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06-19-09:
Agony Column Exclusive — (Around) Three Books With Alan Cheuse
'Every Man Dies Alone'
by Hans Fallada
'The Sleepwalkers'
by Hermann Broch
Recently, we here at The Agony Column have taken to calling Friday Cheuseday, because, well, that's the day we dedicate our podcast to an ever-widening discussion of books and literature with Alan Cheuse. This week, we're going back in time and traveling to Germany, to look at society as an illness.
From "The Disintegration of Values" in Europe in general and Germany in particular, from 1888 through 1918, found in Broch's intense trilogy to the slim volume written in 24 days in 1947 by Ernst Fallada, about dissident Germans in Nazi Germany, today Alan Cheuse and I will talk about how the many affect the few and the few the many. It's always tempting to look at today in terms of "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire," or to see America as an analogue of the post-sunset British Empire. But it's never quite so simple on a personal level. You can hear my conversation with Alan Cheuse about these two harrowing titles by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
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06-18-09:
Agony Column Podcast News Report — Jeff VanderMeer at Shared Worlds : Speculative Fiction Camp for Teens
"They kind of, without meaning too, learn stuff." So says Jeff VanderMeer, the Assistant director of Shared Worlds, a summer camp where kids learn to create speculative fiction in a variety of formats. This is clearly an idea whose time has come, and I suspect that this could take off like wildfire, or even the swine flu. With more beneficent results of course.
Jeff VanderMeer seems to do just about everything, and now he's working at Shared Worlds, a summer camp where teens (13-18) can spend two weeks creating new worlds then exploring them in prose, art or gaming. This really seems like a brilliant business strategy, because, frankly, I suspect that lots of the kids snapping up the Harry Potter and Eclipse novels would be very interested in spending a couple of weeks leasnring how to create such a beast. Add in the armies of adolescents (this in actual age, not maturity) who play video games based on speculative fiction, and you have enough purchasing power to buy the entire United States, while we're on sale, of course, at bargain prices. The curriculum is such that kids will find themselves enjoying the basics — reading, writing, history, economics, biology, ecology — as they are employed to create new worlds in the first week. In the second week, they explore those world in their chosen arena. You can hear the lowdown direct from aJeff himself by following this link to the audio podcast.
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06-17-09:
Agony Column Broadcast Radio Show, March 1, 2009: Deborah Grabien, Michael Boatman and Janis Bell
Into the breach once again, with a podcast version of my broadcast show from March 1, 2009; this time featuring some interviews from SF in SF and an edit of my interview with the Grammar Queen, Janis Bell.
We're back in the re-broadcast business for a moment, this time going back to my radio show from March 1st of this year. One of the fun parts of putting these shows together is slicing dicing and matching voices; so today you get to hear two working writers and a writer who will teach you how to write better. All you have to do is follow the link to this MP3 audio file.
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06-16-09:
A 2009 Interview with Jedediah Berry, Part 2: "It is those characters who are shown to have a real power to change things"
In the second part of my conversation with Jedediah Berry, we talk about nemeses — how they provide a convenient means for self-definition and of the evils ast the heart of his novel, to be found in the Travels-No-More Circus.
Berry has quite bit more up his sleeve than the complicated and cleverly-built world in which you'll find the fictional non-fiction work, 'The Manual of Detection.' It's tempting to think, given the hermetic and almost obsessive construction of the novel, that it might be the first of seventeen already completed works. But as the second part of the interview will reveal, well — I'll let the Talented Mr. Berry speak for himself.
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06-15-09:
A 2009 Interview with Jedediah Berry, Part 1: "It also has an interest that goes beyond solving mysteries"
Jedediah Berry studied his way into the world of noir. You can almost imagine him as the hero of his own novel, Charles Unwin, with a pile of Chandler and Hammet on this desk as the rain spatters on the windowsill through an open window. By the power of the new ISDN line at KUSP, and with the technical expertise of the fabulous staff at WFCR in Amherst, Massachusetts, I managed to get him on the line to read from and talk about his novel 'The Manual of Detection'. As you might expect, the creation of this novel is nearly as interesting as the novel itself, and just as complex. Thus, I'm splitting the interview in the interests of allowing readers to fully immerse in Berry's compelling story. You can hear the first part of our conversation by following this link to the podcast audio file.
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