Oct 29 2005
More from the Texas Book Festival:
Sort of...
MP3 File
Kevin's Mailing List
Where, When, How Much, What Flavor.
Kevin's Mailing List
Where, When, How Much, What Flavor.
Dailysonic, my favorite podcast, just celebrated their 100th episode. Well, they did Oct. 5. I'm just catching up now.
Dailysonic was a huge inspiration for me both in getting to know podcasting and in starting my own. As a kind of NPR's Morning Editon for the Internet generation, Dailysonic creates 30-50 minutes of consistently funny, smart, diverse, radio 5 days a week. I can only hope to do a little bit of the same.
Neighborhoodies, which you've seen if you live in any city with a college campus, new offers a free .mp3 every weekday. I'm cynical about such things since a) Neighborhoodies are way cooler than I and b) I have Pandora, the musicial equivalent of a 24-hour shoulder massage.
Well shut my mouth. I've downloaded a half-dozen tracks and have been thrown back in tuneful ecstacy each time. Just this morning, I downloaded "Your Little Hoodrat Friend" by The Hold Steady, a band I've been "whelmed" with so far.
Listen for yourself. It friggin rocks.
The Stranger, Seattle's alternative weekly newspaper, plans to throw an Indictment Party tonight celebrating whomever gets hauled in over the Valerie Plame affair. Special drinks include "The Judith Miller", "The Scooter Libby" and the "George W. Bush."
Bottoms up. That's fabulous.
Congratulations to Justin, Andrew, Wendy, Claire, Mara, Tara, Alan, Amber and all my friends in Chicago on the White Sox World Series victory. I'm not a baseball fan and didn't catch one game this year. My interest in sports only extends to underdogs. Winners bore the heck out of me. So the Red Sox last year and the White Sox, 88 years overdue this fall? Now that's my kind of fall classic.
Cubs 2006, anyone?
I've just put together my first podcast (say what?). Your 10 Minute World is a palm-sized audio goodiebag of news, culture and factoids designed to be utilitarian in the extreme. Each episode will feature one song, one book or movie and one fun fact of the day. What you do with it is up to you.
If you already subscribe to this site's rss feed (available here), do nothing. It should send the podcast directly to you as an .mp3 file. Or if you want the podcast, plug this URL...
http://feeds.feedburner.com/WhereTheresSmoke
into iTunes or whatever your favorite podcast client is (a huge list).
Or you can listen to it right here.
Please be kind. I don't know the first thing about audio and spent the last 3 days learning Garageband and putting this thing together. I know I have a long way to go but am proud of the results.
As always, your feedback is welcome. Shownotes forthcoming...
Director Noah Baumbach of the new film The Squid and the Whale had this to say on "The Treatment" last week. I'm paraphrasing...
"I read an interview with Ingmar Bergman where he said writing the first draft of a script is like throwing a spear into the woods." You know you have to say something but you're not quite sure what. So you just chuck. Successive drafts are about finding the spear."
I friggin love that. It makes the hardest part of writing (starting) seem like instinct rather than cleverness or a surprise vist by your muse.
I've got something brewing. I need to go throw.
Foxes: (1980): "If Jodie Foster could have achieved stardom from the womb, she would have."
Title: An Invisible Sign of My Own
Author: Aimee Bender
Backstory: After buying 58 books at the San Francisco Library's Annual Sale, I needed to make sure I read deeper in the bibliographies of authors I admired. I loved Aimee's first collection of short stories, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and had picked up Invisible, a novel, nearly a year ago. Plus, with my book collection being added to Library Thing by the day, it's easy now, via tags, to determine whether my last few reads were by a new author, old favorites like Aimee, a female/left handed/Iowian-who-writes-in-the-second-person or otherwise.
Notes: Superstituous math teacher falls for a colleague, worries about her father's death (because he's turning 51, a number with, eh, only prime factors?) and gets second graders to make numbers out of everyday objects. Which is how an ax (which looks like a 7) ends up hanging on the classroom wall.
Verdict: I know Aimee and find her one of the sweetest, nicest people around. Which makes her books all the more delicious because they reveal a pervert, or at least a very dark imagination lying in wait. In her first book, a librarian had sex with every male patron who came by her desk and another woman's crush on a hunchback evaporates when she discovers the hump is fake. This is freaky stuff, set firmly in our workaday world, which reminds me of the little Jorge Louis Borges I have read. I'd be alright calling Aimee Bender "The Borges of North Hollywood" and await correction from someone who has read more of the Argentine master than me.
