Condition of Mr. Segundo: Revisiting his flipbook-authoring hobby.

Author: Steven Hall

Subjects Discussed: The relationship between narrative and text design, textual malapropisms, speculating upon “wooden” dialogue, multiple Eric Sandersons and the Matrix trilogy, narrative onslaughts against institutions, on balancing postmodernism with an adventure story, B.S. Johnson, hooking up with David Mitchell and Scarlett Thomas, junk science, devising the QWERTY codes, first-person vs. omniscient narration, misleading toenail tattoos, and the many ways of reading the shark flipbook.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Hall: I started off as an artist. So I had been working with words and text for quite a while. And I think I was just interested in playing around with that sort of form. I also wanted to write a story that looked to identity and where identities comes from. And I had this idea for a species of animal — conceptual fish which swim in flows of conversation and streams of consciousness. And just playing those little word games really. And that came together with the idea of trying to write a story about what it means to be a person and where your self originates.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Attempting to understand Tasmanians.

Author: Richard Flanagan

Subjects Discussed: The novel as a warning, interviews with overly serious journalists, the novel as a mirror to the world, the inspiration of Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, the tradition of using other people’s plots, Jonathan Lethem’s essay on copyright, the obsession with intellectual property, heightened metaphors, people living without land and love, the remarkable disconnect between the author’s intentions and the reader’s perception, the amount of noise in the world, using brand names in language, plagiarizing from infotainment, not wanting to repeat Gould’s Book of Fish, on being innately semiotic, the Sydney Morning Herald, bourgeois broadsheets vs. yellow journalism, absolute vs. relative truth, on being savaged by the Tasmanian media, the despair of politics, the difficulties of the word “terrorist,” why books are a better conduit for truth than other mediums, the seduction of evil, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s comparison of Hemingway and Faulkner.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Flanagan: A book has many faces. I mean, in the end, a book isn’t what a writer thinks it is. A book is what a reader makes of it, when they lend the authority of their lives and their souls to it. But, for me, I was determined to try and escape politics with the book. I wanted to find a simple parable — that it would act like a mirror to what the world was now. I felt the least useful thing I had were my opinions, my attitudes, my politics. I wanted to abandon all that. I just wanted to try and live within the world the way it was, and have a story that spoke as accurately as possible to it, in a way that might lead me and hopefully the reader to some broader sense of what the world is now. But I didn’t know what the world was. And I don’t pretend to have any clue. I have even less clue actually. But it’s always in story that things are revealed. Not in the author’s attitudes.

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Condition of Mr. Segundo: Contemplating an ethnic switch to Russian.

Author: Gary Shteyngart

Subjects Discussed: Prince Myshkin and Misha Vainberg, Doestoevsky as a muse, fat man fiction, getting inside a corpulent character, Biggie Smalls, hip-hop traditions in other countries, technological references in satire, the apocalyptic novel vogue, the paucity of satire in contemporary fiction, the metafictional elements of Absurdistan, the 19th century plotting techniques for Absurdistan, the importance of notebooks, literary fiction as entertainment, linguistic slumming and lowbrow metaphors, kissing the back of testicles, going up against Cormac McCarthy in the Tournament of Books, the suspicions against comic novels, dick jokes, connectivity vs. inhabiting another person’s mind, and not being able to exist without writing.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Shteyngart: I also work in bed and don’t really move very much. I don’t know. My metabolism has been great so far. So I’m not so big. But when I was thirteen or so, I was actually a very husky child. I had to have a special suit made for my bar mitzvah. A special husky suit. So there’s a big fat guy inside this little frame that’s dying to get out. And the other thing is, I guess, was the American novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. And I was thinking primarily of Ignatius O’Reilly, one of the — I was asked recently to pick my favorite book in America in the last three decades and that was the book that came to mind. A wonderful rambling historical — a place also very rooted in its locality. New Orleans. And about a guy who loves to consume everything in sight. Those Lucky Hot Dogs, I’m thinking of. So I love to eat myself. And I love everything to do with food. So I wanted to make my guy gigantic, and I wanted to make him a real consumer — in a very American mode, but also in a kind of nouveau riche Russian mode.

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