did things in her sleep and another one who read constantly and hated camp. So I compressed them. It seemed to be an interesting mix and those two things were always going on in the bunk. And I found in early drafts — I’m not even sure I did that in my first draft — but early drafts, I found that I had too many people. So it was suggested to me by the teachers at UCLA, “Put them together. You’re allowed to do that.” And it made it much more manageable and easier to keep track of people. And I felt more comfortable because I wasn’t giving away exactly someone’s identity.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Stumbling upon 21st century technologies.

Author: Michelle Richmond

Subjects Discussed: The relationship of research to plotting, author character qualities and protagonist character qualities, Alabama, San Francisco landmarks, the Richmond District, emasculated men who live in restored Victorians, using simple character names, writing in multiple short chapters, contrapuntal searching, disappearances, beaches and sand dollars, waves and warning signs at Ocean Beach, surfing, photography, on how location influences emotional experience of character, days and calendaring, forensic artists, and the Year of Fog audio book.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Richmond: I’ve written a lot about Alabama. I haven’t lived there in — I don’t know, eighteen years. But I can’t seem to entirely get it out of my system. So this is my first book that was really separate from my upbringing, but yet there’s a tiny bit of that Gulf Coast stuff sprinkled in there. Since that’s where she’s from.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Revisiting his flipbook-authoring hobby.

Author: Steven Hall

Subjects Discussed: The relationship between narrative and text design, textual malapropisms, speculating upon “wooden” dialogue, multiple Eric Sandersons and the Matrix trilogy, narrative onslaughts against institutions, on balancing postmodernism with an adventure story, B.S. Johnson, hooking up with David Mitchell and Scarlett Thomas, junk science, devising the QWERTY codes, first-person vs. omniscient narration, misleading toenail tattoos, and the many ways of reading the shark flipbook.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Hall: I started off as an artist. So I had been working with words and text for quite a while. And I think I was just interested in playing around with that sort of form. I also wanted to write a story that looked to identity and where identities comes from. And I had this idea for a species of animal — conceptual fish which swim in flows of conversation and streams of consciousness. And just playing those little word games really. And that came together with the idea of trying to write a story about what it means to be a person and where your self originates.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Attempting to understand Tasmanians.

Author: Richard Flanagan

Subjects Discussed: The novel as a warning, interviews with overly serious journalists, the novel as a mirror to the world, the inspiration of Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, the tradition of using other people’s plots, Jonathan Lethem’s essay on copyright, the obsession with intellectual property, heightened metaphors, people living without land and love, the remarkable disconnect between the author’s intentions and the reader’s perception, the amount of noise in the world, using brand names in language, plagiarizing from infotainment, not wanting to repeat Gould’s Book of Fish, on being innately semiotic, the Sydney Morning Herald, bourgeois broadsheets vs. yellow journalism, absolute vs. relative truth, on being savaged by the Tasmanian media, the despair of politics, the difficulties of the word “terrorist,” why books are a better conduit for truth than other mediums, the seduction of evil, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s comparison of Hemingway and Faulkner.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Flanagan: A book has many faces. I mean, in the end, a book isn’t what a writer thinks it is. A book is what a reader makes of it, when they lend the authority of their lives and their souls to it. But, for me, I was determined to try and escape politics with the book. I wanted to find a simple parable — that it would act like a mirror to what the world was now. I felt the least useful thing I had were my opinions, my attitudes, my politics. I wanted to abandon all that. I just wanted to try and live within the world the way it was, and have a story that spoke as accurately as possible to it, in a way that might lead me and hopefully the reader to some broader sense of what the world is now. But I didn’t know what the world was. And I don’t pretend to have any clue. I have even less clue actually. But it’s always in story that things are revealed. Not in the author’s attitudes.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating an ethnic switch to Russian.

