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.

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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.

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