[MUSIC PLAYING]
I think all of our themes are kind of related in that way I'm trying to put a framework around the work that I do. Fred was talking about a community of people who were trying to make meaning. And Charlie was just inadvertently sucked into conspiracy theory, guiding principles, and annotations, and world building, and conspiracy theory.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) I knew it must have been--
You are listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett, and you should know I'm on the board. And if you're a longtime listener, you know that means trouble in the studio, with Marlee Givens--
[LAUGHTER]
--and a player to be named later. Each week on Lost in the Stacks-- why are you laughing at me? We pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you are here for, we hope you dig it.
And today's show is called "Three Themes." As Charlie said, normally on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then build a show from it. For example, this year, we've done shows-- I can't believe this is this year-- "Dark Academia," "Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom," and "Digital Instruction." We pick a theme, choose music, find a guest, and spend the whole hour on that subject.
This episode is a little different. This time, the three hosts-- Marlee, Fred, and me-- each picked a theme for themselves. You, the listener, are about to hear three pitches for three different themes. MARLEE GIVENS: And we chose music to go with each of those themes, although I think we did find a way to connect the sets. I sort of fell into a connection. But it'll take a couple of sets before its meaning is clear.
All right, until then, I can tell you that our songs today are about babies, making meaning of legendary figures, and conspiracy theories. Each of us thought one of those themes would be a good idea for a show.
[LAUGHTER]
Sorry I laughed at you earlier. So let's start with a good idea, by Sugar, right here on Lost in the Stacks.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That was a good idea, by Sugar. And for reasons that will become clearer later, you might want to know that we have not played a song from Sugar since 2016.
That's a long time for no sugar.
That's true.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm surprised I'm not lighter. This is Lost in the Stacks, and our--
Happy holidays, Marlee.
[LAUGHTER]
The break is about to happen. Isn't that wonderful?
Yes. Yes. This is Lost in the Stacks. And today our show is called "Three Themes." You're going to hear a pitch from each host for a potential show or series of shows on a particular personal theme.
You will hear from all three of us because we recorded with Fred before he dropped into the holiday void. But Marlee, we're going to start with you.
All right. All right, the theme that has been on my mind-- and it's not new. It's been on my mind for a while. It's the Your Baby is Ugly theme. And Charlie, you'll have to remind me of the book where I read this. So you recommended a book to me. It was written by someone who embedded with This American Life to write a book about podcasting.
Oh, yeah, yeah, no, the name's right out of my head, On the Wire, Out on the Wire, right?
That's it. OK.
By the comic-- by the cartoonist or comic book artist. I'll look it up while you keep talking.
OK, thank you. All right, so ever since I learned the concept of Your Baby is Ugly, which I will just explain briefly, it is the point in the This American Life show editing process, where the individual segment is edited to death by the other editors. And so coming into that meeting, you really have to be prepared to present your baby and to have everyone call your baby ugly.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And I know that most of the work that I do in the library is not This American Life. But my first experience with working on something that was not my baby was very positive. And I've been looking for experiences like that, where I, basically, take someone else's idea and work on it for a little bit, try to flesh it out. I end up being a lot more collaborative. I bring other people into the process sooner.
And I think that I end up enjoying it a lot more, and I don't feel as personally invested or like my brand is on the line, if you want to call it that, as I work through it. And I still have my babies that I work on, too, but I've really come to enjoy that as I'm working on something that's not my baby.
OK. So to quote Jackson Lamb, let's walk this cat back. So the concept, your baby is ugly, is shorthand for all of this, comes from Jessica Abel's book Out On the Wire, which detail a number of NPR-style radio shows production and some podcasts. So from that, you took some inspiration on how to handle collaborative work in the library? Is that right?
Pretty much. Well, I think what I got out of it was that ended up introducing a negative element to some of the work that I do, probably some of the work that other people do. I tend to notice it in other people, as we do, someone who seems to be getting kind of territorial or not wanting to let go. And we did a lot of that during Library Next, so during that period where we were creating new services and imagining new spaces. And we hired people to come in and innovate.
We assigned huge responsibility to individual people to develop new things. And now that we're, let's say, five years out, I'm seeing that some people ended up just letting go and leaving the library completely, and other people seem to be having trouble letting go of the thing that they developed and turning it over to someone else. So that's part of the experience.
The other part of the experience is, again, maybe five years ago, our former manager asked me to develop a workshop on something that I didn't really know anything about. And I immediately started bringing in other people. I got ideas from different stakeholders. And that really helped me to shape the end product into something that I think is pretty good. But along the way, it was never my idea, to begin with. So it could really become anything. I've made it my own.
