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

Author: Jeff Parker

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

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

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

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

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

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Empathizing with surnames.

Author: David Peace

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

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

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

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

Correspondent: (laughs)

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

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

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

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

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

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Dwelling on legal inconsistencies.

Author: Katha Pollitt

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

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

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

Correspondent: I know.

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

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

Pollitt: Oh sure!

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

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

Correspondent: Okay.

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

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

Author: Brian Francis Slattery

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

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

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

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