If you are a program director interested in airing Segundo, please note that the first 230 shows of Segundo are available in a one-hour format, with the shows all running just under an hour. While the running time ranges from 23 minutes to 58 minutes, if you are looking for a literary program that you’d be interested in stripping during a post-midnight slot and you have an automated system that can fill in the remaining gaps with short segments, please email me and I’d be happy to discuss arrangements.
A half-hour syndication package, involving a more scheduling-specific 28:30 format, will be available in a few months.
I was as surprised as anyone to learn that the entire Segundo oeuvre now runs close to 10 gigs in MP3 format. (About 98% of these shows fit on two DVD-ROMs.) Because of this, I’m going to soon be releasing twelve torrent packs for these shows that will be uploaded to The Pirate Bay (with the older ones repacked), so that Segundo can be disseminated further.
For those who simply want copies of the shows on DVD, so that you can simply copy the shows over to your iPods or MP3 players without having to download them all, I plan on working out a scenario in which you’ll be sent the first 225 or so shows on two DVD-ROMs for a reasonable price.
In the meantime, the August pledge drive is still on. We’re still short of our goal. So if you haven’t donated, your support will help us continue the show. We’ll have more news on all this later, as well as another podcast up very soon. Thanks again for listening.
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (