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Vital stats:
Format: two dudes eating and evaluating snacks, with tangents
Episode duration: 30-40m
Frequency: weekly

I tweeted this tweet:

What podcast should I review on Podthoughts this week? Open to all suggestions, except those involving "pop culture" or two dudes yammering.

In rapid response came suggestions of one show compulsively concerned with pop culture and another composed of, yes, the yammering of two dudes. These dudes, comedians Michael Ian Black and Tom Cavanagh, host Mike and Tom Eat Snacks [iTunes], or, if you prefer, MATES. But here’s the thing: they don’t just yammer; they chew. They eat snacks. Mike and Tom eat snacks.

At first, I didn’t hear much promise in that either. As a comedic ignoramus, I’d never heard of Cavanagh — he seems to have acted in Yogi Bear — but I remembered a couple distant media scrapes with Black. My irritation at the him-voiced Pets.com sock puppet (“Because pets can’t drive”) singing “Spinning Wheel” still burns, over a decade later, though time has cooled it a bit. I mainly associate him with an appearance on one of those VH1 shows about the eighties, on which he’s evidently made a whole mini-career out of turning up. I tuned in knowing they would talk about the Delorean DMC-12, one of my favorite automobiles. At the end of the segment, Black said something about John Delorean snorting too much of the “cocaína.” He used a really cartoonish South American-type pronunciation, but just on that one word. I could never figure out why.

As I foresaw from it hours of nothing but “Spinning Wheel”, cocaína, and Ranger Smith, this podcast could only pleasantly surprise me. I keep my expectations low for any show that could easily devolve into just one more TTWGBAC (Two Twenty/Thirtysomething White Guys/Girls Bullshitting About Culture) atop the heaping pile, but Black and Cavanagh turn out to use a couple of ingeniously, near-stupidly simple tactic to ward off the evils of that genre. First, though perhaps not by design, one host has reached his forties and the other has nearly gotten there. Second, they assign themselves a task, give themselves something to do, besides ridicule the coming Footloose remake: they have to eat snacks.

On each episode, Black and Cavanagh eat, react to, and evaluate Combos, cocktail peanuts, Blueberry Muffins, what have the snack aisle. They take their snacking seriously, or at least as seriously as you can take anything when two-thirds of the sentences you speak about it sound purely ironic. (Here we have another example of the relatively venerable podcasting tradition of Ridiculousness Uttered Flatly.) They discuss whether one particular manufacturer’s example of a snack can or should act as a representative of that snack. They get into such directly snack-related debates as whether the set “chips” contains the set “pretzels,” or if they share nothing. They slowly realize that, the more rigidly you try to define the boundaries of the concept “snack,” the less of a division you perceive between snack foods and all other foods.

Wine lovers consider favorite beverage as a nexus of subjects, offering gateways into discussions of subjects as various as history, geography, aesthetics, business, and botany. Black and Cavanagh seem to feel the same way about pizza-flavored crackers. Though their tangential discussions take them through exercise regimens, Canadian identity, life in the entertainment industry, and the Footloose remake, the hosts always return to the snack at hand. It anchors them. It’s just like in meditation, when your mind inevitably wanders from the object of focus; you just guide it back, leaving your practice none the worse for wear. When such freeform podcasts lose their anchor — or, more likely, never bother getting one — they lose their way. As long as Mike and Tom keep Eating Snacks, they’ll retain their compass.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation. Please hire him for something.]

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Vital stats:
Format: a man briefly talking about mainstream cultural things
Episode duration: 5-15m
Frequency: weekly, but less so recently

I felt a blip of recognition upon reading the title of Radio Conelrad [iTunes], but I now think it was a false positive triggered by memories of the ColecoVision. “Coleco” stands, need I even explain, for Connecticut Leather Company. “Conelrad” turns out to stand for Control of Electromagnetic Radiation, the form of government broadcasting that preceded the Emergency Broadcast System. I could make a bunch of guesses as to why host West Anthony decided to name his podcast after it, but only one holds water: the old circular Conelrad logo looks sharp and important on an iPod screen.