Author: Gary Shteyngart

Subjects Discussed: Prince Myshkin and Misha Vainberg, Doestoevsky as a muse, fat man fiction, getting inside a corpulent character, Biggie Smalls, hip-hop traditions in other countries, technological references in satire, the apocalyptic novel vogue, the paucity of satire in contemporary fiction, the metafictional elements of Absurdistan, the 19th century plotting techniques for Absurdistan, the importance of notebooks, literary fiction as entertainment, linguistic slumming and lowbrow metaphors, kissing the back of testicles, going up against Cormac McCarthy in the Tournament of Books, the suspicions against comic novels, dick jokes, connectivity vs. inhabiting another person’s mind, and not being able to exist without writing.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Shteyngart: I also work in bed and don’t really move very much. I don’t know. My metabolism has been great so far. So I’m not so big. But when I was thirteen or so, I was actually a very husky child. I had to have a special suit made for my bar mitzvah. A special husky suit. So there’s a big fat guy inside this little frame that’s dying to get out. And the other thing is, I guess, was the American novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. And I was thinking primarily of Ignatius O’Reilly, one of the — I was asked recently to pick my favorite book in America in the last three decades and that was the book that came to mind. A wonderful rambling historical — a place also very rooted in its locality. New Orleans. And about a guy who loves to consume everything in sight. Those Lucky Hot Dogs, I’m thinking of. So I love to eat myself. And I love everything to do with food. So I wanted to make my guy gigantic, and I wanted to make him a real consumer — in a very American mode, but also in a kind of nouveau riche Russian mode.

[This podcast continues our two-part interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berkeley Breathed. The first part is available here.]

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Searching for penguin brides.

Author: Berkeley Breathed

Subjects Discussed: The rising sales of graphic novels, the future of newspaper comics, reservations about Opus being available in digital form, mass market phenomenons, digital audiences vs. print audiences, the “death” of music, the Beatles vs. Gnarls Barkley, shared audience response, on replacing the cartoonist old guard, YouTube, the Doonesbury motif of characters looking into mirrors, cultural appropriation, Breathed’s rocky relationship with Garry Trudeau, why the first year of Bloom County is uncollected, great cartooning as a synthesis of decent writing and decent illustration, Christopher Hitchens, surreal humanism, the cartoon as populist entertainment, the poor reception to Outland, why the kids from Bloom County have not appeared in Opus, the inadequacies of reader reaction via email, the origins of Oliver Wendell Jones and African-American characters in comics, the Banana 6000 and Apple’s advertising, and being ripped off by Microsoft.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Breathed: We had readerships of 50 to 100 million people in the ’80’s and ’70’s for a given piece of entertainment — a single strip. Same person in Kentucky is going to be reading it. It’s the same person in L.A., New York City. You’re not going to have that. Instead of having seventy-five comic strips with readerships of 20 to 100 million, you’re going to have thousands of comic strips with readerships of several hundred to a thousand. That’s a sea change in its effect on society. And the pop culture, I think, has an effect. The unifying aspect of pop culture, I think, is overlooked. And we’re losing that. We’re not all listening to the same music. We’re not all reading the same cartoons. We’re not laughing at the same joke across the country. It’s a unifying aspect of our nation that’s passing.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Jittery of Gittis.

Author: Berkeley Breathed

Subjects Discussed: The disparity between illustrating a daily strip and audience reaction, blond-haired boys named Milo, The Phantom Tollbooth, literary references in Bloom County, receiving a onionskin letter to Harper Lee, picture books and moral dilemmas, film influences, the importance of fun background details in illustrations, foreshadowing, how screenwriting has shaped Breathed’s storytelling, the strengths and weaknesses of moving from hand illustration to Photoshop, pink and purple color schemes, 300, self-editing vs. producing art, beating the procrastination impulse in middle age, chasing the FedEx truck during the Bloom County days, the infamous Opus couch strip, on not being able to get away with certain forms of humor in today’s newspaper age, the generational gap between print and digital, and trying to lure younger readers to the comics page.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Breathed: Certainly, in the ’80’s, when I had fifty to seventy million readers, it was virtually impossible to put it in context that meant anything. And it begins to happen when you go from city to city and you meet people and they talk about your work in ways that you don’t think about it yourself. And it puts it into a different kind of context and it’s good. Because you come back home with a renewed sense of responsibility in some ways. Without getting maudlin about it, you do not take it for granted sometimes, as often happens, when there’s a lot of deadlines. Things almost become rote. And you forget that there are people waiting to read it and what they read, they take very seriously. Even in a funny way.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Scared of Larry.

