Reading Week #71

09.18.2015 by Nicola Balkind //

You know when you’ve been feeling low and then you begin to feel yourself rising out of the fug? That.

This week has been all about establishing new patterns and positive habits. How’ve you been?

–– ON ROBOTNIC.CO ––

You have until tonight to enter my International Subscriber Giveaway! [VIDEO, 7 mins]

I also did a wee Friday Reads video today [VIDEO, 3 mins]

The time has come for Bookish Blether Episode 18 – Our Favourite Books. [AUDIO, 34 mins]

–– ARTS & CULTURE ––

So this white American man called Michael Derrick Hudson has been using the Chinese pen-name Yi-Fen Chou to get his poems published. Jenny Zhang of Buzzfeed wrote this scathing and absolutely necessary takedown: They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist.

In related, I loved hearing Margo Jefferson on Privilege & Race on the Lit Up podcast. [AUDIO, 42 mins]

Renata Adler was excellent on the Longform podcast and I caught up on her infamous piece called The Perils of Pauline. I never got the fuss over deified film critic Pauline Kael either.

“Promotion is expensive”: Elena Ferrante on anonymity is a lesson in clarity.

To Hell With Vox’s Victorian-Living Idiots. In short, “They are anti-tech Silicon Valley libertarians who believe identity is derived from what stupid shit you surround yourself with, regardless of what horrors brought it to you.” Eviscerating. Brilliant.

Taking bets on how long til the Texas school system puts Mallory Ortberg’s Ayn Rand’s Charlotte’s Web on the syllabus.

–– DIGITAL ––

I loved Hank Green’s video on Tumblr, and Yellowstone: The Terror of Change. [VIDEO, 4 mins]

Laura Bennet, for Slate, writes about The First-Person Industrial Complex and how it’s harmful. She has a point, but the focus is squarely on tabloid internet – there’s value in the diversity of voices the web brings (see Jenny Zhang’s piece, above). Perhaps it’s not such an epidemic. Maybe it’s a phase.

Hey so uhh What Ever Happened to Google Books?

This writer is Coming Out of the Closet as a Yahoo Mail User – and actually her inbox hygiene sounds pretty good. (Not as good as mine though. I’m getting, like, 6 emails a day right now.)

–– ON PAPER ––

I’m on a real short book kick so I’ve read tons this month. This week’s highlight was Morvern Callar by Alan Warner, a modern Scottish classic that I much preferred over its film adaptation.

This weekend? I made a video about what I’ll be reading. (If you’re a super-keen newsletter-opener and try to click on this before 12.30pm this won’t be live yet.)

Hit reply and let me know what you’re reading, too.

–– &c. ––

Meanwhile, in South Africa, they’ve discovered a new human-like species. What!!!

Ann Friedman’s latest is ostensibly about making friends in college, but moreso it’s about why starting over is an art.

––

Read anything good this week? Hit reply or tweet me about it, won’t you?

Have a lovely weekend!

Podcast Favourites

01.20.2015 by Nicola Balkind //

If you pay any attention to Reading Week, you’ll have guessed some of my favourite podcasts by now.

I’ve been an avid listener for well over a year now, and while I’ve shared some favourites before in the posts Top Bookish Podcasts and Further Adventures in Podcasting, my tastes have changed and my library has grown.

So, favourites!

As I mentioned in last year’s post, some bookish podcasts I enjoy are Literary Disco, Books on the Nightstand, and Book Riot.

I also enjoy the usual suspects, which I’m kind of assuming you’ve heard about. The public radio darlings of podcasting: This American Life, Serial, RadioLab, and the new NPR show Invisibilia. They’re all great, but allow me to introduce your ears to a few you may not have heard about yet.

Reply All

PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman produce Reply All, kind of a spin-off from their previous On the Media public radio show called TLDR (which also has a fantastic archive that’s worth listening to).

Reply All a storytelling show in the vein of This American Life, getting to the bottom of internet events through human interest stories.

The podcast came around in late 2014 after they were poached by Alex Blumberg of Start Up (which I also enjoy!) as part of his new and growing podcast empire, Gimlet.

Reply All is around 20 minutes a pop, but with stories so engaging and such seamless storytelling that they seem to flash by in 5. After being frustrated by their necessarily spotty TLDR upload schedule, I’m so happy these guys have become weekly podcasters.

Longform

Along with their beautifully curated website and future-of-RSS app, the guys at Longform have put together a brilliant podcast which now spans over 124 episodes.

There are three hosts: Longformers Aaron Lammer and Max Linsky, and Atavist co-founder Evan Ratliff. They take turns to interview journalists – largely from the New York media scene – about their work, processes, and recent stories.

I spent a lot of time scouring the archives of this show, and lately have found myself listening mostly to episodes with journalists I’ve heard of and/or admire, and all of the ladies. I guess women are better at elucidating analyses of their own work. Credit to these guys for parity.

