Mark Okrant is a professor of tourism management at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. A few years ago, when the University cut back on his classes field trips, Mark wrote a murder mystery at a resort that dealt with tourism issues and now he and other schools use his novel as a textbook.
Evan Doorbell was the pseudonym used by a well-known but somewhat mysterious phone phreak of the 1970s. His claim to fame is the vast archive of high-quality tape recordings he made of the telephone network of the period, many of which have in recent years been edited and narrated by Doorbell himself, and presented on the World Wide Web at fellow phreak, Mark Bernay’s, web site, Phone Trips.
In this edition of If You’re Just Joining Us, we listen to part one of this amazing recording about phone noises from the 70’s, which is really about curiosity and noticing.
More Phone Phreak tapes, including parts 2 through 6 of Evan Doorbell’s “How I Became” series can be found at: Phone Trips. For MP3 versions of Evan Doorbell’s story they are at ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/ Just scroll down and look for HowBPhreak2HQ etc.
See the Wikipedia entry on Phreaking.
David Friedman is a professional photographer based in New York. For several years he was the staff photographer for Ralph Lauren. We talked about his visit to a denim distressing factory in Kentucky where they take new jeans, wash, bleach, tear and shred them. We also spoke about his own photography, a story about a very messy man, and his blog Ironic Sans.
David’s blog Ironic Sans.
Additional audio:
In Kentucky, Jeans Get The Right ‘Wear’ by Noah Adams
Corcoran Museum Showcases Photographer Richard Avedon’s ‘Portraits of Power’
Nathan Singer is a novelist, playwright, composer, and experimental performing artist from Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of the critically acclaimed novels A Prayer for Dawn, Chasing the Wolf, and In the Light of You. He teaches writing at Northern Kentucky University and the University of Cincinnati.
Nathan and I spoke about writing workshop cliches, some strange emails he had gotten about his latest novel, In the Light of You, the rewards of teaching writing, and “performance art” among other things.
Nathan Singer’s web site is NathanSinger.net
His novel, In the Light of You was published by Bleak House Books.
Deborah Duchon is a noted nutritional anthropologist, teacher, author and speaker, best known for her work on the hit TV show, Good Eats. She served as director of the Nutrition Education for New Americans Project at Georgia State University, in Atlanta. These days, she is studying the exotic origins of everyday foods, by investigating their un-domesticated beginnings and working forward to the present day.
Deborah and I talked about onions, Hmong refugees, black night-shade, potatoes, theater, and women in anthropology.
Her site is at: www.debduchon.com.
Interview with Nutritional Anthropolgist, Deborah Duchon, from Good Eats [25:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Interview with Nutritional Anthropolgist, Deborah Duchon, from Good Eats [25:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Lee Thomas is the award-winning author of Stained, Parish Damned, Damage, and The Dust of Wonderland. He has won both the Bram Stoker Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
We talked about his three (count them: three) pen names, influential teachers, and his family among other things.
Lee’s website is: LeeThomasAuthor.com
Catherynne M. Valente graduated from high school at age 15, going on to UC San Diego and Edinburgh University, receiving her B.A. in Classics with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics. She then drifted away from her M.A. program and into a long residence in the concrete and camphor wilds of Japan. Her writing tends to be postmodern, with rich language (drawing upon her Classics education) and surrealist elements. She has also ventured into a more mainstream style with her series of original fairy tales, The Orphan’s Tales.
She and I spoke about her coming novel Palimpsest, maps, trains, Japan, and reading Waiting for Godot as a child.
Visit her website at: CatherynneMValente.com. Order her novel Palimpsest at Amazon.
Nick Sherman, a designer, musician, and skateboarder living in Boston. He works for MyFont.com and once spent an entire semester to produce one single type block — a single letter! We talked about that project and his trip to the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. We finished the interview talking about his involvement Nick Sherman’s website. (And his pizza site.)
The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum.
Video of Michael Beruit talking about fonts.
Typography, Wood Type, and Monsters! An interview with Nick Sherman. [23:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Typography, Wood Type, and Monsters! An interview with Nick Sherman. [23:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
John Robert Lennon is a writer, novelist, composer, musician, professor, and former theremin builder.
His most famous novel, Mailman, was released 2003 and concerns a mail-carrying protagonist named Albert Lippincott who is losing his mind. His fourth novel, Castle, coming 2009, is about a man who buys a large plot of wooded land in upstate New York, only to find that someone has built a castle in the middle of it–and the castle is inhabited. Further investigation leads to a journey into the past, and into the darkness of 21st century America.
For the podcast, John read from a funny blog post of his about crappy crime novel tropes, and then we discussed genre reading, strange intruders, his novels Mailman and Castle, his music, and his foray into theremin production.
His website is JRobertLennon.com and the group blog he contributes to is WardSix.com.
Lauren McLaughlin spent 10 years in the film industry writing and producing films, but then abandoned her screen ambitions to write novels. Her first is titled: Cycler and is published by Random House Books for Young Readers.
We talked about actors behaving badly, her need for symmetry, teen and gender issues, the medicinal uses of marijuana, and her novel.
Lauren’s website and blog are at www.laurenmclaughlin.net.
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