Condition of Mr. Segundo: Rattled by interlopers.

Author: Tao Lin

Subjects Discussed: Murakami meets Less Than Zero, the violent impulses of animals, Elijah Wood, Gmail chat as muse, Instant Messenger, one-sentence poetry, figuring out things and calming down, Ann Beattie, Tao Lin’s Wikipedia entry, organic vegan food, the moral and existential nature of fiction, shit-eating grins, cutting-edgeness, Domino’s Pizza, writing in literary journals, Melville House, writing a Nerve story, mangling grammar, feeling interminable, Monica Lewinsky, posting email publicly, privacy, Jason Fortuny, Salman Rushdie, the girls suspended over The Vagina Monologues, and fun.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I note that the stories in Bed are surprisingly realistic. There aren’t much in the way of dolphins or bears or the like. So what caused these bears and dolphins to kind of enter into the equation? Did you find them to be a friendly presence to draw upon?

Tao Lin: Well, after I finished the novel in a realistic fashion, I kept on working on it. And I just felt bored by it. I thought it needed something exciting. So I just went through. Whenever there’s a bored part where I felt bored, I deleted something and added the animals.

Correspondent: Now these dolphins are rather murderous. They actually go after Elijah Wood and company. What accounts for these violent impulses of these animals then?

Tao Lin: I just thought it was fun to write having a dolphin murder Elijah Wood.

Correspondent: But this is Elijah Wood we’re talking about. Has Elijah Wood ever done anything to you personally?

Tao Lin: No, he hasn’t. But did you think I was mean against him? That I was mean against him or that it was just playful?

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Puzzled by polygraphs.

Author: Ken Alder

Subjects Discussed: The connection between polygraphs and Northwestern University, the United States’ fascination with lie detectors and cultural connections, why allied nations use junk science, polygraph tests and employment, the lie detector as coercive device, the CIA, Aldrich Ames, John Larson and William Keeler, Leonarde Keeler, the lie detector vs. due process, waterboarding, August Vollmer, paranoid personal lives of the polygraph progenitors, the subjugation of women, criminal technology and the white male, the polygraph showdown between Ken Alder and Fred Hunter, reliable confessions, American loyalty, detective fiction and tabloid journalism’s role in promulgating the lie detector, polygraphs and movie studios, advertising, Erle Stanley Gardner, asking Doug Moe’s question to Alder, the placebo effect and crime statistics, Alberto Gonzales and contemporary coercion, and the dream of psychological certainty.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Alder: You know, it’s such a bizarre claim. There are different kinds of historians of science, and some historians of science go after the people who have the really big ideas and figure out these great novel ideas like Darwin and Einstein transform the world. And I do the opposite almost. I’m interested in history of the banal — those things that are so ubiquitous, as almost to be invisible. We don’t even notice them anymore. And lie detectors in this country are just part of the landscape and yet we’re the only country in the world that uses them.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Feeling that the community misunderstands him.

Author: Arlene Goldbard

Subjects Discussed: Artistic individuality vs. creative community, the benefits of 20th century funding for the arts, the WPA, community murals, public plays, happenings, the political agenda of “creative community,” collective absolutism, the Forum Theatre and “spectactors,” collaborations between professional and amateur artists, the Great Wall of Los Angeles, the dangers of constant artistic modifications, impoverished people and art, art and fame, reality TV, Stalinism, the Ukiah Players Theatre, and government artistic subsidization.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Goldbard: Marx had this favorite saying: Stadtlyft mach frei. City air makes you free. Which the sense being, in a place of anonymity, you are free to completely express your individual essence and characteristics in a way that you may not be. You may be constrained in the small town you came from. Because people know your name and your face. And you can fool them once, but your probably can’t fool them twice. So there’s a truth that a certain degree of anonymity creates a certain degree of social freedom. And people want that to some extent. You don’t want to be surrounded by gossip. You don’t want people looking over your shoulder all the time. But the kind of community that I aspire to is one in which there’s tremendous permission to be different.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Affirming his miserable status.

