Empress of the World, p.183-196.
Dear Internet friends, I am just about done recording my DIY audiobook. What should I podcast next?*
*N.B.: You will no doubt be shocked to learn that I have already thought of reading from Rules. Besides that, what should I podcast?
signifier
March 19, 2007 at 10:02 pmI always imagine a podcast that would be something along the lines of Madame Psychosis’s radio show from Infinite Jest.
kiplet
March 19, 2007 at 10:31 pmFound art! Randomly dial up some internet content and read it aloud. Theatrical interpretations of spam poetry!
thisisnotanlj
March 19, 2007 at 10:37 pmi am intimidated by the enormousness of infinite jest (yes, i know, totally unjustified coming from a woman who utterly loves jonathan strange and mr. norrell, moving on…) and thus do not know the reference. explain? expand? the name madame psychosis is certainly evocative…
signifier
March 19, 2007 at 11:11 pmMy copy is sadly on the East Coast while I’m on the West, but it’s essentially a very free-form monologue with lots of readings, called “Sixty Minutes More or Less with Madame Psychosis.” Amazon’s search tool reveals that a good Madame-Psychosis-in-the-studio section begins around Pg. 183. “Once last year, Madame Psychosis had the student engineer write out the home-lab process for turning uranium oxide powder into good old fissionable U-235. Then she read it on the air between a Baraka poem and a critique of the Steeler defense’s double-slot secondary. It’s something a bright high-schooler could cook and took less than three minutes to read on-air and didn’t involve one classified procedure or one piece of hardware not gettable from any decent chemical-supply outlet in Boston, but there was no small unpleasantness about it from the M.I.T. administration, which it’s well-known M.I.T. is in bed with Defense. The hot-fuel recipe was the one bit of verbal intercourse the engineer’s had with Madame Psychosis that didn’t involve straight levels and cues.”
Oh, here’s another passage describing the sorts of stuff she reads: “Like for months in the spring semester of Y.D.P.A.H. she referred to her own program as ‘Madame’s Downer-Lit Hour’ and read depressing book after depressing book–Good Morning, Midnight and Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and Giovanni’s Room and Under the Volcano, plus a truly ghasty Bret Ellis period during Lent–in a monotone, really slowly, night after night…The background music is both predictable and, within that predictability, surprising: it’s periodic. It suggests expansion without really expanding. It leads up to the exact kind of inevitability it denies. It is heavily digital, but with something of a choral bouquet. But unhuman. Mario thinks of the word haunting, like in ‘a haunting echo of thus-and-such.'”
(And one thing in particular the name Madame Psychosis evokes is metempsychosis, one of Infinite Jest‘s many Ulysses jokes…)
tugboatcity
March 20, 2007 at 12:20 ama radio play version of Flytrap.
compound
March 20, 2007 at 2:36 amI second that proposal! No, really.
I would have suggested Me & Edith Head, but it kinda defeats the purpose, if you can’t see the costumes or dress-making process.
intothebassment
March 20, 2007 at 6:12 amOther YA fiction that you think is good and would like to promote people to read (or listen to). Good is obviously a very broad word, so it could be whatever you wanted.