Both the fellow who recommended the show to me (Rudie Obias of The Criterioncast) and Anthony’s own Twitter profile pitch brevity as its main selling point. That it has; nearly every episode I listened to ended just as I assumed it had reached “cruising altitude.” This usually takes five to fifteen minutes. During that time, West will have solo-talked about one to three topics. I figured he might talk about midcentury Americana-type stuff, given the show’s name, but no; his concerns revolve mostly around contemporary mainstream culture, like which Oscar nominees he doesn’t think deserve an Oscar, or which viral Miley Cyrus videos he thinks don’t merit the uproar they’ve raised, or how he doesn’t care about the Beatles’ appearance on iTunes.

People can have opinions on all these things, but I never fully understood why I was listening to this particular guy’s opinions on them. I don’t mean to call him not famous or credentialed enough to earn my attention; I just have no idea who he is. Plenty of my friends and favorite podcasters lack fame or credentials of any kind, yet I still listen to them because I know their personalities well enough to contextualize their statements. Even after listening to the complete Radio Conelrad archive, I can’t really tell you anything about West Anthony. He sounds neither young nor old. He speaks in a bold but occasionally halting fashion, sometimes with a slight echo. He tends to use a “radio voice,” but often to say things you wouldn’t usually hear such a voice say.

One of the least expected set of things he says comes in an episode recorded after the Arizona shootings where he just goes off on Republicans for a while. After a few minutes of this, I grew uncomfortable at my inability to tell how seriously he meant his claims about Republicans maliciously hoodwinking the population, ruining society, dismantling America, etc. I don’t even like the Republican party, but when the host of something I like starts grinding away in these directions, I just think, “Stop. Stop. Please stop.” I feel the same way when someone talks to me on the street, says a few sentences I agree with, then follows them up with scary schizophrenic monologues about how Dick Cheney poisons the water supply.

That aside, Anthony seems like someone you could hang out with. I know I could hang out with him because, in one episode, he insists that The Thin Red Line should have won Best Picture instead of Shakespeare in Love. I gather that we could easily talk about Terence Malick for a few hours, and that he has enough of a sense of humor to make a few cracks about Malick’s weakness for the image of the “noble savage” even as he admires the director’s greater aesthetic sensitivities. But what if he started talking about Sarah Palin or something? What would I do then?

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation that, this week, needs 211 new subscribers to survive the year.]

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Vital stats:
Format: NYTBR content-reflective segment collections
Episode duration: 15-25m
Frequency: weekly

I subscribe to the New York Times Book Review. I mean, you have to, right? Isn’t it the law? Besides, how else would I keep tabs on the number of weeks The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has hung in there? You may raise the matter of the internet, but to me, a web browser never quite feels like the right home for the NYT’s book coverage. Something within demands — needs — the sad preposterousness of all those ads for self-published memoirs, the unbridled decadence of Bauman Rare Books’ price lists, the joy of pictures not quite aligned with their own colors.

So if the web falls just short of suitability for the Book Review, what hope can we hold out for its podcast [RSS] [iTunes]? To be fair, the idea has merit, especially given what I imagine as the beyond-connectedness of such a literary-media institution. If they can’t arrange the cooperation of all the right authors, critics, and generalized “book people,” who can? This, it seems, drives the show to provide a sort of cornucopia each week: a single episode might easily contain an interview with an author, an appearance by a critic, some chat about current bestsellers, and a bit of miscellany.

One problem: all these episodes run under half and hour, and some merely half that. So we’re talking a few minutes with an author, a few minutes with a critic, a few minutes about bestsellers — thought that’s probably to the good — and a few minutes of miscellany. A focus group might eventually grind their way to a conclusion that they want this — life is short, gotta hustle, executive summary, etc. — but it winds up poisoning a show’s potential in about 400 different ways at once.

Take, for just one important example, what such a time limit does to conversations: specifically, it bludgeons them into grotesque anti-conversations, turning responses into response-flavored non-responses meant only to “keep things moving,” forcing hosts to resort to flat, dead pre-written questions. The host of this podcast, NYTBR editor Sam Tanenhaus clearly must have the interest and the chops this gig demands, but he apparently feels he needs to questions like this one of Walter Isaacson, who reviewed a new biography of Socrates: “You call this a ‘donut-shaped’ biography. What is that?”

This made me sad. Unless he somehow managed not to read Isaacson’s review, Tanenhaus knows the answer to that question. I don’t care how much interviewing experience you’ve racked up; you’ll never have anything approaching an engaging conversation by asking questions you already know the answer to you. No amount of fakery can paper over your lack of genuine interest in knowing the answer. I mean, jeez; Tanenhaus is an insider. He’s been around. He’s read a hell of a lot. Surely he has much to ask of Walter Isaacson — to ask for real — on the natural rhythm of a conversation, at the length of a natural conversation.

But alas. The NYTBR’s podcast remains mainly a bundle of potential, a condition that will obtain for as long as its producers insist on laboring under the conventions of a “magazine show.” As much as I’ve loved old media, the notion that you should cram a bunch of surface-scratching segments into half an hour belongs to it and it alone. I’d listen to all of these clips as episodes of their own, at whatever length they need. Therein lies the beauty of this new frontier; if you’re not into it, the standardized ground of newsprint has more to offer.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation that, this week, needs 205 new subscribers to survive the year.]

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Vital stats:
Format: multi-man pop-culture scrutiny
Episode duration: 55-75m
Frequency: weekly

“Subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn’t deserve.” There we have the entire mission of Overthinking It [RSS] [iTunes], baldly stated in its subtitle. Yeah, you veteran podcast-listeners might respond, so what else is new? Fair point. Functionally, most of the podcasts I’ve ever heard come down to the subjection of popular culture to undeserved levels of scrutiny, but here’s the difference: none of them aim to do that. They just wind up there when their declared themes become too hard to maintain.

This show thus possesses a sort of purity, in that it didn’t devolve into what it is; it set out that way. That strikes me as a savvy act of prolepsis. Podthinking about nearly 150 podcasts has rendered me cold, hard, and unreasonably stern toward discussions of anything referred to by the phrase “pop culture.” But why? Beyond overbroadness, nothing inherent in it makes it a particularly unworthy subject. The problem lies in the fact that you need never go far to find pop culture; some of it always lays around right there. This attracts those with both an intellectual spark and a slathering of laziness, a combination even worse than laziness without intellectual spark. It smacks of the unambitious kind of American Studies grad students, the ones you’d have found heavily pierced and enrolled in one of Andrew Ross’ seminars fifteen years ago.

So unlike being about old issues of The Flash, West African pop music of the seventies, or Proust, 1910, mimetic desire, and the inflationary universe, being about pop culture demands little in the way of initial effort. I suspect the Overthinking It boys know this, since they seem to compensate with an unusually high degree of conversational effort. Shockingly, they mostly eschew the standard hand-waviness for nonstandard thoughtfulness. While four or more of them get together over Skype to discuss the issue of the day, be it Lady Gaga, the Oscars, Super Bowl commercials, or Justin Bieber’s cracking voice, they don’t shout or cut one another off; they fully make and respond to one another’s points. A true internet rarity.

Can I give this show a greater endorsement than saying that on no other podcast will you hear the sentence, “Happy crunk is all alike; unhappy crunk is unhappy in its own way”? Many times I found myself thinking, “Hey, one of these dudes I still can’t tell apart except by the varying sound quality of their Skype connections actually made a pretty sound observation.” Yet in the realm of pop-cultural discussion, you can hardly ever prove or disprove an argument, no matter how well you argue; the information at hand just doesn’t come in that fine a grain, even if certain ways of framing it produce chewy food for thought.

