And
We Were All Like Huh?
Hi!
I have a question about how you edit your featured interviews. First, in what
format do they generally take place? I've often assumed that they've probably
recorded phone conversations. However, from transcribing interviews I've had to
do for classes or projects, I know that there is no way that the interviews
your post are literal transcriptions—they're missing all the "likes" and
"uhs" and awkward wording that happen in normal conversation. So I guess my
question is, how do you decide what your subjects really meant to say? And
what's to say that the (flawed) way we naturally say things shouldn't be heard,
or isn't meaningful in its own sense? Are the interviews edited in a way to
simply fit the intended finished format of your site, or to make the subjects
seem less pedestrian, and more intelligent?
Liz
Keith
Phipps likes looking intelligent:
It's
nice to get a question that doesn't require me to rack my brain for 20-year-old
memories! To answer the first part first, we prefer to do our interviews in
person, but because most of the writers you read on this site work out of the
Midwest, that isn't always possible. Sometimes our interview subjects do some
publicity here in Chicago, but even touring musicians are easier to catch
during press days in New York and L.A. So we end up doing a lot of phone
interviews, with the very occasional e-mail interview. (Even more rarely, two
of our interviews were conducted entirely by fax machine.) And you're right,
you aren't reading word-for-word transcriptions most of the time. We edit out
the "likes" and "uhs" and false starts and grammatical problems with abandon.
But beyond that, we don't really do any burnishing or try to make our subjects
sound better than they are. This is called editing for clarity, and we employ
it minimally, largely because we don't have to do more. We tend to talk to
people capable of expressing themselves easily, in part because it's a
professional requirement. On the few occasions I've been interviewed, I've
gained a new respect for those who can do it well.
The
failures usually take place on our end. Rolling Stone writer Anthony DeCurtis published a book a few years back
called Rocking My Life Away that closed with a chapter called "The Naked
Transcript," which contains an excerpt from a difficult interview with Peter
Gabriel, in which DeCurtis attempted to draw conclusions about Gabriel's music
without making much sense. We've all had those moments. I remember interviewing
Robyn Hitchcock and attempting to draw out an interpretation of a song by
offering my own, only to have him stop me cold and just tell me what he thought
the song was about. I think I left that part in, but false starts on our part
do get cut as well. So does the occasional unproductive, confusing, or
uninteresting exchange. When publishing these things, we assume our readers
want the meat, not the chewy fat and gristle surrounding it.
Inch By Inch, Roar By Roar
I'm trying to remember what I think
was a series of stories from my middle-school years. They were tall tales (and
possibly used as an example of the genre in the Adventures In
Reading textbook) about a family that had incredibly rich soil on their
farm. Their neighbor was always trying to cheat them out of it with outrageous
bets. In one of them, they win the bet by causing crops to grow overnight by
trapping lighting bugs in jars and using that to light the ground.
Bill
As
children, my siblings and I received many picture books from my grandmother, a
retired librarian with boxes of discarded books. Amongst The Lonely Doll and
others that have been easier to locate the history of online was a book called LION! This picture book
told the story of angels creating animals. They would sit at drafting boards
and sketch the new animals. The protagonist is going to create lion, and his
animal goes through several permeations, with feathers, a tiny body, and other
divergences so amusing for little kids to see. Through most of the book, he is
dead set on Lion saying "Peep peep," and only includes a ROAR once presenting
to the master creator, or some such final arbiter. Without an author's name, it
is just about impossible to find this thing online, as "lion" is much
too generic a name, and the details are too common in other books. It was a
discarded book by the early '80s when we read it, and I would guess it was
published in the '50s or '60s. The illustrations were really gorgeous with
great detail. I would really like to tie up this childhood loose end. Any help?
Dustin
Tasha Robinson, on the other hand, likes
20-year-old memories:
These two questions had a few things in common:
They were maybe a little too easy to answer, I was able to track down the
answers with some determined Googling… and they brought back great memories of
childhood books I'd forgotten. So while I'd normally just answer Bill and
Dustin privately, lest we be mocked for punting, I'm sharing their questions
here so I can point people toward a couple of books I loved when I was a kid,
and clearly need to go look up again.
Bill, I'm almost positive you're talking about Sid Fleischman's Josh McBroom stories, a series of tall
tales starting with McBroom's Wonderful One-Acre Farm. The idea is that a rube buys 80 acres of what's supposed
to be prime Iowa farmland, only to learn that those 80 acres are "stacked up on
top of each other." But as a result, they're phenomenally rich and abundant, so
much so that an acorn planted at noon is a shade-providing oak by 3 p.m., and
nickels planted in the ground quickly grow into quarters. It's a kids' book,
obviously, illustrated by the prolific Quentin Blake, perhaps best known to
kids as the guy who does the weird, sketchy pictures for Roald Dahl books like The
Witches, The BFG, and Matilda.
