It's amazing to hear a writer's work read aloud, especially when the writer is as good as Alan Cheuse. While I read the essays in 'A Trance Before Breakfast,' I myself fell into a trance — that of a reader. I followed the words on the page as a reading experience, and lost myself in Alan's travels. When he picked up a copy to read something, pretty much on the fly, I wondered just what I had gotten him into. His prose was so good that I'd forgotten he actually reads aloud for a living.
Alan's reading of his travel essay was revelatory. With the heart of a skeptic and the prose of a mystic, he describes his time in Bali. The prayer-like feeling of his prose becomes a gyre of words, spiraling upwards. But he's smart enough not take himself too seriously, both within the work, and in some asides that kept the audience laughing as we too, I became part of the audience, spiraled upward.
"Already, I was associated with one of the greatest cartoonists in the world." — Harvey Pekar
I had to fight to talk to Harvey Pekar. It was a battle worth fighting, but it wasn't as if I just set up a studio appointment and just showed up. I was not the only person interested in speaking to this living legend, and there was more than a little pressure for me to simply back down and let the real people get on with their work. But I'm nothing if not persistent — as perhaps 8 years of working this website may show — and scheduled the interview anyway, giving myself a good hour and a half. Turns out I needed it.
And not surprisingly, it turns out that Harvey Pekar was a most interesting man to speak to. The interview I'm podcasting today, in its entirety, was recorded four years ago now. But it frankly seems fresh to me, as does Harvey himself. Even back then, I'd done quite a few interviews. I was pretty accustomed to making guests at ease, and getting past the automatic Q&A into something more unusual.
Intros and Peter S. Beagle Reads "The Stickball Witch"
OK, yes. I'll get the intros together the next time around, and I stand on my hind legs and deliver speech as she is meant to be delivered. Peter S. Beagle and Alan Cheuse last saw one another some mumble-mumble years ago — I think it was around the time that Beagle was living in Watsonville and writing his now-famous intro to the then-soon-to-be-ubiquitous LOTR paperbacks. Get past a minute of me and you'll hear these two raconteurs set a high-quality low-ethos bar for the proceedings that follow. What this works out to is an incredibly fun evening for all involved.
And once the obligatory territories are literally and literately marked, we get down to business. I sort of thought that I had indicated to they they'd be reading, but I guess I'd not been quite firm enough, as in: "You will, be reading a story, select it beforehand and bring a copy to read."
Fortuantely, both gentlemen had some remarkable quality material on hand, and we began with Peter Beagle. After a quick "What the hell?" moment, a copy of 'We Never Talk About My Father' was dropped into Peter's hand, and I heard him say, "The Stickball Witch." I could look at it as yet another instance of magic in my life, you know, the wishes that come true when you least expect them. I'd just read 'We Never Talk About My Father' to prep, and saw that story in my mind in those simple Rod Serling black-and-white sets...
I've spoken with Aimee Bender, three times now, and I can say with great certainty that she has access to a place in this universe where nobody else can go. Her facility with words is utterly unique. Her relationship with language is very personal. And her connection to story, to narrative, is subterranean. When you meet Aimee Bender, and if you ever get the chance to see her when she tours for her books, you should — you'll find one of the sweetest, nicest, most intelligent and perceptive humans you're likely to encounter. But if you've read her books, you might expect her to be slightly out of focus, because, really, she lives in a parallel dimension that's very close to ours ... but is not ours.
I was fortunate enough to get Aimee Bender to join me in our dimension, or at least get her close enough so that her lovely voice was crystal clear as we spoke at KQED studios. Her latest novel is a delight, but it is also deeply uncanny and in a sense, quite terrifying. Bender is a delight, but she's in no way terrifying.
Bender teaches writing in Los Angeles, and in conversation about her fiction, the teacher in her comes out. You can only envy her students, because she's quote good at articulating the ineffable. Bender's novels are built on a per-word basis. She dives into her characters and pursues them through hundreds of quantum universes, each following a different decision tree. The trick is for her to find the single universe in which the novel takes place, untangle the decision trees and find the path and leave the side-trips beside. She's a unique craftsman of the supernatural, in that she has to push herself, she tells me in our interview, to bring back just the right amount of prose from her visits to the alternate dimension. You can bring our discussion to your dimension by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
New to the Agony Column
09-06-10: Commentary : Brendan Connell Tells 'Unpleasant Tales' : Close-up and Too Close-up
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Guy Gavriel Kay : "I'm telling myself you bloody well better figure out where this is going because you have to start heading there sometime around now."
