Tonight on Bibliocracy, KPFK 90.7 FM at 8 PM: SHAWN VESTAL. My guest this week was perhaps given lemons, sour
and sweet, by way of family, culture, religion and politics, but out of it he
has squeezed literary lemonade indeed, co-opting and transforming and
repurposing the myths and tropes and vernacular of his Mormon upbringing into
serious, sincere short literary fiction.
Somehow not exactly disrespecting that religion but instead perhaps
respecting more the resisters, doubters, overlooked or victimized and even
maybe himself, Shawn Vestal has
rewritten past and present and future toward creating alternative and
transgressive, often funny and frequently very much darker versions of the
already dark, weird and fascinating tales of that experience. Author of the new collection of short stories, Godforsaken Idaho, Vestal takes
the iconography, stories, obsessions and cultural practices of the “family home
evenings” tradition and reworks them for audiences in a big wink or grimace,
you decide, but in nine stories elegant, smart, funny and resonant. His day job is as a regular columnist for
Spokane, Washington’s Spokesman-Review, and these and other stories have
appeared in McSweeney’s, Tin House and in the new anthology from Ecotone
magazine called Astoria to Zion: Twenty-Six Stories of Risk and Abandon from
Ecotone's First Decade. This is one of my most favorite recent short story
collections, covering past, present ant future, from heaven to the mythic
stories of the conquest of the American West. Thanks for listening, on the radio or online,
or as a download whenever you like, free from the KPFK audio archives.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Wednesday, March 19 Tom Zoellner
Tonight on Bibliocracy: TOM
ZOELLNER. My guest tonight is a gregarious and engaging social historian
and researcher and, most of all, a terrific storyteller. No matter the subject, Tom Zoellner finds a way in, and along with his unassuming yet
authoritative voice he brings vulnerability and nearly ego-less experiential generosity. His previous nonfiction has considered uranium
and diamonds, respectively, the real-life humanitarian behind the Hotel Rwanda
story, and offered an urgent cultural case study of the state of Arizona by way of the
shooting of its congresswoman. Train: Riding the Rails that Created the Modern
World, from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief is perhaps Tom
Zoellner’s most ambitious book, and certainly covers the most territory, no
kidding. This one is bound to be an
instant travel-writing classic, in the tradition of Paul Theroux and Pico Iyer,
and will please both choo-choo fanatics and general readers with its
rail-centric view of seven different parts of the world, each considered in
relation to the tracks, the trains, the towns and the people, and forces that
put them there. Zoellner rides the
rails, across China and India and the USA , looking out the window and
looking into the past, with a brief journey into the future by way of high-speed
bullet trains. Zoellner teaches at Chapman University, where I spoke with the
author of the excellent A Safeway In
Arizona, as well as Uranium, The Heartless Stone and An Ordinary Man. For more, see my recent blog post over at OC Bookly:
Thanks for listening, on the
radio or online, or as a free download from the KPFK audio archives. All aboard!
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Wednesday, March 12 - Gary Amdahl's Debut Novel
Wednesday night at 8 on Bibliocracy: GARY AMDAHL.
I am an admirer of both the writing of Gary Amdahl and the topics he
chooses, of the politics and the dreamful associations, and of that alchemy
which seems to occur when he begins a story and, as with few other writers, I
am absolutely with him at each and ever step of the story, as if always at the
beginning throughout, sometimes so much so that when his beginnings meet up in
character kismet and symmetry and poetry and an obviously and creatively
calculated or inspired dénouement or pause or plot development I am made giddy
and breathless. Two things you should
know about his work: Amdahl cannot
finish a thought, and for that we readers are so much better – as thinkers and
co-conspiring imaginists. And, yet, he simultaneously
just does not know when to stop, which is our good luck too, because his peeling of
the onion, layering of the story, reassembling of onion and brain and heart and
even history is about as much serious, sincere fun you can have, as they say,
with your pants on. Amdahl’s newest is the first novel published by the
playwright, poet and short story writer boostered by Sven Birkerts and then
Milkweed and now a small house which has established, of all things, the Gary
Amdahl Library. Across My Big Brass Bed is a novel posing as an intellectual and
emotional memoir, an elegant and seamless and endlessly self-reinvigorating big
story meets autobiography meets political wish fulfillment meets love and sex and
empathy-story, with motorcycle racing, music, sex and love, anarchism, the Viet
Nam War but always those amazing, long, textured, funny, startling Gary Amdahl
sentences, here more than 400 pages of them.
A sane Holden Caulfield, perhaps, a Proustian rememberer and a fabulist,
too, Amdahl’s adolescent to recollecting grown, lonely man narrator writes the
whole book in a single day, unbelievably or, no, not unbelievable, totally believable
for an Amdahl narrator. It’s a real joy
to host Gary Amdahl, and to hear him read from and talk about the new book. Thanks for listening, on the radio or online,
or later as a free download anywhere, any times you like.
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