It has been a while since Bwog writers Pierce Stanley and Lucy Tang called to session a recent incarnation of the Bwog Book Club. For those short of memory or perhaps for whom the summer has worn on maybe a bit too long, the Bwog Book Club kicked off several weeks ago with a reading of Nathaniel Rich's debut novel The Mayor's Tongue. Bwog was fortunate enough to sit down recently with Mr. Rich for an interview to discuss the challenges of writing a debut novel. Lucky for Bwog, the discussion took place in the comfort of The Paris Review's famed TriBeCa offices. Bwog is grateful to Mr. Rich (and The Paris Review) for hosting us so hospitably and for dedicating time for discussion of The Mayor's Tongue.

Bwog: We'll start the interview with the book, The Mayor's Tongue. It was a great debut.

Nathaniel Rich: Thanks -- it took a long time to write, about five or six years. I worked on it in total secrecy for most of that period, and while I was working on it I always had other jobs, and was living in different places. There was never a sustained period where I sat down and wrote the whole novel. It was something like a process of accretion. That said, nothing in the book came about in a haphazard way -- for the first two years I worked on the book, much of what I was doing was writing an outline, and planning the novel's structure. At the beginning there was way too much planning -- not enough writing. I blame it on nerves.

Bwog: Is that why there is a parallel structure to the work? It is sort of bizarre how the parallel stories never meet. Which came first? How did it all come about?

Bwog tipster Sara Vogel informs us that Robert Thurman, professor of Buddhist studies and relative of all sorts of famous people, is this week's New York Times Magazine "Questions For..." interviewee. In the interview, Thurman talks about why the Dalai Lama never comes over to hang out anymore, totally disses Slavoj Zizek, and also at one point says, "I meditate on how Dick Cheney was my mother in a previous life and nursed me at his breast." (Impromptu Photoshop contest: if you send us an image of Thurman suckling at the teat of our Vice President, we will include it in this post.)

For more of the Robert Thurman interview experience, check out the Blue and White's October Conversation.

UPDATE 12:06 AM: A treasure arrives in our inbox, from Photoshop hero Jon Hill:

(Hello, Daily Intelligencer!)

Bwog freelancer Stephanie Quan isn't a classical music buff, but she got interested in virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell when she heard about this experiment in a D.C. metro station. Eight months later, she snagged a phone interview with the Strad-playing celebrity, and quizzed him on childhood habits and favorite dead people.

Bwog: Hi.

Joshua Bell: Hi! This is Joshua Bell here.

Hi, this is Stephanie. Shall we start? I've got a lot of questions written down here.

I got answers.

So you first began violin after your parents found you playing with rubberbands on your dresser. What inspired you to do that?

Well I grew up with a lot of music around me. So I'm sure that I was stimulated by hearing my mother play the piano and my father, [he] loved music. [he] had a violin himself. Although he was sorta self-taught. But there was just a lot of music going around. All my cousins, my siblings played music. So I suppose hearing all that made me want to make music and my first sort of homemade instruments were those rubberbands on my dresser drawer. Then my parents got me a violin and it was just a very natural thing. It was like learning to speak, you know, playing music. I can't even really remember not playing the violin.

So I've actually had to try this myself... and it's not easy! How does it exactly work? Where do the rubberbands go?

Well I haven't repeated the experiment myself in the last thirty years. I had a set of nine little dresser drawers and I used to string these rubberbands across from one to the next and open up the drawers to different lengths to get different pitches.

Bwog correspondent and masthead editor Justin Vlasits spoke to Robert Maschio, CC '88 and The Todd on Scrubs, about "The Todd Song", the Writers' Guild strike, his days at Columbia and In Rainbows.

Let's start with the big news of the day. You're debuting "The Todd Song" on your website and it seems to be the definitive statement on your character. (See below - Ed.)

