Interview with Tobias Wolff
This week, The Bat Segundo Show will cross the 200 episode barrier. A future program will feature a conversation with the writer Tobias Wolff, whose most recent book, Our Story Begins, is a short story collection containing previously collected tales — including the classics “Bullet in the Brain” and “Hunters in the Snow” — and more recent offerings like “A White Bible,” a gripping narrative that takes the notion of entitlement to task, but leaves judgment to the reader. In the New York Times Book Review*, Liesl Schillinger wrote, “To read a story is to sink into the soft seat of your grandfather’s strong, modest old Buick and let yourself be carried through an America of small towns, small joys, small struggles and small despairs — a landscape so familiar as to be invisible, the landscape of homeland.” Wolff’s stories are certainly a place to recognize readily identifiable qualities, but what makes him a fabulous writer is the way in which these quotidian moments are charged with import without coming across as overtly portentous.
I got the chance to talk with Wolff last week when he was in New York. He was a confident figure beating a bad cold. And while he was interested in how readers interpreted his stories, he had no desire to offer explanations. But I did pry further. And I was able to unfurl some of the science Wolff brings to his tales. What follows is a partial transcript of our conversation.
Correspondent: This idea of first-person narration that is somewhat removed — maybe this is more of a classical sense of the short story, in the sense that today, contemporary short stories are, as you point out, more of a gushing therapy session. Maybe that’s what we’re talking about.
Wolff: Well, I don’t know. Again, when I think, for example, of Philip Roth’s first-person narrators, they are interested in the world at least as much as they are interested in themselves and interested in other people. And that shows up in the narration. It would be a pretty boring story that was so — if I could put it this way — narcissistically defined if you didn’t get a sense of the world beyond the narrator or of other people beyond it. I would think that, unless it was deliberately taking on the pathology of narcissism, it would be a deficiency of the story. Some stories, of course — some first-person stories — rely on a very heavy colloquial. And that may be something that you’re noticing with some of the stories. Like the one I just quoted from, “Next Door,” is quite colloquial. In other stories, you get the sense that the narrator is telling the story not in the immediate moment of the story, but perhaps from a distance. Which also would give you a wider vision of the circumstances and the people involved. And also perhaps a more articulate voice. A more capacious voice. So it isn’t just a Catcher in the Rye, moment-by-moment narration, but something that would open up a little more in the way of Philip Roth or William Trevor. The way their first person stories work.
Correspondent: I’m wondering if it’s something similar to Nabokov’s idea — that he had to know the lay of the land before he could write any particular novel or short story or what not. Maybe this is your concern.
Wolff: Well, by the time I write the last draft of a story, which — well, when Nabokov wrote his first drafts, they were like the last drafts of anybody else’s. By the time I write the last draft of the story, I certainly do know more than I can ever tell about my characters’ situations. So you’re just seeing a part of it.
Correspondent: I wanted to ask about the very subtle use of symbols throughout these stories. They are essentially straightforward realism. But you have, for example, in “A White Bible,” the attention to Frontage Road. You have the light shutting off at the end of “Say Yes.” And also, I really love the tule fog at the end of “The Rich Brother.” So these are really symbolic. But also, at the same time, they come from this realism. And I should also observe that, particularly with these endings, these symbols pop up often when you have a concise story.
Wolff: Well, they’re not symbols in the way that a high school English teacher teaches symbols. They are features of the story that a reader can probably sense some consequence without being able to define it. Yeah, at the end of “A Rich Brother,” Pete’s in a bit of a fog. But it’s also a very real fog. If you drive through that valley in California — the Central Valley, that time of night — you’re going to be in a fog. So what symbolism there is simply what life itself gives us. I mean, we actually navigate our lives by symbols. That is, by the outward signs that lead us in one direction or the other. Nature is filled with these things. And, of course, writers make use of them.
Correspondent: Well, in terms of endings, I think also of “Powder” and “Say Yes,” which have endings before the endings. In the sense that we think it’s going to end at a particular point, but, in fact, it ends before that point. And we are then forced to speculate upon where these characters are going. I mean, again, this supports the theory I’m throwing out at you that these concise stories have more going on or the action needs to be stopped at intervals.
Wolff: Well, the ending of a story, I think, contains all that the reader needs to have an intuition of how the story might continue. And they shouldn’t necessarily spell those things out, as some readers do. Tolstoy, for example, writes short stories as if they were novels. But to make a contrast, Chekhov draws enough of an arc that you imaginatively complete the circle yourself. You’re given all you need to do that. And my own practice as a short story writer has tended to gravitate toward that. One of the things I like about the story form is how much it can imply. Not as a kind of guessing game or some cute riddle you’re playing on the reader, but in the way that situations in life imply other situations. I mean, we actually, in our daily lives, become quite adept at intuition, at teasing out implications of present situations in order to get a sense of how the future might unfold. When we go out with a girl on the first time, we’re doing that. We have our first week at a new job, we’re doing that. We meet a new friend. We’re just constantly in these. It’s a very natural and emotional exercise that we do. And I try to find a way of expressing that in the forms of my stories. I don’t close things down because they aren’t closed down in life. The way that Tolstoy closes things down is that he has his characters die at the end. And that is a pretty neat way to do it. But they’re not going anywhere then. I love his stories, but they aren’t the kind of stories that I write.
* — One must point to good fiction coverage in Tanenhaus’s rag from time to time, with the unrealistic hope that such plaudits will correct unpardonable oversights elsewhere.
Interview with Bill Plympton
I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a number of new podcasts, which I anticipate releasing today. But in the meantime, here’s an excerpt from my forthcoming interview with animator Bill Plympton.
If you don’t know who Bill Plympton is, you’re missing out on one of the most unique independent animators now working in America. Plympton emerged into national consciousness when many of his shorts begin appearing on MTV’s Liquid TV during the late 1980s and early 1990s. This came concomitantly with success on the film festival circuit — in particular, with Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. But, ironically, his work has found greater appreciation outside of the States. In his own country, he’s considered more of a cult item. Which is too bad. Because if this were a just universe, Plympton would be considered a national treasure.
I wasn’t surprised at all to see Plympton name-check Winsor McCay during our conversation. There is a fascinating surreal component to all of his films. Take 1994’s “Nose Hair,” in which a pesky and ever-growing follicle kick-starts a wondrous free-associative trip involving a man walking up and down a changing landscape. Or the unusual first-person approach of 1998’s “The Exciting Life of a Tree,” which is told entirely from a tree’s perspective. Couples copulate on a blanket, believing that there is privacy. Other trees are sawed down. But somehow the tree is abandoned.