And of course, we have an (admittedly acknowledged) elephant in the room: most of this stuff really doesn’t deserve scrutiny, of any level. All of Overthinking It’s participants come off as so sharp and articulate that I can’t help wondering about the possibilities of a podcast where they discuss... well, anything other than pop culture. They accomplish their mission more skilfully than most, but a slightly higher mission couldn’t hurt. You can reach the top of a hierarchy, but consider the hierarchy itself: as the best tweeter I know once twote, “Humanity for the first time is burdened with a vast proletariat of literate, ambitious, and demanding people who can't really do anything.”

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation that, this week, needs 200 new subscribers to survive the year.]

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Vital stats:
Format: interviews with travelers, plus travel news and tips
Episode duration: 25-45m
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: number 30 onward

I can’t close the Kayak tab open as I write this. Interpret that as a testament to the power of The Amateur Traveler Travel Podcast [RSS] [iTunes], which, despite that title whose ungainliness I only now realize, stokes the trav’lin fires in (I assume) all who listen. In my case, it helped that the show’s archive of hundreds of episodes happened to offer one or more about everywhere I want to go, be it Mexico City [MP3], Seoul [MP3], Iceland [MP3], or Ethiopia [MP3]. I’m packed. Let’s do this.

But that’s not to call it an exoticist’s podcast. It first favorably struck me that the episodes on my well-la-de-da destinations listed above stood shoulder-to-shoulder with explorations of places that a regular old North American just might forget about, like Prince Edward Island [MP3], northern Ohio [MP3], and Wisconsin [MP3]. I smiled upon seeing a two-part special on Los Angeles [MP3] [MP3], my favorite (and most-visited) city of all. My enthusiasm for L.A. has reached such a strength that it barely took a ding when I listened to the episodes themselves, interviews with an L.A.- native (a) “social media expert” who (b) recommends the Sunset Strip, (c) makes no mention of Little Ethiopia or Koreatown, and (d) talks like he’s about to shove me into a wall of lockers.

Every episode of The Amateur Traveler takes the form of Skype interviews between host Chris Christensen and some resident of a place or a frequent visitor to that place, a format that works both to the good and to the ill. Episodes tend to stand or fall on the guests’ personalities: fantastic when they turn out to be engaging people with stories to tell, but less than fantastic when they don’t. Either way, they can’t expect help from the setup: despite coming off as a sharp, curious guy, Christensen uses a bewilderingly ineffective interviewing strategy.

Rarely do questions follow from the guest’s previous answer; base a drinking game on Christensen’s tendency to come back with nothing but “Okay,” “Interesting,” and/or a chuckle at your peril. Now, as an interviewer and an interviewing geek both, I labor under a hypersensitivity about interviewing principles, one of which dictates that you should aim to ask questions askable by nobody but you and answerable by nobody by your guest. Hard to think of a more flagrant violation than asking every single guest what surprised them about their place, what disappointed them about their place, what their favorite day in their place was like, what three words best describe their place, etc. These simplify the job, sure, but they also put up a thick barrier against genuine conversation.

Nevertheless, Christensen does a valuable service. You’d have to work hard not to learn from his podcast, and you’d have to work even harder to stop it from moving you to browse airfaires. The Amateur Traveler opens a window on the travel culture I so sorely yearn to join — I got my passport shamefully late, at almost 24, to go to Canada — but, like The Indie Travel Podcast, it also offers a glimpse at what looks to me like some habitual travelers’ bland unreflectiveness, which at times borders dangerously on nihilism. “I got to see one more cathedral,” goes the show’s theme song, “I got to sit in one more café.” But to what end? The travelers here get little time to go into their deeper reasons for doing what they do, mostly cleaving to talk of sights, food, and pure logistics, but perhaps listening to more of them will bring me to an understanding. This program certainly makes it easy to put in the hours.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation that, this week, needs 198 new subscribers to survive the year.]