And I never realized like how enjoyable an experience that could be, of being given response-- and in fact, I did it before that, too, Charlie, when you and Amit asked me to lead a project to develop the library's cafe space. That was not my baby. I just managed the project. I mean, the outcome is what it is, but I didn't feel that personal investment or feel like I couldn't let go of a particular idea, and was able to take in feedback from other people.
So I'm going to get away from the "your baby" metaphor, just so we don't get into-- so you prefer an adopted child rather than your own?
Being a nanny.
Or it's like I'm that child's preschool teacher.
Right.
You know? CHARLIE BENNETT: What I'm hearing is that, when you were doing a project that was not of your own generation, when you were assigned a project, when you were a gig professional, in a way, you experienced a kind of freedom and collaborative energy, that if you could do that with your own projects, with your own babies, they would be better. Mm-huh.
So it was almost you need to internalize, my babies are ugly, too.
Yes. Yes.
Wow.
Or if I've got a baby, I really have to get that baby out into the village and invite the village in to help me raise and develop it.
It's amazing. I was just talking to someone a couple of days ago about the radio show, about this very radio show, and the let go-ness that is required in a collaborative work. Everyone is equally responsible for these end results. And speaking for myself, of course, if I have an idea of how I want the stroke to sound, but it's impossible for me to do that just by myself, I have to accept help from outside on my idea and thus, let it be changed.
You can't take help from your colleagues, from your peers, and expect the idea to survive without change. This is Lost in the Stacks. We'll be back with another theme after a music set. And Marlee, I know the script says that you're supposed to file this set. But it's tradition. Mom, will you pull that mic towards you? My mother is in the studio-- all the way towards you, Mom. OK, now you're a stand-up comedian. Go ahead and read that file, the set, for me.
Please file this set under PZ.U26.
I love it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
That was "Impression of Jay Temperance," by The Fall, and before that, "Ugly Baby," by Mimi Oz, two songs about very different ugly babies.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks. And today's show is called "Three Themes." From each show host, we have a short personal pitch for a show theme.
And Fred is next.
I recently enjoyed looking at my Spotify Unwrapped the yearly compilation of everything that you listen to over the year on Spotify I listen to quite a bit. And I thought, I wonder if it's possible to do a Lost in the Stacks, based on our music tracks that we play on Unwrapped. It's not really the same thing, because we have a certain amount that we play every week. And because I tend to choose what goes in to the playlist, I can determine that we don't play the same artist over and over.
So we don't have a top. Really over the last year, no one's been played more than two or three times. And most people have just been played once.
I will confess, Fred, that it is my mission to get us to play someone enough, that they're the top. I try all the time. I mean, that's why there's all that Neil Young in my suggestions.
I was going to ask, is that Led Zeppelin?
For this past year, we did play a Neil Young solo, a Neil Young with Pearl Jam, and a Neil Young with Crazy Horse. So I mean, technically, Neil Young could come on top with three. But as I was looking at that, I thought, that's not going to be very illuminating--
[LAUGHTER]
--because the trends are set by me, curated by me. And you guys suggest tracks every week as well. But in thinking about my own Spotify Wrapped, my top artist of the year was The Fall. And that made me think about something that I wanted to do a show about, never really brought the whole theme together that could make it over a whole show. But it's this website.
It's called the Annotated Fall, which has all of the lyrics of every single Fall song from 1978 through the final release in 2014 or '15, whatever it was. And it's a community of folks interested in The Fall, that take a real serious look at lyrics that seem at first glance to be pretty obscure and often, present themselves as stream of conscious. But there's usually a deeper meaning that can be found in them.
And so I wanted to talk about annotations in literature, but putting that to music lyrics and opening that up to the community. Because when you do research on something, Shakespeare's texts, Henry David Thoreau's text, and you get an annotated version, it's usually one scholar. Now, maybe one scholar that's done a lot of research and compiled a lot of notes from other scholars, but it's one scholar that's going line by line, saying, this is referring to that. This word means this in its time.
The annotated Fall does the same thing, presenting all the lyrics with little notes to footnotes. But it's all contemporary folks who are just interested in The Fall pointing out things that may not be obvious to just the casual listener or the casual reader of the lyrics.
So that kind of thing makes me so excited, the idea of on a website, the entirety of some artist's work-- or some group of artist's work with a concordance and correlations and connections and all that. I just love that. That's the kind of website I want to find all the time.
