Catherine Lacey, former Melville House intern extraordinaire and now book correspondent for a number of venues, interviewed debut author Lee Rourke (The Canal, Melville House July 2010) for HTML Giant about his new book, the writing process, and the wildlife of Greater London.  The full interview is here, along with two brief excerpts from the book.  Here’s Rourke on his philosophy of boredom:

I truly believe – as Bertrand Russell did before me – that if we truly embraced boredom there would be less violence in the world. When I say truly embrace boredom I mean that we should make an effort not to fight it – we especially shouldn’t do something just to stop us from feeling bored (this just leads to the type of passive nihilism the philosopher Simon Critchley warns us about). I think we should just accept it and naturally feel bored and ultimately do nothing. Fighting boredom only leads to friction, which can cause myriad things, including the type of violence that haunts my novel. But I know this is a losing battle. It is a losing battle because boredom reveals to us the nothingness that makes up our lives: the gaping void of our existence, its meaninglessness and finiteness. Obviously this gaping void scares the shit out of us. And it is because of this intrinsic fear that we mostly fail.

Okay, so it’s in French. Okay, so he doesn’t have the hair thing going on yet. But it’s him, I’m telling you — check out the eyes!

In case you missed it yesterday morning, our man Dave Tompkins talked up the vocoder (and his new history of it, How to Wreck a Nice Beach) on NPR’s Morning Edition.  If you think you’re not familiar with the vocoder (what the heck it?! you might be asking yourself), well, think again.  If you’ve turned on the radio in the past 40 years or so, you’ve heard the vocoder.  Its the robotic voice present in popular music from Neil Young to Kraftwerk to the Beastie Boys.

But its voice-changing ability wasn’t always used enhance a song or a beat.  The vocoder was invented by Bell Labs back in its heyday to compress sound in order to make transatlantic phone calls cheaper!  Soon the military decided that it would be more useful as a way to encode speech — and they classified the entire technology.  When it was declassified, however, musicians adopted it for their own purposes, and the rest is history.

For more on the vocoder, listen to Dave’s interview online and read an excerpt from the first chapter.  And in case you’re not convinced that you are already very familiar with the doings of the vocoder, check out the Beastie Boys’ “Intergalactic” on YouTube.  Then you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Roberto Bolaño’s following only seems to get bigger and bigger, extending beyond his work and into the character of the writer himself and his thoughts on literary matters in general. At Melville House, we found tremendous interest in our publication of his final interviews, Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations. Below, a television interview with Chilean journalist Cristián Warnken.

On the very day Yann Martel arrived in New York to promote his new novel Beatrice and Virgil a couple of weeks ago, the book was the victim of a classic — that is to say, unnecessarily vicious — Michiko Kakutani take-down in the New York Times. She called it “misconceived and offensive,” as well as “perverse,” and accused him of plagiarizing Beckett. And, as Jason Boog recently observed in a Galley Cat report, the book has been the subject of some other rather scathing reviews as well.

But say what you will about his writing, Martel himself is a refreshingly frank and admirably game guy: Galley Cat points us to the below interview in which Martel speaks to the folks at Big Think about, well, what it’s like to get a bad review. Here’s a partial transcript:

It’s hard.  Just today I got a bad review of my book in the New York Times.  The day it comes out, I’m in New York, the Goddamn New York Times gives me a terrible review.  It hurts.  But there’s no secret to it.  I imagine Shakespeare hated getting negative reviews, and you know, there’s always going to be somebody who doesn’t like what you do, always, no matter, you know, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dante, I’m sure there are people who told them their stuff sucks.  It hurts….

…. art is profoundly social, so you want at some level your gift to be accepted.  I say that, but at the same time, it is a free gift, you have to let go.  You have to have that Buddhist attitude of passionate detachment.  Which I generally had, and I just got that review today, so that kind of sucks, but you have to let go.

NY Times Notable Book of the Year, and Melville House translation.

Dennis Johnson, co-publisher at Melville House, tells all in this interview with Biblioklept’s Ed Turner. Johnson answers the ‘klep’ts questions about some of the thornier issues in publishing — such as, How to publish translated books, and how to make them work. Where do publishers get their ideas for books? And how is it that people still love to read the classics? And, oh yeah: Did you ever steal a book?

In a wacky, retro 1960 interview from — we think — Canadian TV, the great writer and media theorist Marshall McLuhan talks about the future of books … or, whatever comes next ….

Poor Aldous Huxley. After The Doors of Perception, nobody really wanted to talk about the books, exactly ….

This amazing discussion between two twentieth century giants of American literature — Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling, on the subject of Lolita — proves three things: 1. Nabokov was as funny off-the-cuff in conversation as he was on the page; 2. there’s some deepy wonderful stuff to be found on Youtube; and 3. modern American television, where such a conversation is entirely inconceivable, totally blows.

Part two:

Ruth Padel at Oxford

For the first time since her infamous and short-lived stint as the first female professor of poetry at Oxford University — which position she resigned after it was revealed that she’d sent critical emails to journalists about her rival, Derek Walcott – Ruth Padel has given her first public interview, with The Guardian’s Aida Edemariam:

She has, understandably, no wish to revisit the episode, but she seems to struggle, a bit, with her newfound media training-by-fire: her instinct seems to be to answer a question directly put; experience tells her it would probably be a bad idea, the two imperatives keep flashing across her face. Did she want the job very much? “I don’t really know. I didn’t expect to get it. I would have loved to do what I’m doing now, which is taking poetry into the science labs, going round college to college. I would have found the lectures daunting, but I would have enjoyed the challenge of them. So I don’t know – it became … I’d never been part of a campaign before, and other people …”

… Is there anything she regrets? “I think I should talk less.” She laughs. How about the emails? “Do we need to talk about this really?, because it’ll just be picked up by other papers. I mean, I wrote things in response to people who asked me about things. And I think that’s probably all I will say.”

Poetry not being a paying sort of job, she’s made a complementary living from journalism for years. Could she not guess it would be picked up like that? “Um … no, I didn’t. I didn’t have any idea.” What has she learned from the whole thing? The answer to this is a lot less hesitant. “Not to trust people. And also to breathe more deeply before I answered things.”