S3E21: High-Functioning Freak (HFF) with Tyson Cornell

Colin Marshall sits down above Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles with Tyson Cornell, proprietor of Rare Bird Books and Rare Bird Lit, former longtime Director of Marketing & Publicity at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip, punk rocker, and co-editor of the forthcoming essay collection Yes Is the Answer: And Other Prog Rock Tales. They discuss the seeming contradiction between Los Angeles' image as an "unreaderly" place and its rank as the largest book market in America; this city's tendency not, unlike other cities, to tell you straight-up what it is; how his study of the American newsstand brought him to Los Angeles, and then to Book Soup; the perspective he gained on Los Angeles through both working newsstands and having as a neighbor the manager of the Laugh Factory; how the reading came first in his life, and then the punk rock; Yes Is the Answer and the supposed antagonism between punk and prog; his time rocking in the both-advanced-and-retrograde Japan alongside former hair metalists; Sparkstastic, the upcoming book on Los Angeles (but England-beloved) band Sparks by Tosh Berman, also formerly of Book Soup; the nature of working at a bookstore, or of trying and failing to work at a bookstore, among the industry's classically high-functioning freaks; how much crazier crazy writers can get than crazy rockers, and the ultimately tiresome nature of the non-Thompson, non-Bukowski literary wild man persona; the way that books and bookstores seem both unimprovable, in away, and yet somehow headed straight for disappearance; why books cost so much, and the advantage of slapping dogs on their covers; and the implications (and potential conspiracy theories surrounding) girls who make millions on their self-published vampire e-books.