Plympton puts together his films with a small staff in his New York studio. And, believe it or not, he draws all of the frames himself — at least a hundred drawings a day, he tells me — with his staff coloring and compositing these drawings.
Plympton was kind enough to find a few minutes to talk with me while putting the finishing touches on his most recent animated feature, Idiots and Angels.
(And, incidentally, Plympton tells me that the storyline for the new film involves a disgruntled angel who is a bit peeved that the angel wings force him to be good. As soon as I learn of a release date and/or a distributor, I will follow up.)
Correspondent: I wanted to ask you about something that’s long been curious to me. The suit guys, who have these square shoulders, and who likewise seem to have these very large frames and these very big asses and these very short legs. I’m wondering how this particular look came about.
Plympton: Well, that’s a very good question. Because I see a lot of young animators doing cartoons. And one of the cartoons on the Cartoon Network uses the format that “zany looking people are funny.” Like clowns or animals with big bulbous eyes and huge noses and tongues that stick out and crazy hair. And it’s my feeling that that’s really not funny. For me, humor comes across when you take something that’s normal, that’s placid, that’s bland, that’s a cliche, and do something weird to it. If the main character is weird already when something weird happens, it’s not a surprise. It’s not a shock. Therefore, it’s not funny. So I like to choose characters that are fairly bland. Like vacuum cleaner salesmen. Very normal. And someone you can identify with.
I guess that character, who was originated in “Your Face,” was inspired a little bit by Bud Abbott on Abbott & Costello. The pencil-thin moustache guy with the suit, the slicked back hair. Kind of a sleazy salesman type guy. And that film was such a big success, such a big hit, that I continue that character on through “The Wise Man” and through “Push Comes to Shove,” and a bunch of my feature films — The Tune and Mutant Aliens and I Married a Strange Person. So those films use that character a lot. And I’ve found that he’s a very good character for laughs.
Correspondent: In “Push Comes to Shove,” that character resembles Alfred Hitchcock to some degree.
Plympton: Well, not at all, I don’t think. Because Alfred Hitchcock is really a caricature. And this guy — even though he is a little stockier — there were two guys in “Push Comes to Shove.”
Correspondent: Yeah.
Plympton: A thin guy and a stockier guy. I guess that was inspired by the old Laurel & Hardy gag where they would take an egg and squash it on his head and put the hat back on. It was very dry humor. Very deadpan humor. And then that would escalate. And it escalated into, I don’t know, getting hit by a board or something like that. Well, I wanted to take that escalation and exaggerate it even more. So it becomes so violent and so surreally violent, that it’s just preposterous. And that was my initial inspiration for the film. So Alfred Hitchcock wouldn’t be someone I would say. It was more like Laurel and Hardy. Although even then, Oliver Hardy is more of a caricature than I would want to use. I brought him down as to more of a normal person than Oliver Hardy.
Correspondent: It also reminds me very much of the Fish-Slapping Dance. That kind of one-upmanship between the two characters.
Plympton: Yeah. That’s exactly what the inspiration was.
Correspondent: I wanted to also ask you about some of the perspectives you have. You had a few shorts — and also in your features — where there’s this first-person perspective. I think of the tree, for example.
Plympton: Yeah, “The Exciting Life of a Tree.” “One of Those Days.”
Correspondent: I’m wondering how this came about. Did you need to get away from the typical third-person look of these particular shorts?
Plympton: Well, the magic of animation is that the camera can go anywhere you want. And it’s harder to do that with live action. Although it’s easier now with digital technology. Digital effects. But with animation, you can put the camera anywhere. And that’s part of the fun of it. You’re seeing something that is maybe cliched or boring from a different angle. It makes it exciting. It makes it interesting. And so I wanted to see an event from one person’s POV and see the worst day ever — what it would be — if you lived that life. If you were actually in that person’s place. So it’s very autobiographical in that sense.
But I like to do that a lot. I did another film called “Draw,” where it’s a cliche of two cowboys in a mainstream Texas town. And they draw their guns. Only this is a POV of a bullet. And so again, it’s a kind of cliched, boring situation. But when you see it from the eye of a bullet that is traveling through space, going through someone’s heart, it gives it a whole new perspective. And I love that kind of thing that you can do with animation: change the perspective, change the viewpoint in each shot. And that’s the reason why I love animation.
Correspondent: Is this often why you are drawn to weapons? Not just bullets and cannons and the like. But also chainsaws, I have to ask you about. And cutting people in half. This seems to be a common theme throughout the work.
Plympton: Well, you know, movies have always been violent. Whether it’s Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton or Abbott & Costello or the Marx Brothers, violence has always — the Road Runner is a perfect example. Violence has always been part of humor. And so has sex. I don’t know why a lot of Americans are offended by sex in cartoons. It never made sense to me when I grew up with Mae West or Jean Harlow or Marilyn Monroe — there was always sex in adult films. And I just thought cartoons should also have sex. And so the violence is as American as apple pie. And so I like to take the violence and exaggerate it to such an absurd degree that it’s not really scary anymore, it’s funny.
I saw those Saw films and I was really squeamish about it. And it really wasn’t my cup of tea. But I think if they were to have taken that humor and that violence, and exaggerated it to an absurd level, I think it would have been much more interesting and a lot more entertaining.
(The full conversation will appear in a future podcast installment of The Bat Segundo Show.)
Interview with Jami Attenberg
(Note: The full interview excerpted here can now be listened to as the 172nd installment of The Bat Segundo Show)
For my first 2008 interview, I met up with writer Jami Attenberg at her Williamsburg apartment. During our conversation, Attenberg’s very friendly and intelligent cat, Cracker, proceeded to climb upon my leg and claw at the wires. He then deposited his slinky corporeal mass upon my lap and, later, climbed atop the table and deliberately occluded my notes. I was then forced to wing a portion of the interview. But the cat’s daring locative intervention proved pertinent to the conversation at hand.
Attenberg’s second novel, The Kept Man, is as much about a woman’s relationship with topographical territory as it is about a passive thirtysomething drifting on the dregs of her husband’s legacy. To my mind, the two themes were linked. And during the course of the interview, I asked Attenberg about the connections between her protagonist, Jarvis Miller, and the neighborhood she inhabited. (The full interview will appear in a future installment of The Bat Segundo Show.)
Correspondent: I’m wondering also about the Terri Schiavo narrative, because it does play in more later in the book than in the beginning of the book. Did you know immediately that there was this almost quasi-allegorical feel to that? Or did it start with the fact that you had Martin Miller in this coma?
Attenberg: It started with Martin being in a coma. I knew that. Actually, the first chapter that I wrote in the book was about the donut girls at one point.