I can go into a wormhole and spend a lot of time on that website. Just to give you an idea, the song by The Fall, "Hey Luciani," which is one of the recent ones that I looked up on the site, it's a song about Pope John Paul I, who, in 1978, died after 33 days in office. And there were a few fringe conspiracy theories that he was actually murdered rather than died of a heart attack. And so Mark E Smith really latched on the conspiracy theory part of it and wrote a song about this pope.
And one of the lines in the song is your hermetics are through.
[LAUGHTER]
Now-- and it sounds like he's saying, your hermantics are through. And the lyrics are presented as your hermetics are through. And there's a footnote that explains the discussion that these annotation folks have had. It's like seeing the Wikipedia editing right up front. It's like, well, it could be hermeneutics, which is biblical interpretation of script.
Or it could be hermetics, which is like finding-- I'm going to explain this in the wrong way, but like finding a singular religion out of all religions, like there's a truth to all of it. Or it could be a portmanteau of hermetic and hermeneutics, and it turns into hermantics. Because Mark E Smith was also known for creating those kinds of nonexistent words, those portmanteaus. And so the discussion is there.
And it's a really fascinating window into people that are really familiar with the work discussing the possibilities. And it's such an enjoyable wormhole to dive into. And I'm like you, Charlie. I would like to see that work for every single artist out there. I worry how much it would feed artificial intelligence training bots. But I think there are so many artists, that I wish people would just devote their entire time to picking out individual lines and what they mean.
Some real James Joyce action.
You have to keep in mind, though, that not everybody is quite that deep.
That's true. There's some that deep. Just by overanalyzing, you can create depth where there is shallowness.
I'll give you that. I think you're on to something there, Marlee. Because Mark E Smith's lyrics were never "I love you, and I've got a broken heart." They're about--
Or the properties of love.
Ha, ha, ha, ha. They're about radio enthusiasts who find their neighbors murdered. They're about animal cloners that create horrible monsters. They're about jukeboxes that come to life. There is a wealth and a depth in Fall lyrics that rewards this deep dive. I'll give you that. CHARLIE BENNETT: Fred, since I'm doing the music for this episode, you'll be glad to know that this is all Fall, the entire episode.
Yay, all right, that'll bring it to the top of the ranking for Lost in the Stacks Wrapped at the end of the year.
You are listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we have one more theme for you on the left side of the hour.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
OK, I've got it. All right, I'm Snowden Becker. I'm an archivist who's worked with everything from film and home movies to bricks and pieces of bedsprings. And you're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(SINGING) All through my particularly [INAUDIBLE]..
Everybody, be sure to be nice to Dapper Dan when he's holding the weather box. Today's show is called "Three Themes." And I want to get to the music set for Fred's theme as quick as I can, so I'll just quote John Gardner here. "The writer can think consciously of only a few things at a time. But the process by which he works eventually leads him to his goal." Mom, will you file this set, please?
Please file this set under PZ3.n521U.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You just heard, "Hey, Luciani," by The Fall, ah, The Fall, and before that, "Soapstar Joe," by Liz Phair. Those were songs about stories we tell about certain kinds of heroes.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called "Three Themes." Each host is delivering a pitch for a potential episode or series on a particular personal theme.
Interestingly enough, after Fred's segment, my theme is conspiracy theories. And this has happened for a very particular reason. OK, I have a very silly hobby. My silly hobby is that I intricately plot and thoroughly research novels that I will never write. So I get an idea, and then I approach it like I'm going to write the novel. And I write the story, and I put the plot through the revising process. I build my research out to try and figure out the things that I can bring in.
Because I'm a big admirer of Thomas Pynchon, these doorstop novels that are full of research and portmanteaus and imagery, and all that. And so then I do the research, and then I just let it go. So this is not a hobby that I set out to take on, but clearly, just my inability to ever start writing again turned this into a hobby. And I've done this for three or four imaginary novels. It's very fun.
And when I had the last initial idea for a fake novel, it was about a conspiracy theory, in particular. I don't know if you've ever heard this one, but people are saying that it's possible that Bill Hicks faked his own death and became the DJ Alex Jones.
It doesn't ring true or possible, but it sounds fascinating.
It does sound fascinating.
It is so fascinating.
It does. I don't know enough about either person to weigh in.
Well, if you're interested, whomever you might be, and you were to do a little bit of the internet research, a rich vein of thought research and imagination would appear. Anyway, so I knew about this conspiracy theory. And then I actually saw Alex Jones himself. In one of those odd times when the political landscape was so rocky, that people were saying things like, the memo will prove, that kind of thing.