...Sign has many of the characteristics I admire about Aimee's work--a tilted take on the mundane, characters aware of but struggling with their eccentricities and a savantlike fascination with unconventional methods of organizing existence. In this case, our protagonist Mona Gray counts everything and believes that numbers and their divine orderings are perfectly reasonable rules to live by. She's also gifted at just about everything she tries but likes to quiting more than succeeding.
It all sounds like jollly good fun and, for the most part, it is. I wish though, Mona's obsessions had been minded for either more comic or emotional ore. Thing about reading about an obsession is in can't be written like one or it becomes repetitive. So maybe Mona needed a friend, a hurricane, a turnip addiction, something to kick the character around a little. As is, she plays fine as a long short story but as a whole novel, gets a bit long in the tooth.
Worth reading? Still, yes. Start with ...Skirt, skip around a little in this one, then dive headlong into Aimee Bender's new short story collection Willful Creatures. I didn't like this book as much has her first, but she's never dull.
Followup:
I'm finishing up a book review for The Chron today but have some rather large news. Back soon.
October is really the last summer month in San Francisco and Suzan has taken a photo that captures this sentiment perfectly.
Isn't that great?
KQED, San Francisco's gianormous public radio and TV station has launched a video podcast called Gallery Crawl wherein they visit different galleries around the Bay Area and see what's doing. Seems to be a shorter, portable version of their Spark! which profiles 3 area artists but extends to theatre music and literature as well.
I don't jump too high for KQED or their offerings but here they might be onto something. San Francisco's gallery scene is notoriously user unfriendly, with few shows appearing on Upcoming.org, important organizations lacking even basic mailing lists and local impressionarios reporting way after the fact. It's a scene clinging to audience principles of 20-30 years ago, a "you'll know it if you need to but we won't help any" attitude that would seem like benign neglect if it weren't so rude.
Although I haven't watched any episodes yet, Gallery Crawl seems just what an amateur art lover like me needs. It's bite-sized and comes right to ya. Do you need a video iPod though?
Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch discusses the new design of the legendary literary journal. Philip Gourevitch and I will be on stage together at the Wisconsin Book Festival, Friday, October 14, 8 PM at the Orpheum Theatre. I'm really looking forward to it.
In other news, I won't have a laptop while travelling so blogging will be light for the next nine days. See you when I get home on the 15th.
Title: Always Running: Gang Days in L.A.
Author: Luis J. Rodriguez
Relationship: I read the author's short story collection The Republic of East L.A. and enjoyed it. Plus, I love books about Los Angeles, about gang life or those that combine them both.
Synopsis: Memoir of Rodriguez's life in the Chicano gangs of East Los Angeles in the 1970s. Originally published in 1994, publisher Simon & Schuster has just released a 10th anniversary editon.
Acquired: Sent at random by book's publicist. Small miracle then that I'm this excited. Few books sent by publicists make me react in a "Cancel my morning, Dolphine, I'm reading!" sort of way.
Early Verdict: I'm flying cross-country on Wednesday. It's coming with me.
On my mind and in the reading queue this week.
*The Supreme Court's new term begins tomorrow. The Christian Science Monitor reports that the new court, with Chief Justic Roberts at the helm, will face several potential landmark decisions early on.
*The New York Times reports that, in just over a decade, the Internet has grabbed 2/3 of the nation's used book business.
*Why does all of Fenway Park sing Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" at during the eighth inning of Red Sox games? Susan Orlean investigates for NPR (via 43 Folders).
*Dismissed Paris Review editor Brigid Hughes has started her own literary journal called A Public Space. Published quarterly, Hughes says the magazine will focus less on the writing process like TPR does and more on work in the field.
*Google has submitted a bid to create a free wireless network for the City of San Francisco (via Susan Mernit).
*Nora Ehpron attends a panel discussion on blogging and files this very funny report.
*Illinois Senator Barak Obama is podcasting.
*The AV Club interviews Neil Gaiman.
*Tangible evidence that the U-Haul corporation is the spawn of satan (via A Whole Lotta Nothing).
Serenity: "Converting TV to the big screen can work in capable hands."
Defenestration: "The act of throwing someone or something out of a window." (via Schupp)
Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times edited by Kevin Smokler