Author: Ellen Klages

Subjects Discussed: On being approached by Sharon November at a convention to write a children’s book, writing fiction from a child’s perspective vs. an adult’s perspective, conducting research for a story, the 1950s, how characters kick-start stories, realism and fantastical elements, libraries, the gender divide in science, the label of “science fiction,” comfort food, Stephen King, missing words in sentences, the advantages of a late start, becoming a writer by hanging out with professional writers, writing “Portable Childhoods” with two meanings, word choice, and assembling a short story collection after many years.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Klages: I write about the point of view of children for a couple of reasons. One of them is because I think I remember being a child better than I really understand being a grown-up a lot of the time. It’s a much simpler mind set. And I don’t really do a lot of politics and, oh I don’t know, insurance claims. And that sort of thing. That if you have a grown-up character, they might have to worry about and it just goes right over children’s heads. Especially in short fiction. You can streamline the world a little bit if you’re telling it from the point of view of a kid.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: One might say quite “un”-well.

Author: China Miéville

Subjects Discussed: World-building, building a world with an urban center, being a “city animal,” the imagination-per-page ratio, a creative license to put in anything, C.S. Lewis, ideology and YA books, Marxism, terrorism, the 1952 London smog, London bus drivers, politics and fiction, inventing monsters, environmentalism, the pleasure and joy of the grotesque, Miéville’s creative veto process, Un Lun Dun as a creative experiment, having to lay off arcane words in a YA book, the nature of spoilers, the underrated virtues of sidekicks, narrative surprises, the journey vs. the destination, rigid plotting, the two types of people who respond to “fridge man,” and how literal puns transform into monsters.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Miéville: There are different ways of world-building. When we say “world-building,” we tend to think of that D&D-esque kind, which is not a diss incidentally. It’s just a description. It’s sort of a consolidation between the geography and the history and the culture and so on before writing the story. At that’s one way of doing it. But then there are others, which are less rigid, less to do with internal coherence, in the same way. So in terms of something like Un Lun Dun or some of the short stories or even King Rat, and the book I’m working on the moment as well, it’s less to do with having a coherent back-narrative and more to do with having a coherent moral and emotional feeling. I know the whole question of world-building is quite controversial at the moment, because M. John Harrison just wrote his blistering attack on the idea. Which I thought was, characteristically for his stuff, was a brilliant provocation and full of a certain kind of angry integrity. I don’t agree with him exactly, but I think it would be a fool who dismissed his criticisms out of hand.

Authors: Charlie Anders and Annalee Newitz

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Rethinking his views on women.

Subjects Discussed: The gender divide in science and technology, whether empirical accounts can raise public awareness, present historical perceptions of gender in relation to past perceptions, female stereotypes, positive cultural portrayals of women, Trinity from The Matrix, Scarlett Thomas, the relationship between underground and mainstream culture, prognosticating gender roles, macho sentiment in the workplace, geek answer syndrome, sexual roles, jiggly breasts and video games, Ghost Rider, gender presentation vs. work performance, dress code, the “lawyer situation,” unisex possibilities, responding to Olivia Boler’s review, and the nature of geek.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Anders: Part of the problem is the stereotype that Larry Summers famously perpetuated a couple of years ago, the stereotype that women are naturally less adept at science and math. I blog surf all the time and web surf for the book’s blog, and I see lots of people say, “Well, but women just don’t have the spatial sense. Women can’t rotate five-dimensional objects in their sleep the way men can.”

Author: Ron Jeremy

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Filled with gushing admiration.

Subjects Discussed: On being “the hardest working man in show business,” being covered by the New York Times Book Review, Eric Spitznagel as ghost writer, celebrity stories, Parkinson’s disease, Al Goldstein, on being a “walking publicity sheet,” The Boondock Saints, on being a “blithering idiot” when it comes to technology, the details and taxonomy of Ron Jeremy’s black book, on hooking up with girls, on whether Jeremy considers himself an artist, John Frankenheimer, being a mainstream character actor, Sam Kinison, 1970s porn vs. contemporary porn, cinematographers who have worked in porn and mainstream, being a workaholic, travel mathematics, declining virility, Viagra, on being overweight, responding at length to Susan Faludi’s 1995 New Yorker profile, the effect of bad publicity upon career, Tammy Faye and Jessica Hahn, the future of porn, and remaining in demand.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Jeremy: If I want to speak to a girl here in San Francisco, without that phone book, I can’t call her up and tell her I’m in town. Now you just saw me on the phone calling a girl, who called me last week or so, wants to see me. Her number’s in that book. Now it would be in my cell phone if she called me today. But by now, her number’s long gone from my cell phone. I don’t program numbers into my cell phone. I have a few. But I’d go nuts, because every time I change cell phones, I’d kill myself. That book is permanent, and I have numbers in there that are very, very important and some not that important. But to answer your question, why do I carry that book, it’s because it’s my phone numbers! Without that book, I couldn’t call anyone in San Francisco.