Correspondent: Oh, interesting.
Attenberg: That was the first thing. Because I wanted to write a little bit about the art world. I knew that. And then I knew that there was this man who was in a coma. I wanted to do that. But I didn’t know how it was going to end. I’ve said this before, but when you have a guy in a coma, you set the stakes really high like that. There’s only three ways that it can possibly end, which is that he dies, or he wakes up, or somebody kills him. Or he just keeps floating along, I suppose. But that wouldn’t be a very good ending to a book now, would it? So I didn’t know about the more political stuff until I got to the end of the book. I don’t want to give away the ending though.
Correspondent: No, no, no. We’re not.
Attenberg: But I really have no idea when I start writing a book how it’s going to end at all.
Correspondent: So you actually had sort of a mish-mash here. You jumped from Point A to Point 6 to Point Z, etcetera, throughout the course of writing these novels? And that’s how you sort of stumble upon the narrative?
Attenberg: I mean, the first two books I wrote — this is the second book — I wrote in about a year. So everything, like I said, it’s very organic. I just sort of making up things around me and putting them into a book. Eventually, when you get to the end, you filter out what worked and what didn’t work.
Correspondent: Okay, well, if Davis and the donut girls was one of the key starting points, was this an imagined experience? Or was this drawn from anything specific that you observed? Because I am certainly not familiar with this phenomenon. (laughs)
Attenberg: With donut girls?
Correspondent: Yeah, yeah.
Attenberg: Well, you have to live in this neighborhood. It’s more north side. We’re on the south side right now. And we’re doing this interview in my apartment. And on the south side, it’s very Hassidic and Puerto Rican and Dominican, and then when you head towards more of the north side, it’s Greenpoint. And then it’s really Polish over there. So you notice the Polish girls that are out there. And some people are really fascinated and obsessed with beautiful young woman.
Correspondent: Yeah.
Attenberg: And they’re recent immigrants. And they’re definitely a force in the population.
Correspondent: Well, I’m wondering though. Donut shops in particular. It seemed…
Attenberg: There is a donut shop! In Greenpoint. On Manhattan Avenue. And it just stuck in my brain. I think I went there after seeing a rock show. So it’s sort of like that donut shop. And it just sort of stuck in my head. And I wanted to write about it.
Correspondent: Did you observe any specific pickup artists there?
Attenberg: No. I don’t even know if people really do pick them up. It was just in my imagination that they did.
Correspondent: Interesting. Or even someone constantly buying clothes and this whole modeling thing.
Attenberg: Right.
Correspondent: The whole thing escalating into something else. This was the imagined part.
Attenberg: But that’s no different from Jarvis wanting to be taken care of. Or these men wanting to be taken care of. That there are these people in the world who look to other people to sponsor them or meet their needs. But they provide something in return. I think I missed the point that I wanted to make, which was that, after I had all these ideas about these characters and plot points, I came across the idea of being kept or held back. Once I realized that that was going to be the title of the book and that was a major theme, then it was really to go back to move forward and make sure that every character has something that’s holding them back or keeping them into their life. That’s where it comes from.
Correspondent: Going back to this issue of topography as a launching point, it’s reminiscent to me of Nabokov’s rule, where he basically said that he could not write a novel until he actually had a particular location. Likewise, in addition to this inspirational momentum, I wanted to first of all find out if this was a factor for you in terms of writing this. And it also leads into another question about Jarvis’s perspective, where she’s generally taking a small item and putting it into a larger neighborhood. For example, there’s a pack of cigarettes she observes. And she’s very clear in the way that she describes it as coming from a particular deli and how it was actually purchased and the like. So I wanted to ask you about this phenomenon. Was this a way for you to generate momentum in your book? You needed to get the lay of the land before the lay of the characters?
Attenberg: I’ve lived here for five years. And I’ve lived in New York for ten years. So, for me, it’s not conscious in any sort of way. I wanted to write about the neighborhood that I lived in. And I take a lot of pictures. I go out a lot to document. And I have a blog. So I have been writing about the neighborhood a lot. So, for me, it’s just a natural — I don’t know. It’s not like — it’s not a conscious thing. I would love to take credit for it being some sort of conscious, deliberate act on my part. I just write about the world around me. But I did feel like, at that moment I was writing the book, that there was so much going on in Williamsburg. I mean, this is a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Thematically, it did feel perfect for Jarvis. Because Jarvis needs to break out of something in Williamsburg. And Williamsburg was very quietly becoming something. Then all of a sudden, it burst out and there was all this development. And people were really concerned with its development. And I think people in this book suddenly become very concerned with Martin Miller’s life as well.
Correspondent: Well, concerning this gentrification, you have Jarvis fleeing — almost like the Trail of Tears — across the river. And yet, she is very taken with, for example, bagel shops. The laundromat as a kind of social nexus. As well as finding comforts in the very locations that she often despises. So I’m wondering when did you know that this was coming up. Did this come about from knowing the neighborhood or as an extension of Jarvis’s consciousness?
Attenberg: I think that, if you’re going to write a true New York story, you have to write about all of these little shops and stores. We don’t know our neighbors a lot of the time. Our friends tend to live really far away from us. Or it’s not like you can walk down the street and knock on someone’s door and see them. So it becomes really crucial where you have these relationships with a person at your bodega, with a laundromat. It’s just an interesting community. And in Williamsburg, where there’s so many different kinds of people here, and there’s this big influx of young people who really like to engage, it just seems really natural. I don’t know. That’s just my version.
Correspondent: So it sounds like it very much is a topographical concentration.
Attenberg: But she’s not me. But it’s just how someone like her would. You know, I certainly identify with her. I don’t think that I’ve ever done anything that she’s done before. And I’ve certainly never had anyone support me.
For related conversations, see Jami Attenberg in conversation with Kate Christensen and Ryan Walsh interviewing Attenberg at Largehearted Boy.
BSS #159: Garth Risk Hallberg
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Considering alternatives to artsy-fartsy books.
