Bat Segundo and Updike

Today at Ed Champion's excellent Return of the Reluctant, the announcement of the 50th episode of the Bat Segundo Show podcast. Fittingly, the landmark broadcast (Webcast?) is with übbernovelist John Updike. Among other things, they're discussing:

Epigraphs, faith and disbelief, starting Terrorist with a Catholic priest, first person vs. third person, on writing upon Americana, post-9/11 symbolism, humanism vs. pessimism, blow jobs, Christopher Hitchens, the state of the September 11 novel, Norman Mailer, Neil LaBute’s The Mercy Seat, applying “On Not Being a Dove” to Iraq, airport X-ray machines, external sexual imagery vs. internal emotion in prose, why Updike concentrates on explicit anatomical detail, Goths, language, challenging Updike on the BEA speech and the Internet.

You can visit all 50 Bat Segundo podcasts. Thus far, interview subjects have included Colson Whitehead, Hal Niedzviecki, Sarah Waters, Jeffrey Ford, Sheila Heti, Erica Jong and about 45 others.