Jan Swafford | Biography | Ep. 8

Jan Swafford | Biography | Ep. 8

Musician, writer, and biographer Jan Swafford reads not one but two passages! The first from the opening of his biography of the American composer Charles Ives and the second from his massive book on the life of Beethoven, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph–9n his words the hardest thing he’s ever written. He also talks to Jon and Cory about: * Why a musical biography has to reflect the subject–an Ives book should be Ivesian, a Beethoven book should be Beethovenian. * His start as a “hack writer” writing Civil War history books for hire and learning how to do research. * His research process and the value of a solid chronology. * What you can learn about how people think and talk–from reading–and retyping–letters. * The temptation to interpret a subject and the risks in doing so. * Why writing about Beethoven’s process of composing his monumental Eroica symphony was the hardest passage he’s ever worked on. * The importance of instinct–and of having a good early reader to give you honest feedback. Jan’s first passage, from Charles Ives: A Life in Music: In the old Ives house in the middle of Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, among the warren of rooms smelling of beeswax and fruit, these sounds were familiar. The intimate patter of rain, the measureless peeling of thunder, the jingle of sleighs in winter, the sure of spring peepers from springs and ponds, the clatter and clop of buggies down dusty Main Street, and the deeper rolling rumble of wagons on their way to shops and factories. From the congregational church next door are the muffled sounds of choir and organ and the great bronze booming of the bell, and all day Sunday the sound of distant bells like intimations of a presence beyond the horizon of this moment of this life. At holidays, the brass bands marching past, the rattle and crump of fireworks, the clang of the fire bell, in summer the cries of icemen and boys selling newspapers, inside the house the groaning of old floors, the antiphonal voices of a big family's comings and goings, and every night the bright rising and falling of music, cornet or piano or violin or bands, little orchestras playing in the park, outside in the shed or in the barn playing quick steps and hymns and Beethoven and Stephen Foster. On October 20th, 1874, from the large bedroom over the South Parlor, rose the Keening whale of newborn Charles Edward Ives, who would register the myriad sounds of home as few people have, and who would never forget them in the intimacies of their timbers and in their deeper human resonances. Jan’s second passage, from Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph: The dots and quilled and penciled on the page define an accumulating and clarifying vision of the work. Beethoven has never seen a battle, but years before, on the road from Bonn to Vienna, he encountered armies heard the bustle and rattle of troops on the march, the bugle calls and martial music. The overarching conception and the minutiae of melody and rhythm and harmony feed on one another. As usual, conceives his ideas in terms of familiar formal outlines. So now I'm talking about the process and the finished at the same time. For the first movement, he needs a Thema for the opening, then what he calls the Mittelgedanke, subsidiary ideas. Then he needs ideas for the Durchführung, his term for the development section. His forms are not molds to be filled with notes, but general guidelines to help organize the conception. This time, the conception is a name, Bonaparte. Whatever the form becomes, it has to be measured and cut to that subject. He wears out one quill pen after another, notes spreading over empty staves, pages accumulating in the sketchbook...

Nathan Ballingrud | Horror | Ep. 7

Horror and dark fantasy writer Nathan Ballingrud reads a passage from his novella, The Butcher’s Table, originally published in the short fiction collection Wounds (The Atlas of Hell). He talks to Jon and Cory about: * The story’s origins as a blog serial * His initial struggles to commit to the significant tonal departure from the stories in his first collection, North American Lake Monsters * The fear of being taken less seriously by writing pulpy, fantastical fiction * How Mike Mignola's Hellboy inspired him to commit to something as over-the-top as an angel-possessed squid * Switching between laptop and pen and paper to unlock looser, more reckless drafting * Learning to write by mimicking Stephen King and Clive Barker * Attending Clarion Workshop * Why he tries to avoid reading reviews (including those on Reddit, Goodreads, and social media) * His love of Mervyn Peake and the Gormenghast books Nathan’s passage, from The Butcher’s Table: It spoke a word that fractured the jaw of its host, registering the pain as a curiosity. Upon hearing the word, one of the roosting angels took flight, rearing against the sun in a flare of black feathers, and plummeted into the sea, where it sank from sight like a corpse weighted with stones. The angel descended quickly, a dark-feathered ball, until it passed beyond the reach of sunlight and the water grew cold and black. It fell more deeply yet, oblivious to the atmospheres pressing against its body, its eyes pulling from the lightless fathom darting shapes, shifting mountains of flesh. It found a host, made a bloody gash and wriggled into it, and filled the beast with its holy spirit. Skin split in fissures along the length of its form, and it jetted forward with fresh purpose, its tentacles trailing in a tight formation behind it, its red saucer-shaped eyes incandescent with hunger. [...skips about 10 pages…] It was a squid, a deep-sea monstrosity with tentacles nearly as long as the ship itself, and it was inverted in the sky. Its arms pulled the sails from their masts, yanked yardarms free of their moorings. People slid from the deck and into the churning water. The squid hovered in the air, its skin split lengthwise, revealing the white flesh of its interior, as though something within itself did not fit. Ragged black feathers jutted from the wounds. Its tentacles splayed in the air around it, a corona of horrors. Its glaring eyes smoked in the beating rain.

