Sam Pink is the guest. He is the author of several books, including the novel Person. And his latest novel, Rontel, is due out from Lazy Fascist Press in February 2013.
Electric Literature raves
Reading Sam Pink may make you a danger to society. The voice here in Rontel, as it was in Pink’s previous novel Person, is invasive. It will burrow its way deep into your brain and then echo through your gray matter. You will find yourself thinking the way his narrators think, and will then wonder if those fucked up thoughts tunneled in recently or if they were always there just waiting to be dug up.
Monologue topics: email from a listener, elevator theater, reality television, Board.
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I think Sam is the shit. I remember once I emailed him and said I bought his books and he called me a bitch ass hoe. It was gratifying.
Who is this clown? Some spoiled white kid who does not even know where daddy gets his money that sends him to Community College to sell dope (& he quits before the cops catch him & has made a bunch of money?), and then this fuck has the nerve to say he finds school easy! I’ve never heard of this hack before but after listening to this I hope I never hear from him again.
Brad I applaude you for enduring an hr. with this little prick but I quit him after 30 min.
“Who is this clown? Some spoiled white kid”
he said he would live a luxurious (i think was the word) life making $18/hr, then couldn’t think of anything he would actually buy
that doesn’t seem spoiled to me
“who does not even know where daddy gets his money”
he said his father did engineering work
“that sends him to Community College”
i don’t know much about this but isn’t community college, like, not expensive or free
“to sell dope (& he quits before the cops catch him & has made a bunch of money?), and then this fuck has the nerve to say he finds school easy!”
he said he got good grades & it was easy, that seems like a factual statement
feel like you’re implying he should lie, for some reason, & say it was hard
“I’ve never heard of this hack before but after listening to this I hope I never hear from him again.”
why? it seems like if you don’t want to hear from people like sam pink then you want to hear from someone who views $18/hr as [opposite of luxurious], someone who has intimate knowledge of his/her father’s financial situation, someone who continues selling dope until the cops catch him, then in jail you would want to hear him say that school was hard, even if it was easy
“Brad I applaude you for enduring an hr. with this little prick but I quit him after 30 min.”
i feel like since brad read sam pink’s work, liked it, probably researched sam pink a little, then made the effort to contact sam pink & do the interview, which had a lot of laughing in it, brad probably didn’t view it as something he ‘endured’
too much time on your hands dude.
Poisoning a dog? Can’t accept.
Wowza… I’ve been listening to Other People since it was a wee babe, and with that in the trunk I gotta say that this was by far the worst guest appearance I’ve ever heard on the show. As a guy who does his own talk show on Friday night radio in Boulder, CO, I gotta laud Brad for hanging in there and not balling his fists and spitting shit-fire venom all over Sam. That’s some serious professionalism when dealing with a monosyllabic answering spittoon of boredom. Now, I don’t know Sam, and I’ve never read his books (and maybe he was bumming in a down-cycle of bi-polarism), but to agree to coming on a kick ass podcast like Other People and pissing on the whole shebang with yes/no answers and crypt-like silence and a hard-to-believe failure to remember anything that has ever happened in his whole life from moments before the podcast backwards…it made me want to send Brad a box of Oreos and Sam a paper sack of poisoned (non-lethal; maybe diarrhea inducing) dog shit.
Thank god BL has the intestinal fortitude to bring the laughs in that train wreck. As bad as that was, the interview solidifies Other People’s standing as my favorite podcast in the history of our terrestrial sphere.
Keep up Baby Jeebus’s good work, Brad!
i thoroughly enjoyed this interview
I loved the interview. I find Sam’s personality and sense of humor endearing and enjoyable. I laughed a lot during certain parts, such as about him enjoying having a bad fever.
i felt entertained and highly interested throughout almost the entire interview. i like listening to sam pink talk about things.
I’m looking forward to listening to this. For one, I loved my talk with Brad Listi, and secondly, I had lunch and walked around Chicago with him not long ago and he was a total sweetheart.
Oops – I meant to say I walked around with SAM and had a great time. Multi-tasking makes for incoherent comments. Sorry.
Really enjoyed this interview, especially the part about enjoying depression and not having a phone, seems sweet.
i found this interview to be extremely compelling and funny.
listening to this made me have very positive feelings about both brad and sam.
i feel slightly less alienated, in general, i think, after listening to this interview
sam seems really funny. the idea of liking getting bad fevers is sweet.
brad ranting about coke heads was good.
“don’t be fooled — there’s a lot of hype around this anti-suicide thing, but it’s good for you”
so good
i enjoyed this interview. i like sam pink and his books, and now i feel i can relate to him a little better, know him a little more
‘shitstorm’
This was an unusual and interesting interview. I found Sam’s answers regarding his bi-polar endearing.
He sounds so young and vulnerable.
I enjoy Sam’s blog. His humour is in the gallows camp.
I’m relieved he didn’t poison the dog. The dog owners are the sickos NOT the dog.
The previous posters who complained about this interview missed a very important point. Your podcast is described as: in-depth, inappropriate interviews with authors.
Another excellent interview, Mr. Listi. Thanks.
sweet interview
sweet shitdrizzle
sweet positivity
‘good job’ everybody
lol
I’ve been a regular listener of OP since the Blake Butler interview (whenever that was) and this is the only interview that I couldn’t finish. Man, talking to Sam Pink is what it must be like to teach high school or be Chris Brown’s manager. Brad’s patience on this one is beyond me, he must have meditated before this interview. Great work–as always–on his part, I would have hung up after 10 minutes and scrapped it.
I agree with the commentor who called the interview “compelling,” but not in a good way. Sure, Sam Pink is funny, and odd, and if I was 22 I might think he was sticking it to the man by making poor Brad squirm. Brad’s usually pretty dialed-in, cool-wise and artist-wise, but in this case it sounded like he was speaking to someone whose playbook came from another planet.
The thing is, I don’t think Pink was doing it on purpose; I think he’s just a really, really troubled guy. This is a middle-aged guy with a teenager talking, but the whole time I was listening I kept wondering if Sam Pink is going to make it to 30. Very disturbing.
Thank you Brad for saying, Don’t kill dogs. That bit was screwed up.
It was funny/sad when Brad asked if Sam liked him and Sam didn’t really say yes.
Very interesting interview. I felt like wanting to give Sam a hug. Seems like he needs one.