Author: Austin Grossman

Subjects Discussed: Retconned culture, the human qualities of superheroes, origin stories, the postmodernist trappings of comic book continuity constructs, grad school vs. superheroes, writing while driving, how Grossman’s work on video games influenced his work as a fiction writer, Max Allan Collins’s A Killing in Comics, the relationship between prose and illustrations in a novel dealing with superheroes, the mainstreaming of geek culture, the unusual domestic living arrangements of Superfriends, secret identities, the problems of making video games based on superheroes, and reconnecting with 19th century literature.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Grossman: I feel like superheroes debuted as the sort of archetypical gods and every once in a while, they get retconned back to that — just to kind of refresh them. But I like them — I like them now! When they’ve had so much layered onto them. When archetypes have been established and now they can sort of start to live inside them and be a little more human. But I feel that, in liking them that way, I’m caught in some kind of cultural cycle. That that’s why I like them now and that, twenty-five years from now, people will like them as archetypes again. So I can’t really understand why I like them that way. It’s just that I do. I like to feel like they have a consciousness that I can relate to, that I can live inside, and yet are also godlike in some way.

Author: Scarlett Thomas

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Recovering from Scarlett fever.

Subjects Discussed: Prodigious fiction authors, pursuing the novel of ideas, Neuromancer, moving away from families to loner characters, striving for authenticity in a middle-class literary culture, smart women characters and sex, breaking rules, codebreaking, academic environments in novels, plots dictated by ideas, the importance of preplanning a novel in a notebook, the relationship between teaching and writing, the difference between a reader and a reading audience, the dangers of information processing, Derrida, relative narrative vs. the Jungian collective unconscious, devising the troposphere, the mashing up of literary and genre, Arturo Perez-Reverte, the question of whether genre is superior or inferior, formulaic plots, narrative ambiguity in the novel of ideas, responding to Mark Sarvas’s narrative quibble about The End of Mr. Y, and the New Puritans.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Thomas: The family in the Lily Pascale novels was very much a combination of a fantasy and a lie. I mean, I’ve had quite — I guess everybody’s had a strange crazy life in some ways. But for me, I knew when I was a teenager that I didn’t want to have children for myself. I didn’t have a cozy, middle-class upbringing at all. My life was really very complex growing up. And when I decided I was going to write, I almost made this weird decision at the very beginning of my career that I was going to write as a kind of mask. I was going to do something completely different from what I try to do know. I mean, now, authenticity is very, very important to me. At the time, I felt like writing was kind of a game, a construction. And I don’t know why I created such a nauseating bourgeois family back then. I think partly, I wanted to come from that. Because then my life would make a more usual kind of sense.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Procrastinating at the last minute.

Guests: Carolyn Kellogg and Alan DeNiro

Subjects Discussed: Small Beer Press, genres, Jim Monroe, on being a post-science fiction author, picking from years of fabulism, on being a genre agnostic, weaving between genres, literary fiction, creepiness, letter-writing action, wordplay, Dungeons & Dragons, absurdity, contemporary income disparities, dread, footnotes in fiction, jolts of emotion, reversing polarity between poetry and fiction, the rust belt, and the loneliness of Wal-Mart.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

DeNiro: I’ve always kind of considered myself science-fiction influenced. Or another way I’ve kind of thought of it as — and I don’t know if adding “post-” anything is really vain or pretentious or whatever — but almost kind of a post-science fiction, of kind of looking at the whole field of hundreds of years of fantastic literature and definitely being within that larger tradition of fabulism and the like.

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky’s Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show.)

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Remarkably terse.

Author: A.M. Homes

Subjects Discussed: Expanding the New Yorker piece to book form, the rules of memoir, inventing deposition testimony, being “dished up” by the Roiphe sisters, the false connection between Homes’ novels and the memoir, Joan Didion, the culture of confessional memoirs, truth stranger than truth, speculating upon parents, being fact-checked by The New Yorker, negotiating with Granta and The New Yorker, declarative sentences, deciding what to reveal, court documents, judging other people, not running from the truth, Daughters of the American Revolution, on being excluded by family, and maternal fantasies.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Homes: The lawyers kept saying to me that you should sue your father for paternity. And I kept thinking, I don’t really want to do that. And a couple of things became clear to me. One was how interesting it is that one person’s decision to exclude you from your family history excludes you from all of your family history. Hundreds and hundreds of years, and yet you’re no more or less related to any one person than another. And how interesting is that someone could remove you from all that. So that was kind of fascinating to me. And then I was thinking about, if we did sue him, what would happen? And essentially, he would be legally compelled to not only produce some sort of a test or a document, but also to really answer all of the questions that had never been asked. And I also thought as an artist or writer that was most interested in these, by that point the reader knows who my biological father is well enough to participate in the reading, that I could just ask the questions and not even have to provide answers.

