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!

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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?”

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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.

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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.

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