Either way, here are some of my favourite episodes to get you started: Susan Orlean (the reason I found them); Alex Blumberg; Anne Helen Petersen; Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah; Katie JM Baker; Margalit Fox; Wesley Morris; Tavi Gevinson; Molly Young; Alice Gregory; Meghan Daum and Edith Zimmerman.

You Must Remember This

Film historian and former LA Times critic Karina Longworth began You Must Remember This – an historical storytelling podcast – as kind of an experiment. Now it’s full time and part of the Infinite Guest network – another place to find some interesting cultural podcasts.

The show bills itself as containing the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century, and it runs the gamut from classic Hollywood stars to forgotten gems to mid-1990s memories. I love Longworth’s languid delivery and pepperings of acted dialogue.

Some of my favourite episodes are (The Printing of) the Legend of Frances Farmer; The Many Loves of Howard Hughes, Chapters 1, 2 & 3; and Theda Bara, Hollywood’s First Sex Symbol.

Call Your Girlfriend

Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow’s takes on life and the media, basically.

They’re great, just go and listen to it already.

Death Sex & Money

Another public radio show, the topics of Death, Sex & Money are pretty self-explanatory.

The show airs on WNYC and is hosted by Anna Sale, who seems thoroughly delightful. Episodes deal with one, two or all of the title issues, sometimes focussing on star guest individuals and other times on a range of people who have submitted their stories through open calls.

Aaaaand…. Introducing Bookish Blether!

If you made it this far, congratulations! You’ll be one of the first to know that I’m launching my own podcast!

My brilliant friend Holly and I are embarking on a new podcast project called Bookish Blether. It’s a fortnightly podcast about books and reading, and we’ll also be discussing longform articles and other book-related topics in the near future.

Click here to listen to Episode 0 and subscribe before Episode 1 drops this Wednesday!

You can also learn more about us on our Bookish Blether Twitter and Tumblr pages, and by email.

––

What are some of your favourite podcasts? Drop me a comment below or tweet me @robotnic with your picks!

Writing About Old Dudes Who Write About Old Dudes

03.27.2014 by Nicola Balkind //

These past few weekends I’ve mostly been reading longform journalism. Last week, it was Frank Sinatra Has a Cold and Other Essays by Gay Talese.

The title essay is one of the most cited profiles – and most successful write-arounds – of the contemporary era of journalism. For longform journalists, it’s the gold standard.

Lately I’ve been listening a lot to the Longform podcast, on which Gay Talese was a recent guest. On one hand, hearing about his early life and the formative experiences that made him a writer were fascinating. For example, he attributes much of his ability to get the most out of his interviewees to his mother and her tailoring business, where he used to hang out and later work as a child and a young adult.

The more I listened to him, though, the more I became aware of how practiced he has become at telling his own story. We all do. The extent to which we self-edit, exaggerate our current-day perspective and project it onto our young, growing, unwitting selves is so ubiquitous that we seem to absorb it without question. “That was the moment when I realised that I wanted to be a ___” is, to my mind, one of the most reverse-engineered and overused sentiments of our time. It’s one of the key tools in any interviewee’s toolbox. Frankly, it’s bullshit.

Yet it’s a story we’ll lap up over and over again. It’s a story that journalists spend their lives trying to get at in their various interviewees. Perhaps some don’t spell it out, but it’s often the hook that makes a story fizz. In fact, one of the best moments in an interview is when the interviewer points out an overarching theme that the interviewee has not been aware of in his or her own work.

So Gay Talese is on this podcast, and the interviewer points out that Talese’s subjects have been primarily men, mostly Italian-Americans of a certain era, and frequently middle-aged. If, like me, you’re a young woman growing up in the Millenial era, these are ripe not with the wisdom of an age, but history’s sexist 60s stint in which the only women who feature – beyond those hanging off his arms at casinos – are his beloved mother, daughter, or divorcée. And yet…

Talese’s work is as good as everyone says it is. ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’ dwells not on the bad-boy manner, the nervous entourage, or the volcanic emotional turns (though all of those things are present and correct). It’s a cinematic journey, taking in the man and turning him into an empathetic figure cute adrift in fame and without the comfort of a home. A man of the road with a near-estranged beloved daughter and a lot to live up to at the landmark of his fiftieth birthday. It’s such a well written and curated journey with all the drama and ridiculousness of a great melodrama of its time. It shows vulnerability and the self-righteousness that follows in the event of good luck and a big relief. It shows a man unmoored without making him weak or in some way beaten.

It’s so good that I almost forgot I was reading some old man writing about some other old man. Which is more than I can say for most of the stuff I read at school. I came a skeptic and left a devotee.

This blog post was inspired by Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s piece on Why We Should Stop Teaching Novels to High School Students, and as a reminder to myself that there are cultural pieces out there that are by men, about men, and mostly for men, to which I can still relate – as long as the writing is good.

A choice quote:

With most women Sinatra dates, his friends say, he never knows whether they want him for what he can do for them now – or will do for them later. With Ava Gardner, it was different. He could do nothing for her later. She was on top. If Sinatra learned anything from his experience with her, he possibly learned that when a proud man is down, a woman cannot help, particularly a woman on top.