Go to the head of Marc Maron

In his almost sixteen years on the air, “WTF with Marc Maron” recorded more than fifteen hundred episodes, with guests from Rupaul to Robin Williams to Barack Obama. In 2015, Maron interviewed the creator of Saturday Night Live, Lorne Michaels, who had long rejected Maron for a job. As Sarah Larson noted, which could have seemed a loss was really a gain, allowing Maron to arrive at “the right thing at the right time”-that is to say becoming “a disadvantaged garage messiah”. This fall, “WTF” will put an end to his race, after which Maron plans to spend more time acting and doing the Standup. (His new special, “Panicked”, arrives on HBO this week.) Not long ago, he joined us to recommend a few books on special interests that he recently appreciated. “I wouldn’t say that I am a passionate reader, and when I read, I mean business,” he said. “If I’m going to read a book, it’s better to do your job.” His remarks were edited and condensed.

No one left to pick you up

by Sam Lipsyte

This novel concerns young people who live through a moment of transition, when the Lower East Side and the music associated with it becomes swarled. These are people who think that “sale” means something, and that some things are really garbage because of its mass attraction.

The intrigue is a story of a luscious detective that revolves around this kid named Jack Shit, who is in a punk outfit of rock noise, and who has lost his bass and his main toxican singer. He needs to find them because they have a concert in a few days. He is singularly focused on this, but during his research, Jack learns that there are larger forces at hand – that it is not him, and that not only the music is moving away from what it thinks that it should be, but that New York is also about to be transformed by real estate developers.

I must be transparent – Sam is one of my best friends. But I read it forever, and I think he is one of the great comedians of our time. The book has a beautiful ending which takes place in a ice rink, where Jack must face a hired goon which is also a great skater. I think that the requirement of a story of all kinds is that your main character should probably change. At the end of this, all around Jack changed, but it remains, and it’s a bit touching.

Sonny Boy

by Al Pacino

Reading the story of Pacino was fascinating. This shows you how really he was invested in the beginning of the beginning because of art. You read his influences, his beginnings as part of this kind of radical theater company – where he and Martin Sheen are in the back – and on the fact that what forced him was the continuation of the truth. I know that people speak of “truth” by acting all the time, but acting can be a lot. You can just get away with it. Many actors are only scammers, they are crooks on natural gifts. But he was in it, everything.

Another thing I left with is that with an audience like this one, you judge them by their performance. Al Pacino always has these roles where he has a lot of boastful, but it turns out that he is quite shy. I did not know that he was this vulnerable, sensitive and neurotic artist. And it is very honest to have to make roles for money, because it was such a crazy guy that he just couldn’t manage money. It was just a little incredible for me to know this guy, the real Al Pacino, and to learn a little more about his process.

The culture crisis

by Olivier Roy

Yeah, this one, damn it. It is not an easy reading. I have always been a guy who wants to face these books – whatever the criticism of cultural criticism towards, I try to break it. I am not so intellectual, I do not have the foundations to really wrap my brain in a part of the language of these kinds of things, but I like to look at books like these to nourish my own perception of what I see.

The most important thing I have taken is the idea of Roy that society separates and that we lose a shared cultural understanding – which, especially since we have passed through a world reigned by social media, we have lost the capacity to have a civic body. He has really interesting things to say about how neoliberalism flows into the structure of digital platforms, and how it has all kinds of questionable effects, as people represent without sense without a certain way.

The book really made me think about the effects of creativity made available, for many people, only through social media platforms, which are corporate entities designed and designed to capture eyeballs and make money and make advertising – to throw things up in people’s brains. This is particularly interesting for me in terms of the comedy industry. You know, I have this idea that as a comic strip, you have freedom of expression, freedom of voice. But if your career is attached to a one -minute clip and algorithms dictating what should and should not be put in front of people – an algorithm that also escapes the duration of people’s attention – what happens then? If you operate in this world, which is not the real world, then maybe you have no real freedom.