Interview Roundup

Congratulations to my litblogging buddy Mark Sarvas (left), who achieved local celebrity status as the subject of an interview with LAist (which makes him my second friend to wind up on that site in the last month, after Ruth Andrew Ellenson). He explains litblogs to Angelenos, refuses to get pinned down on his favorite restaurants, and shares his favorite biking routes.

I’ve actually been saving up a bunch of interview links, and now seems as good a time as any to finally share them with you:

• Lydia Millet chats with Strange Horizons about writing a novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, that’s got science and fiction but isn’t quite science fiction, except that it sort of is: “I wanted the book to reach across literary fiction lines into the realm of the speculative; I wanted it to be read by people who wouldn’t normally read my books, people usually more interested in politics and science and fiction that deals with the imaginary than in fiction that centers on play with language.”
• Robert Birnbaum’s keeping himself busy, landing interviews with Chip Kidd and George Packer.

• In the realm of comic books, we’ve got interviews with Harvey Pekar (“I don’t think the people that like my work the most are superhero comic-book readers because it took getting out of the comic-book stores for my stuff to start selling”) and Seth, the most elegantly dressed man in comics (“For a long time, the way I dressed was deliberately anachronistic, but now it’s mostly a habit”). And, what the heck, Matt Madden, because I really dig his 99 Ways to Tell a Story.

17 January 2006 | interviews |

Can’t Stop the Music

The 1970s wasn’t just an amazing decade for movies, as I outline in The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane, but a pretty fab period for music as well…and, of course, the two often intersected. Wendi Kaufman of The Happy Booker asked me to take part in her site’s recurring “If I Only Had an iPod” feature, where writers tell you what they’re listening to, or would like to listen to, or have listened to in the past… anyway, here’s my (mostly) film-related ’70s tunes.

12 January 2006 | listen to this |