Since about 80% of this article went unread after I downloaded it, I'll point you to the 20% that made me feel better about myself. Really I think half my gripe with podcasts is the word "podcast" itself. Don't fall for the hipstercast bloggercast buzzcast hype, kids! Remember! Not once has television ever a) given you a broad or b) been casted at you by a broad. (And if "b" ever has held true, it was probably a nasty fight, and I'm sorry for bringing up bad memories.)
That said, Edward Champion recently interviewed William T. Vollmann. Kazuo Ishiguro recently appeared on the Guardian Book Club. And David Foster Wallace was recently aurally-spotted on Bookworm. It's a veritable cornucopia of audio of my current Important White Male Writer Obsessions. (I figure Ishiguro is British enough to count, eh?) If someone coughs up a J-Franz interview in which he says he's on my way to my apartment right now to hand me the manuscript of his next book--to discuss a few points with me--I'd probably love you the only way a man can love someone through the Internet without using his credit card. (Links! I mean links to your blog! Sicko.)
Also speaking of Ishiguro there's a couple of other bits of audio I've been digging up recently that I need to figure out how to save for posterity. And by posterity I mean, that day when I'm going to stop jamming to tunes and get down to listening to very important literary audio things.
Speaking of tunes, I still owe Maureen a list of songs that have held my attention recently. It's so amazingly hard to do that, to pick some arbitrarily finite number of songs, especially if I'm going to say something brilliant about them, something that will make you as a reader instantly go give bands money so they'll keep making music for me. (That said I'd like it if someone would give Autolux a billion dollars so they could play in my living room. That would be sweet. Same deal for A Cricket in Times Square. Buy me a second living room. Or just a bigger living room. Also, Laetitia Sadier. I mean, she should be in my living room. I've downshifted back to normal Stereolab listening rates recently but my God whenever Fab Four Suture comes up in the playlist I go into immediate French-rock love spasms. Yeah.)
Also, isn't the current test-name for Maureen's blog genius? Note the impartiality I wear on my sleeve. (On a shirt I'm not actually wearing, but.) Sadly, due to unforeseen (saddening) circumstances, I won't be able to make the reading at Mac's Backs on Thursday (which means no sword-fighting with Austin, so he'll hopefully keep his hands and recap it for Team Blogland). You should go though anyways because I'm certain it will be awesome.
To close out with a couple random things before I disappear for maybe a week (or more) (because sometimes, life calls in the bills): While I intend to read Don Quixote this year, and while the idea of combining the reading with a deathmarch tickles my fancy, the timing on the Don Quixote Deathmarch is sadly not right for me, so I'm going to have to wait a while and go it alone, though I do salute those who partake in this endeavor; Jane Dark has an interesting take on V for Vendetta (which yours truly did like and was sort of surprised by the "subversiveness" of it, but was more surprised by how sad it made me that something as weakly "subversive" as this movie was was somehow surprising); Yay!!!--I mean come on, I'm way more likely to go buy two paperbacks than one hardcover anyday, nevermind whether I might wind up spending more total; and finally, did I say hells yeah to this judgment yet? If not: Hells yeah! No no, I mean it. Hells yeah.
2 comments:
Jane's comments on V are indeed interesting. And I was especially interested in her comments on the military being told to stand down. The W brothers tend to treat everyone in uniform as cannon fodder.
I kept thinking of the military in Tianamen Square in 1989. One of the resons that nothing happened for so long was that it became clear that the troops stationed in Beijing thought of themselves as the People's Army and that they would not fire upon the Chinese people. Troops were brought from the ass-end of nowhere, country boys from Sichuan Province, who had only spoken Mandarin in school. They had to come past the Beijing troops to take up positions and there was a day or two of tricky negotiation out in the Beijin suburbs (not so far from the zoo, if you're interested) before the Sichuan troops went on into the city and subsequently rolled through the square.
So I kept waiting for the soldiers in V to respond to the fact that it was their neighbors, their parents, their friends, their siblings that might be behind those masks.
But in the world of the Wachowski Brothers, uniforms are very strange things.
I hated. hated. hated. when the people took off their masks and the dead stood with the living. The dead are dead. No matter how deserving they are of life.
I have not seen V. I guess I should? I'm thinking I'll wait 'till the indie theatre here gets it.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who tends to save the podcast stuff rather than listen to it immediately. I still haven't listened to the Guardian one with Banville and I love Banville (well, "The Sea" at least).
A week? *sob*
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