by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Mary Robinette Kowal

In this 45 minute radio interview, Mary Robinette Kowal discusses her novel, Shades of Milk and Honey.

Mary Robinette Kowal appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #356. Ms. Kowal is most recently the author of Shades of Milk and Honey.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Confusing magic with milkshakes.

Author: Mary Robinette Kowal

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to start with the specific language in this book. The specific Jane Austen template that you laid out. You took great care to mimic Jane Austen’s particular spellings. You used chuse with a U instead of choose with double O. Shew instead of show. Surprize and teaze spelled with a Z. But on the other hand, you didn’t, for example, hyphenate today. And things along those lines. And nuncheon! Jane Austen never used nuncheon!

Kowal: That’s not true. She used it twice.

Correspondent: When? And where?

Kowal: She used it in Lady Susan and Sense and Sensibility.

Correspondent: Ah, okay. Well, in any event, the hard choices of vocabulary. I wanted to first of all start with how this came about. Why go ahead and emulate this language? Was the idea here to create a series of limitations with which to approach a long-form novel? What came first here?

Kowal: I thought that language reflects society very closely. The reason I wound up using some of her spellings, it’s really an affectation. I am trying to pretend that this is something that could have been written then. I deviated from her spellings in places where I thought it would be confusing. In places where I didn’t feel the word was going to appear often enough for a reader to get used to it. An example of a word that was confusing was that she spelled stayed – like stayed at home – S-T-A-I-D.

Correspondent: That’s right.

Kowal: Which is a different word now. The word sofa appears, I think, once in the novel. And she spelled it S-O-P-H-A. And there’s not actually a reason to stop people. I actually thought that they were going to make me change all of the spellings. But I guess you can think of it as dressing up in Regency clothes, but remembering of course that it’s still going to a costume party.

Correspondent: By “they,” are you referring to Liz Gorinsky?

Kowal: Yes.

Correspondent: Or the copy editors?

Kowal: Well, Liz Gorinsky. The production department. I thought that someone in the editing line was going to say, “Hey, we need to change that.” The copy editor, once we had decided with Liz and marketing to keep the spellings — and we did lift out some of them – then I gave the copy editor a style sheet that said, “These are the correctly misspelled words. Please do not change them.”

Correspondent: Which words didn’t make the cut? I’m curious.

Kowal: Sopha. Staid. All of the to-days and to-morrows.

Correspondent: Oh! So those were originally spelled that way in your original draft.

Kowal: Yeah.

Correspondent: Okay. Wow.

Kowal: I can’t remember what some of the others were. But I did a find/replace. I can’t remember where I found it, but I found a Jane Austen spelling list. And I went through and did a find/replace on everything. And then they went back and undid that. So it’s funny. There’s a couple of places. I know that there’s at least one chuse that we missed and it’s still spelled with two Os. But you know.

Correspondent: Well, goodbye to that, I suppose.

Kowal: You know. Second edition.

Correspondent: Well, this is interesting. Because I’m wondering if it took you several practice tries to write in this particular meticulous style.

Kowal: I would read a chapter of Jane Austen and then write a chapter of Jane Austen. So I was reading Persuasion while I was writing this. And one of the things I picked up from the puppetry is that I frequently have to mimic somebody else’s style. So once I decided to do this, I sat down and started reading Austen. And then the reason that I was writing right after finishing reading a chapter was because I knew that the language would stick and the rhythms would stick. But I don’t really think I did a practice run.

Photo: Annaliese Moyer

The Bat Segundo Show #356: Mary Robinette Kowal (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segudo Show: Allegra Goodman

In this 25 minute radio interview, Allegra Goodman discusses her latest novel, The Cookbook Collector.

Allegra Goodman appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #355. She is most recently the author of The Cookbook Collector.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Confusing cookbooks with novels.

Author: Allegra Goodman

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Jonathan’s dialogue is so reflective of Sergey Brin. I mean, he says things like “Introduce me. I’m serious.” Very Star Trek-like in his dialogue.

Goodman: Actually, I’m glad you raised that. Because in terms of research into the dot commers, I did not go to libraries obviously and do that kind of research. You can’t research them like you would a group of rare cookbooks. But my research consisted of listening to the way they talk. I’m very interested in voices. The way somebody like Bill Gates talks. The way somebody like Sergey Brin talks. I’m interested in their militant casualness. They’re very bright. They’re very ambitious. They’re very driven. And they’re very chummy and casual. Like “Let’s all just make this happen.” In a way, anti-intellectual in some ways. In their rhetoric. Not that they aren’t intellectual, a lot of them. And I don’t mean to lump all of them together. But I listened to the rhetoric that they used.

Correspondent: Who did you listen to? Specific tapes or recordings?

