http://odeo.com/channels/3212-Open-Source Radioopensource no with Christopher Lydon with Christopher Lydon with Christopher Lydon en 40 Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:56:08 -0800 Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:56:08 -0800 Politics http://odeo.com/episodes/25447266-Whose-Words-These-Are-15-Bloom%E2%80%99s-Hart-Crane We’re in the “living labyrinth” of Harold Bloom’s astonishing memory here. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Harold Bloom (32 minutes, 15 mb mp3). The great sage of New Haven is walking us through the dark, dense maze of his first and favorite poet, Hart Crane (1899 – 1932). Take this as a sort of companion piece to go with Helen Vendler’s reflections on her own “closest poet,” Wallace Stevens. There’s a preview, too, of Harold Bloom’s next big book, coming in Spring, 2010, just before his 80th birthday. Living Labyrinth: Literature and Influence will reconsider his famous grand argument in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) about poets and their precursors. But the joy of this conversation for me is the generous, melting demonstration of Bloom’s theory and his method — tracing (with never a glance at text or note) the spidery links from Crane’s words and images back to Melville, Yeats, Milto... We’re in the “living labyrinth” of Harold Bloom’s astonishing memory here. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Harold Bloom (32 minutes, 15 mb mp3). The great sage of New Haven is walking us through the dark, dense maze of his first and favorite poet, Hart Crane (1899 – 1932). Take this as a sort of companion piece to go with Helen Vendler’s reflections on her own “closest poet,” Wallace Stevens. There’s a preview, too, of Harold Bloom’s next big book, coming in Spring, 2010, just before his 80th birthday. Living Labyrinth: Literature and Influence will reconsider his famous grand argument in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) about poets and their precursors. But the joy of this conversation for me is the generous, melting demonstration of Bloom’s theory and his method — tracing (with never a glance at text or note) the spidery links from Crane’s words and images back to Melville, Yeats, Milton, Spenser, Walter Pater, and The Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible; with real-life anecdotes thrown in touching Hart Crane’s friend the photographer Walker Evans, and his devotee the playwright Tennessee Williams. By the end of Harold Bloom’s living-room performance, one of Hart Crane’s most famous pieces, “The Broken Tower” makes a kind of music — madly, deeply in tune with Bud Powell’s “Un Poco Loco.” Listen for Professor Bloom’s laughing indulgence when I tell him that, of course, Harold, the living labyrinth is you! “A nice trope, my boy.” Here, for before and after readings, is what Bloom calls Crane’s “death poem”: The Broken Tower The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell Of a spent day – to wander the cathedral lawn From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell. Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway Antiphonal carillons launched before The stars are caught and hived in the sun’s ray? The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower; And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave! Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain! Pagodas campaniles with reveilles out leaping- O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!… And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice. My world I poured. But was it cognate, scored Of that tribunal monarch of the air Whose thighs embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word In wounds pledges once to hope – cleft to despair? The steep encroachments of my blood left me No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower As flings the question true?) -or is it she Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?- And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes My veins recall and add, revived and sure The angelus of wars my chest evokes: What I hold healed, original now, and pure… And builds, within, a tower that is not stone (Not stone can jacket heaven) – but slip Of pebbles, – visible wings of silence sown In azure circles, widening as they dip The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower… The commodious, tall decorum of that sky Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower. We’re in the “living labyrinth” of Harold Bloom’s astonishing memory here. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Harold Bloom (32 minutes, 15 mb mp3). The great sage of New Haven is walking us through the dark, dense maze of his first and favorite poet, Hart Crane (1899 – 1932). Take this as a sort of companion piece to go with Helen Vendler’s reflections on her own “closest poet,” Wallace Stevens. There’s a preview, too, of Harold Bloom’s next big book, coming in Spring, 2010, just before his 80th birthday. Living Labyrinth: Literature and Influence will reconsider his famous grand argument in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) about poets and their precursors. But the joy of this conversation for me is the generous, melting demonstration of Bloom’s theory and his method — tracing (with never a glance at text or note) the spidery links from Crane’s words and images back to Melville, Yeats, Milton, Spenser, Walter Pater, and The Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible; with real-life anecdotes thrown in touching Hart Crane’s friend the photographer Walker Evans, and his devotee the playwright Tennessee Williams. By the end of Harold Bloom’s living-room performance, one of Hart Crane’s most famous pieces, “The Broken Tower” makes a kind of music — madly, deeply in tune with Bud Powell’s “Un Poco Loco.” Listen for Professor Bloom’s laughing indulgence when I tell him that, of course, Harold, the living labyrinth is you! “A nice trope, my boy.” Here, for before and after readings, is what Bloom calls Crane’s “death poem”: The Broken Tower The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell Of a spent day – to wander the cathedral lawn From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell. Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway Antiphonal carillons launched before The stars are caught and hived in the sun’s ray? The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower; And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave! Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain! Pagodas campaniles with reveilles out leaping- O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!… And so it was I entered the broken world To trace the visionary company of love, its voice An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled) But not for long to hold each desperate choice. My world I poured. But was it cognate, scored Of that tribunal monarch of the air Whose thighs embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word In wounds pledges once to hope – cleft to despair? The steep encroachments of my blood left me No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower As flings the question true?) -or is it she Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?- And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes My veins recall and add, revived and sure The angelus of wars my chest evokes: What I hold healed, original now, and pure… And builds, within, a tower that is not stone (Not stone can jacket heaven) – but slip Of pebbles, – visible wings of silence sown In azure circles, widening as they dip The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower… The commodious, tall decorum of that sky Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-13,25447266 Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:56:08 -0800 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired, Whose Words These Are http://odeo.com/episodes/25434025-David-Bromwich-on-Obama-Looking-at-Words-Closely Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Bromwich (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3). It’s a measure of the change in the discourse that David Bromwich, Yale’s Sterling Professor of English who used to write op-ed in the New York Times, now keeps a sort of Times Watch in the Huffington Post, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. “I don’t have a particular grievance, or have it in for the Times,” Professor Bromwich says to me in conversation, “but they are an important mainstream paper, and the way they bent towards the war in Iraq, I think, was all-important in legitimating that war. So they bear watching, and when no one else is minding that watch, I do it.” He was the only writer I saw who broke through the “de mortuis” sentimentalism around the Times’ late language meister William Safire to nail the propagandist and congenital war-monger: “the true Safire touch — clever, punchy, a... Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Bromwich (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3). It’s a measure of the change in the discourse that David Bromwich, Yale’s Sterling Professor of English who used to write op-ed in the New York Times, now keeps a sort of Times Watch in the Huffington Post, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. “I don’t have a particular grievance, or have it in for the Times,” Professor Bromwich says to me in conversation, “but they are an important mainstream paper, and the way they bent towards the war in Iraq, I think, was all-important in legitimating that war. So they bear watching, and when no one else is minding that watch, I do it.” He was the only writer I saw who broke through the “de mortuis” sentimentalism around the Times’ late language meister William Safire to nail the propagandist and congenital war-monger: “the true Safire touch — clever, punchy, alliterative, demagogic.” In a more consequential “close