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
02-01-12: Commentary : Stan Lee Splashes 'Stan Lee's How to Write Comics' and 'Stan Lee's How to Draw Comics' : Lessons in the Form, From the Master
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..."