This character that I've created is a total parody, the whole thing is a big gag. I came up with this larger than life character who thinks he's God's gift to women and the life of the party wherever he goes and he really just has no understanding of how people see him. That's the funniest character for me to be, so I just keep trying to push that as far as I can and this song is the latest example of that. Sometimes when I listen to rap I listen to Will Smith sing about Will Smith or Queen Latifah or Diddy, they write songs about themselves. It's so egocentric to me that I think that the Todd should have a song and it's basically the Todd's song about his penis, more or less. I think that your audience would really get that I, Robert, am just perpetuating this gag and that's what "The Todd Song" is.

He's the guy who wanted to bring Gilchrist back to Columbia, and the only presidential campaign communications director you might also run into on College Walk. Bwog correspondent Christopher Morris-Lent was sat down with his former Lit Hum teacher to chew over free speech, gay rights, and why Mike Gravel is an American hero. Illustration by Julia Butareva.

Is it true that you haven't left Columbia since arriving in the fall of 1990?

DCE: It's very true. I've spent my adult life more or less around Columbia University.

Give the peanut gallery a quick summary of how you've been occupying yourself since you first got here.

DCE: First as an undergraduate I did a modern European history major, specializing in the Second World War. After that I went to Teachers College. Then I taught for a few years, just right on 106^th Street at a high school for kids who were convicted for crimes and actually incarcerated there. Then I went back and got a Ph.D. in History while teaching at the Manhattan School of Music. (Ed.: Dave's also been teaching Lit Hum for five years.)

Didn't you also write a book or something?

DCE: Last year I published Gay Power: An American Revolution — it's the first history to explain how the gay rights movement altered the entire American political and social landscape and transformed life for gays and straights. When people ask why I wrote about this, I tell them that these brave gay activists expanded freedom of all Americans. They began a public debate about something that was completely ignored and out of that debate came liberation for everyone. That's why I call it an "American Revolution." By the way, two chapters of my book describe events at Columbia: the creation of the first gay student group and the first gay student lounge.

Tell me more about teaching at MSM.

DCE: There's lots of flexibility in teaching there — for example, I offer a course on Shakespeare's Tragedies.

Ever wanted to take Turkish? Now you can, thanks in large part to Professor Etem Erol, whom Bwog correspondent Omar Siddiqi sat down for an interview last week.

As I understand it, you weren't always a Turkish professor, but in business before. Why did you switch into the world of academia?

Well, that was another life time. In my previous life, I did have an MBA in Finance, but then I switched. I always wanted to study history but social pressures led me to study for an MBA. I worked in that field for 12 years, but at the age of 40 I decided to change my direction. I've never looked back after that.

By training I'm a historian, and the connection to language actually came with the need to learn Ottoman Turkish, in order to study my own history. After learning Ottoman history I ended up getting into languages. Proper training in Ottoman Turkish requires knowledge of Arabic and Persian, so I got into learning languages because of that. As I was teaching history, I was actually called by other universities to teach history there. I began at Columbia teaching Ottoman Turkish. So, that's the language connection.

Tune in to Channel 2 later tonight, we suppose. Also spotted near Lerner, a camera crew from Fox News who actually had no idea why they were shooting b-roll of the campus. Bwoggers shoved a Spectator in front of their faces. "Oh. Ok," the camera guy said.

Before Midlake's whirlwind European and national tours, Bwog staffer Lucy Tang catches up with drummer McKenzie Smith.

While 4^th of July usually evokes images of barbeques and beaches, it's also starting to hold connotations of free music. This year, we have Midlake supporting headliners The New Pornographers as part of River to River's festival in Battery City Park; this show is a great option for those interns and whoever stuck in the city on 7/4. Though it's too late to get tickets now, scalping remains a viable option.

The opening band, Midlake, is a mish mash of sounds. Their debut Bamnan and Slivercork was a critical success, experimental pop full of lush sounds along the vein of Grandaddy and The Flaming Lips. Then, they turned a 180 and transcended time with The Trials of Van Occupanther, reviving folk-rock with "Roscoe" and "Young Bride." Fortunately, I had the opportunity to talk to McKenzie Smith of Midlake before things get hectic.