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Vital stats:
Format: conversations with cinematic creators
Episode duration: ~30m
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: all

Before screenwriters write a screenplay, they often shop around what’s called a “treatment,” or “a concise overview of a screenplay.” This knocks against my own class of cinephilia as one of those Bad Hollywood Things, as yet another industry convention enabling the laziness and conventionality of mainstream cinema. You write yourself a treatment, then you slather some more words on top of it, then you slather some images and sounds on top of that, and bam: you got yourself a big slab of un-integrated nothin’ headed to a theater near you.

But though I pulled that definition above from the web site of The Treatment [RSS] [iTunes], the show has little business in that shallow end of film’s creative pool. The program doesn’t read treatments; it gives them. Administering said treatments, veteran film critic Elvis Mitchell engages a slew of directors, writers, actors, and others in conversation about their work. He knows that no treatment based upon a list of pre-written questions can succeed, and he knows that a truly effective treatment must reach well beyond the cultural area at hand. Mitchell’s guests make movies, but he knows better than to talk to them only about movies.

As a production of KCRW in Santa Monica, The Treatment thus stands in further evidence for that station’s spooky aptitude for one-on-one interview shows. Two years ago, I Podthought about KCRW’s Bookworm in this space, and the shows turn out to be counterparts. Both run for half an hour. Both deal in two-way dialogue, not simple (indeed, simplistic) extraction of answers. Both have hosts you’d want to hang out with. This quote from a Film.com interview with Mitchell sheds light on their common method:

[James Lipton] sits down with that stack of questions, and like a prosecutor he never asks a question that he doesn't know the answer to. And for me that's where it gets interesting, where I want to start is the question that I don't know the answer to and with any luck they don't know the answer either, and it becomes a conversation about that. You know, there's a kind of connection you make when people are just weighing things out. Sometimes it gets to be that moment when somebody says ‘I've never said this before,’ because in conversation we tend to not say that kind of thing. But, you know, that's the kind of thing that happens.

No knock against Lipton; Mitchell had Lipton on [MP3] and they made one of my favorite Treatments. He also had Werner Herzog on [MP3], which resulted in an interview I plan to listen to over and over until something goes wrong in my iPod. The man talks to Wayne Wang [MP3], he talks to Charles Burnett [MP3], he talks to Wes Anderson [MP3] [or previously] [or previously] [or previously] — he talks to everyone from whom all growing film geeks need to hear.

But here’s the thing: Mitchell also gives the treatment, without lowering the level of his discourse a hairsbreadth, to creators of movies film geeks might write off as, well, dumb. Your teen comedies. Your remakes of seventies television shows. Your Kevin Smith projects. Your Guy Ritchie adaptations of Sherlock Holmes. The Treatment’s hardest-core fans say that, if you didn’t like a movie, you need only listen to Elvis Mitchell draw out its director’s inner intelligence to convert your artistically inferior experience into, if not an artistically superior experience, then at least an artistically interesting one. They’re right.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to host and produce The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], a public radio show and podcast dedicated to in-depth cultural conversation that, this week, needs 196 new subscribers to survive the year.]

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Vital stats:
Format: two comedians walking
Episode duration: 45-70m
Frequency: six-monthly-ish
Archive available on iTunes: all

New media give rise to new forms — or at least that’s the hope. Six-ish years after the invention of podcasting, a medium that strips nearly all conceivable restrictions from audio entertainment, most of its practitioners still pretty much work with modified and/or improved radio concepts. I don’t mean to knock podcasters who do that — I do it too — but it makes me value exercises in the truly new all the more. I consider Walking With Michelle [RSS] [iTunes] one such exercise.

And — prime the rimshot — I do mean exercise. At least I mean exercise if you happen to be one of those people who, having a spent an unusually large fraction of the day traveling on foot, declare yourself to have “gotten your exercise in.” Michelle Biloon and her guests two-birds-one-stone it by simultaneously getting their exercise in and their comedy on. No need to break a sweat, though, since both she and those with whom she walks have backgrounds in the stand-up comedic arts. Since all this walking needs places to happen, you might say the stone takes down a third bird as well: finally visiting popular attractions too tacky, dorky, or inconvenient to have approached under any other circumstances.