Author: Garth Risk Hallberg
Subjects Discussed: Authoring a conceptual book with veto power over the designer, family detachment, cross-references, Bay Area literary magazines, the McSweeney’s influence, Em Magazine, book art practitioners, being on a first name basis with Dave Eggers without really meeting him, teaching a class on design with scant knowledge, frightened photographers, how to organize artists without having them succumb to advertising influence, inviting readers to cut up the book, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, nepotism and William Gass, character who share surnames with authors, speculating on character deaths, Garth Risk Hallberg’s streetcred, drugs, the problems of a representative North American family living in New York, lying and imagination, the “healthy glow” on cheerleaders, penis envy, lengthy sentences and commas, Raymond Queneau’s “sonnet machine,” being hostile towards Geos, plastic bags and trees, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, Ian Frazier’s “Bags in Trees,” on the reader being unfairly tricked by the book’s trompe-l’œil, whether all books should be published in hardcover, e-books, and reading Bob Woodward in PDF.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Correspondent: In “Security,” you suggest that cheerleading practice actually results in a healthy glow. Do you have any personal evidence for this? Why did the healthy glow of cheerleading practice sort of stick out in this section? It certainly stuck out for me. Because I’ve seen cheerleaders coming back from practice and they don’t always have that healthy glow. So why did you, Garth, have this healthy glow described in this book?
Hallberg: Something about the character of Lacy, who is the cheerleader. She seems to always be ensconced in a healthy glow to me. And that sounds kind of trite. But in a way, she’s the least afflicted of these characters. Again, I think I have an image in my head of someone I went to high school with, who was just kind of — again, this sounds trite, but she was kind of the all-American girl and she was happy and functional and emotionally available and friendly and just a generally cool person.
Correspondent: But no healthy glow! You haven’t described that!
Hallberg: Well, and she had an extremely healthy glow.
Correspondent: Okay, really. I mean, how — can you elaborate on the healthy glow? What kind of healthy glow did she have? How did this actually get from ten years later into this book?
Hallberg: Do I use the phrase “healthy glow?”
Correspondent: You use the phrase “healthy glow.” That’s why I’m so excited about it.
Hallberg: (laughs) I guess it is sort of an exciting concept.
BSS #158: Yannick Murphy II
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Abdicating any and all Mata Hari dreams for a far more noble ideal.
Author: Yannick Murphy
Subjects Discussed: The juxtaposition of first person, second person, and third person within Signed, Mata Hari, the loss of Mata Hari’s voice within the novel, on not pushing a point of view upon the reader, balancing source texts vs. imagination, books that accessed some of Mata Hari’s closed files, how to work within the lack of non-specific biographical details, being a young mother in a foreign country, writing hyper-exuberant sex scenes, S-shaped and elliptical symbols, gibbons and the male gaze, the expressive possibilities of symbols, narrative transitions, extremes vs. gradients, the “third eye,” balding gentlemen, the importance of environment, the relationship between personal experience and objective data, dreams, on making Mata Hari’s husband evil, the oppression of women in pre-World War I, and novels telling unknown history.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Murphy: Well, I started off thinking that it would be just in the first person. But there was so much about her in later life that I thought her mature-sounding voice would need a second person. And that’s how the person began with “If you want to be a spy….” That’s how that voice came about. Because it showed her being more mature about the entire situation, about all of the conflicts that she had had in her life, and the first person worked for her as a young girl — for me, when she was a young girl. But then there was so much that happened in her life that I knew that that first person as a young girl, that particular sounding voice, wouldn’t work for the whole book. Because I wasn’t going to write a book that actually detailed every point of her life.
Segundo Overhaul
Okay, folks, the Segundo site has been tweaked a bit and I’ve caught up with all but one of the outstanding capsules. Still needs some work and I may add another column, but if you have any problems or specific requests, let me know and I’ll employ them in the next few days. Also, more podcasts are coming this week.
Coming Soon to The Bat Segundo Show
You may know Peter Fernandez and Corinne Orr from their voiceover acting for Speed Racer. In addition to writing and directing the American scripts, Fernandez was the voice of Speed Racer and Racer X. Orr was the voice of Trixie and Spritle. But what you may not realize is that both of these actors began their careers just as old time radio was on the decline. (Indeed, Orr even appeared on an episode of CBS Radio Mystery Theater, Himan Brown’s effort in the 1970s to bring back old time radio.) Since one of my side projects has involved attempting to revive old time radio for the podcasting age, I am greatly interested in this generation of great voiceover actors. I’m also a fan of Speed Racer. Fernandez and Orr — both of whom are especially friendly people — kindly took some time out to talk with me while I was bumping around The New York Anime Festival. There were many topics discussed during our conversation. (After many curious years, I finally learned the story behind the third season Star Blazers casting switchover, which will be revealed once the podcast goes up.) But as it turned out, we got to the subject of old time radio pretty quickly.
Correspondent: Was there a stigma in terms of female actors doing boys at the time?
Orr: No. Everybody did it. (laughs) Not everybody, but it was common because we were coming out of the radio era.
Correspondent: Yeah.
Orr: And people had doubled and tripled in shows. So…
Fernandez: Well, on radio though — and I grew up partly doing the radio shows from the East Coast, which was where most of the dramatic shows came from. And they used real kids. There was one boy named Ronald Liss, who started doing radio when he was a year and a half. He could read.
Orr: Really?
Correspondent: Wow.
Fernandez: Yeah. Quite a bit. He went to the same school I did and they skipped him three grades.
Orr: I knew him. I loved him.
Correspondent: I’ve listened to a lot of old time radio and I actually have heard children. So that’s definitely true.
Fernandez: Yes.
Correspondent: Actually, this brings up a question I wanted to ask both of you, in terms of animation and anime reflecting this old time radio feel. Rather, there’s a whole generation that grew up who didn’t listen to old time radio. I only discovered it just by complete curiosity. And I’m wondering if you feel, both as actors, that there has been something lost in the last forty years.
Fernandez: I want to address that. My favorite medium of all time is radio, and it always will be. You’ve heard the cliche “theater of the mind.” And it’s absolutely true. Every listener had a different picture of what he was listening to in his head. And it was a marvelous medium. And great for actors. It was live!
Orr: We do a convention each year called Friends of Old Time Radio in New Jersey. And it’s glorious. They recreate all the old shows with some of the original actors who are still alive, and they use other people to do the shows. And it’s great fun! We do it each year. And I just won an award last year.
Correspondent: Oh! Congratulations.
Orr: Thank you.
Correspondent: Well, we’re talking about radio as “It was a fabulous medium.” Do you think there’s absolutely no hope — particularly in this podcasting era; I mean, here we are talking on a podcast — of old time radio returning?
Fernandez: I don’t think it can ever return. Because now it’s a commercial every three minutes on whatever you’re watching or listening to. Three or four minutes. However, I was thinking of maybe devising three minute segments of soap operas — you know, original ones. Not going back to the old ones. And having a little brief drama or comedy. Whatever. Lasting only for the three minutes. What stations would run it, I don’t know. Because you need X amount of stations to pay for it.
Correspondent: But what I’m suggesting is, is that here we have this podcasting medium in which this isn’t a factor. In which you can have a sponsor sponsor an entire podcast. So I’m wondering if there’s any hope of old time radio that’s lengthy thirty-minute drama.
