The Bat Segundo Show & Follow Your Ears
by Edward Champion
The Bat Segundo Show is a cultural radio program devoted to quirky and very thorough long-form interviews with contemporary authors, idiosyncratic thinkers, and other assorted artists. Guests have included John Waters, John Updike, Stephen Fry, Marilynne Robinson, Karen Russell, David Lynch, Weird Al Yankovic, Robert A. Caro, and more than 500 others. Follow Your Ears is an investigative radio program committed to original inquiry and the pursuit of a specific subject through several angles. A new Follow Your Ears episode is released every month. The remaining weeks are devoted to Bat Segundo. New shows are released every Tuesday.
Episodes
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My Henry James Problem: Dinitia Smith and Susan Mizruchi (The Bat Segundo Show #553)
This Bat Segundo special chronicles Our Correspondent’s indefatigable and good faith efforts to find appreciation for an author he does not care for — namely, Henry James. Our Correspondent read numerous books for this particular episode and appealed to several James scholars and acolytes to help...
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5. Compassion Fatigue (The Gray Area)
Emma is a top-notch psychiatrist who can change the lives of the most difficult patients imaginable. But there's a great personal cost to her formidable talents that she's not telling anyone about, an internal torment eating away at her inner life that she's hiding from her patients and her...
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4.5. The Waiting Room (The Gray Area)
Virginia Gaskell finds herself on the other side of the portal that lured her in, greeted by an extremely exuberant (and strangely familiar) receptionist, some squawking avians that aren't quite okay with her love of chicken fajitas, and further mysteries about how the universes rupture into each...
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4. Loopholes (The Gray Area)
As a thriving empire faces war with ferocious barbarians, a mischievous scholar named Minerva hopes to bring law and civilization to a great realm populated by talking birds, giant rats, gregarious knights, elemental gods, and menacing malasanders. An unanticipated dispute among the knights gives...
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3. Fuel to the Fire (The Gray Area)
An artisanal mustard retailer from Astoria finds herself in a strange realm with the ability to set things on fire. Meanwhile, Ed Champion continues his investigation into Miss Gaskell's disappearance, meeting a woman in mourning who may hold the answer to his own strange curse. (Running time: 19...
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2. Brand Awareness (The Gray Area)
Joanna loves Eclipse Ale. It's the best beer in the world. She has boxes of Eclipse memorabilia. She regularly wears Eclipse baseball caps. But on one rainy night, Joanna discovers that this happy relationship (along with the relationship with her boyfriend) is not what it seems. Why can't she...
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1.5. Dissociation (The Gray Area)
Greg Sutton, a fidgety young man who is a little too fixated on selling himself, sees his psychiatrist for the first time in months, hoping to find answers about his lost childhood and how to get back the woman he loves. But his own quick fix solution to his problems is not quite what the...
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1. Hello (The Gray Area)
A man wakes up in his apartment with a hazy memory of the night before. He's greeted in bed by a mysterious woman who keeps saying, “Hello.” But she seems to know far more about his life than he ever could have told her in one night. And as the rats gnaw mercilessly from within the walls, she has…
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0. Prologue (The Gray Area)
Virginia Gaskell, an underappreciated 66-year-old cult writer forced into a rest home, contends with mysterious voices summoned from her typewriter and an obscure literary interviewer named Ed Champion. (9 minutes)
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The Gray Area – Season One Trailer
Strange voices, agitated psychiatrists, giant rats, magical couriers, mysterious women, and loud and disheveled men. This 90 second trailer serves as a teaser for the first season of The Gray Area, a new audio drama project that will be premiering very soon.
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Loser: A Report from the Trump Tower Protests
On Thursday, November 10, 2016, I attended the protests that had unfolded across the street from Trump Tower after Donald Trump had been elected the 45th President of the United States. I talked with anti-Trump activists, people who voted for Gary Johnson, people who voted for Trump, and people…
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Disappearing Act
This five minute radio play deals with mortality, connection, and who we choose to leave behind as we continue our tricky march through life.
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The Mark Twain Special (BSS #552)
This special program devoted to Mark Twain features editor Benjamin Griffin (The Autobiography of Mark Twain), Ben Tarnoff (The Bohemians), and Adam Nee and Kyle Gallner (Band of Robbers).
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Season of the Witch (Interstitial Mix #4)
Just in time for Halloween, this is the fourth in a series of interstitial mixes. I recently worked a gig to provide a 50 minute Halloween AV mix for a party. The audio version can be enjoyed in the feed. Go to the main site to see the audiovisual version.
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Vibes, Liebe, Plucks, Horns, and Kazoos Yodeling in the Deep (Interstitial Mix #3)
This is the third of a series of interstitial mixes, this one very heavy on Germanic influence (although featuring many others!) and designed with the changing seasons, both in year and in life, in mind.
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An Elemental Race Between a Nice Guy and a Duck (Interstitial Mix #2)
This is the second of a series of interstitial mixes, this time imagining a race between two very strange imaginary figures.
