01-25-14 UPDATE:Podcast Update: Time to Read Episode 145: John Rizzo, 'Company Man: Thirty Years of Crisis and Controversy in the CIA'
Click image for audio link.
Here's the one-hundred forty-fifth episode of my series of podcasts, which I'm calling Time to Read. Hitting the two-year mark, I'm going to make an effort to stay ahead, so that podcast listeners can get the same sort of "sneak preview" effect that radio listeners get each Friday morning. This week, I seem to be on top opf the game, but who knows what the hell might happen. I am hoping to stay back up and stumbling.
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.
"Our policies, especially in the United States, are completely insane..."
—Riane Eisler
Riane Eisler lives in the sort of compound you might hope to find as the residence for the author of 'The Chalice & the Blade.' It's quiet, surrounded by trees, and feels rather like a library and a monastery combined. The carpets are white.
I had the honor of being invited to Eisler's home office to discuss her books 'The Chalice & the Blade' and 'The Real Wealth of Nations.' She's appearing next week in Santa Cruz, and beyond wanting to get the word out about her appearance, I was just curious to hear what she had to say about her work in person.
I suppose I should not have been surprised to find that she's a passionate, expert speaker, able to dive into her scientific theories in a manner carefully calibrated to be accessible to a general audience. What she probably did not expect was my (eventual) reaction, in the review of the similarities between the reading experience of her work — and speaking with her — and the reading experience of great science fiction, the idea beeing that both genres inspire the imagination.
I was also quite curious to talk to her about how it feels for her to see her ideas start to get traction in the popular mindset, as evidenced by an interest in income inequality that does not seem to be getting washed out in the 24-hour news cycle. She's been a pioneer with a fearless vision for over a quarter century. She has a (I think I've got this right) 501-3C organization set up, The Center for Partnership Studies (http://www.partnershipway.org/), where you can get more video than you may have time to watch. All this effort has played out with constant work, so I wanted to find out how it felt to toil away.
01-22-14 UPDATE:Podcast Update: Time to Read Episode 144: Riane Eisler, 'The Chalice & the Blade'
Click image for audio link.
Here's the one-hundred forty-fourth episode of my series of podcasts, which I'm calling Time to Read. Hitting the two-year mark, I'm going to make an effort to stay ahead, so that podcast listeners can get the same sort of "sneak preview" effect that radio listeners get each Friday morning. This week, I seem to be on top of the game, but who knows what the hell might happen. I am hoping to stay back up and stumbling.
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 one-hundred forty-fourth episode is a look at Riane Eisler and 'The Chalice & the Blade.'
"...that floating quality to the voice that I enjoyed..."
— Chang-rae Lee
Having spoken with Chang-rae Lee the night before in front of an audience about his book 'On Such a Full Sea' made my interview the next day all the easier. After a good night's rest in Santa Cruz, and with no interviews beforehand, Lee and I were able to follow up on threads I'd not had the time to discuss the previous night and recover some of that ground from a new and fresh angle.
This time around, we returned to the topic of "we" — how and why he chose that voice and how it shaped the novel. For me, it was fascinating to see how a simple, if unusual, choice changed not just the way the story was told but the story being told. It's a cASe of content following form rather than the reverse.
In this setting we also talked about the humor in the book, which I think has been missed by some, given the more serious nature of the voice and the dire-seeming setting. It's important to remember or perhaps easy to ignore the fact that Lee's world. while a bit broken down, is not so, so much worse than ours. If you want to point a finger at it and say it's a dystopian vision, fine, but to my mind you should be prepared to just look around and check out your own personal dystopia, now playing in a lifetime near yours. If you don't feel as if you're living in a dystopia yet, just wait — one will be arriving for you shortly as an ever-decreasing number of people manage to in hale an ever-increasing portion of the world's goods and wealth.
Lee told me that he's unlikely to work in the speculative fiction setting soon, I think mistaking in my question for "Will there be a sequel/series?" I would never want to see him revisit the same world, but I would love to see this author raid the genre toolkit again in a radically different manner. I think and hope that we will see more writers who have in the past hewed to mimetic realism swerve ever so slightly away to write a nice ghost story. Lee did, however give a glimpse of what's to come and I am very interested in reading it sooner rather than later, even if it arrives sans ghosts.
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