Author: Jane Ganahl

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating older women.

Subjects Discussed: Newsweek‘s controversial article about older women and marriage, the interrelationship between the “Single Minded” columns and Naked on the Page, why Ganahl left the Chronicle, how the book represented an effort to revisit the columns, on writing without instant reader feedback, on being “always right” as a journalist, the difference between writing for newspapers and writing a book, Mary Gaitskill in a punk rock t-shirt, debating the hook-up possibilities of literary events, confessional writing, writing as therapy, raising a ruckus among readers, Phil Bronstein, the future of women columnists, divorce, the institution of marriage, the current state of memoirs after James Frey, the San Francisco literary scene, name dropping, and shifting happiness.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Ganahl: I would write a column. I would think I was right. Because, you know, I did my research and everything, and I would get these torpedoes from people saying, “You’re so full of crap,” and I was really indignant. And, at first, I would dismiss it out of hand. Well, you know, I am not good at taking criticism. I’m really not. And that was a very new experience for me being a columnist, because, you know, I did pop music criticism. And when you do that, you also get some hate mail, but nothing like when you talk about your own personal feelings on things. It just took some time to learn. I still think I’m right. So obviously I haven’t learned it very well.

Author: David Lynch

Condition of Mr. Segundo: In absentia, terrified of meditation.

Subjects Discussed: Transcendental Meditation, true happiness, contending with stress, fear and anxiety, anger, the relationship between filmmaking and TM, inner happiness, walking vs. TM, Knut Hamsun, Einstein’s Theory of Everything, Dostoevsky’s 1866 publishing deal, on coming up with ideas, the art life vs. the business life, Frank Silva’s unexpected casting as Bob in Twin Peaks, and whether Lynch understands his own films,

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Lynch: Let’s talk about suffering. Like in movies, people die. Well, you say, you don’t have to die to show a death. And there’s all kind of suffering and torment and all these things in a story. And, for me, those things come from ideas. Now when you catch an idea, you see the thing. You hear the thing. You feel and see and hear the mood of it. And you see the character. You almost see what the character wears. And you see what the character says and how they say it. That it’s an idea that comes all at once. And you know that idea.

Author: Tayari Jones

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Caught in the act of untelling.

Subjects Discussed: Drawing from personal experience, Atlanta, accessible metaphors, writing and throwing away many pages, conversational vs. literary tone, “This is not what Dr. King died for,” the West End neighborhood and half-gentrified neighborhood, class segregation, Aria’s naivety, antediluvian word processing machines, the racial divide in bookstores and literary readings, labeling in the publishing industry, achieving literary respectability while being labeled, The Bigamist’s Daughters, and omniscient narration.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Jones: No one ever believes my position on this. I think actually, as strange as it’s going to sound, the bookstores that tend to have the African-American section tend to carry more African-American titles than bookstores that don’t have these sections. For example, there’s a bookstore in DC, Kramer Books. You know, they pride themselves on shelving everything together. And they have hardly any books by people of color there. And with no section. There’s no way of keeping them honest. They don’t know what they have. And though they can feel very progressive about their shelving, my book isn’t in there.

Author: Charlie Huston

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating the socialist qualities of the sun.

Subjects Discussed: Dialogue vs. description, the influence of acting upon fiction writing, Raymond Chandler, dashes vs. quotation marks, Huston house style, Cormac McCarthy, one-word-one-period dialogue, indicative gestures, drinking and smoking, setting the vampire rules, unintentionally ripping off Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the beginnings of the Joe Pitt series, verisimilitude vs. heightened reality, the book reviewing climate, critical opposition to genre and series novels, Stephen King, parallels between Moon Knight and Joe Pitt, cruelty to animals, and getting New York details right while living in Los Angeles.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Huston: When I was writing my first novel, Caught Stealing, I was writing it without any expectation or drive toward getting it published. It was while I was still an actor, but not employed. And I needed to stay busy creatively. And so I started writing something that I thought would be a short story, and it grew and grew and grew. But I wasn’t thinking about anyone else reading it, let alone having it published. I didn’t care about form. I didn’t care about format. Which is why a lot of the style has evolved through the books.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Avoiding impostor kings.