Fernandez: I don’t think there’s an audience for it.
Correspondent: Really.
Fernandez: Yeah, if they want to spend a half hour, they want to see it on television or whatever.
Correspondent: Even if they’re walking in the streets with their iPods? Have you considered that? I mean, people do need to listen to something on the subway.
Fernandez: Well, “listen,” there’s the key. To listen. Is it enough to just listen? Do you want to listen to a book being read or — I don’t know. I just don’t think that people are used to it mentally now.
Segundo Cleanup
Apologies to all for the unfinished capsules for the last seven shows and the delay in getting these most recent shows up. It’s been extremely busy around here. I should have the capsule situation rectified in a few days. In the meantime, four new shows are available. Beyond the two part interview with Tom McCarthy, which touches upon a remarkable range of topics, you won’t want to miss Show #157 if you’re interested in the future of independent publishing. Multiple streaming and downloading options are, as always, available at the main site. Thanks for your patience.
BSS #157: Roy Kesey & Dan Wickett
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wondering if Roy Kesey is a “real” Roy.
Author: Roy Kesey and Dan Wickett
Subjects Discussed: Writing stories in Beijing, exotic stories, conversational vs. descriptive stories, Carlo Ginzburg, working from pre-existing conversations, text that kick-starts a character’s voice, personal experience and intuitive narrative choices, the relationship between art forms and words, Jack Kerouac’s scroll, the worst case scenario of the artist’s lifestyle, baroque vs. conversational stories, finding the heart vs. putting together the puzzle pieces, imbuing a baroque character with a human sense, the advantages and disadvantages in “working on only one element at a time,” the difficulties of cooking a seven-course meal, the relationship between problem-solving and being a narrative ventriloquist, limits to the level of invention, Elmore Leonard, Donald Barthelme, cathartic responses to unpleasant airport experiences, dashes in dialogue, on being seduced by Dan Wickett, and starting up a new publishing company.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Kesey: I like playing with diction levels. I like the way that people talk. I like the way they hide things from themselves sometimes when they talk. And all of my stories start with voice. I get a piece of voicing and I try to figure out who it is who would talk like that, and then get them in trouble and try to get them out. And so it all starts with talking. And that doesn’t mean that they’re all going to end up as conversation. But the “Cheese” story was from — the book that the epigraph comes from, a book called The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, which is a fantastic history book about a 16th century miller in the Fruili, in Italy, who had some pretty strange beliefs and who was pretty outspoken about them and got in some trouble and ended up being burned at the stake. And Ginzburg went into the — he was maybe the first person to go into the archives of the Vatican and get into the history of the Roman inquisition, but looking specifically for places where the inquisitors and the the people that they’re asking questions of are kind of talking past each other. Because these are people — he’s kind of the father of microhistory — and he’s interested in these people that only exist in terms of history now, because they had some kind of problem with an authority figure. Otherwise, they would have totally disappeared from history.
BSS #156: Andrea Barrett
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Praising the smell of authors.
Author: Andrea Barrett
Subjects Discussed: The similarities between pre-World War I and contemporary environments, stumbling upon 1916, sanatoriums, The Magic Mountain, ethnic backgrounds, dwelling upon immigrants and working class backgrounds, blowhard intellectuals, cure cottages, the American Protective League, writing in first person plural, working from two green volumes of chemistry, amateurs in science, X-rays and radiation, the dark underbelly of science, research and ensuring verisimilitude, period clothing, symbols of an ethereal environment, unintentional imagery, stylizing a love quartet, characters who maintain a love of science, character names, Eudora Welty, on being a chaotic writer, the 1916 silent film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, on being labeled a “historical fiction” writer, writing in the past vs. writing in the present, inventing details vs. being inspired by real-life details, the importance of architecture, entertainment vs. atmospheric narrative emphasis, movie rights and film adaptation, how Barrett’s names turn into characters, and the access to inner lives within novels.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Barrett: That time — just the time of the First World War, before the war — was really the last time as a culture when we could imagine science as wholly benign, as something that was only going to help people, as something that was only full of intellectual excitement. It is the First World War, really, that gives us the dark underbelly of science. It’s when X-rays are discovered and then they’re found to be damaging. It’s when the chemical and dye industry is bringing all these wonderful things to light and at the same time they’re making poison gas. It’s when cars are invented and then they turn into tanks. It’s when airplanes are invented and they drop bombs. Everything gets turned so quickly in the First World War into darkness.
BSS #155: Tom McCarthy, Part Two
(This is the second part of a two-part interview with Tom McCarthy. To listen to Part One, go here.)
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Baffled by French artistic references.
Author: Tom McCarthy
Subjects Discussed: Guns and weapons, the smell of cordite, authenticity, Remainder’s protagonist as revolutionary, the ethical imperative of bearing witness, Antonioni’s films, Andy Warhol, Lockean nouns, the central axis of art, philosophy, and literature, Stanley Milgram’s experiments, Jeremy Deller’s reenactment, The Cramps, prisoner reenactments of the “Thriller” video, the common motif of the Michelin Man within Remainder and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, Tristram Shandy, the bid to be authentic, author intuition and ambiguity, reenacting a bank heist, Bob le Flambeur, Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory, Dog Day Afternoon, bubbles, wine and dinner, the Blueprint Cafe, visualizing a carrot, Samuel Beckett, Giambattista Vico’s idea of history running in loops and its influence upon Finnegans Wake, the lineage of repetition, Shakespeare and plagiarism, mainstream publishing remaining in denial about modernism, hooking up with Clementine Deliss and Thomas Boutoux, Olympia Press, Deliss’s distinction between art and mainstream publishing, middlebrow novels, and inventing meaning from simple form.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
McCarthy: I mean, lots of critics have seen Remainder as a sort of postmodern parable. Or a parable of the postmodern. That history’s ended and we’re just a chain of repetitions. And it’s all to do with digital culture. And so on. And so on. But if you look in literary history, you get exactly the same logic played out in Don Quixote, for example, where Don Quixote reenacts — literally reenacts! — stylized moments from penny novels that he’s read in a bid to be more authentic. In Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne, Uncle Toby has lost one of his testicles in the Battle of Namur. And so he spends his whole retirement gardening. And he lays out the flowers in his garden in the exact position of the soldiers of the battles — so the red flowers are like the British and the blue flowers are the French, or whatever it was. You know, even Hamlet sits around doing nothing for half the play and then hires these actors to literally — to reenact his father’s death scene in front of the whole court. There’s this kind of awkward moment. So I think you find these patterns played out, right back to the beginnings of literature almost. I mean, I suppose the most contemporary or modern version of it, and one that was very much on my mind when I wrote the book, was Ballard’s Crash, which is a fantastic book, and its hero again reenacts car crashes, reenacts stylized violent moments, in a bid to be authentic. Ballard makes it very, very clear. He says the only real thing in this world is the car crash. And therefore we must reenact it and create the perfect one.