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Robert Smiths Slightly Mad Pop Pop Canon Cannon Bang Bang Wake (Interstitial Mix #1)
This is the first of a series of interstitial mixes that will be rolled out as I continue to develop some future projects. What follows is a descent into the contradictions of pop music, initiated by one Robert Smith trapped in the framework of a famous Lionel Richie composition. While the mix is...
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Merritt Tierce (BSS #551)
There are 2.4 million waiters and waitresses now working in America. Why have our narratives failed to confront the realities of working in a restaurant? Merritt Pierce, author of LOVE ME BACK, joins us to discuss working-class narratives, the male gaze, abortion, and women as second-class...
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The Cultural Redemption of Stefan Zweig: Anthea Bell and George Prochnik (BSS #550)
This special two hour episode of The Bat Segundo Show details the life and work of Stefan Zweig in considerable detail. It may be the most epic radio program ever devoted to Stefan Zweig. It includes interviews with translator Anthea Bell and George Prochnik, author of THE IMPOSSIBLE EXILE.
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Amanda Vaill (BSS #549)
Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway headed to Spain to help the Loyalists during the Civil War. Gellhorn was to transform into one of the 20th century's best war correspondents. Hemingway needed to have his romanticism crushed to write a masterpiece. They are two figures in Amanda Vaill's HOTEL...
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Mimi Pond (BSS #548)
Cartoonist Mimi Pond spent a good chunk of 1978 working as a dishwasher and a waitress in an Oakland diner. Thirty-six years later, she's collected her experiences in the graphic novel, OVER EASY. This 40 minute conversation examines that experience, looking into the difficulties of accurately...
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Joanna Rakoff (BSS #547)
Joanna Rakoff spent 1996 working as an assistant for Harold Ober Associates, overhearing the likes of J.D. Salinger and Judy Blume talking shop. This 75 minute conversation, which discusses Rakoff's memoir MY SALINGER YEAR, gets into some of the underlying privilege and protective family dynamics...
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Paula Bomer III (BSS #546)
Author Paula Bomer has dedicated her fiction career to staring inside the abyss and seeking the human. We discuss her new short story collection, INSIDE MADELEINE, and discuss everything from Flannery O'Connor's notion of the grotesque, how sex defines relationships, boarding schools, how modest...
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Porochista Khakpour II (BSS #545)
In this wide-ranging 79 minute conversation, Porochista Khakpour discusses how she fused the romantic with the grotesque for her second novel, THE LAST ILLUSION, birds as an inevitable cultural symbol, growing up as an Iranian immigrant, quirky and pragmatic attitudes to death, Kafka and...
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Nikil Saval (BSS #544)
Was there ever an age in which the office provided reasonable security for the worker? Is it possible for the office worker to be given respect and adequate compensation in the 21st century? We talk with Nikil Saval, author of CUBED, to figure out how a system designed to pit office workers…
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Evie Wyld (BSS #543)
Evie Wyld is the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize-winning and Granta 20 author of ALL THE BIRDS, SINGING -- a novel that is arguably more alive than most of the dull literary books about flatware and chalices at pretentious dinner parties. Our conversation gets into how work defines even the natural...
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Yiyun Li II (BSS #542)
In this vivacious chat with MacArthur fellow Yiyun Li (and on the occasion of her latest novel KINDER THAN SOLITUDE), we discuss nothing less than the mysteries that humans impose upon the universe, Li's secret life as an accordion player, why poison is the most passive-aggressive murder…
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Ben Tarnoff (BSS #541)
More than a century after his death, Mark Twain is often portrayed as a jolly and avuncular figure. Yet the truth is that Twain was a savage wit and an incendiary figure, and it took this free-spirited iconoclasm to push expression forward. We talk with Ben Tarnoff, author of THE BOHEMIANS, to...
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Islamophobia, Extremism, and the War on Terror: Arun Kundnani (BSS #540)
Twelve and a half years after 9/11, Islamophobia remains alive and well. Where did it come from? Why does it perpetuate in American and British culture? And what effect does it have on our democratic values? To get some answers to these questions, we talked with Arun Kundnani, author of THE…
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Dinaw Mengestu (BSS #539)
MacArthur Fellow Dinaw Mengestu's novels have been needlessly categorized as "immigrant fiction" when his work is about so much more. On the publication of his third novel, ALL OUR NAMES, Mengestu unpacks these issues with us, discussing how journalism helped him to peer into revolutionary…
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About this show
The Bat Segundo Show is a cultural radio program devoted to quirky and very thorough long-form interviews with contemporary authors, idiosyncratic thinkers, and other assorted artists. Guests have included John Waters, John Updike, Stephen Fry, Marilynne Robinson, Karen Russell, David Lynch, Weird Al Yankovic, Robert A. Caro, and more than 500 others. Follow Your Ears is an investigative radio program committed to original inquiry and the pursuit of a specific subject through several angles. A new Follow Your Ears episode is released every month. The remaining weeks are devoted to Bat Segundo. New shows are released every Tuesday.
Hosted by
Edward Champion