05-13-10: Guy Gavriel Kay Reads for The Agony Column Live on May 8, 2010
"A meaty chunk." — Guy Gavriel Kay
Guy Gavriel Kay arrived to find that his co-star and reader Zachary Mason had read most of Kay's work, uh — in his youth. I wasn't sure what to have Kay read from his latest, as there was so much nice prose in there. I do think that readers will find he gives you enough to totally understand the setting and the set-up. That's quite an achievement for a fifteen-minute reading from a 572-page novel.
Kay also managed to literally satisfy my request that he read us what I called a "meaty chunk" from his novel. As I looked at the audience on that mild spring evening here in Santa Cruz, I noticed more than a few stacks of Kay's signature novels on the tables in the Capitola Book Café.
One of the aspects of these events I was hoping to achieve proved to be quite easily done with the setup provided the Capitola Book Café. There were four rows of four chairs surrounded by six tables with four chairs. The whole affair had the perfect intimate feel that I had hoped for.
Kay's prose in 'Under Heaven' is really quite beautifully sculpted and well-set for reading aloud. There's a measured, epic feel to event he small-scale and appropriately intimate opening passages that he read from. You can hear his reading by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
05-12-10: Zachary Mason Reads for The Agony Column Live on May 8, 2010
"The longest and the shortest pieces." — Zachary Mason on what he was planning to read
I'll start the podcasts from this even with the reading by Zachary Mason from his novel, 'The Lost Books of the Odyssey.' I have to admit that I had no idea what the man himself would be like in person; I loved the book, which casts a haunting, surreal spell.
As it happens, Mason is a relaxed, slightly shy and smart computer scientist who weaves his fiction by first leaving everything, including the Odyssey itself, behind.
He chose to read the longest and the shortest pieces from his novel, which is ... not exactly your everyday, kitchen-window epiphany work that one associates with high literature. He told about the original first edition, and about his style of creation, which involves more subtraction than anything else. That sort of arid feeling I detected is quite purposeful and the result of lots of hard work. To hear that style, follow this link to the MP3 audio file of his reading.
05-10-10: SF in SF, April 17, 2010: Gail Carriger, Blake Charlton and Terry Bisson
"Do you think the popularity of Victoriana in the United States is partly because we've never outgrown the dream of empire, and so we relate?" "Oh, definitely..."— Audience question and Gail Carriger's reply
It is funny how much a bunch of librarians can light up a show. When the time came for the panel discussion with Gail Carriger, Blake Charlton and Terry Bisson, things got fun fast and stayed that way. We were hardly five minutes into proceedings before we began casting actors for roles in movies based on the books. Now that's a literary discussion!
There was a big crowd there to see Gail Carriger and Blake Charlton. Carriger managed to throw a memorable coming-out party at the World Fantasy Convention here in San Jose last year, and the locals who enjoyed that soiree made a point of coming to this one. The advance publicity (difficult to obtain!) in Boing Boing surely helped. But in the end, it was the books that mattered.
Carriger and Charlton had a lot to say about getting into the writing biz. Charlton charmed the audience with tales of his dyslexic youth, and the cheesy paperbacks that turned him into a reader, and eventually, into a writer. Carriger immediately moved to the juicy subject of who would play who in the movie versions of her novels, and Bisson brought his usual bemused perspective to the proceedings. Terry Bisson is in every sense a seasoned, professional writer. He's already done what most every other writer is doing or hopes to do. His observations add a nice measure of depth and experience to the enthusiasm of writers like Charlton and Carriger.
"We have an editorial team at StoryCorps who printed out probably four thousand transcripts."
— Dave Isay
It was spring in San Francisco; sunny but cool, with rain both going and coming. But when we talked, in his hotel room, it was almost like being suspended in light, six stories up. We were really suspended in stories, in the ultimate storytelling project — StoryCorps.
When you interview anyone, you ultimately have to ask a very specific kind of question. You have to ask something you want to know. And as much as I had heard the stories, read the blurbs and website and the handouts and the thises and that's, I really wanted Dave Isay himself to tell me about how and why he created StoryCorps. I knew it was a question he'd been asked; but selfishly, I wanted him to tell me.
Which, he did, in the precise manner of a man who had immersed himself in America. One of the things I really admire about StoryCorps, aside from the simple brilliance of the idea, is that it hearkens back to some great efforts in the past. While we climb ever so slowly out of the worst financial times since the Great Depression, it makes perfect sense that Isay's WPA-like project unfolds in a slow fractal growth across America. Isay is at the precise center of an audio snowball, at this point 30,000 interviews and growing every day.
This kind of archive even now is an incredible and impressive work of data architecture. Each interview is facilitated and annotated by the facilitator. The kind of cross-referencing and indexing that they will be able to achieve is astonishing. This portrait of the actual America, not the cartoon version, is what will, in the fullness of time, become history.
Moreover, one can see that even this gigantic amount of data and vision is just a small subset of what they will be able to eventually accomplish. Now here's an amazing bit of information: Isay told me that going in, they expected that maybe 60%-70% of the participants would give them permission to post the interviews for general public access.
01-23-12: Commentary : Sara Paretsky Nails 'Breakdown' : The Machine Stops
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Interview with Sara Paretsky : "Everything in a courtroom is a story; it's not justice, it's combating narratives."
01-18-12: Commentary : Téa Obreht Conjures 'The Tiger's Wife' : The Grammar of Vision
01-13-12: Commentary : Hard Case Subterranean Block : Not from Bob's Basement Tapes
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Phone Interview with Lisa Randall : "...there seems to be some evidence, especially from one of the experiments."
01-10-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Terry D'Auray Catches Lawrence Block and 'The Burglar on the Prowl' : "A show well worth the price of a ticket."
12-29-11: Commentary : My Life in the Bush of Books : Island of Vice by Richard Zacks, Iago by David Snodin, The Coincidence Engine by Sam Leith and The Dipatcher by Ryan David Jahn
12-21-11: Commentary : Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman : From the Seedy to the Sublime
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Three Books with Alan Cheuse : 'Kill Bin Laden' ; Ryu Mitsuse, '10 Billion Days and 100 Billion Nights' ; Michael Crichton and Richard Preston, 'Micro'
12-20-11: Commentary : David Blackbourn Visits 'Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Village' : Externalizing a Culture Clash
12-15-11: Commentary : Ayize Jama-Everett Reveals 'The Liminal People' : The Powers That Be
Agony Column Podcast News Report : The Agony Column Live with Lisa Goldstein and Ayize Jama-Everett, and music by Fenyang Smith, December 10, 2011 : "... let's look at what happens if people have abilities that other people don't have ..."
11-28-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Scott Wallace : "Within months of first contact, these groups experience a huge die-off."
11-22-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Charles Frazier, Part Two : "It's not me telling you, there's this storyteller voice."
11-21-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Charles Frazier : "If we're going in the wrong direction, we could turn around and go back."
11-17-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Gianni Mola : "The only way you can learn, I told them, is to watch me cook it."
11-11-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Karl Marlantes : "...the way I "think" about things, with quotes around think, is I tend to write them down..."
10-31-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Colson Whitehead : "In the Apocalypse, somebody's gonna have to do the grunt work..."
10-17-11: Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2011 Interview with Russell Banks : "They are in a sense, permanently marked and thrown into this darkness..."