Michael Katz | Russian Translation | Ep. 6

The great Russian translator Michael Katz reads a passage from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and discusses the painstaking process, many challenges, and hard limitations of translation, which he considers a “recreative” act vs. a purely creative one. He also talks to us about what keeps readers coming back to Dostoevsky’s strange, often difficult books, and why a good translation is only good for about 20 or 30 years. Michael’s passage, from his translation of The Brother’s Karamazov: He had a strange dream, utterly out of keeping with the time and place. He was somewhere out on the steppe, where he’d been stationed a long time ago, and a peasant was driving him through the slush in a cart with a pair of horses. Mitya felt cold; it was early November and snow was falling in large, wet flakes; it melted immediately, as soon as it hit the ground. The peasant drove along swiftly, boldly snapping his whip; he had a long fair beard. The driver wasn’t an old man, perhaps fifty, wearing a gray peasant’s homespun coat. There was a village not far off. He could pick out the very black huts; half of them had burned down, and there were only a few charred beams sticking up. Standing along the road leading out of the village were lots of peasant women, a whole row of them, all thin and wan, with brownish faces. There was one in particular at the edge, such a bony woman, tall, looking about forty, but perhaps only twenty, with a long, thin face; in her arms she held a little child who was crying; her breasts must have dried up, with no milk left in them. The baby was crying, crying, holding out his bare little arms, his little fists blue from the cold. “Why are they crying? What are they crying for?” he asks, briskly flying by. “It’s the babe,” the driver replies. “It’s the babe crying.” And Mitya’s struck by the fact that he says it in his own way, the peasant way, “babe,” and not “baby.” He likes the peasant’s calling it a “babe”; it seems as if there’s more pity in it. “But why is he crying?” Mitya persists like a fool. “Why are his little arms bare? Why don’t they wrap him up?” “The babe’s chilled to the bone; his little clothes are frozen and don’t warm him.” “But why is it so? Why?” foolish Mitya persists. “They’re poor people, burned out; they haven’t a crust of bread; they’re begging because they’re burned out.” “No, no.” Mitya still seems not to understand. “Tell me: why are these poor mothers standing there? Why are the people poor? Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don’t they all embrace and kiss? Why don’t they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black misery? Why don’t they feed the babe?” He feels that although his questions are unreasonable and senseless, he still wants to ask them and he has to pose them in just that way. He also feels that an emotion of sweet tenderness is rising up in his heart, one he’s never experienced before, and that he wants to weep, he wants to do something for everyone so that the babe won’t cry anymore, and so that the dark, dried-up mother of the baby will no longer cry, so that no one will shed any more tears from this moment forth, and he wants to do all this at once, at once, without delay, in spite of all obstacles, with all of the Karamazov recklessness.