So she and Jimmy Pardo drive around with a Map of the Stars’ Homes [MP3], she and Samm Levine go to the Getty Villa [MP3], she and Dave Holmes go to Universal Studios [MP3], and so on. All the while, they talk about life, they talk about careers, they talk about the crappiness of the Simpsons ride, and they talk about their compulsive peoplewatching — i.e., whether they should play a round of “retarded or ugly.” The ever-shifting geographical territories give rise to ever-shifting conversational territories, from Biloon and a reflective Tom Scharpling having an insightful lunch discussion about coming up in the comedy game to Biloon and Doug Benson, stoned (if you can believe it), gawping at a cluster of skimpily dressed seven-year-olds singing “Bad Girls” for Scientology.

For a cornucopia of reasons, this show could’ve only happened in podcasting. One is the legendary infrequency — eight episodes in over four years — which has become the first thing people mention about the show. Another is the content: few play “retarded or ugly” on the radio, and even fewer take pot pills on it. Yet another is the technology involved, which only in recent years began to offer the combined affordability, portability, and recording quality to record a couple of comedians wandering museums, miniature golf courses, and New Jersey all day long.

I gather the fruits of these recording sessions put the editor’s craft to the test; they must, since the resulting episodes tend to clock in at around one hour. From what I can tell, Biloon engages the services of an outside tradesman to cut the material into shape and separate its segments with one of those strummy musical micro-stings so fashionable in comedy podcasting. She even has a producer. What with a staff, practically, and all the travel required, Walking With Michelle really feels like some kinda production; no wonder we get one an average of every six months. Besides, I hear Biloon’s spending much of the year in Vienna these days, so that must throw a wrench into these things. Then again, I’d like to hear an episode recorded on those very cobblestones. I guess she’d just need to find an Austrian comedian for that. Are there such things as Austrian comedians?

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: multi-critic film discussion with occasional director interviews
Episode duration: 40-50m
Frequency: weekly
Archive available on iTunes: last 20

As one of film criticism’s hands beckons me forward, its other one pushes me away. For my money — or, these days, for my internet attention — film criticism can, at its best, be one of the most interesting forms going. The conversation around film criticism, a festival of anxious hand-wringing about the profession’s current relevance and/or prospects of future existence, offers far less. Hence film criticism fans’ desperate thirst for the work of engaged, conversational, non-academic critics for whom criticism is not a sideline to a sideline, a secret pursuit during office hours, or a way to notch a byline or journal article — critics who take movies as, shall we say, serious business.

On FilmWeek’s [RSS] [iTunes] rotating panels of critics, at least several members do seem to approach their craft that admirably. Each week, the show draws a few from a pool just large enough to keep me from really having gotten to know each one’s individual personality and preferences well, but exposure to such a wide, shifting range of cinematic judgment has its own advantages. These critics, who write for everything from national newspapers to web sites whose URLs are their own names, share their takes on and debate the merits of what’s new in theaters and on DVD, from the interesting (Somewhere, White Material) to the pretty interesting (Black Swan, The King’s Speech), to that which takes breath they’ll never get back (The Green Hornet, No Strings Attached).

You’ll have noticed the KPCC logo in the image above — nothing gets by a sharp reader like you — which explains why FilmWeek though distributed as a podcast as well as a broadcast, retains a much more public-radio-y sensibility than most film podcasts. In its original context, the program runs as but a weekly segment of the Southern Californian station’s flagship show AirTalk (MiddleCaps evidently being KPCC’s house titling style). Larry Mantle, one of those quick-on-his-feet public radio guys — and a veritable gold mine of moves to steal for an aspiring public radio superstar such as myself — hosts both AirTalk and FilmWeek with that particular brand of objective-type demeanor which allows guests’ opinions to soar proud and free. (Until shot down by other guests, that is.)