Goodman: I was interested in Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and some of the younger voices that I was reading in interviews in magazines at the time. The way researchers talk. The way techie people talk. The way programmers talk. Not necessarily just the powerful ones. But these are the words that they use. And I was interested actually – you know, Jess and George are very literary. And their dialogue and their banter has a lot of references to books and things like that. People have mentioned this about my book. But there’s a counterweight that people don’t mention. Maybe they don’t hear it because it’s so obvious. It’s like what we hear all the time. It doesn’t stick out. But it’s very not literary. It’s very anti-intellectual. Techie.

Correspondent: Well, Jonathan quibbles with “tenuous” at one point, looking at it like a mystified word. But this is interesting. Because I’m wondering if one of the motivating factors to write this novel is because the 1990s – God, that time was incredible in the way we documented everything about the dot com era. We documented everything about our culture. We wanted to publicize our own vacuity, so to speak. I’m wondering if this made things easier from a novelistic standpoint.

Goodman: Well, it’s really interesting. Because we did document that era and we still do. It’s been so well documented. But what I always thin is, “Well, what can my contribution be as a novelist?” As opposed to being a historian or an economist. Or even a psychologist. A sociologist. People talked about the different syndromes of sudden wealth at the time. There was a tremendous amount of journalism at the time. And after. The aftermath. The postmortems. So what could I contribute as a novelist? And what I contribute is to write about it from the inside rather than the outside. To give an intimate portrait rather than the broad overview. And as I did in Intuition, to talk about motivation. Which journalists are really not allowed to talk about, but novelists get to do.

The Bat Segundo Show #355: Allegra Goodman (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Prince of Broadway & Adam Langer II

In this one hour radio interview, we talk with Prince of Broadway filmmakers Sean Baker and Darren Dean and Thieves of Manhattan author Adam Langer.

Sean Baker, Darren Dean, and Adam Langer all appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #354.

Sean Baker is the director and co-writer (among other things) of Prince of Broadway. Darren Dean is the producer and co-writer of that same film.

Adam Langer is most recently the author of Thieves of Manhattan. He previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #175.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Searching for princes and publishing insiders.

Guests: Sean Baker and Darren Dean, and Adam Langer

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPTS FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Because this was a low-budget operation, I have to say that there had to be at least one moment where it was guerrilla shooting.

Baker: Oh yeah.

Correspondent: Could you talk about this? I mean, how much of this was sneaked….

Baker: Do you want to talk about it?

Correspondent: Can you talk about it?

Baker: I don’t know if we can talk about this.

Dean: (laughs)

Correspondent: You can hint at it.

Baker: The fight scene.

Dean: Yeah, we can talk about it.

Baker: I think so.

Dean: We had permits for everything. Which fight scene? The first fight scene or the second fight scene?

Baker: No, the second fight scene.

Dean: We had permits for everything. And we just ran up against the wall. And at the very, very end, we were like, “Oh my god! We forgot this fight scene!”

Baker: Yeah.

Dean: But we shot in the parking lot. We got up that day and we said, “Well, we need to shoot this scene.” Our permits were gone.

Baker: We ran out of insurance that morning.

Correspondent: Wow.

Dean: Everything was gone. This was the last scene we had to shoot or one of the last scenes we had to shoot. And we got up. We went to Prince. And we said, “Here’s $10. Or $15. For each guy you can find. Tell them we need them for twenty minutes. There’s going to be a fight. And meet us at that garage over there.” I went over to the gate of the garage, talked to the guy who was working the garage. I gave him twenty bucks. I said, “We’re going to be here shooting for fifteen minutes and then we’re out.” Shot the scene and literally took off. And that was it.

Baker: That was the one point where we just had to resort to that. Because we were running out of money. We ran out of insurance. And to get the film completed, it took those drastic measures.

* * *

Correspondent: John McNally at the San Francisco Chronicle called you a “publishing insider.”

Langer: Oh yeah.

Correspondent: And I’m wondering why he thought this. This is a book, after all, that has the rather implausible idea of US News & World Report having a books editor. I thought that was rather absurd, I have to say. If you’re a “publishing insider,” that should have been the big tipoff.

Langer: Yeah, I know US News & World Report. But that’s also from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know a hell of a lot about the book industry. The guy who identifies himself as a US News & World Report guy. But publishing insider? I mean, I don’t know. I write books. So I’m inside publishing that way. I’ve never had a job in publishing. I worked as an editor for a book magazine. I don’t know. If you’re a sportswriter, are you inside the sports world? Maybe. I don’t know.

Correspondent: It could very well be that the literary world, or the publishing world, has only so many cliches or is so diaphanous in its subject matter that anyone could, by way of delving into it, could become a publishing insider.

