Another quick little offering:

Torrent Packs #4 and #5 of The Bat Segundo Show have been released to The Pirate Bay.

Pack #4 contains Shows #61-80, and features interviews with Alison Bechdel, Daniel Handler, Tommy Chong, Nora Ephron, Scott Smith, Richard Dawkins, and many others. You can download the torrent here.

Pack #5 contains Shows #81-100, and features interviews with David Lynch, Mary Gaitskill, Kate Atkinson, Francine Prose, Nina Hartley, Richard Ford, Christopher Moore and many others. You can download th torrent here.

There will be a sixth pack, once time can be found to complete more shows.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Procrastinating at the last minute.

Guests: Carolyn Kellogg and Alan DeNiro

Subjects Discussed: Small Beer Press, genres, Jim Monroe, on being a post-science fiction author, picking from years of fabulism, on being a genre agnostic, weaving between genres, literary fiction, creepiness, letter-writing action, wordplay, Dungeons & Dragons, absurdity, contemporary income disparities, dread, footnotes in fiction, jolts of emotion, reversing polarity between poetry and fiction, the rust belt, and the loneliness of Wal-Mart.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

DeNiro: I’ve always kind of considered myself science-fiction influenced. Or another way I’ve kind of thought of it as — and I don’t know if adding “post-” anything is really vain or pretentious or whatever — but almost kind of a post-science fiction, of kind of looking at the whole field of hundreds of years of fantastic literature and definitely being within that larger tradition of fabulism and the like.

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky’s Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show.)

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Remarkably terse.

Author: A.M. Homes

Subjects Discussed: Expanding the New Yorker piece to book form, the rules of memoir, inventing deposition testimony, being “dished up” by the Roiphe sisters, the false connection between Homes’ novels and the memoir, Joan Didion, the culture of confessional memoirs, truth stranger than truth, speculating upon parents, being fact-checked by The New Yorker, negotiating with Granta and The New Yorker, declarative sentences, deciding what to reveal, court documents, judging other people, not running from the truth, Daughters of the American Revolution, on being excluded by family, and maternal fantasies.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Homes: The lawyers kept saying to me that you should sue your father for paternity. And I kept thinking, I don’t really want to do that. And a couple of things became clear to me. One was how interesting it is that one person’s decision to exclude you from your family history excludes you from all of your family history. Hundreds and hundreds of years, and yet you’re no more or less related to any one person than another. And how interesting is that someone could remove you from all that. So that was kind of fascinating to me. And then I was thinking about, if we did sue him, what would happen? And essentially, he would be legally compelled to not only produce some sort of a test or a document, but also to really answer all of the questions that had never been asked. And I also thought as an artist or writer that was most interested in these, by that point the reader knows who my biological father is well enough to participate in the reading, that I could just ask the questions and not even have to provide answers.

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Torrent Packs #2 and #3 of The Bat Segundo Show have been released to The Pirate Bay.

Pack #2 contains Shows #21-40, and features interviews with William T. Vollmann, Dana Spiotta, Erica Jong, Sarah Waters, Tom Tomorrow, Harvey Pekar, and many others. You can download the torrent here.

Pack #3 contains Shows #41-60, and features interviews with John Updike, Colson Whitehead, Jonathan Safran Foer, David Mitchell, A.M. Homes, Jeff VanderMeer, and many others. You can download the torrent here.

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Vacating from vacations.

Guests: C. Max Magee and Marshall Klimasewiski

Subjects Discussed: Drawing upon compartmentalized personal experience, writing unpleasant characters, sabbaticals, maintaining an ever-shifting narrative, writing short stories vs. novels, characters stuck in environments, protracted scenes, human connection vs. work, locals vs. vacationers, John Ruskin, Charles Dodgson, co-opted misfits, and invention vs. personal experience.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Klimasewiski: The odd thing for me — and I don’t know why this is — is that I found Cyrus so much easier to write, even though I don’t think I’m a writer with a really terrific memory. And so therefore I don’t have this great sense of exactly what it was like to be nineteen, or to live inside my own nineteen year old mind. And yet he was so much easier for me to write than the cottagers, who demographically are much closer to me and to people I know. Yet I had a terrible time making them seem to come alive or feel credible in some way in my mind.

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky’s Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show.)

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Avoiding pie-throwing Bolsheviks.

