"...you have the right to demand that they grope your genitals manually..."
Dave Barry
I thought, I seriously, seriously thought that having read 'You Can Date Boys When You're Forty' would somehow innoculate me from laughing during my interview Dave Barry. I should have sold myself the Brooklyn Bridge while I was at it.
So, here's the deal. You will hear me, throughout this interview trying, almost always without success, to avoid laughing. My attempts might themselves be laughable, were their humor not dwarfed by Barry's genial ease. I've spoken with Barry before about5 his fiction. but this was the first time we got to speak about his essays, which he can just reel off again and again, every time making you laugh.
We did get to talk a bit about how he does what he does, which is sort of like a live autopsy. Barry is a skilled enough patient / doctor in this equation that we did in one very memorable exchange get to the heart of his skills with language. Barry brings a lot of pertinent experience to the table, and not from a source you'd necessarily expect.
03-19-14 UPDATE:Podcast Update: Time to Read Episode 153: Dave Barry, 'You Can Date Boys When You're Forty'
Click image for audio link.
This time around, we tried something pretty different, offering Dave Barry a "lightning round" to finish out the time we had together.
Here's the one-hundred fifty-third 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.
Elizabeth Spencer, 'Starting Over: Stories'; James Magnuson, 'Famous Writers I Have Known'; Dasa Drndic 'Trieste'
NPR has its place for books, and it generally does a good job offering reviews. But of necessity, the time is extremely limited and the range of language is as well. Here in the wilds of podcasting we have no such restrictions. Alan and I have been talking about three books a month for years now and it's just as fun and refreshing as ever.
Here's my précis for the three books we discussed last month. I have a new episode of this already in the can and will try to launch it later this week.
Our first book was Elizabeth Spencer's 'Starting Over: Stories.' Here readers here can find a collection of low-key Americana, the folks music of literature. Spencer's been publishing fiction for more than sixty years, and has an eye for the sparse, lyric detail as well as a keen understanding of the human soul. The latter proves to be her strongest point, as she's able draw stark, understated stories about people who seem normal, but prove to be a bit more mysterious than one might at first expect. She crafts tension from deep within the human heart, understanding how tides of emotion are not so easily captured by reason.
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Next, we talked about 'Famous Writers I Have Known' by James Magnuson, a very smart, very snarky and very funny novel about Frankie Abondonato, a conman who impersonates a great, reclusive writer in the vein of J. D. Salinger. Anyone interested in writing and anyone suspicious of teaching the art of writing is going to find a lot to like here, as is anyone who just like jokes at the expense of high art. Frankie has fun at art's expense and sets his sights on the financial legacy of another legendary writer-in-residence. Magnuson, who runs a program like this, clearly loves all his characters even those he's making the most fun of, and the result is a very funny and very likable novel that takes no prisoners.
'Trieste' means sad in Italian, but that's just the start of this stark novel by Dasa Drndic, so intense its experimentation seems in keeping with its tone. Haya Tedeschi's son was fathered by an SS officer, and he was taken away from her. Haya's search for him takes her through a litany of the Nazi horrors visited on Italian Jews in the Second World War. Drndic's novel, beautifully translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac, is a collage of terror and sorrow so deep that it rots the soul from within. This is not an easy book to read, but it is an impossible book to forget.
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