The podcast’s best showcase for Mantle thus comes outside the critical segments, when he interviews filmmakers like David O. Russell and Sofia Coppola. (I’d link you up to those conversations, or to any of them, but they inexplicably go unmentioned in the RSS feed’s episode descriptions.) While somewhat rare and often way too short, they keep the criticism-centric rest of the show feeling fresh with their occasional doses of the creator’s perspective. Maybe this sounds a little daring for public radio at this moment, but let me pitch it: wouldn’t it sometimes be damn cool to hear the directors in conversation with the critics, too? I don’t mean to go all Godard on you, but the wall built between filmmaking and film criticism has come to bother me; I think it’s high time to knock some holes in it.

As film criticism on the radio goes, AirTalk delivers some of the most entertaining I’ve heard. The only qualm I can summon borders on philosophical: is it better to discuss movies systematically, criticizing everything that enters a certain width of release, or is it better to allot coverage as advocacy, devoting more time and attention to richer pictures, regardless of their public profile? This show tends to take the former route, talking about whatever’s coming out and in the zeitgeist. That can be to the good, but part of me will always wish for a radio show that doesn’t know Country Strong exists.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: long-form genre fiction writing advice
Episode duration: 53m or 27m, depending on what I don’t know
Frequency: monthly
Archive available on iTunes: last 36

When the BBC says “world”, they don’t kid around. Its World Service, so Wikipedia tells me, broadcasts in 32 languages to 188 million people. Its World Book Club [RSS] [iTunes] discusses work by authors as nationally varied as the English David Mitchell [MP3], the American Richard Ford [MP3], the Egyptan Nadaal el Sadaawi [MP3], the Nigerian Chinua Achebe [MP3], and the ostensibly French but seemingly stateless J.M.G. Le Clézio [MP3]. Its discussion questions come not just from the mouth of English host Harriett Gilbert, but from those of listeners in the England, the States, Canada, Australia, Greece, the Czech Republic, Zambia, Namibia... I could fill my word count with this. Point being, an agreeable sound for a would-be literary internationalist such as myself.

The words Book Club in the title strike me as a misnomer, but not in a bad way. Reaching for a greater formal interestingness, the broadcast hybridizes at least four breeds of literary event: the book club, sure, but also the interview, the live reading, and the audience Q&A. The BBC flies in a different writer each month and sits them down with Gilbert and an invited group of physically present listeners. Rather than talking about whatever the writer is currently promoting, the show usually focuses on something from their back pages, a well-known book many listeners will have already read. Gilbert asks the author questions about it, but she also has them read a passage or two, relays questions e-mailed in advance, or asks listeners on the phone or seated in the audience to fire off a question of their own.

Whether or not you’re read the volume under discussion — I usually haven’t — you can get a great deal of enjoyment out of these goings-on, mannered yet straight-to-the-point as they are in that very BBC sort of way. Since many questions from Gilbert and the audience alike deal with plot points, you may entertain concerns about the possibility of spoilers. I can assure you that you needn’t worry. Given world World Book Club’s selections, spoilers don’t matter; this show talks about actual books. If spoilers really and truly spoil a book, so my own handy rule goes, then that book must be nothing more than a spectacle, escapism, a jack-in-the-box — lousy, in short. As far as I can tell, not a single lousy book has refuge in this bunch.