Guests: Carrie A.A. Frye and Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Subjects Discussed: Satirical plausibility, Wordsworth’s willing suspension of disbelief, narrative explanation and interconnectedness, queuing, The Wizard of the Crow as a history of Africa and a global epic, poverty, truth vs. fiction, metamorphosis in nature, comic literary references, Jonathan Swift, how dialogue carries the narrative, theatrical metaphors, Tajirika as charming villain, writing in Kikuyu and translating in English, Kenyan cultural politics in the 1960s, and being imprisoned for writing in an African language.

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

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Thiong’o: Getting a character mentioning, or the narrator mentioning, something in passing, which may look very almost — if a reader is not careful, he may actually miss it. But then as you go on, the small thing mentioned at the beginning becomes larger and larger, and more and more significant. For instance, the issue of queuing. The way it begins is almost offhand and then, as it goes on, it increasingly becomes more and more important, more and more central, connecting the various events.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating the litigious aspects of fatherhood.

Author: Neal Pollack

Subjects Discussed: The stigma against father memoirs, the Neal Pollack persona vs. the real Neal Pollack, neighborhood activism, politics, writing a book to “feed my family,” balancing art and commerce, the Chicago theatre scene, on being “family stunty,” responding to Marritt Ingman’s criticisms about failing to acknowledge previous subcultural parenting books, the desuetude of Mr. Mom, the conformist aspects of being an “alternadad,” the mommy wars, how Alternadad “rocks the boat,” the hostile reactions to the Elijah biting essay, the “Shut Up” essay, harsh reactions to Pollack in general, provoking readers, Never Mind the Pollacks, family films, pot vaporizing, the bad breakup with Dave Eggers, on pissing people off, involvement with Cracked, Regina as “straight man,” and sticking with dad writing.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: A lot of people have been sort of criticizing this book. I don’t necessarily agree with them, but I think that people are saying…

Pollack: Some people. There’s been positive and negative criticism. You know, this has definitely been the best reviewed book I’ve written. So I mean…so what were you going to posit?

Correspondent: The question is: the nature of commentary. Even in a crude form, does it have any kind of value? It seems to me that the “Shut Up” essay was more of a visceral reaction, but at the same time…

Pollack: Yeah.

Correspondent: …a lot of people really were upset by it.

Pollack: Yeah, and a lot of people also really liked it. That’s the thing. I’ve always had this uncanny ability. I’ve always had this sort of “love me or hate me” kind of thing going on. Especially with my writing. And again, people were upset by it. But I also had a lot of people telling me they appreciated it. And that’s the same thing with this book. For some reason, even though it’s a pretty simple book about a pretty basic subject, it’s been getting harsh reaction and then a lot of praise too. So again it’s just a sign that I’m doing something right.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Enchanted with sobriquets.

Author: Heidi Julavits

Subjects Discussed: Heidi’s middle name, the psychotherapeutic muse, Michelle Stacey’s The Fasting Girl, Mollie Fancher, science vs. faith, Freud’s Dora study, responding to Marisa Meltzer’s claims of conservatism, the pros and cons of unreliable narrative, “What Might Have Happened,” setting a novel in indoor environments, dialogue vs. description, Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods, narrative resolution and ambiguity, perfect endings, Before Sunset, cultural metaphors vs. gesture, Viewmasters, repartee vs. gushing in a therapeutic environment, pushovers, grief tea, the inspirations for Hyper Radiance, clarifying the antisnark manifesto, Nick Hornby, The Believer‘s role in review coverage, Dale Peck, and constructive criticism.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: For example, Nick Hornby’s column. I mean, there’s a risk that he can be almost a more highbrow form of Harriet Klausner in the fact that he writes nothing but positivism.

Julavits: Yeah.

Correspondent: I mean, isn’t there something about laying one’s cards down on the table and offering not necessarily — okay, to bring up the Dale Peck review.