reading” of the Times through a five days of late October, Bromwich wrote: “the conclusion draws itself. The New York Times wants a large escalation in Afghanistan.” David Bromwich seems to me better yet at Obama-watching than at press criticism. He can write with penetration of Barack Obama as an American almost-literary invention, and he can make you feel you’re reading Nabokov on Don Quixote or Harold Bloom on Hamlet. In our gab, Bromwich’s essentially sympathetic but distressed view is that Obama “is a capitive of the inertia of the use of American power that he inherits.” To my taste, Bromwich does what the magisterial columnists of old like James Reston and Walter Lippman (the people I wanted to be when I grew up) used to do: pull the threads of news and impression and gossip and deep reading into a “mood of Washington” and some sense of where we’re going. Sitting in New Haven, Bromwich comes at it with the training primarily of the literary man, a biographer of the critic William Hazlitt and prolific interpreter of Rousseau, Burke, Lincoln and Mill. He adopted the old liberal prejudices when they were uncontested — in favor of peace, against torture; for civil liberties without cavil; for the republican virtues and constitutional standards. Bromwich’s finished work has an often chilling clarity and eloquence I find nowhere else these days: Afghanistan is the largest and the most difficult crisis Obama confronts away from home. And here the trap was fashioned largely by himself. He said, all through the presidential campaign, that Iraq was the wrong war but Afghanistan was the right one. It was ‘a war of necessity’, he said this summer. And he has implied that he would accept his generals’ definition of the proper scale of such a war. Now it appears that Afghanistan is being lost, indeed that it cannot be controlled with fewer than half a million troops on the ground for a decade or more. The generals are for adding troops, as in Vietnam, in increments of tens of thousands. Their current request was leaked to Bob Woodward, who published it in the Washington Post on 21 September, after Obama asked that it be kept from the public for a longer interval while he deliberated. The leak was an act of military politics if not insubordination; its aim was to show the president the cost of resisting the generals. The political establishment has lined up on their side: the addition of troops is said to be the most telling way Obama can show resoluteness abroad. This verdict of the Wall Street Journal, the Post and (with more circumspection) the New York Times was taken up by John McCain and Condoleezza Rice. If Obama declined at last to oppose Netanyahu on the settlement freeze, he will be far more wary of opposing General Petraeus, the commander of Centcom. Obama is sufficiently humane and sufficiently undeceived to take no pleasure in sending soldiers to their deaths for a futile cause. He will have to convince himself that, in some way still to be defined, the mission is urgent after all. Afghanistan will become a necessary war even if we do not know what marks the necessity. Robert Dole, an elder of the Republican Party, has said he would like to see Petraeus as the Republican candidate in 2012. Better to keep him in the field (this must be at least one of Obama’s thoughts) than to have him to run against. For Obama to do the courageous thing and withdraw would mean having deployed against him the unlimited wrath of the mainstream media, the oil interest, the Israel lobby, the weapons and security industries, all those who have reasons both avowed and unavowed for the perpetuation of American force projection in the Middle East. If he fails to satisfy the request from General McChrystal – the specialist in ‘black ops’ who now controls American forces in Afghanistan – the war brokers will fall on Obama with as finely co-ordinated a barrage as if they had met and concerted their response. Beside that prospect, the calls of betrayal from the antiwar base that gave Obama his first victories in 2008 must seem a small price to pay. The best imaginable result just now, given the tightness of the trap, may be ostensible co-operation with the generals, accompanied by a set of questions that lays the groundwork for refusal of the next escalation. But in wars there is always a deep beneath the lowest deep, and the ambushes and accidents tend towards savagery much more than conciliation. David Bromwich, “Obama’s Delusion,” in the London Review of Books, 22 October 2009. Read it all here. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Bromwich (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3). It’s a measure of the change in the discourse that David Bromwich, Yale’s Sterling Professor of English who used to write op-ed in the New York Times, now keeps a sort of Times Watch in the Huffington Post, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. “I don’t have a particular grievance, or have it in for the Times,” Professor Bromwich says to me in conversation, “but they are an important mainstream paper, and the way they bent towards the war in Iraq, I think, was all-important in legitimating that war. So they bear watching, and when no one else is minding that watch, I do it.” He was the only writer I saw who broke through the “de mortuis” sentimentalism around the Times’ late language meister William Safire to nail the propagandist and congenital war-monger: “the true Safire touch — clever, punchy, alliterative, demagogic.” In a more consequential “close reading” of the Times through a five days of late October, Bromwich wrote: “the conclusion draws itself. The New York Times wants a large escalation in Afghanistan.” David Bromwich seems to me better yet at Obama-watching than at press criticism. He can write with penetration of Barack Obama as an American almost-literary invention, and he can make you feel you’re reading Nabokov on Don Quixote or Harold Bloom on Hamlet. In our gab, Bromwich’s essentially sympathetic but distressed view is that Obama “is a capitive of the inertia of the use of American power that he inherits.” To my taste, Bromwich does what the magisterial columnists of old like James Reston and Walter Lippman (the people I wanted to be when I grew up) used to do: pull the threads of news and impression and gossip and deep reading into a “mood of Washington” and some sense of where we’re going. Sitting in New Haven, Bromwich comes at it with the training primarily of the literary man, a biographer of the critic William Hazlitt and prolific interpreter of Rousseau, Burke, Lincoln and Mill. He adopted the old liberal prejudices when they were uncontested — in favor of peace, against torture; for civil liberties without cavil; for the republican virtues and constitutional standards. Bromwich’s finished work has an often chilling clarity and eloquence I find nowhere else these days: Afghanistan is the largest and the most difficult crisis Obama confronts away from home. And here the trap was fashioned largely by himself. He said, all through the presidential campaign, that Iraq was the wrong war but Afghanistan was the right one. It was ‘a war of necessity’, he said this summer. And he has implied that he would accept his generals’ definition of the proper scale of such a war. Now it appears that Afghanistan is being lost, indeed that it cannot be controlled with fewer than half a million troops on the ground for a decade or more. The generals are for adding troops, as in Vietnam, in increments of tens of thousands. Their current request was leaked to Bob Woodward, who published it in the Washington Post on 21 September, after Obama asked that it be kept from the public for a longer interval while he deliberated. The leak was an act of military politics if not insubordination; its aim was to show the president the cost of resisting the generals. The political establishment has lined up on their side: the addition of troops is said to be the most telling way Obama can show resoluteness abroad. This verdict of the Wall Street Journal, the Post and (with more circumspection) the New York Times was taken up by John McCain and Condoleezza Rice. If Obama declined at last to oppose Netanyahu on the settlement freeze, he will be far more wary of opposing General Petraeus, the commander of Centcom. Obama is sufficiently humane and sufficiently undeceived to take no pleasure in sending soldiers to their deaths for a futile cause. He will have to convince himself that, in some way still to be defined, the mission is urgent after all. Afghanistan will become a necessary war even if we do not know what marks the necessity. Robert Dole, an elder of the Republican Party, has said he would like to see Petraeus as the Republican candidate in 2012. Better to keep him in the field (this must be at least one of Obama’s thoughts) than to have him to run against. For Obama to do the courageous thing and withdraw would mean having deployed against him the unlimited wrath of the mainstream media, the oil interest, the Israel lobby, the weapons and security industries, all those who have reasons both avowed and unavowed for the perpetuation of American force projection in the Middle East. If he fails to satisfy the request from General McChrystal – the specialist in ‘black ops’ who now controls American forces in Afghanistan – the war brokers will fall on Obama with as finely co-ordinated a barrage as if they had met and concerted their response. Beside that prospect, the calls of betrayal from the antiwar base that gave Obama his first victories in 2008 must seem a small price to pay. The best imaginable result just now, given the tightness of the trap, may be ostensible co-operation with the generals, accompanied by a set of questions that lays the groundwork for refusal of the next escalation. But in wars there is always a deep beneath the lowest deep, and the ambushes and accidents tend towards savagery much more than conciliation. David Bromwich, “Obama’s Delusion,” in the London Review of Books, 22 October 2009. Read it all here. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-10,25434025 Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:23:26 -0800 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25386627-%E2%80%9CThe-Wire%E2%80%9D-Rewired “The Wire” was the genius series on HBO that “revealed” Baltimore today (”Bodymore, Murderland”) the way Dickens’ Bleak House and Oliver Twist revealed 19th Century London. It was “reality television,” finally, about no-go America: not just terror-stricken drugged-out public housing but the complexity of human responses inside it. It was the new-media breakthrough that made producer David Simon an authority on how and why old media failed. It was the series that retired in glory after five years, but in DVD release is still challenging all our mythologies of drugs, race, schools, work, want of work, and police work. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Sonja Sohn and Donnie Andrews. (29 minutes, 13 mb mp3) First Middlebury, then Duke, now Harvard are teaching courses around The Wire, because as the esteemed Harvard Sociologist William J. Wilson put it, the show goes deeper than social science has into the challenges... “The Wire” was the genius series on HBO that “revealed” Baltimore today (”Bodymore, Murderland”) the way Dickens’ Bleak House and Oliver Twist revealed 19th Century London. It was “reality television,” finally, about no-go America: not just terror-stricken drugged-out public housing but the complexity of human responses inside it. It was the new-media breakthrough that made producer David Simon an authority on how and why old media failed. It was the series that retired in glory after five years, but in DVD release is still challenging all our mythologies of drugs, race, schools, work, want of work, and police work. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Sonja Sohn and Donnie Andrews. (29 minutes, 13 mb mp3) First Middlebury, then Duke, now Harvard are teaching courses around The Wire, because as the esteemed Harvard Sociologist William J. Wilson put it, the show goes deeper than social science has into the challenges and inequality of urban life. This is television that changed also the people who made it. Our conversation is with two of the key contributors who are part of teaching the Wire are also still dealing with what it stirred up in their own lives. First, the real Donnie Andrews, a “ghetto famous” free-lance killer of drug dealers in Baltimore who fired up the idea of The Wire and inspired “Omar,” a main character in it. Ed Burns, later a co-producer of The Wire, was Donnie’s arresting officer. David Simon covered the story for The Baltimore Sun: It was during a time when I think I was at my lowest point, because I had just lost a very dear friend of mine, who died in my arms… As he was dying, he asked me who he was, who was I? And I told him: Donnie. He said “Donnie, I can’t see you.” At that point I realized, I couldn’t see myself either. That was the turning point for me. It was like we had a war going on, a drug war, in Lexington Terrace. We were always assigned to take somebody out. And the guy I took out, I already put like 4 bullets in him, and I stood over top of him, and he looked up and asked me: why? I stood there for what seemed like an eternity trying to figure out that question, why am I doing this? He’s black just like me, got a mother, brother, sister, family, just like me, and I just took everything from him. And I don’t even know why. And at that point it began to turn my life around. So I went home and I read the Bible. Paul. I read Paul. I didn’t come out of the house for like 2 days, and I just kept reading Paul over and over. Finally I realized that if Paul, who did basically same thing that I did, God forgave him. And converted him, so maybe he can do the same for me. So I got on my knees and I prayed. Donnie Andrews with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009. And the actress Sonja Sohn, who played the often anguished narcotics cop, Kima Greggs: My first year on The Wire was absolute torture. For some reason, and I didn’t know at the time, I would get on the set, and many times I couldn’t remember my lines, I would go into a little bit of a panic, and it just – it was something I just couldn’t figure out. And I thought, gosh, am I really this bad of an actor? I later started learning about complex PTSD, and realized that a part of my brain was just shutting down, the entire year I was shooting The Wire. I’ll give you an example: my mother was battered by my father on a somewhat regular basis. And in the neighborhood, you don’t ever call the police, ever. You don’t snitch and you don’t call the police. But there were a number of times when I thought my mother was going to be killed by my father, and I would go upstairs and call the police, hoping that my mother was going to be alive when they came. And