Over and above that, I would argue that the talk on this show has less to do with characters, events, conflicts, false crises, and false dawns than it has to do with culture. Or, to make up a word that sounds like academic nails on an academic chalkboard, it has to do with interculturality. Fortunately, given the demands of holding a conversation across numerous cultures, things have to get down to their essences pretty quickly; not much room remains for the sort of theoretical fog that would give cover for a word like “interculturality” in the first place. World Book Club deals with active writers, active readers, and active texts (whatever that last means). When you’ve got, say, an Oxford-educated German novelist born in Morocco answering questions about his narrative that oscillates between 13th-century Kyoto and 23rd-century Johannesburg from an Azerbaijani caller listening in Brussels, you can’t help but let particularly refreshing gusts of fresh air blow in on the regular.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]

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Vital stats:
Format: long-form genre fiction writing advice
Episode duration: ~15m
Frequency: five or so per month
Archive available on iTunes: last 35

Being deep in several writing and editing projects, I guess I sit in the prime seats for a podcast like Writing Excuses [RSS] [iTunes]. At first listen, it seems as if almost anyone into writing stands to gain from the show’s topics: getting the first paragraph right [MP3], avoiding melodrama, [MP3], writing what you don’t know [MP3]. These episodes offer deeply practical advice which no novelist in their right mind should ignore.

Notice I said “novelist.” When this podcast claims to be about writing, it means it’s about writing long-form fictional narratives. Something, probably insufficient research, led me to assume the show would focus on generally applicable principles and mechanics of English prose, but its mission turns out to be narrower. Perhaps hosts Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler, two novelists and a comic writer/artist, are simply sticking to their areas of expertise; for them, writing equals writing long-form fictional narratives. I can’t begrudge them that, since, for all the last couple centuries’ hand-wringing over its supposedly imminent demise, the long-form fictional narrative retains an unmatched power to enchant.

But listen longer and Writing Excuses purview shrinks further still. If you know Sanderson, Wells, and Tayler’s names, you probably know their work. If you don’t, no explanation I can offer will put you in its proximity. I’ve looked up their projects, but since my brain processes their titles as an endless procession of meaningless compounds, I’ll just make some up: HawkBane. Murdero. Brokenwind: Bringer of Eternality. Space-O-Crat. Killed By Darkest Death. SpellFelcher. Scratch “long-form fictional narrative” and make it “long-form genre fictional narrative” with heaping, melty scoopfuls of fantasy and science fiction on top.

You either like this stuff or you don’t. I myself tend to find most of what’s offered under the wide banner of “speculative fiction” brutally unappealing, which brings me to the first grand quotation of this review: “A book can either allow us to escape existence or show us how to endure it.” That’s Samuel Johnson, and I don’t think he’d look any too kindly on the heaving mountains of raw escapism fantasy and sci-fi presses pump out with the grim determination of juggernauts. The world-building inherent in these forms strikes me as somehow both pedantic and garish, and, worse, essentially in service of opiate production.

Not that fantasy and sci-fi serve uniquely anesthetic functions (in several senses of the word “anesthetic”); the problem lays in genre itself. Hence this review’s second grand quotation, from Walter Benjamin: “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.” Writing Excuses admits no great works of literature. Willfully or not, the hosts and their guests display little engagement with any fiction outside genre. In the middle of each episode’s writing discussion comes a regular book-of-the-week feature. One recommendation shone amidst all the SkullWinds and Frustrumworlds. The book’s author? Dean Koontz.

In my defense, I’m not one of those cranks who insists all literature ought to proceed from The Unnamable. (But to look at the novelist primers I write for The Millions, I’m getting there.) I appreciate Sanderson, Wells, and Tayler’s obvious enthusiasm for and dedication to their craft. If you do the work of generalizing their recommendations out and away from their convention-bound home turf (in several senses of the word “convention”), you’ll find they know their game and then some. This emerges most clearly when they perform three-way line-edits on concrete examples of prose. Sure, they might well be editing prose about a dragon battling a pegasus, but in that context they’ve got what moves and what drags down cold. Sometimes they even show flashes of recognition that, really, you don’t need to write about a dragon and a pegasus at all. Ironically, that’s when you stop caring so much about all the dragons and pegasi.

[Podthinker Colin Marshall also happens to be the host and producer of public radio’s The Marketplace of Ideas [iTunes], the blogger of The War on Mediocrity and the writer of The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project.]