Guests: Jessica Stockton and Mark Binelli

Subjects Discussed: What’s real and what’s not real in Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die, anarchism, 20th century film references, the Coen brothers, Upton Sinclair, extemporaneous speeches, on not writing the novel chronologically, the sensation of research, knife-grinding, Buster Keaton, meat metaphors, Out of Bounds, shopping S&V around to publishers, Dalkey Archive Press, the fragmented trial scenes, and experimental fiction.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Binelli: When I hit on the comedy team idea, I immediately liked that. And then at some point, I can’t say when, but at some point the name “Sacco and Vanzetti” just popped into my head and it was such a perfect comedy team name. Initially, it seemed so ridiculous, which it is obviously. But then the more I thought about it, the more parallels between anarchism and slapstick started to come out. And it just kind of weirdly made more and more sense. So I just decided to embrace it.

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky’s Paperhaus and The Bat Segundo Show.)

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Abdicating his duties for an advertising campaign.

Author: Lionel Shriver

Subjects Discussed: Devising a dual narrative, snooker, film references, the relationship between The Bad Seed and Sliding Doors and Shriver’s novels, dialect and transcribed speech, sports in Shriver’s books, contrasting characters, the pros and cons of popcorn, playing the 9/11 card in contemporary fiction, writing from outlines and notes, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, on books having a short-shelf life, the success of We Need to Talk About Kevin, writing about the States from the UK, persevering as an author, food, fiction with a sense of purpose, being in love with language, Shriver’s evolving fiction tastes, on being a book critic, the benefits of reader exasperation, sex and relationships, and the Bad Sex Award.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Shriver: It was important of me never to play games for the sake of it, that is, I didn’t just want to write a clever book that was a formal experiment. The idea was always to be illustrating something about the characters, something about the nature of two very different kinds of relationships. It’s a book about tradeoffs. Neither of these men is perfect.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Avoiding Sheppard tones.

Author: John Sheppard

Subjects Discussed: Responding to Dan Green’s post, on being rejected by publishers and self-publishing, writing without a plot, on doing things twice, the connection between the conscious and subconscious thematics, getting out of the muddy ditch, basing fiction on reality, music and anger, Minor Threat, Pizza Hut, the Reagan era, the “punk” label, imploding labels, abrasive commentary, the circus people of Sarasota, Florida, cartoons vs. writing, the rhythm of Catholic catechisms, writing to a mix tape, orange juice concentrate, sound effects in sentences, and being a comma freak.

Sheppard: I was an illustrator, once upon a time. And I thought of this book — it’s somewhat like making a painting. You start off with the canvas and then you paint on top. And then you paint another layer on top and another layer on top. And eventually at the end, you have a painting. And that’s sort of the way I thought of writing this book. I didn’t write it with a plot in mind. Absolutely no plot in mind. And some people, like a reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times thought it was pointless that I had no plot, that there wasn’t a South Park moment, “I learned something today,” at the end. But I really don’t believe it’s a pointless book. Otherwise I wouldn’t have written it.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Rattled by interlopers.

Author: Tao Lin

Subjects Discussed: Murakami meets Less Than Zero, the violent impulses of animals, Elijah Wood, Gmail chat as muse, Instant Messenger, one-sentence poetry, figuring out things and calming down, Ann Beattie, Tao Lin’s Wikipedia entry, organic vegan food, the moral and existential nature of fiction, shit-eating grins, cutting-edgeness, Domino’s Pizza, writing in literary journals, Melville House, writing a Nerve story, mangling grammar, feeling interminable, Monica Lewinsky, posting email publicly, privacy, Jason Fortuny, Salman Rushdie, the girls suspended over The Vagina Monologues, and fun.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: I note that the stories in Bed are surprisingly realistic. There aren’t much in the way of dolphins or bears or the like. So what caused these bears and dolphins to kind of enter into the equation? Did you find them to be a friendly presence to draw upon?

Tao Lin: Well, after I finished the novel in a realistic fashion, I kept on working on it. And I just felt bored by it. I thought it needed something exciting. So I just went through. Whenever there’s a bored part where I felt bored, I deleted something and added the animals.

Correspondent: Now these dolphins are rather murderous. They actually go after Elijah Wood and company. What accounts for these violent impulses of these animals then?

Tao Lin: I just thought it was fun to write having a dolphin murder Elijah Wood.

Correspondent: But this is Elijah Wood we’re talking about. Has Elijah Wood ever done anything to you personally?

Tao Lin: No, he hasn’t. But did you think I was mean against him? That I was mean against him or that it was just playful?

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