Fleischman is pretty prolific himself; you'll find a list of his many kids'
books at
his website, including several more McBroom books that follow that
first and best-known collection.
Dustin, your question was easier to
answer. Yes, looking up "lion book" or elaborate word combinations like "lion
book angels design feathers" etc. got me nowhere fast, given that angels and
lions are both common Christian signifiers, and there are a ton of books out
there about their relative symbolism. But just browsing the Chicago Public Library
system for books with the title Lion narrowed the search down
considerably, and as soon as I saw the book cover for William Pene du Bois' Lion (no
exclamation point), I knew that was the one you were looking for. It's a 1956
book and a Caldecott Award-winner, illustrated by du Bois himself, like another
popular (and childhood memory-stirring) book of his, Bear Party. I hope you
guys enjoy rediscovering these books as much as I plan to.
Hoes
Got To Eat Too
When I was growing up in the '70s (I was born
in 1969), my mom got me an album called (I think) Here, There And Everywhere.
It was a sort of folk album, with one guy and two women on the cover. The songs
included "Three Little Tiddlywinks," "Snake Baked A Ho Cake," and "Whenever
Hettie Has A Green Dress On." All my Googling has come to naught. I'm hoping
one of your staff may have had this folkie album, too.
Gillian
Cornelius
Noel Murray never had the album, but he has
superior Googling skills:
Gillian, if you go to the website
"maraisandmiranda.com" and click on the discography, you'll find a picture of Here,
There And Everywhere,
a children's record the folk duo Marais & Miranda made with '70s TV
personality Carol Merrill (best known as the model on Let's Make A Deal). Click on the duo's
"song list," and you'll see that they recorded all the songs you mentioned. So
even though the cover on that site doesn't look quite as you described, I'm
betting that's your record.
As to where you can find it, well, nothing of
Marais & Miranda's copious output appears to be in print at the moment, but
if you're willing to haunt eBay—and pay up to a hundred bucks—you
can sometimes find some of their old records on vinyl. Happy hunting!
Girls In Space!
So I'm pretty sure I caught this on
the SCI FI Channel, like, 10 years ago, back when most people were still
calling anime "Japanimation." The movie featured an all-female crew on a
spaceship that had landed on a strange planet. One of the chicks got swallowed by
a blob that produced essentially a male clone of her- and the chicks were all
weirded out by it, because somehow, they'd never seen a dude before.
I don't remember much other than
this, except that maybe there was a hoverbike chase scene, and the very end of
the movie featured shots of present-day people going about their business,
implying that this spaceship and her intrepid crew somehow formed the origin
for all human life on earth.
If I were bigger into the anime
scene, I'd probably already know what this movie is, but do you think you guys
could give me a little help?
Sean Kelly
Tasha Robinson lives to help:
Sure thing, Sean. You're remembering 1986's Gall
Force: Eternal Story,
a big cosmic anime space opera that's been repeatedly sequelized, even though
it effectively ended by jumping into the future all the way up to the present
day. The storyline has the all-female, humanoid Solnoid race battling the
buggish Paranoid race in a series of epic space battles, as the Solnoids try to
establish a new home on a world called Chaos. One Solnoid ship, the Star
Leaf, is
damaged in battle, leaving only six crew members and a stranded pilot alive.
Due to a plot between Paranoid and Solnoid leaders who are trying to end the combat
by forming a "third race," one of the female Solnoids is cloned, and a male
version of her is produced. Various depressing, melodramatic adventures ensue,
as the crew realizes they've basically been isolated as an experiment, to see
how the third race will work out. And it ends pretty much as you recall, with a
leap into the modern day, when men and women wandering around on a normal
afternoon on modern-day Earth are presumably the offspring and end result of
one Solnoid crew member and the male clone.
The whole film is available on YouTube, though the
subtitles are difficult to read and the visuals, which aren't that great to
begin with, aren't particularly well-served; if you want to see it again,
you're better off with the DVD box set, which packages Eternal Story with Gall Force 2 and Gall Force 3, which jump back in time
to deal with a Star Leaf survivor and the ongoing Solnoid/Paranoid war, and Rhea Gall Force,
which takes place in the 21st century, among
reincarnated/rebooted/re-envisioned versions of the original characters. Then
again, that's an awful lot of Gall Force. I watched it all back in the '80s when it
was really hard to lay hand on translated anime, but even so, none of it ever
impressed me much. Eternal Story at least has ambition and plot novelty on its
side, but it's pretty plodding and muted, and the follow-up series feel pretty
much like cookie-cutter space-opera anime.
Next week: Humanity, animality, and The
Onion Movie.
Send your questions to [email protected].