BSS #154: Tom McCarthy Part One
(This is the first of a two-part interview with Tom McCarthy. To listen to Part Two, go here.)
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Pondering whether he may be a reenactment.
Author: Tom McCarthy
Subjects Discussed: Really good rhubarb tarts, cappuccinos and loyalty cards, the relationship between caffeine and psychosis, repetitive patterns, writing a book with the maximum number of ambiguities possible, cracks in the wall, unintentional allegory, writing Remainder in three drafts, J.G. Ballard and the “Eureka!” moment, the illusion of a brisk read, weird guys at bars, modulating dialogue, the clues within Remainder that it’s set in the late ’90’s to 2000, accidental interpretations of post-9/11 commentary, Time Control UK and concierge companies, speculation, the protagonist looking up at the heavens, the morphine hit of authenticity, empathy, the invented moment with the homeless character, post-traumatic stress disorder and shell shock, responding to trauma, ethics, examining the character of Naz and examining the World War II references, the fascism of reenactments, loyalty, Melville’s racism, the aesthetics and the rebellious temperament of the pianist, the sophistication of Tintin, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” colons and Graham Greene, the $8.5 million sum and eight symbols throughout Remainder, the councilor and his failure to use second-person in conversation with the protagonist, the proprietary nature of pronouns, Kafka’s “The Burrow,” David Lynch and “looking at yourself from the outside,” the royal we, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, James Ellroy, McCarthy’s love for the blue, the Blueprint Cafe, idealist philosophy vs. the materialist tradition, Naz’s tendency to look up words on his phone, setting rules on perspective, the protagonist’s obsession with time and space, tingling and electricity, the Freudian connection with trauma, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, and the relationship between neurosis and neoliberalism.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
McCarthy: These concierge companies were just emerging in the UK who would more or less do anything for you. They sort of lived your life vicariously, or they stretched your life for you. Which I just find kind of fascinating. I mean, it’s quite kind of metaphysical, really. It’s like you outsource your godliness. You outsource your autonomy. Even though you’re paying them. And the stock market was — 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? (laughs) I read this article about the South Sea bubble of the 17th century — or was it the 18th century? When stocks were going so high that people would throw money at anything and there was a company called A Very Good Idea Yet No One to Know What It Is. And its shares sold out in a day. And of course it went bankrupt six months later. But I guess in this book, the movements of capital are very much tied into the movement of everything else. So there’s this very idea of speculation, which has an astronomical meaning as well. Constellation of the heavens. And my hero spends a lot of time just looking at dust. Constellations of dust suspended in a stairwell. And they’re either going up or down. And the shares are doing the same thing. I mean, their speculation is about projecting futures, keeping shares buoyant, and at the end, both the dust crashes and the shareholders crash and everything crashes.
Coming Soon to The Bat Segundo Show
Just hours before 2006 NBA finalist Jess Walter headed on a plane back to Spokane, we talked about his novel, The Zero, which he fully confesses to be an allegory of post-9/11 life.
Walter: We were clinging to our economy, and the fact that our leaders — Giuliani and Bush at the time — said they attacked our economy. They attacked our way of life. And the fact that we didn’t bat an eye over the fact that they equated our economy with America, with our way of life, it was as if we had forgotten that there was some larger thing. And then, as we started debating whether or not it was okay to torture, and this lurched into a war that I didn’t agree with, it just seemed as if the conflation of victim and hero, the confusion of economy and country, were disastrous. And so, it comes out in a novel.
Correspondent: But it’s not all bad. You have, for example, the honor of the tip. The dollars constantly inserted under the martini glass.
Walter: Right.
Correspondent: So I don’t think it’s entirely a cynical view you have of the..
Walter: No, no. I’m not entirely cynical. Again, this is all — I sound so dour and political. But this is all framed in a novel that’s hopefully funny and entertaining. And I remember those ghost bars being in Lower Manhattan. I mean, I was right in the thick of Ground Zero. So you’d walk into these ghost bars and there’s no reason for firefighters not to take the bottle down and take a drink. And some of them would leave a dollar tip. Was that an ironic tip? Was that a real tip? I don’t know. But the descriptions of Ground Zero in the book. In my mind, the book starts when I arrived five days after. And so, from that moment on, it does hopefully capture everything. Some honor, some pathos, and a lot of cynicism.
Correspondent: The whole notion of Jesus being mentioned 93 times in the Koran. Where did that come from?
Walter: Jesus is mentioned 93 times in the Koran.
Correspondent: It really is?
Walter: It really is. If you think about the history of religion in our world and all these pantheistic movements, and all these animism and natural worship, to all of a sudden come up with monotheism with gods that are almost exactly the same, with some of the same prophets, but just these tiny gradations of difference — to have those cause the death and destruction of millions upon millions of people and lead us to the brink of mutual destruction over a couple of degrees, it’s another kind of insanity. These religions are so incredibly similar. And within the differences, obviously, are enough places for all of us to die and the fundamentalists are the one who cling to those differences.
Coming Soon to The Bat Segundo Show
This morning, as the man was midway through packing his carefully prepared clothing and about to check out of his hotel, Ken Kalfus was generous to take some time out of his schedule to talk with me about his book, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. His novel, which blissfully assaults the “irony is dead” conventions of post-9/11 life, began from a short story. Kalfus is now working on short stories, but it’s just possible that, in his concern for words and language, he’ll find that grand idea that will translate into a third novel.
(And, incidentally, Kalfus will be reading with another 2006 National Book Award finalist, Jess Walter, tonight at Bookcourt at 7:00 PM.)
A good part of our conversation was concerned with the following passage, which Kalfus agreed was one of the key galvanizing points for Disorder:
But Joyce felt something erupt inside her, something warm, very much like, yes it was, a pang of pleasure, so intense it was nearly like the appeasement of hunger. It was a giddiness, an elation. The deep-bellied roar of the tower’s collapse finally reached her and went on for minutes, it seemed, followed by an unnaturally warm gust that pushed back her hair and ruffled her blouse.
Correspondent: So, in this case, it looks like you have long sentences. But they resemble short sentences by way of the comma.
Kalfus: You know, you want these words to go off in the reader’s head in a certain way. You really do. I mean, that’s what you’re trying to do when you write. And sometimes, you do that with commas. Or you do that with sentences. You do it with colons. Semicolons. Whatever it takes, you do.