Julavits: Yeah.

Correspondent: I object more about the literalism behind the amazing sentence “Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.” That’s an extraordinary thing to say.

Julavits: Also unprovable though. I guess I feel like the reason that I feel like there are writers who are extremely critical, and I mentioned them in my essay. But Daniel Mendelsohn — I mean, that guy pulls no punches. But he only says things that are actually provable, thereby showing that he is a serious intellect. You know, he’s not out there just to throw slanders around and call attention to himself, which is what Dale Peck — I didn’t want to read past that first sentence. Because this is not going to be an intellectually serious takedown of Rick Moody. This is just going to be someone throwing their fists around.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Not sacrificing time for horror.

Guests: Scott McKenzie and Stephen Graham Jones

Subjects Discussed: Approachable authors in the frozen food section, the implementation of pre-2000 references into narrative, the lineage of horror films, screenplay terminology, the relationship between Demon Theory‘s top text story and the footnotes, movie references, protagonists vs. ensemble casts, horror novels, drafting vs. editing, the influence of real-life horror, girls in bras, Jones’ unintentional academic life, trepidations towards New York, refraction and contemporary “science” novels, Against the Day, small town writing communities, Jones’ influences, how the trilogy structure changed the footnotes, the difficulties of writing screenplays, drive-by urinals, and the major stylistic difference between the Demon Theory hardcover and paperback.

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

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Jones: I just discovered that footnote function in my Microsoft Word, I guess. And I was writing Demon Theory and having a ball with the screenplay terminology and all that. But then maybe, I guess fifteen pages into it, if that, I started dropping footnotes. They were meant to be deleted later. I was dropping them. Like I was calling myself names. Like “You obviously stole this from Halloween.” “You stole this from here.” You know. But then they just kept snowballing and snowballing until everything was stolen from something. And that kind of just became one of Demon Theory‘s conceits, I guess.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Introspective about his long lost lawn gnome.

Author: Nick Mamatas

Subjects Discussed: The X+Y book formula, H.P. Lovecraft, Jack Kerouac, Aristophanes’ The Acharnians, telepathy, garden gnomes, radioactive fallout, conspiracies, Elián González , Littleton, Under My Roof as allegory, the influence of current events upon narrative, Cthulhu as muse, Lovecraftian poetry, crazy tenants, writing short novels in a “big book”-friendly environment, working with Night Shade and Soft Skull, Skybars, the downside of product placement in the future, pursuing an MFA, health insurance, narrative ideology, character testimonials, the influence of Animal House, micronation novels, George Saunders’ The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Duck Soup, and life-changing YA novel experiences.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Mamatas: Well, at first it was going to be a lawn jockey.

Correspondent: Really?

Mamatas: Yes. In an early draft, I had it as a lawn jockey. But I figured that was too unctuously petty bourgeois. I thought a garden gnome was more down market. And also, they’re bigger. So you can put more nuclear stuff inside a garden gnome.

Correspondent: But at the same time, there’s also a certain kind of suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. Because if you actually go ahead and try to produce a nuclear device in a garden gnome, there’s going to be some radioactive fallout. The FBI guys kind of show up and like — I’m thinking the FBI would immediately sort of seize this family. And yet they don’t. I was wondering if this kind of realism isn’t of concern for you, or is it meant to be more of a meditative kind of…

Mamatas: Well, partially it’s meditative. Partially, people get away with things, you know. 9/11 — people got away with it, even though there were many people watching these terrorists and keeping their eye on them. But they all managed to get through and carry out this attack. There’s almost a nationalist type of myth that the FBI and the CIA are super-competent and that we always know what’s going on. That’s part of why we have the 9/11 denial movement, or conspiracy movement.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating his vampiristic sensibilities.