Before Midlake's whirlwind European and national tours, Bwog staffer Lucy Tang catches up with drummer McKenzie Smith.

While the date 4^th of July usually evokes images of barbeques and beaches, it's also starting to hold connotations of free music. This year, we have Midlake supporting headliners The New Pornographers as part of River to River's festival in Battery City Park, a great option for those interns and whoever stuck in the city. Though it's too late to get tickets now, scalping remains a viable option.

The opening band, Midlake, is a mish mash of sounds. Their debut Bamnan and Slivercork was a critical success, experimental pop full of lush sounds along the vein of Grandaddy and The Flaming Lips. Then, they turned a 180 and transcended time with The Trials of Van Occupanther, reviving folk-rock with "Roscoe" and "Young Bride." Fortunately, I had the opportunity to talk to McKenzie Smith of Midlake before the craze hits.

Because Bwog doesn't do hot, sandy or constantly-in-existential-danger, Iraq didn't quite make it into our summer plans. Not so for Matt Sanchez, GS, who has been blogging out of the war-torn country for the past couple of weeks. What the hell's gotten into the conservative activist, military man, Spec opinion writer, American studies major and one-time porn icon? We reached the Marine corporal by e-mail in an attempt to find out.

How did you get the opportunity to travel to Iraq? Moreover, why go there in the first place?

I applied for the media embed; the process seems daunting but if you're tenacious and know exactly what you want to do, your chances of getting approved are a lot higher. I had several advantages. I have a security clearance from my time at NYPD Counter-Terrorism, I know people who have been through the process and they explained it in detail, I had a definite plan of doing a syndicated radio show, In Their Own Words and Hometown Heroes, and I was as specific as possible with dates, units, places etc.

Bwog Music Critic Bryan Mochizuki catches up with former boss Will Welch, CC '03. Settle in, it's a long one.

Will Welch isn't the sort of alumnus you hear about a lot—he doesn't donate eight figures in scholarship money or own the Pats or herd sheep with Heath Ledger. But he's the Deputy Editor of a magazine called The Fader, so chances are he's at least had something to do with your iTunes library. Welch co-wrote Kanye West's first-ever cover story, and as an editor, helped break artists like M.I.A., Lady Sovereign, Lupe Fiasco, Baby Cham, Mavado, Love Is All, Rick Ross, and Bloc Party, to name a few. I got to know him when I interned for The Fader a year ago. A few weeks back, we grabbed Indian food.

So when you were at Columbia, you worked at WKCR right?

Not really, I was an intern there for my friend Hank Shteamer who now works for Time Out NY writing about music and who writes for us occasionally. He graduated in 2002 but I did a couple semesters of just casually working with him, he was just teaching me shit. The idea of working with someone like that is to eventually get your own show. But I kind of bagged it before that. It was an awesome experience — the show was Daybreak Express - but the jazz I was listening to wasn't really aligned with the program, and I didn't want to fake it. I wasn't really immersed in Charlie Parker and stuff like that. So I ended up not following through with it.

Bwog editor emerita Sara Vogel bumped into Jon Scieszka, one of her childhood heroes, on 112th street and Broadway a few weeks ago. When she found out that the author of The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales, Math Curse, and the Time Warp Trio series got his Master's at Columbia in the late 70's, she took down his number, and followed up. He's planning a new series about trucks and books about a cowboy and an octopus, and he's on the board of 826NYC — for all of you non-McSweeneyites, the tutoring center disguised as the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. Here Scieszka muses about kindergarteners, coming up with Borat way before Sasha Cohen, and why he's second best to Roald Dahl.

So sorry I accosted you on the street the other day.

No, I thought that was kind of funny.

Does that happen to you a lot, where you get people recognizing you and stopping you on the street?

Not so much. But I was out in Arizona on a book tour and one little guy asked me if I had security. Like he was wondering if I had a body guard or something. I said, "No, most people don't even know what I look like." Except there's this whole little crew of kindergarteners that I was working with last year that will wave to me on the street and go, "Hi Jon Scieszka." And their parents will go, "Who was that guy? Who are you talking to?"