09-03-10: Commentary : The Eternal Youth of 'Madame Bovary' : "To be simple is no small matter."
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Bruckner Chase at Blue Ocean Film Festival : "...a breath to your right and look at the moonset over the Pacific, and a breath to your left and see the sun rise over the mountains..."
09-02-10: Commentary : Collecting Philip K. Dick : The Books That Launched A Thousand Films
08-30-10: Commentary : David Doubilet Captures 'Water Time Light' : Painting with Pixels
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview With David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes : "Everything people have always feared about photography comes true underwater."
08-25-10: Commentary : Vendela Vida 'The Lovers' : Reading and Revelation
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A Live Reading and Interview with Vendela Vida At Bookshop Santa Cruz : "...there was an owl that came into this place we were renting one day..."
08-24-10: Commentary : Jeff VanderMeer and 'The Third Bear' : Absurd Is as Absurd Does
08-20-10: Commentary : Joe R. Lansdale Takes 'Deadman's Road' : Deader Than Thou
Agony Column Podcast News Report : On the Phone with Vendela Vida : "You do all this background information, most of which never makes it into the book."
08-19-10: Commentary : Gary Shteyngart Tells a 'Super Sad True Love Story' : Retro-Prescience
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Gary Shteyngart Live Reading and Interview at Bookshop Santa Cruz : "...please like me, this will make up for Hebrew school if all of you like me.."
08-18-10: Commentary : Mark Pilkington Unleashes Weapons of Mass Deception : "ECM+CIA=UFO"
Agony Column Podcast News Report : David Corbett and Barry Eisler for The Agony Column Live at Capitola Book Café, August 7, 2010 Q and A : "This is NewSpeak."
08-16-10: Commentary : Howard Norman Asks 'What is Left the Daughter' : The Past Always Rises
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with Howard Norman : "I'd wanted to write from the beginning an epistolary novel; this is just an epistolary novel that's consisting of one letter."
08-12-10: Commentary : James O'Neal Copies 'The Double Human' : Proceeding into the Future
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Barry Eisler and David Corbett Live at Capitola Book Café on August 7, 2010 : "If anyone thinks it's absurd that the government might assassinate the founder of WikiLeaks, it's quite a bit less absurd than I wish it were".... — Barry Eisler
08-11-10: Commentary : Joe R. Lansdale Takes Huck Finn to 'Dread Island' : "Classics Mutilated"
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Barry Eisler Reads at The Agony Column Live on August 7, 2010 : "...they'll pick up that angle and run interference for us..."
08-10-10: Commentary : David Corbett Asks 'Do They Know I'm Running?' : Crossing Borders
Agony Column Podcast News Report : David Corbett Reads at The Agony Column Live on August 7, 2010 : "These Families are making incredible sacrifices..."
08-09-10: Commentary : David Mitchell and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet : The World is Ever the World
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2010 Interview with David Mitchell : "The periodic table of the human heart is still the same now as it was then."
08-06-10: Commentary : Tim Powers Sails 'On Stranger Tides' : History, Fantasy and the Reality of Reading
08-03-10: Commentary : Robert M. Price Spins 'The Tindalos Cycle' : Terrorize, Horrify, Repeat
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A Short Chat with Gary Shteyngart : "...the technology is outpacing our ability to absorb what it is doing to us..."
08-02-10: Commentary : A Second Tour Through 'The Passage' : Sending Characters into Time
07-30-10: Commentary : Subterranean Press and Robert R. McCammon Wake at 'The Wolf's Hour' : The Time Before Cheese
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Three Books with Alan Cheuse : Allegra Goodman, 'The Cookbook Collector,' Noam Shpancer's 'The Good Psychologist' and Elie Wiesel 'The Sonderberg Case'
07-28-10: Commentary : Rule Britannia, In Space 2 : En Route, RJ Frith and Peter F. Hamilton
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Brian and Wendy Froud at SF in SF on Monday, July 19, 2010: Q & A : "The people you deal with at the publishers ... if they last the end of the week, you're lucky."
07-27-10: Commentary : Rule Britannia, In Space : UK Space Opera Demonstrates Excess is Not Enough (Part one, the Arrived)
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Brian and Wendy Froud at SF in SF on Monday, July 19, 2010 : "Well, I thought if I do faeries then nobody's going to say that I've got it wrong."
07-26-10: Commentary : Brian and Wendy Froud Seek 'The Heart of Faerie Oracle' : Cards, Books and a New Perspective
