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
09-18-15: Commentary : William T. Vollman Amidst 'The Dying Grass' : An Epic Exploration of Simultaneity
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with William T. Vollman : "...a lot of long words that in our language are sentences..."
09-05-15: Commentary : Susan Casey Listens to 'Voices in the Ocean' : Science, Empathy and Self
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Susan Casey : "...the reporting for this book was emotionally difficult at times..."
08-21-15: Agony Column Podcast News Report : Senator Claire McCaskill is 'Plenty Ladylike' : Internalizing Determination to Overcome Sexism [Incudes Time to Read EP 211: Claire McCaskill, Plenty Ladylike, plus A 2015 Interview with Senator Claire McCaskill]
Agony Column Podcast News Report : Emily Schultz Unleashes 'The Blondes' : A Cure by Color [Incudes Time to Read EP 210: Emily Schultz, The Blondes, plus A 2015 Interview with Emily Schultz]
07-05-15: Commentary : Dr. Michael Gazzaniga Tells Tales from Both Sides of the Brain : A Life in Neuroscience Reveals the Life of Science
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Michael Gazzaniga : "We made the first observation and BAM there was the disconnection effect..."
04-21-15: Commentary : Kazuo Ishiguro Unearths 'The Buried Giant' : The Mist of Myth and Memory
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro : ".... by the time I was writing this novel, the lines between what was fantasy and what was real had blurred for me..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report : A 2015 Interview with Marc Goodman : "...every physical object around us is being transformed, one way or another, into an information technology..."
Agony Column Podcast News Report UPDATE: Time to Read Episode 199: Marc Goodman : Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