Correspondent: Is it largely intuitive? This rhythm that you’re looking for. How much of it is planned through kind of a psychological approach? Do you test this kind of thing on other readers?
Kalfus: No, no, no, no. But there’s a lot of rewriting. I can’t say. If I were to look at it again, I might want to change something in that sentence. It sounded pretty good when you read it. It’s partly intuitive. And then you write it down and it looks like junk. And then you rewrite it again. You know, you go over and over and over it again. So the process is making these sentences work. And, quite frankly, I’ve discovered that’s maybe the easiest thing — the most pleasurable thing about writing — is getting those sentences right. It’s a lot of work, but in a way, maybe it’s the easiest thing. Because you can always tinker with it, tinker with it. Plot and character are actually more — are probably the big things that are more demanding when you’re plotting or you’re putting it out. Making sure that the major parts work. Dealing with sentences, you can always rewrite those little sentences. But once the story gets locked in, it’s hard to shift things.
Correspondent: So, for you, the sentence is more of the motivating factor than the actual plot and the character…
Kalfus: You know what. I can’t answer for everybody. I think we write because we love language. Was Shakespeare really obsessed about Denmark? About succession in Elsinore? Or fathers and sons? He had some ideas for some great lines. And he found a story that he could use. But I think all of us come to writing for the love of language. And the stories come after that. There’s a story when I write a book or a project. But I saw a way of using language in a way that was interesting to me.
Correspondent: Well, that’s a good point. Because people remember Twelfth Night not really for the plot, but “If music be the food of love, play on.”
Kalfus: That’s very awkward to compare myself to Shakespeare.
Correspondent: I’m sorry about that.
Kalfus: But I see an opportunity to use language when I write.
Coming Soon to The Bat Segundo Show
A few prefatory words about this excerpt: Will Self is a tall, thin, vaguely cadaverous-looking man, with a triangular head and enormous eyes that blink sparingly. He is also quiet, curious, and considerably punctilious. His command of the English language is as present in his speech as it is in his fiction. I talked with Self right after he had checked into his hotel — this after a walk from LaGuardia Airport. He carried no luggage. When I asked him where he stored his change of clothes, he then proceeded to reveal several carefully folded squares of clothing that he had kept upon his person. Self challenged me on my assumptions about the dérive, the psychogeographical term for a “drift.” When I suggested that such a linear walking narrative might reveal recurrent patches of drab land, he suggested that I had a perceptive anxiety. I said that I simply didn’t have the time, but he may have been right. The day after the interview, I found myself immersed on a long walk around the perimeter of Prospect Park where I drifted into surrounding blocks and contemplated the insanity of a twenty-five mile walk. Perhaps this was just the beginning.
Correspondent: I wanted to actually ask you about your observation in “Madame Jacquard,” about giving up cigarettes, and how cigarettes form this necessary unit to get from one place to another and how it’s part of this linear narrative “translated into a series of perplexing jump-cuts.” You’re down to three [a day] now. So I’m wondering if, speaking now, you have any kind of linear narrative now with these three or…?
Self: Three is not enough for a narrative. Then, it would be concision. It would be like haikus.
Correspondent: (laughs)
Self: And that’s just not enough cigarettes to provide a narrative anymore. You need the constant ebb and flow of nicotine in your system to provide that. It’s not working for me anymore. I’ve lost the cigarette narrative.
Correspondent: Yeah. Well, you have, basically, the walking narrative, I suppose.
Self: Yeah, maybe the walking narrative is there more strongly as a result. I’ve had some absolutely splendid walks during this trip. It’s been very exciting for me. The airport walks have been great. But perhaps the best walk was — I walked in from Pearson to Toronto. I walked in from Sea-Tac to Seattle. Big walks. Sixteen, seventeen mile walks. I had a good long walk in San Francisco out from Castro to Sausalito over the Golden Gate Bridge. I had a beautiful walk where I arrived at O’Hare and then kind of got off the subway the first stop — I think it’s called Rosemont. Within twenty minutes of leaving the aircraft, I was face-to-face with a deer in a wood by a river in this totally underimagined place. It’s a classic interzone — classic liminal place — and then found myself walking through the wood directly under the flagpole.
So I had this kind of juxtaposition — what I think of as the modern sublime. Jet travel is the strangest, fascinating, most awe-inspiring physical experience that most of us will have in our lifetime. It’s mediated by human society in that way. And yet everything about international air travel is arranged to make it dull and vacuous and boring. And yet the airport walk recovers the sublime aspect of air travel in that way. And then yesterday in Chicago, I walked to Wal-Mart, which was another kind of walk. Another sort of biopsy of the urban environment.
I mean, I think, in the way I do differ from [Guy] Debord is that, of course, I don’t believe in the act of the dérive. I don’t know what the L.A. Times critic thinks about it, but on the Debordian premise, a dérive should destroy the society and the spectacle.
Correspondent: Yeah.
Self: When Debord was writing, the Marxists still spoke quite fervidly about late capitalism. But how late it is. (laughs) And it’s later and stronger than ever!
Correspondent: (laughs)
Self: So I don’t have that kind of — and indeed I think that the kind of Marxian conception of what these sort of ants might be involved in is ridiculous and moonshine. But I do think there’s a different kind of insurgency involved in long-distance walking in this way.
Coming Soon to The Bat Segundo Show
Correspondent: I’m wondering, in your research, did you find a kind of Miles-like figure who was occupying the public sanatorium, as opposed to a private one? Were there many of these types of figures?
Barrett: There were a lot of wealthy people in cure cottages. I didn’t find someone like Miles. He’s really wholly invented. But the American Protective League is real. That institution that he belongs to was real and very powerful during the early part of World War I. So I really built him from my knowledge of people in cure cottages, which I had written about before in a story called “The Cure” in Servants of the Map. And then from what I found out about the American Protective League.
Correspondent: Gotcha. The sessions that Miles conducts are rather interesting because we don’t actually know all the time what’s being reported in those sessions. You reproduce a rather bland page-long sentence of some of the things that are discussed, but I found that to be kind of an interesting decision in light of the first-person plural narration, which we haven’t even begun to discuss. I’m wondering why you kept that sort of disguise. Was it a way to foreshadow the inevitable revelation as to who this narrator is?