(with thanks to Annalee)

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Vacating from vacations.

Guests: C. Max Magee and Marshall Klimasewiski

Subjects Discussed: Drawing upon compartmentalized personal experience, writing unpleasant characters, sabbaticals, maintaining an ever-shifting narrative, writing short stories vs. novels, characters stuck in environments, protracted scenes, human connection vs. work, locals vs. vacationers, John Ruskin, Charles Dodgson, co-opted misfits, and invention vs. personal experience.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Klimasewiski: The odd thing for me — and I don’t know why this is — is that I found Cyrus so much easier to write, even though I don’t think I’m a writer with a really terrific memory. And so therefore I don’t have this great sense of exactly what it was like to be nineteen, or to live inside my own nineteen year old mind. And yet he was so much easier for me to write than the cottagers, who demographically are much closer to me and to people I know. Yet I had a terrible time making them seem to come alive or feel credible in some way in my mind.

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky’s Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show.)

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Avoiding pie-throwing Bolsheviks.

Guests: Jessica Stockton and Mark Binelli

Subjects Discussed: What’s real and what’s not real in Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die, anarchism, 20th century film references, the Coen brothers, Upton Sinclair, extemporaneous speeches, on not writing the novel chronologically, the sensation of research, knife-grinding, Buster Keaton, meat metaphors, Out of Bounds, shopping S&V around to publishers, Dalkey Archive Press, the fragmented trial scenes, and experimental fiction.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Binelli: When I hit on the comedy team idea, I immediately liked that. And then at some point, I can’t say when, but at some point the name “Sacco and Vanzetti” just popped into my head and it was such a perfect comedy team name. Initially, it seemed so ridiculous, which it is obviously. But then the more I thought about it, the more parallels between anarchism and slapstick started to come out. And it just kind of weirdly made more and more sense. So I just decided to embrace it.

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky’s Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show.)

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Abdicating his duties for an advertising campaign.

Author: Lionel Shriver

Subjects Discussed: Devising a dual narrative, snooker, film references, the relationship between The Bad Seed and Sliding Doors and Shriver’s novels, dialect and transcribed speech, sports in Shriver’s books, contrasting characters, the pros and cons of popcorn, playing the 9/11 card in contemporary fiction, writing from outlines and notes, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, on books having a short-shelf life, the success of We Need to Talk About Kevin, writing about the States from the UK, persevering as an author, food, fiction with a sense of purpose, being in love with language, Shriver’s evolving fiction tastes, on being a book critic, the benefits of reader exasperation, sex and relationships, and the Bad Sex Award.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Shriver: It was important of me never to play games for the sake of it, that is, I didn’t just want to write a clever book that was a formal experiment. The idea was always to be illustrating something about the characters, something about the nature of two very different kinds of relationships. It’s a book about tradeoffs. Neither of these men is perfect.

I have always done my best to learn from failure. And I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t report that, this afternoon, while conducting an author interview, I failed to carry out my duties as interviewer. I hope that my honesty here will atone for my inadequacies.

This afternoon, I attempted to have a conversation with Marisha Pessl for The Bat Segundo Show. I use the word “attempted,” because I saw no point to continue the conversation after the twenty minute mark. It wasn’t working out and we would have gone around in circles. I thanked Ms. Pessl for her time, apologized, and she ran away from me as if I were a leper.

We weren’t getting anywhere. I think it’s because Ms. Pessl, and please understand that I am not trying to make her look malevolent here, isn’t accustomed to having her assumptions questioned. Maybe it’s because, last year, I made about one tenth the amount that Pessl got for her book, and there was a division. Maybe it’s because Pessl is attractive and I’m just some average-looking thirtysomething going bald. Maybe it’s because my interviewing style is less rapid-fire Q&A and more conversational and idiosyncratic. Maybe it’s because I don’t like to ask questions that everybody else asks. Maybe it’s because Pessl doesn’t like to consort with my kind.