And Alex Jones was on his show, his video to show, saying, we've got the memo coming through. It's coming through right now. And literally, he was printing something out from a laser printer, and it was going and going. It's was page after page after page. And the memo that everyone had been talking about was a one-pager. And I saw that, and I thought this is like he's setting out to destroy the conspiracy theory on his own. He's making it so ridiculous, that no one will believe it.
And then I thought, what if he's doing that on purpose? What if he's actually a double agent? What if he's a CIA asset who's ruining conspiracy theories on purpose? And from there, the book started to develop. Which meant I had to start researching conspiracy theories. And it turns out there is extraordinary research into how and why conspiracy theories grip us, and how they create meaning, and how they align people with each other or against authority or against classes.
Anyway, it's very striking. And it's got an extra wrinkle for me because in my youth, in the '90s, the blessed '90s, conspiracy theories were just this fun thing that we played around with. It might as well have been cheeseburgers or illegal drugs. We just, yeah, we'll just do that. That's fun, right? And it's about as unhealthy, . But we were young, so we could get through it.
And we would talk about how the Freemasons actually built the pyramids, and ball bearings were invented by ancient Peruvians, and all kinds of stuff. And then after 9/11--
Is that another real-- is that an actual conspiracy theory?
One of those is not true.
Sorry. OK.
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, post-9/11 conspiracy theory is very different. I don't know. I think now is a time when I should allow you all to reflect a bit on how you relate to conspiracy theories.
I was just reading an article that was recommended on some social media feed in The Atlantic. It was published in 2019, and it was about the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, explaining. And it walked through all of the conspiracy theories related to that and debunked all of them and said that there's still a lot that we don't know and a lot that we will never know because the Malaysian government is never going to let this information out.
The unknown is always going to invite this kind of speculation in. And I think some people are very persuasive in the idea that they come up with. But I would love to know more about how conspiracy theories grip us.
Yeah, they coalesce meaning around unrelated events. They provide a backing of determination against chaos.
I mean, is it more than just confirmation bias?
Oh yeah, very much so, because people can actually find themselves changed in values, ethics, or political stance, when they become enamored with a conspiracy theory, when one becomes the thing that makes them feel safe/powerful/vulnerable, which it will do, all kinds of things. So conspiracy theories as a playground and as a research concern is my mini theme for the day.
What I latched on to, Charlie, was that you said that you liked to set up and plot out a story framework. And the stories had to do with conspiracy theories, but for these novels that you wouldn't write. And that resonated with me because, for one thing, that's what I did as a kid. I wanted to create the world.
Me and my friends would get together and like my friend's basement, and we set up either our Star Wars figures or our transformers, or whatever, and said, OK, they're going to live over here. And these are the people that are coming to invade. And we would spend three hours setting up the whole story. And then it's like, OK, it's time to go home. All right, see you. But that was enough fun for us.
And that's the appeal of the conspiracy theory itself, is the building of that world that maybe not everyone has access to. Like you were saying, Charlie, it makes you feel powerful and in control that you know this, quote, unquote, "secret knowledge."
This is Lost in the Stacks, and it is time for some music. Sherry, one more.
Please file this set under PS3535.01713G8.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You have been listening to "New Face in Hell," by The Fall, and before that, "Curious Minds," by the Mary Timony Band, songs about conspiracies, both real and imagined.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Today's show is called "Three Themes." For Lost in the Stacks, you heard three starter pitchers-- pitches--
Starter pitchers, that sounds right.
Starter pitches, starter pitcher, yeah. You heard three starter pitches for Lost in the Stacks episodes.
And I don't know about you, Marlee, but I am ready to do any one of those episodes as a full series.
Well, let's see what happens in the new year. And roll the credits.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens.
Legal counsel and fresh revisions to the annotations of Fall lyrics were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
Special thanks to everyone who has ever pitched a theme to us. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.
Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form, if you want to get in touch with us.
Our episode next week is "LITS-mas"--
Yay.
"Merry LITSMAS!" we'll celebrate a particular quality of the Christmas holiday in our particular, Lost in the Stacks way.
Yeah, I've got to cut that together first. OK, time for our last song today.
Are you going to add one more Fall track to unbalance our music statistics?
I really wanted to. But then it struck me that the more important part of the show, the more satisfying part of this show, was the personal nature of each of our themes, the fact that each one, ugly or not, would be our baby if it became an episode. So let's finish with "Be My Baby," by The Ronettes, right here on Lost in the Stacks. I just got a nod from my mom on that one. Have a great weekend, everybody.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC - THE RONETTES, "BE MY BABY"]
(SINGING) The night we met, I