Langer: Yes. Guilty as charged. But I never really thought of myself that way. And I wish I had a few more editorial jobs to give myself a little more streetcred in that regard.

Correspondent: Well, going back to the names of people you brought up, did you have to go through Legal to get permission in house? Was anything considered to be defamatory in any capacity?

Langer: No. Not everything is defamatory in the book necessarily. I mean, I really didn’t want to slag individual people in the book. But at the same time, I wanted it to be taking place in the real publishing world. So I didn’t want anything in there fictional. I mean, if someone’s at a party, I wanted people who would be at these parties intermingling with fictional characters. In the same way I like to talk about how you have Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But you also have Jessica Rabbit running around. So I like the intermingling of cartoonish and reality. But I had no desire or interest in ragging on anybody specific in publishing. And anyone who is libeled in the book is fictional, I would say.

The Bat Segundo Show #354: Prince of Broadway & Adam Langer II (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Notice to Readers: Offline for Uncertain Period

I’m typing this in my neighborhood cafe. I just moved and I thought that the broadband transfer would be flawless. It has been anything but. An evil company* by the name of Ace Innovative lied and misrepresented what the true nature of service was in my new neighborhood was. (I will have more on this later. Also, please pardon the lack of contractions. I am typing this on a keyboard where I cannot do apostophres. This probably explains why I sound like Data from Star Trek.) I have also lost my landline number. So I cannot be contacted for a while. What this means is that I am essentially out of commission for the foreseeable future. Bat Segundo is now on hiatus. I cannot respond to email. Content has slowed to a halt. I hope to be back up and running sometime in the next few weeks. And hopefully I will be able to offer reviews of films that I have seen (which have apparently been released) and audio interviews that I have conducted. My apologies to the publicists who were counting upon timed release of said content and the readers and listeners who regularly come here. If you need to get in touch with me, try friends or email (very slow response time).

* — As is often the wont for expanding companies, Ace was wonderful until they decided to grow. It was a company run by Russian geeks. Now it is a company run by closet sociopaths.

9-1-10 UPDATE: I appear to have found alternative broadband service. A small independent company who has been nothing less than polite, professional, and transparent about getting this done. Should be back in about two weeks.

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Daniele Thompson

In this 30 minute radio interview, director Daniele Thompson discusses Change of Plans, how people act during certain times of the day, and how cinematic fantasy can reflect real life.

Daniele Thompson appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #353. Ms. Thompson is most recently the co-writer and director of Change of Plans — a movie that opens in theaters on August 27, 2010.

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Confusing his code with his plans.

Guest: Daniele Thopmson

Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I wanted to start off about confinement and physical space. In Jet Lag, you have two characters who are predominantly occupying a hotel room. In Avenue Montaigne, you have a broader physical space with the cultural world. And in this [Change of Plans], you have, of course, the dinner party. Eleven characters. It’s the ultimate locked room mystery of life. So my question to you is whether you pursue this confinement as a way to generate dramatic conflict. Or whether this reflects more a concern with the home truths that come out with this human relationship with physical space.

Thompson: Well, we’re dealing with the question of time and space in all fiction!

Correspondent: Yes!

Thompson: It’s true that it’s a challenge to have eleven people in the same place one night, and then again one night a year after not in the same place. I don’t want to give out all the…(laughs)

Correspondent: Sure. But we’re talking predominantly the first dinner party.

Thompson: Right. It seemed that it was the ideal frame for the original idea for the film. The original idea for the film — my original ideas are usually very tiny. They’re like little seeds. And then we have to work on it for weeks, and sometimes months, to find out whether that seed is going to give out some kind of flower or tree or whatever.

Correspondent: Or transform in this case to a baroque redwood.

Thompson: Exactly. So the original idea was fascinating by the fact that when we meet friends in the evening, our friends and ourselves are not the same people in the afternoon. The afternoon or the day or whatever. Because I thought we all have few choices in life. Waking up in the morning and going to work is not a choice. It’s an obligation. 7:00, 6:00, 8:00 in France is later than in America. You can make a decision of not going out to dinner. You have that choice. You can call in sick. I have a headache. I have a problem. So if you do go out, the politeness — the least thing you can do is bring something of yourself. The more sunny side of yourself. And that’s what people do. And therefore people lie. People pretend. And the lovely thing about it, and this is why it’s kind of an apology. It’s an aspect of life that I think is very important in social life. You believe it in yourself. It makes you feel better. You have a sort of entr’acte. An intermission in your own life where you have laughed and told funny jokes, and pretended that everything is going well with your couple and your children and your work. And I thought it was a very funny idea to make the audience aware of what these people’s lives were really going on in the afternoon and then see what happens at night.

The Bat Segundo Show #353: Daniele Thompson (Download MP3)

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