Blogcasting

Yesterday I made the alarming discovery that that Reading the Maps is on the cusp of its one thousandth post. If you've been bored by endless blocks of text about EP Thompson, the obscurer aspects of Kiwi history, the seedy side of the Auckland literary scene and the perfidy of Australian cricketers, then you might be relieved to know that we're now mixing media a little by venturing into the realm of blogcasting. Not that we'll be steering too far from those tried and true topics.

'Who's we?' I hear you asking. I'm all too aware of the tardiness of the two people who are supposed to be co-authors of this blog - I think it's about a year since Muzzlehatch deigned to post, and months since Skyler's last effort - but over the past fortnight I've coerced them to take part in the shambolic recording sessions for a series of blogcasts by buying them both copious amounts of booze and plugging a mike into Muzzlehatch's computer.

Our first blogcast, which I've put online in downloadable format here, is an occasionally coherent discussion of the fortunes of Titus Books and independent publishing in Aotearoa, the alchemical novels of Jack Ross, the tangled forest of Jen Crawford's poetry, and Bill Direen's interpretation of the life of Michael Joseph Savage. We've punctuated proceedings with bootleg Direen and Dead Men Rising recordings, and thrown in a late night interview with Richard 'it's a spot of luck you caught me sober' Taylor for good measure. Don't take it all too seriously.

In a couple of days I'll post our second, somewhat more organised blogcast, which includes a long interview with Sinologist, musicologist and travel writer Michael Arnold about Chinese culture, the Olympics, the proper relation between politics and music, and the hallucinatory effects of African drumming.