Author: Christopher Moore

Subjects Discussed: WordStar word processors, using the nouns “monkey love” and “guy,” Midwestern vernacular, trying to figure out the ten year interval between Bloodsucking Fiends and You Suck, San Francisco topography, George Romero, Bullitt, the 42-Downtown bus loop, invented references vs. real references, Abby Normal’s perspective, Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Goth kids, Near Dark, vampire violence, dialogue vs. description, deadlines, narrative pace, the “book a year” demands of publishers, writing big books vs. little books, research, living up to Lamb, the burdens of having a mass audience, Basket Case vs. Citizen Kane, ambitious narratives, marketing vs. writing, answering email, living up the goals of being a commercial writer, Andrew Weil, “drive-bys,” on achieving balance, oscillation, Moore’s “mistress,” the last time Moore took a vacation, writer’s block, on being clueless, William Gibson, Jack Womack, on being a “piece of crap” vs. being a “master of the universe,” John Steinbeck, avoiding reviews, and boob flashing.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Since you’re a funnyman, that would probably keep the pace going because someone’s pausing to laugh. I don’t know. I’m just wondering why you avoided metaphor — aside from pace.

Moore: Don’t even think about it.

Correspondent: Yeah?

Moore: Yeah. You’re applying way too much analytical — the kind of thing that happens in deconstructive analysis of literature that doesn’t happen when you write a book. I don’t think, “Oh, I’m going to put much less metaphor in this book.” It’s just: you write what occurs to you at the time. I would say probably that if I were to tell you what was the reason? The reason: the first book I didn’t have a deadline; this one, I did.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Fleeing from disco.

Guests: Anne Fernald and Valerie Trueblood

Subjects Discussed: Weaknesses for beautiful books, life as “structured anarchy,” the definition of plot, David Markson, narrative flow, cause and effect in narrative, unexpected events, Seven Loves‘ “eventless” perception, on being “anti-plot,” the beginnings of May Nilsson, family characteristics, the relationship between unpredictable life and fiction, compartmentalized American novels vs. compartmentalized British novels, Edward P. Jones, MFA workshops, the short story form, the paucity of older protagonists in fiction and how older people are underestimated, Faulkner and race, Sidney Thompson, verboten perspectives, underlying nuances beneath sentences, Trueblood’s unintentional wisdom, two-inch items in newspapers, “quiet” vs. melodramatic reader perceptions, people who disappear, and being an apocalyptic person.

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

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Trueblood: Narrative seems to me to be something that sort of flows in many currents through us and carries us through life, but is not — I guess what I mean by plot and why I’m sort of anti-plot is the sort of contained arc: the beginning, the complication and the resolution. Novels like that, I just don’t believe. It’s hard for me to see that things could really ever be tied up with a resolution.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Trying to get the lay of the land.

Author: Richard Ford

Subjects Discussed: Bill Buford’s “dirty realism,” inland vs. coastal territory in the Frank Bascombe books, nautical motifs, Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World, the development of Haddam, recurring supporting characters, crafting long, information-heavy sentences, Ford’s dismissal of cyclical metaphors as “a bunch of baloney,” religion and irony, the politics of the Bascombe books, arranging Frank Bascombe’s days, Ford’s violent reactions to reviews, Colson Whitehead, Bascombe’s culinary habits, quotidian details, street names, evading the influence of other writers, the Permanent Period, self-help books, Sally’s letter vs. Frank Bascombe’s voice, roomy novels, writing short stories vs. novels, dyslexia, research and real estate terminology, William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, Frank’s Great Speeches book, making trips to New Jersey, Haddam vs. Updike’s Brewer, memory and perspective, the relationship between Ford and his readers, on pissing the right people off, responding to the “fool” Christopher Lehman, and character conventions.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Ford: I don’t think of [Haddam] as a character. I think of it as just the backdrop of what the real characters, which is to say the human beings in the book, do in the foreground. Setting for me is always just the context that makes what people do more plausible. And I invented Haddam out of what experience I have had and continue having in central New Jersey. And so for me it was an amalgamation of a bunch of different places that I sort of organized under the name Haddam. And it never really was intended to be more than that, except as these books began to develop to be more about American cultural life and American spiritual life in the suburbs, it sort of rose to become a bit of a touchstone subject in and of itself. Because in describing a town’s housing stock, in describing moratoriums, in describing sprawl outwards from these little towns, that became for me a subject I never intended to find but did find and then did use.

Here’s a hint:

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Harried and henpecked.