the police would come – and I thought “wow, thank god, they’re going to take him away.” And they would talk a little bit, and they would leave my father there. I would go, “why aren’t they taking him away?” and then after a course of time, third, fourth time, they would come and just sort of smirk and snicker, just kind of pooh-pooh this thing away. And I started to hate the cops, because I thought “you guys are supposed to help me, you’re supposed to save my mother, and it’s not happening, and as a matter of fact, you’re now laughing at my family.” So I realized, one reason I couldn’t step into the character of a cop is because I had such deep resentment for the cops, and a lot of pain, that eventually I had to unravel. Sonya Sohn with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009. “The Wire” was the genius series on HBO that “revealed” Baltimore today (”Bodymore, Murderland”) the way Dickens’ Bleak House and Oliver Twist revealed 19th Century London. It was “reality television,” finally, about no-go America: not just terror-stricken drugged-out public housing but the complexity of human responses inside it. It was the new-media breakthrough that made producer David Simon an authority on how and why old media failed. It was the series that retired in glory after five years, but in DVD release is still challenging all our mythologies of drugs, race, schools, work, want of work, and police work. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Sonja Sohn and Donnie Andrews. (29 minutes, 13 mb mp3) First Middlebury, then Duke, now Harvard are teaching courses around The Wire, because as the esteemed Harvard Sociologist William J. Wilson put it, the show goes deeper than social science has into the challenges and inequality of urban life. This is television that changed also the people who made it. Our conversation is with two of the key contributors who are part of teaching the Wire are also still dealing with what it stirred up in their own lives. First, the real Donnie Andrews, a “ghetto famous” free-lance killer of drug dealers in Baltimore who fired up the idea of The Wire and inspired “Omar,” a main character in it. Ed Burns, later a co-producer of The Wire, was Donnie’s arresting officer. David Simon covered the story for The Baltimore Sun: It was during a time when I think I was at my lowest point, because I had just lost a very dear friend of mine, who died in my arms… As he was dying, he asked me who he was, who was I? And I told him: Donnie. He said “Donnie, I can’t see you.” At that point I realized, I couldn’t see myself either. That was the turning point for me. It was like we had a war going on, a drug war, in Lexington Terrace. We were always assigned to take somebody out. And the guy I took out, I already put like 4 bullets in him, and I stood over top of him, and he looked up and asked me: why? I stood there for what seemed like an eternity trying to figure out that question, why am I doing this? He’s black just like me, got a mother, brother, sister, family, just like me, and I just took everything from him. And I don’t even know why. And at that point it began to turn my life around. So I went home and I read the Bible. Paul. I read Paul. I didn’t come out of the house for like 2 days, and I just kept reading Paul over and over. Finally I realized that if Paul, who did basically same thing that I did, God forgave him. And converted him, so maybe he can do the same for me. So I got on my knees and I prayed. Donnie Andrews with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009. And the actress Sonja Sohn, who played the often anguished narcotics cop, Kima Greggs: My first year on The Wire was absolute torture. For some reason, and I didn’t know at the time, I would get on the set, and many times I couldn’t remember my lines, I would go into a little bit of a panic, and it just – it was something I just couldn’t figure out. And I thought, gosh, am I really this bad of an actor? I later started learning about complex PTSD, and realized that a part of my brain was just shutting down, the entire year I was shooting The Wire. I’ll give you an example: my mother was battered by my father on a somewhat regular basis. And in the neighborhood, you don’t ever call the police, ever. You don’t snitch and you don’t call the police. But there were a number of times when I thought my mother was going to be killed by my father, and I would go upstairs and call the police, hoping that my mother was going to be alive when they came. And the police would come – and I thought “wow, thank god, they’re going to take him away.” And they would talk a little bit, and they would leave my father there. I would go, “why aren’t they taking him away?” and then after a course of time, third, fourth time, they would come and just sort of smirk and snicker, just kind of pooh-pooh this thing away. And I started to hate the cops, because I thought “you guys are supposed to help me, you’re supposed to save my mother, and it’s not happening, and as a matter of fact, you’re now laughing at my family.” So I realized, one reason I couldn’t step into the character of a cop is because I had such deep resentment for the cops, and a lot of pain, that eventually I had to unravel. Sonya Sohn with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-04,25386627 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:05:50 -0800 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25386628-Ralph-Nader%E2%80%99s-Flight-of-Fantasy Ralph Nader has charted a utopian fictional flight out of the dystopia he sees all around him on the ground. In conversation I’m trying to figure whether Ralph has written a happy ending to his career, or a scream of despair. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ralph Nader. (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Citizen Nader is feeling isolated and stymied these days in the Age of Obama. It’s been 50 years now of his reform drive for home virtues and people power, and there have been many victories along the way for safer cars and cleaner air and water. Leaving aside the fact that his third-party presidential campaigns have left him a pariah in the Democratic Party (and the Obama White House), the healthcare fight and others tell him that money power rules Congress as never before. So in a sort of novel, “Only the Super-Rich can Save Us,” Nader has fantasized that the money is in his pocket. It’s a sort of dream that Ralph’s lifelong agenda has been bought o... Ralph Nader has charted a utopian fictional flight out of the dystopia he sees all around him on the ground. In conversation I’m trying to figure whether Ralph has written a happy ending to his career, or a scream of despair. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ralph Nader. (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Citizen Nader is feeling isolated and stymied these days in the Age of Obama. It’s been 50 years now of his reform drive for home virtues and people power, and there have been many victories along the way for safer cars and cleaner air and water. Leaving aside the fact that his third-party presidential campaigns have left him a pariah in the Democratic Party (and the Obama White House), the healthcare fight and others tell him that money power rules Congress as never before. So in a sort of novel, “Only the Super-Rich can Save Us,” Nader has fantasized that the money is in his pocket. It’s a sort of dream that Ralph’s lifelong agenda has been bought out by Warren Buffett, Yoko Ono, Ted Turner, Bill Cosby, Ross Perot and a dozen other patriotic billionaires. With their money, his whole program has been enacted. Ralph speaks (a little disconcertingly, perhaps) as if it’s actually happened. But if it had, would we call it good news or bad? Democracy, or Bloombergism — built like so much else in our world on the charisma of money? RN: The problem is the nature of power, and the corporate entity controlling government, which Franklin Roosevelt, in 1938, called fascism… The global corporate model is all powerful, has no competition in terms of a model… They have nationalized the savings of the American people. They are too big to fail, so that they are bailed out, as Wall Street is bailed out. They have monetized elections, nullifying effectively people’s votes. They select the politicians, put them in office, and when they retire they hire them and give them a half a million dollars or more a year as lobbyists. It is the most clever, dynamic, creative system of controlling power in the history of the world. And they give people entertainment, and they allow people to confuse personal freedom with civic freedom. So you’ve got a lot of people in this country who say, “what do you mean we don’t live in a free country?” That’s right, you have personal freedom, you can eat what you want, buy whatever clothes you want, date who you want, divorce who you want, choose the friends you want, pick the music you want, get the bicycle you want, get into a five-thousand pound vehicle and go three blocks and buy chiclets if you want. That is personal freedom. It’s not civic freedom. Civic freedom is what’s been shredded. As Cicero said “freedom is participation in power.” What kind of freedom do we have by that standard? … Right now we have a dystopia on the ground. It’s called the liberal progressive intelligentsia and their flock. They think if they keep writing more books (the way Bill Greider and Bob Kuttner and Jim Hightower and Ralph Nader and others keep writing, exposing, proposing, diagnosing, denouncing and suggesting) that something is going to happen. We have hit a stone wall — one reason I ran for President three times. Congress has shut down. Washington is corporate-occupied territory. That’s the dystopia on the ground… Between that real life dystopia of the progressive liberal intelligentsia and their world, and their least-worst voting for the Democrats over the Republicans and never pulling the Democrats in their direction — between that and my practical utopia I’ll take my proposal as more realistic. CL: That’s a very serious question you’re talking about. And we all know it intuitively around health care. We all know that what Congress is doing has almost nothing to do with what people want, or even what the wonks say are the best provisions of the best policy. it’s about what the healthcare industry will let us have. RN: That’s been documented in books from A to Z. Here’s where this book kicks in. Let’s say ten elderly super-billionaries get together and they say look, enough is enough. 