May Podcast Madness!
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on May 10, 2009
Filed Under Bat Segundo, Reviews
In today’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times, you can find my review of Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger. Waters appeared on The Bat Segundo Show back in 2006. And she’ll soon be making a second appearance. Which brings us to an unexpected issue of productivity that I need to address.
First off, I wish to offer a profound apology to several authors and publicists, who have been waiting patiently for several Segundo installments.
I am not entirely certain how it happened, but I apparently interviewed quite a number of intriguing people over the past month or so. Many of these interviews are quite funny and interesting. One interview is extremely odd and features a notable cinematic figure making a rather naughty reference to a chorizo. Another interview ended with the guest falsely believing me to be a Republican when I stopped tape. Yet another interview features an author and a translator sitting next to each other. But one should not confuse the prolificity of these interviews for any downturn in quality.
But because there was so much interview conducting, this has resulted in an extremely ridiculous backlog of shows that I could not keep up with. And the many gigabytes of data presently lingering on my hard drive probably represents the largest backlog of shows I’ve had in the show’s history. (Indeed, I was so busy conducting these interviews that it hadn’t occurred to me to produce the shows. Between looking for work and other professional obligations, I could do either one task or the other. And not one to keep idle hands, I ended up doing a lot of the former.)
So in an effort to catch up with this mess, I have decided to not interview anybody for the next two weeks or so (although a few interviews have been scheduled after that time). Instead, for the next two weeks, this website will become a depository for May Podcast Madness! I will be putting up a new conversation during just about every weekday for the next two weeks. I suppose that this is podcasting’s answer to television sweeps week. Brace yourself.
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
Looking forward to these.
Bring it onnnnnnnnnnnn!