08-19-11 UPDATE:Podcast Update: TECHNOSTALGIA: Time to Read, Episode 6: Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Here's the sixth 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. This one was written and recorded while I in the process of interviewing Juliet Eilperin, Michael Reynier, and Michael Harvey.
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.
08-17-11:A 2011 Interview with Michael Katakis and Kris L. Hardin
"There was still this sense of hope."
—Kris L. Hardin
It is one thing to immerse one's self in writers' lives by reading their work, even if that work is entirely autobiographical, and it is something quite different to sit down with them in their home. The immediacy of 'Photographs and Words' by Michael Katakis and Kris Hardin is the most striking aspect the book. You are there with Michael and Kris as they live day-by-day in Sierra Leone, Rapallo, Paris or — name your destination.
Sitting down with them at their table in Hardin House, in the most gorgeous part of one of California's most celebrated towns, Carmel, is an experience that itself evokes their experience. You can feel the entire world in this lovely room.
I spent quite a bit of time with 'Photographs and Words' before I sat down to talk with Michael and Kris. You can probably read it cover-to-cover over the course of a long, lazy summer's day. That's a great way to start, but having done so, you'll find yourself wanting to return. To really spend some time with these two, to follow their journey.
When I found myself actually sitting down with them, their presence was enveloping, their house comforting. It's been in Kris' family for generations. It's in a part of town so small, there's no house number. It's just Hardin House.
"The name Watts is from a John Hughes movie called Some Kind of Wonderful..."
—Ernest Cline
Sometimes a book comes along and you read more than the book itself; you can read the author as well, in the book, in the prose, you can feel the author's enthusiasm and it is infectious. When I finally sat down to talk with Ernest Cline, I knew in advance that it would be one of those interviews where it would be all too easy to tweedle the whole day away in minutia. I mean, here's a book that references the 1980's show Riptide, and not just once.
The trick then, is to stay on point, to stay on task, and to keep the perspective just far enough back so that you don't spend the entire week in Yosemite looking at the bark of one tree, so to speak. I'm pretty sure that Ernest and I could have done just that on any one of a number of points in the book. But the brilliance of 'Ready Player One' is not just its evocation of 1980's nostalgia. Cline gets behind the specifics to talk about some of the mechanisms of nostalgia, and that was just one part of our conversation.
I knew that Cline had started out his career as writer with the screenplay for the movie Fanboys, and that the movie which came out of the experience was not what he intended going in. But as we talked about his writing history, one of the themes that came out was the import of getting out and putting both yourself and your work, in public. Cline was a fixture in the Austin spoken word scene, and in the poetry slams. Public performance goes a long way to help any writer hone their chops.
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."