Why were you working with kindergarteners?

I'm actually working on this pre-school project where I've thought up this whole world called 'Trucktown' where all the characters are trucks. I definitely needed to get into the classroom to see what four-year-olds are like.

What'd you learn?

Mostly that kindergarteners are like little guys with Alzheimer's on acid. They are nuts, man. It's like the world is completely reinvented for them every fifteen minutes. Any kind of parody or satire, which is what I really enjoy writing, just is way beyond them. Since the world is so brand new every fifteen minutes, you can't really make fun of it. They don't even know what the rules are for the regular world. We were in there for Saint Patrick's Day and the teacher was telling them, "Oh, well if you don't wear green, the Leprechaun is going to come around and pinch you" and immediately half the kids looked really worried. They thought "oh no, I don't have green on, I'm going to get pinched!"

Students for a Democratic Society—that group that shut down Columbia and other Universities across the country in 1968—generated some buzz last week, when about 20 students met in a Kent classroom to hash out plans for their return (sitting in, Bwog found the Young Spartacists particularly entertaining). "The New SDS" even landed the cover of The Nation, which talks about the nationwide phenomenon. Craving commentary (and something quite different from this commentary), Bwog sought out Mark Rudd, the leader of Columbia's chapter in the 60s, who consented to an interview via e-mail.

Have you been back on the Columbia campus much since your time here as a student?

I was there in 1988 for the twentieth reunion. I've been off and on to show friends from New Mexico around. I spoke at a 25th reunion of the class of 1969, which I should have graduated with, on a panel on 68. They didn't even invite me to lunch.

In the 1968 protests, how much of the student body seemed like it felt the way you did about the war and other issues you were protesting? Was it a small core of radical leaders, or more of a mass movement?

It grew to be a huge mass movement, probably the large majority of campus. Over 6000 people were organized into the strike coordinating committee through delegates. That was after the bust. The campus was highly politicized.

How did the administration react--do you think those tactics had any lasting success?

Our primary goal was building the anti-war movement. That we did. Columbia served as a model for many other campuses, not just in this country but internationally. The administration intransigence built our movement. Never underestimate the stupidity of college administrators.

You've said that we need to help foster anti-war sentiment within the ranks of the military itself. How can students do that? How should they treat other students in ROTC programs, for example, or those who have returned from military service?

All future and past soldiers should be treated with the utmost respect as human beings. Anti-war people should enter into dialogue with them about the true nature of this war. The goal is to get service people to understand their experience as occupiers of a foreign country and to use that experience to oppose the war. Soldiers are the victims of the government as well as the people they are forced to torture or murder.

With their latest album Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? at the top of WBAR's charts and two shows on March 9th and 10th at Irving Plaza, Of Montreal's been keeping busy as they've made their way into the hearts of many a college hipster here in New York. Bwog contributor Ashley Nin caught up with keyboardist Dottie Alexander for a quick chat.

Quick intro: on which albums do you appear?
We all got together about nine years ago and recorded as a band for the first five albums, and then Kevin Barnes since then has kind of done his own thing on the most recent three, though we still work together on the live shows and the videos.

And before you started playing with Of Montreal, you and Jamie actually played together in Lightning Bug vs. Firefly.
Woah, that's a blast from the past. Yeah, Jamie and I just experimented with music on drums and keyboards together doing small gigs until Kevin Barnes kind of took us under his wing.

Was the music you played then similar to the type of music you played with him?
Yeah, Elephant 6 totally influenced us, so even twelve years ago, the stuff we were playing was along the same vein as what we play now with Kevin.

Ok, so who's the best groupie you've ever had?
Ryan always gets the best groupies. He had one that we'd call "the brute witch." She was this spooky lady who'd come up to you and just bless you with these spooky witchy words. And she smelled bad, so she'd dance around at our shows and there'd be like a 10ft radius around her in the middle of the crowd. Eventually, she stopped coming and we assumed that she had descended back to the underworld.