Author: Nina Hartley

Subjects Discussed: The meaning of “total sex,” vanilla vs. “alternative” sex, basics vs. options, self-acceptance, foreplay, the relationship between sexual realities and porn film fantasies, the “three position” proclivity, swinging, sexual alienation, responding to Naomi Wolf’s 2003 article, Hooters, extreme porn, porn as education, Jocelyn Elders, Caitlin Flanagan, “death and babies ay-yi-yi!,” spontaneous sex vs. technical know-how, intrapersonal relationships, acceptance, insecurity, and polyamory.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Hartley: I call it “total sex” because it encompasses the mainstay of most sexual practices. It touches on most things pretty well and it leaves plenty of room for exploration of the more esoteric things. I’m a very wide-ranging sexual creature, but I do know that most people are — many people are a little less broad-ranging than I. And so I do try to make it able to speak to the so-called regular person, who is not identified as a quote unquote kinky or freaky or pervert individual, but the regular person who would like to be more comfortable with sex and to get more pleasure out of it in his or her life.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Ready to party in the Biblical sense.

Author: Amy Sedaris

Subjects Discussed: The lost art of hospitality, Martha Stewart, party theme taxonomy, entertaining old people, profiting from party guests, having a first date in your apartment, how to manage shy people, unexpected guests, remembering guests and logging menus, working with artists, Sedaris’s fear of computers, homemade art, children’s books, opposition to brunch, observing party hosts, the safety of counters, hosting vs. guesting, hosting vs. performing, Jonathan Rauch’s “Caring for Your Introvert,” ruminating vs. writing, communication difficulties, solutions for potheads with bad cases of the munchies, on being misinterpreted, shaking off the Jerri Blank persona, hosting for everyday people, indices, organizing cerebral chaos, being in control vs. delegating, on having too many ideas, the atmosphere within Sedaris’s apartment, and operating by instinct.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Sedaris: I don’t normally have gimmicks and I don’t normally have themes for my parties, but, for the book, I came up with what I thought would be challenging for hostess. Like a hot lunch. And I thought who eats hot lunches? Lumberjacks and grips. So I thought, oh, I’ll have a lumberjack for lunch. Or, you know, if you have a bunch of old people over, just what the hostess has to think about. Or children. Or someone grieving or a depressed person.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Ready to drink geologists under the table.

Author: Simon Winchester

Subjects Discussed: San Francisco’s edgy impermanence, San Francisco vs. Venice and the North Sea cities, humankind’s geological privilege, New Orleans & Katrina, the hubris of California residents, anonymous threatening letters, denial vs. geology, Japan and disaster preparation, West Coast subliminal fear, editorial input into Winchester’s work, San Francisco vs. Daly City reactions to the earthquake centenary, Bruce Bolt, the true epicenter of the 1906 earthquake, Jim Tanner, Loma Prieta, subparallel faults, the Parkfield drilling, operating in the geological dark, responding to Bryan Burrough’s NYTBR review and Sam Tanenhaus, the importance of geology, Kevin Starr as an influence, Katrina federal aid vs. 1906 federal aid, looting after the 1906 earthquake, Winchester’s stance on tracking casualties, and defining historical context.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Winchester: The San Francisco event was a minor seismic event, but a major social event and a major scientific event that had huge importance on American history. Because it was the first time in world history that we stopped looking at these catastrophes as the work of a malevolent god and started to look at them as a natural event which should be explained. And so instead of unleashing priests on the problem, which we did in Lisbon in 1755 and after Krakatoa — mullahs there, because it was Islamic — in 1883, we unleashed on the orders of the then Republican Governor of California — Mr. Pardee, a rather dull dentist — we unleashed scientists. And scientists gave us answers. And those answers are of such profound importance that niggling around with whether there were 500 or 50 or 300, whether they were shot, whether they died under falling buildings, whether there was a deaf fireman, are so unimportant. They’re the stuff of tabloid journalism. They’re not the stuff of history.

What I was attempting to grapple with in this book was a historical series of realities, why this was an important earthquake. And whether or not the casualty figures were 1,000 or 5,000 is more or less irrelevant. It was the aftermath, the impact on human society, generally that is important.

Correspondent: So in covering any sort of moment in history, it’s not necessarily the fatality —

Winchester: You don’t cover the moments in history. Journalists cover moments. Historians look back on them with perspective and have, I think, a wider view which does not encompass the tiny details of whether there was a deaf fireman shot. It’s of no consequence whatsoever.