Tom Toner / Caspar Geon | Science Fiction | Ep. 5

Science fiction writer Tom Toner reads a passage from his latest novel, The Immeasurable Heaven, published under the pen name Caspar Geon. He talks to Jon and Cory about his many notebooks full of longhand worldbuilding ideas, finding inspiration for alien species in David Attenborough nature documentaries, writing under contract vs. writing on spec, and a unique drafting process built more around addition than subtraction. Tom’s Passage, from The Immeasurable Heaven (slightly abbreviated for space): In the silt-suspended gloom something huge uncoiled. It scratched itself with a few lazy sweeps of its fins, scraping a peel of dead skin into the depths, before extending a tongue shaped like a fabulously intricate key and latching into the receiver. The apparatus glowed into life, startling a flitting ecosystem into the shadows and revealing the full, serpentine bulk of its user in a ghostly wash of light. The interior of the water-filled space lit up with every flicker and flash to reveal a cavern of gnarled, artificial stalactites and equipment that poked like instruments of torture into the creature’s lair. The Translator, hundreds of meters from snout to tail, had never seen the galaxy with its own eyes, for it possessed none. It was likewise completely deaf, as most other species understood the term, relying instead on the single most sensitive organ for light-years around: a tongue equipped with twenty million pressure receptors per cubic centimetre, a tongue it had never seen.   The receiver pulsed with flowing light as the Translator cycled through a wealth of options, sorting the signal vaults. Trillions of rising transmissions had been collected from the fissure in the realities as if with a giant net and left to stew, their caches of interference filtered and stored in separate branches of Obaneo station for further analysis. Today it was moving downwards through the datastores, so to speak, into a vault that had been left unopened for millennia.  The Translator clenched and relaxed one of the hundreds of muscles in its tongue in rapid succession, exploring a chronological sensochart and discovering that the signals in today’s vault were pre-Throlken, over five hundred million years old, the deepest it had ever gone. It made itself comfortable, suckling a jet of Jatsotl milk from the reservoir below the receiver while a population of Tickler species went to work massaging its ancient, scaly body, and dialled the pressure volume to medium, looking forward to the stimulating glut of undiscovered languages it was about to sense for the very first time. The Translator opened the vault, recoiling a moment later as the waters of its nest clouded with dark, sulphuric blood. It shut the receiver off, yanking its tongue free and nursing it inside its mouth, every nerve howling in pain. It could only think of one sufficient word for what it was: a scream of a strength never recorded before. The older transmissions were always diluted and weak; nothing even a tenth that antiquated had ever come through so potent, so painful. Converted into sound it would surely deafen—perhaps even kill—anything unlucky enough to be born with ears.  The Translator gingerly reinserted, probing carefully through the data to check the signal strengths—something it really ought to have done beforehand. There. Nine thousand one hundred on the scale. No wonder its poor tongue had almost split in half.  It labelled the vault as unsafe and coiled into a knot on the floor of its cavern, thinking, the nest’s filtration systems already dispersing the blood. Such a signal would take colossal amounts of power to produce, whole star systems’ worth, the output of a widespread and successful interstellar civilisation. All that power, channelled straight into its mouth.

Anya Von Bremzen | Food | Ep. 4

Food writer and memoirist Anya Von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, reads from the epilogue of her latest bestseller, National Dish, and discusses what happens when world-historical events dictate last-minute rewrites—and a project becomes personal.   Anya’s passage, excerpted from National Dish: On February 25, 2022, I woke up after a turbulent night checking news updates about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Amid the shock, bouts of crying, and adrenalized doomscrolling, a seemingly trivial yet intimately unsettling thought entered my mind. I realized that after years of investigating national cuisines and identities, I no longer knew how to think or talk about borsch—a beet soup that both Ukraine and Russia claimed as their own. I grew up in Soviet Moscow eating borsch—борщ in Cyrillic, no “t” at the end (that’s a Yiddish addition)—at least twice a week. For better or worse, it always signified for me the despotic, difficult home we had left. Here in Queens, a big pot my mother had just made sat in my fridge. But who had the right to claim it as heritage? That tangled question of cultural ownership I’d been reflecting on for so long had landed on my own table with an intensity that suddenly felt viscerally, searingly personal. Back in Moscow, at the height of Brezhnev’s “stagnation,” I never regarded borsch as any people’s “national dish.” It was just there—a piece of our shared Soviet reality, like the brown winter snow, the buses filled with hangover breath, or my scratchy wool school uniform. Our socialist borsch came in different guises. Institutional borsch, with its reek of stale cabbage, was to be endured indistinguishably at kindergartens, hospitals, and workers’ canteens across the eleven time zones of our vast Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Personal borsch, on the other hand, brought out every Soviet mother’s and grandmother’s quiet ingenuity—although to me, it all tasted kind of the same in the end. My mom was inordinately proud of her hot, super-quick vegetarian version. I still have an image of her in our trim Moscow kitchen, phone tucked under her chin, shredding carrots, cabbage, and beets on a clunky box grater right into our chipped enamel family pot. It was her recipe, she always insisted—a miracle of a shortage economy conjured from a can of tomato paste and some withered root vegetables.