With the help of KQED in San Francisco, I'm happily able to bring listeners even more Ian Shoales this week, in an effort to catch up and keep up with his entertainingly prolific output. I just hope he will be willing to let us run his stuff when he finally gets picked up by 60 Minutes, who clearly need him. 60 Minutes, the nation needs you!
02-10-12:A 2012 Interview with Christopher Renstrom
Click image for audio link.
"...anything that is born into time has a natal horoscope..."
—Christopher Renstrom
I'll admit quite freely that my actions make no logical sense. I love reading my horoscope, even though I've never been particularly clear as to how the daily bits in the newspaper are derived and crafted. Horoscopes and astrology in general are the targets of both irrational belief and unseemly disdain. When you step back a bit from all the foofaraw, what you find is a sentence or two offered in the hope that you might get a different perspective on the day to come.
Step back even further, and you can see that horoscopes are stories we read to revise our own story. And since they are usually positive, they tend to put a good spin on the day to come. Whether or not they presage the future, and how they do so is somewhat irrelevant to me. I think the best horoscopes are fine little pieces of writing and once I thought about them in that manner, I thought it would be fun – and instructive – to talk to someone who wrote them.
In my wanderings through the audio landscape, I've spent a fair amount of time at KQED in San Francisco, where I recently had the privilege of meeting the one and only Ian Shoales.
"...I walked away from that meeting in 2008 with an old friend of mine and literally saw at least the outline of the book in front of my eyes..."
—Thrity Umrigar
Smart, sweet and well-spoken; Thrity Umrigar is pretty much everything you'd expect her to be having read 'The World We Found.' There's something more though; she is so at ease with herself that she manages to entrance those around her. Spend a few minutes with her and you'll feel, at least (even if it later proves to be an illusion) that you might know your life as well as she knows hers.
Given that her novel is anything but direct, Thirty herself is very and surprisingly so. She picked the portion to read, and I was glad she did as it captured the book better than the passage I had marked. She's a great reader of her own work.
I tend to ask the sort of questions that writers will sometimes say suggest that I am reading more into their work than they put there deliberately. I don't have a problem with that; I think the best writers are working at a level of which they themselves are not conscious. That's what makes the books good, makes them worth my valuable reading time.
Thrity actually addressed this topic in the interview, even though I had asked no such question. Thrity told me that she was pleased that readers would see things in her work that she could not, in this case that a character in the novel tended to show up in a certain setting. She realized that readers would be able to see themes and throughlines in her work that she might not have realized were there. This is why talking with her was such a pleasure; she is a writer who intuitively understands her readers.
02-07-12 UPDATE:Podcast Update: Time to Read, Episode 30: Thrity Umrigar, 'The World We Found'
Click image for audio link.
Here's the thirtyth episode of my new series of podcasts, which I'm calling Time to Read. The podcasts/radio broadcasts will be of books worth your valuable reading time. I'll try to keep the reports under four minutes, for a radio-friendly format. If you want to run them on your show or podcast, let me know.
My hope is that in under four minutes I can offer readers a concise review and an opportunity to hear the author read from or speak about the work. I'm hoping to offer a new one every week.
The thirtyth episode is a look at Thrity Umrigar and her new book, 'The World We Found'.
"...by the end, given all the amazing people I met out there, I've changed my views about that."
—Eric Weiner
Eric Weiner manages to duplicate his prose persona in person. He's very funny in a no-nonsense way. He knows how to observe the truth and then speak to that truth with an aplomb that counter-intuitively undercuts the seriousness of what he is saying. His self-effacing honesty is bracing. He makes you feel like you're sharing a beer with him even if beer is unfortunately far away.
When we sat down to talk about his book, the trick was to get to the themes and the best characters while still leaving them fresh enough for readers to discover. Weiner made that easy because, as he told me, there was a lot he had left out of the book. And yes, I did ask about Scientology.
One of the religions he has spent time visiting was the Jain religion. Now, I have some familiarity with this religion but only because the hive-mind wasps in Neal Asher's far-flung science fiction novels consider themselves to be of the Jain religion. Weiner's explanation helped me to understand Asher's choice. I'm guessing that this is not primary intention of either work, but it is one of those intersections you're only likely to find in this column. You can hear my conversation with Eric Weiner by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
New to the Agony Column
05-16-12: Commentary : Mark Sundeen Pays Out 'The Man Who Quit Money' : Over the Edges
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Interview with Mark Sundeen and Daniel Suelo : "What would happen if we actually practiced this stuff?"-Daniel Suelo
05-15-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Clive Barker 'Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War' : Impure Life
05-08-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Clive Barker 'Abarat' : Reading in Color
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2012 Phone Interview with Mark Sundeen : "...over the years, I had heard through my friends that he had stopped using money and was living in a cave..."
04-30-12: Commentary : Christopher Moore Follows 'Sacré Bleu' : A Story in Color
Agony Column Podcast News Report: A 2012 Interview with Christopher Moore : "...it often isn't efficient to tell a story in chronological order..."
04-27-12: Commentary : Lisa Lutz on 'Trail of the Spellmans' : Meta-Fiction is Fun
Agony Column Podcast News Report: SF in SF from February 11, 2012 : Panel Discussion Moderated by Terry Bisson and Interviews with Rudy Rucker, K. W. Jeter, and Jay Lake
04-26-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Emmanuel Carrere 'The Adversary' : The Enemy Within
04-23-12: Commentary : T. M. Luhrman Listens 'When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God' : Science and the Supernaturaly
04-18-12: Commentary : Gregg Jones Stirs Through 'Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines and the Rise and Fall of America's Imperial Dreams' : A Dream Of Today From Yesterday
Agony Column Podcast News Report: A 2012 Interview with Gregg Jones : "The Philippinos would welcome us with open arms and greet us as liberators."
04-17-12: Commentary : Archive Review: Caleb Carr 'The Alienist' : Subterranean History
04-16-12: Commentary : Richard Zacks Visits 'Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York' :The Wild, Wild East
Agony Column Podcast News Report: A 2012 Interview with Richard Zacks : "Roosevelt and Riis were out looking, and if they did find a cop, he was talking to a streetwalker."