Barrett: This collective narrator — usually when we read something that starts off with a “we” voice, we’re waiting for it to separate out into an “I.” And that is the case for most stories. This doesn’t right through the very end, and there’s a reason for that. And partly the reason is that, as a group, those people do something — or, in some cases, fail to do something — about which they feel really guilty. So they’re not willing to separate out. The reason for reproducing what they’re talking about so literally is partly to give you a sense of the real texture of their lives and what they’re really learning. There was a tendency then — and there’s still a tendency now — to think that recent immigrants to this country, if they’re working in menial jobs, aren’t educated and don’t have complicated intellectual lives. And that’s just silly. It was silly then and it’s silly now. The workmen’s circles, which is what that discussion group is based on, was very common in New York. Especially on the Lower East Side. People talked about them in great depth and with great rigor after very long days working horrible jobs about the Yiddish theater, about French music, about painting, about all sorts of things. And I thought that just to describe those things, to tell about those things really briefly, would in a sense be unbelievable. That I needed to reproduce for you some of the texture of that. So that you could fully imagine what it was like to really have those discussions.
Correspondent: I think there’s also a mystery of not discussing the full minutes of the agenda. Were there two green volumes that you actually found during the course of your research?
Barrett: I have those two green volumes.
Correspondent: Really?
Barrett: Yeah. I have the books that Leo works from and I know them almost as well as Leo does at this point. I don’t actually know any chemistry. But I do know…
Correspondent: Come on! Cite something at the top of your head right now!
Barrett: I can’t. I just can’t. But I could when I was writing the book.
This conversation with Andrea Barrett will appear on a future installment of The Bat Segundo Show.
BSS #153: Ursula Hegi
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating the worst thing he’s ever done.
Author: Ursula Hegi
Subjects Discussed: Collage artist protagonists and collage-inspired novels, stream of consciousness and italics, using specific fonts, Mason’s voice as a pulse, how Hegi communicated with typographers, the problems with emailing manuscripts, characters representing a contentious unified whole, subverting the nuclear family structure, the layers that come from writing 50+ drafts, gestures involving shoulder blades, why there are so many water environments in Hegi’s work, kayaks, William Faulkner’s building, on whether or not a novel is “absolutely right,” the origins of the name Mason, working on an intuitive level, planning through revision, ellipses and pauses, the introduction of a protester into the narrative, the Tribe of the Barefoot Women, nasty fortune cookies, the peace symbol and Mercedes-Benz, confusion in semiotics, Bush and Hitler comparisons, the curtailing of rights in contemporary America, how Hegi varies her stylistic vernaculars, being driven by writing, and being a “method writer.”
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Hegi: For example, to write from Annie’s point of view, I need to become Annie. To write from Opal’s point of view, I need to be nine years old. To write from Trudi Montag’s point of view in Stones from the River, I am her height. I feel her rage. I feel her bliss. I cannot write about feelings unless I go there with the characters. So sometimes I sit at my desk blushing, smiling, close to tears. But I do have to become each character. It’s like method acting.
Correspondent: Yeah. Interesting. Did you have any theatrical background?
Hegi: No. But I read about method acting when I was in my thirties. And I thought, “But that’s what I’ve been doing in my writing!”
BSS #152: Richard Russo
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Spending the days sighing.
Author: Richard Russo
Subjects Discussed: The origins of Bridge of Sighs’s dual narrative, writing a long novel without an end in sight, Byron, characters who approach Lucy’s elbows, a protagonist’s blind spots, Marconi — the character and the telegraph, the American dream in post-World War II, hidden niches and the architecture of Thomaston, Gabriel Mock and his fence, the influence of Mark Twain, the chasm between the working class and the middle class, narrative dichotomies, the benefits of computers for ambitious novels, writing novels vs. screenplays, how Russo figured out corner market psychology, how operating schemes provide heft to narrative, Richard Ford’s realty knowledge, the origins of the “wrong end of the telescope” passage, teaching metaphors, dialogue and uptalking, John P. Marquand, a narrator setting down a story without awareness, the urge to tell a story, literary antecedents and unreliable narrators, writing in the dark, contending with massive topography and multiple characters, on being a natural propagator, the benefits of routine, violence and fights, Kitty Genovese, eccentric small-town teachers, Charles Baxter’s “Griffin,” howling, and using “gizzard” in dialogue.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Correspondent: I’m curious as to where that moment, which seems to me your 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.
BSS #151: Oliver Sacks
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Dwelling upon the rotten fruit that comes from musical relationships.
Author: Oliver Sacks
Subjects Discussed: Musicophilia, emotional responses in patients with dementia and Tourette’s, an amazing musical rendition from Alzheimer’s patient Woody Geist played by Dr. Sacks on his CD player, the relationship between music and the auditory cortex, the memory of performance, responding to rhythm, the overpotent stimulant qualities of music, earworms, music as “advertisements for toothpaste,” being bombarded with tunes in interior environments, the dangers of iPods, neurological speculation upon having a “soundtrack to one’s life,” musical hallucinations vs. brainworms, musical perception and “intercranial jukeboxes,” musical dreams and the hypnopompic state, the dangers of being oversaturated with sounds, pattern recognition, blind children and absolute pitch, famous blind musicians, septo-optic dysplasia, amnesia and the case of Clive Wearing, Chomsky and speculation upon a hypothetical innate musical theory, congenital amusia and those who sing out-of-tune, associating a song with a sound, and recent developments in melodic intonation therapy and the right hemisphere.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Correspondent: Really, what’s the difference between, for example, this innate idea of music and the kind of cognition in Clive’s head?
Sacks: Say that again.
Correspondent: I’m sorry. The difference between the innate rules of music versus the cognitive processes that cause him to sing and perform quite well. What causes him to perform as well as he does?
Sacks: It is memory. It’s procedural memory. The memory of how to do things. And that — I don’t know if one needs to bring Chomsky into this.
Correspondent: You mentioned “anticipation is not possible with music from a very different culture or tradition.” So I didn’t know if you were making a comparison to Chomsky with this kind of proviso of…
Sacks: Listen, I think this Chomsky thing is a red herring. And I don’t know how to answer it properly.
Correspondent: Okay, no problem. We’ll…
Sacks: So let’s — and I think the business of Chomsky and implicit rules doesn’t have anything obvious to do with Clive’s memory.
Correspondent: Okay.
Sacks: You know, otherwise we will get into a knot from which we cannot explicate ourselves.
Five New Podcasts
The capsules will be completed later. For now, the latest five podcasts are also available on the main Segundo site, where additional streaming options are available.
BSS #150: James Lipton
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!
BSS #149: David Michaelis
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?”
BSS #148: Naomi Wolf
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.
BSS #147: Steven Pinker
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.
BSS #146: Danica McKellar
[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.
Coming Soon to The Bat Segundo Show
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.]
Pledge Drive Update — October 17, 2007
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.
Pledge Drive Update
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