I honestly don’t know. But I deeply regret what happened.

My approach, which has been carried forth in over 130 author interviews, is to offer ideas and observations and to work in a series of conversational calls and responses with the author. These are things I have picked up from careful study of the interview masters: Robert Birnbaum, Dick Cavett, and a number of other interviewing influences. But in Pessl’s case, she kept asking me, “What’s the question?” When I offered a few unusual perceptions of her book, it was apparently incompatible with her absolute authorial intentions. And even then, you couldn’t talk about this, because figuring out Pessl’s book was up to the reader. So what then was the point of the interview? (Interestingly, while Mark Danielewski kept his cards close to his chest and doesn’t like to reveal answers, we were still able to talk about Only Revolutions quite well. Did I simply fail to read Special Topics in Calamity Physics? I don’t know.)

So I abandoned my usual approach and opted for a more routine approach of boilerplate questions.

“Okay,” I asked, “but what of literary ambiguity?” That stuff that William Empson was writing about more than seventy years ago. “What steps did you take to allow for invention? What kind of herringbone plot structure did you jump off from?”

I got terse responses from Pessl that had nothing to do with these questions.

Pessl had looked at her watch about ten minutes in and seemed about as happy to chat with me as if I were some porter she’d have to endure as she checked in her luggage. I failed to connect. It was my fault.

Why did I want to interview Pessl? Well, I’ve always done my best to talk with the misunderstood. And I had a sense that, irrespective of the class chasm, Pessl was misunderstood.

There had been considerable controversy over whether the book had been accepted because of Pessl’s good looks and because the book had been judged less on its merits and more on the amount of money. I had wanted to talk about some of the book’s constructs: the reliance upon annotations, the hermetic bubble that the protagonist Blue prevents her from interacting with the world, the like. I would stop, allowing for a pause, and then Pessl would stare at me.

I failed.

Then again, I suppose, after 130 interviews, a failed interview had to happen sooner or later.

I’m still determining what I plan to do with the conversation we recorded.

So for the moment, I apologize to Ms. Pessl, to Penguin for going to the trouble of arranging this, and to my listeners and readers.

The hell of it is, I conducted two really great interviews earlier in the week.

I’ve held my own with Martin Amis, John Updike, Richard Ford, and Erica Jong. Why then could I not talk with Pessl?

I look upon this failure as a learning experience. This incident has certainly made me rethink how I approach interviews. And aside from one interview I have lined up, I plan on taking a break from these conversations. I’m going to dwell upon what happened and get back to you with an answer on what I plan to do with this material.

In the meantime, there are many interviews in the can, all of them quite fun and good, and my conversation with Marshall Klimasewiski should go up tomorrow.

[UPDATE: Thanks to all for the kind words. I’m truly stunned. I’ve listened to the interview and I think it would be best for all concerned parties if I didn’t post it. If I came into the interview to have a literary discussion and it didn’t happen, then I’d rather take the high road here.]

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Avoiding Sheppard tones.

Author: John Sheppard

Subjects Discussed: Responding to Dan Green’s post, on being rejected by publishers and self-publishing, writing without a plot, on doing things twice, the connection between the conscious and subconscious thematics, getting out of the muddy ditch, basing fiction on reality, music and anger, Minor Threat, Pizza Hut, the Reagan era, the “punk” label, imploding labels, abrasive commentary, the circus people of Sarasota, Florida, cartoons vs. writing, the rhythm of Catholic catechisms, writing to a mix tape, orange juice concentrate, sound effects in sentences, and being a comma freak.

Sheppard: I was an illustrator, once upon a time. And I thought of this book — it’s somewhat like making a painting. You start off with the canvas and then you paint on top. And then you paint another layer on top and another layer on top. And eventually at the end, you have a painting. And that’s sort of the way I thought of writing this book. I didn’t write it with a plot in mind. Absolutely no plot in mind. And some people, like a reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times thought it was pointless that I had no plot, that there wasn’t a South Park moment, “I learned something today,” at the end. But I really don’t believe it’s a pointless book. Otherwise I wouldn’t have written it.