10-28-10:Cara Black Interviewed at SF in SF October 6, 2010
"I get to go to Paris twice a year for research."
—Cara Black
Cara Black has a damn good reason to be so enthusiastic, and it's embedded in the quote above. Twice a year to Paris for research. Well, it works for her, judging by the regularity with which she publishes her Aimee LeDuc novels.
I had the chance to speak with Cara Black at the SF in SF / LitQuake performance of "The Maltese Omelet," where she was doing the sound effects. And while she certainly knew how to dial that rotary phone to get the perfect sound, it was clear her true talents lie in the written realm.
Cara Black brings an understandable enthusiasm to her writing. I asked her about creating her character, and about her research.
While she lives in San Francisco most of the time, she does make those two trips to Paris each year, and she's clearly developed a support network there to make sure her novels reveal the flavor of France.
This includes the different nature of crime abroad. We're inundated with American crime, and there's a tendency to think that it's universal, but that's not the case.
I talked with Black about how she works with those on the ground in Paris to make sure her novels are accurate.
It is in fact just a coincidence that today's podcast will, I trust, make the world go away for the reader. I've carefully edited it to allow our listeners to immerse, while making sure the live nature of the work is untouched. Michael Kurland has been mashing genres since before many of those currently feeling that they invented the process were born.
For SF in SF and Litquake this year, Micheal Kurland dug out a piece that I understand has been making the rounds in various forms for a while, but is perfect for this podcast. Today, we present Michael Kurland's The Maltese Omelet, a radio play performed live in the Variety Children's Charity Theater on October 6, 2010. The cast includes:
Michael Kurland
Announcer: Richard Wolinsky
Sam Spud : Gregory Tiede
Humpty Dumpty: Conner Cochran
Effie : Pat Lupoff
Miss Muffit/Mary Mary: Lori Leigh Gieleghem
Jack Sprat: Morey Garelick
Peter P Pumpkin: Conner Cochran
Georgie Porgie: Peter Beagle
Wee Willie Winkie: Richard Lupoff
Bo Peep: Angela Beske (also the purring car)
Several sheep: The Cast
Sound Effects: Cara Black
Music: Linda Robertson
Directed by: Michael Kurland
A live radio play is a very strange thing, and Kurland and his players did a grand job staging it. There are two levels of drama and invention going on here. The first and most obvious is the actual play, which takes place in a universe that is part Mother Goose and part Dashiell Hammett. In this story, a certain ovoid-shaped gentleman has met an unpleasant demise after falling from wall. His erstwhile employer can pick up the pieces, but not put them together again. But he can solve a crime ...if he's so inclined. A damsel, perhaps in distress, perhaps not, make inspire another course of action.
Karen Joy Fowler, , What I Didn't See, John Le Carré, Our Kind of Traitor, Philip Roth, Nemesis
"...the form chooses me..."
—Alan Cheuse
Alan Cheuse and I had a conversation to continue from our last discussion, when we talked about the brilliant writers who find themselves on the less-readable side of literature. This time around, Cheuse spoke not as a critic, but as an author of fiction. It provided a very different topic of conversation and we ended up in a place that neither of us expected. That is, until we started in on the books we had decided to cover.
'What I Didn't See' by Karen Joy Fowler, 'Our Kind of Traitor' by John Le Carré and 'Nemesis' by Philip Roth were all top-notch works by writers at the top of their power. This is what happens when you get to be our own editor; you get to talk about books that you like, with the intention of helping readers find the right choice for their taste.
The three books we chose were all rather different, and I've been living with them for a while. But it is always fun to talk with another reader who gets lost in books, and Cheuse is certainly a top-notch writer and reader. So, for example, he pointed out the Borgesian nature of Fowler's work, which I hadn't quite twigged to, lost as I was in the American mythos world. Fowler's collection proved to be as much fun to talk about as it was to read, which is a sign that it should be enjoyable by a wide range of readers. It would be nice to see Small Beer sell books like hotcakes. They deserve it.
I had been away from John Le Carré's work for a while, so it was nice to have Alan give me his pocket history. I have vivid memories of the times when I became a rabid Le Carré fan, and I collected all his work I could in these mass-market paperbacks. One of my good friends was working for The Aerospace Corporation, and had Top-Secret clearance, doing his part to bring about World War III in a manner most beneficial to the West. I worked at Quotron, a stock market quote vendor that was somewhat involved in building infrastructure for electronic communication between its locations. Computers and email, and USENET newsgroups. Now I'm back with Le Carré, and the Apocalypse is purely financial.
"...it devastates the people around the polio victim..."
—Philip Roth
Philip Roth's new novel was so good that, inspired more by a lack of fear (fear is a nicely worked-out theme in 'Nemesis') than any notion I might actually succeed, I decided to forge ahead and see if I could get the opportunity to talk to him about it. Perhaps it was the confluence of fear and timing, or maybe the (by the writer himself, suggested and approved) name-dropping, but whatever the case, I did get the chance to talk to Mr. Roth about his new book. And it was every bit as immersive as the book itself.
Roth's new novel is set in New Jersey in 1944, and, he told me, the background at least, is based largely on his intact memory of those years. He might have been one of the children under Bucky Cantor's supervision, and his life was touched by the polio epidemics that form the springboard for his intense mediation on conscience.
Roth did not rely solely on his memory to create his novel. He researched the polio years extensively, and it was fascinating to hear him talk about the progress of polio itself over the years since the turn of the twentieth century. We really have no analogue for polio these days, for which we should be immensely thankful. The mystery of this disease and the fear the summers must have brought to parents of those times seem inconceivable now.
Of course, we have come so far into the future that we've started to forget what happened back then, and what it was like before polio vaccinations. This is one of the great services this novel performs, since it reminds us of these pre-vaccine times. Even as I write this, California is suffering from an entirely preventable epidemic of whooping cough, with more deaths than need have occurred. 'Nemesis' certainly reminds us of the importance of vaccinations — of the miracle of them, really. In their absence there is only tragedy, albeit superbly handled by Roth in this novel.
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
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