45,000 Americans are dying every year because they can’t afford health insurance. Trillions of dollars lost, claims denied, anxiety, grieving, it’s an incredible mess, a pay or die system in the richest country in the world. Suppose these guys get together at the Four Seasons. They’re on their third martini. They say, “you know, I met a couple of great organizers… and they said if they had a billion dollars they could organize every congressional district and move the thirty-percent of congress who’s already privately for single-payer health insurance to a majority. Obama will sign it because he’s for single-payer, but wasn’t willing to take on the drug and health-insurance companies. That’ll happen in eighteen months.” You wanna argue that with me? A billion dollars organizing the congressional districts the way Donald Ross and others know how to do it. Eighteen months, we’d have single-payer. Eighteen months. No one will die in America because they can’t afford health insurance. Just like no one dies in England, Germany, France, Sweden or Canada because they’re insured from day one when they’re born. That’s what I mean about money. You’ve got people all over the country — the majority support single payer; a majority of doctors support it; even larger majority of nurses support it. And it’s going nowhere because there isn’t one full-time lobbyist on capital hill for single payer, and there are 2000 corporate lobbyists for the drug companies and the Aetnas and the hospital chains. When are we going to face up to the money issue? Money is not enough. You have to have smarts, strategy, determination, humanity, time, diligence — but you can have all those, and if you do not have money it goes nowhere. Ralph Nader with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009. Ralph Nader has charted a utopian fictional flight out of the dystopia he sees all around him on the ground. In conversation I’m trying to figure whether Ralph has written a happy ending to his career, or a scream of despair. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ralph Nader. (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Citizen Nader is feeling isolated and stymied these days in the Age of Obama. It’s been 50 years now of his reform drive for home virtues and people power, and there have been many victories along the way for safer cars and cleaner air and water. Leaving aside the fact that his third-party presidential campaigns have left him a pariah in the Democratic Party (and the Obama White House), the healthcare fight and others tell him that money power rules Congress as never before. So in a sort of novel, “Only the Super-Rich can Save Us,” Nader has fantasized that the money is in his pocket. It’s a sort of dream that Ralph’s lifelong agenda has been bought out by Warren Buffett, Yoko Ono, Ted Turner, Bill Cosby, Ross Perot and a dozen other patriotic billionaires. With their money, his whole program has been enacted. Ralph speaks (a little disconcertingly, perhaps) as if it’s actually happened. But if it had, would we call it good news or bad? Democracy, or Bloombergism — built like so much else in our world on the charisma of money? RN: The problem is the nature of power, and the corporate entity controlling government, which Franklin Roosevelt, in 1938, called fascism… The global corporate model is all powerful, has no competition in terms of a model… They have nationalized the savings of the American people. They are too big to fail, so that they are bailed out, as Wall Street is bailed out. They have monetized elections, nullifying effectively people’s votes. They select the politicians, put them in office, and when they retire they hire them and give them a half a million dollars or more a year as lobbyists. It is the most clever, dynamic, creative system of controlling power in the history of the world. And they give people entertainment, and they allow people to confuse personal freedom with civic freedom. So you’ve got a lot of people in this country who say, “what do you mean we don’t live in a free country?” That’s right, you have personal freedom, you can eat what you want, buy whatever clothes you want, date who you want, divorce who you want, choose the friends you want, pick the music you want, get the bicycle you want, get into a five-thousand pound vehicle and go three blocks and buy chiclets if you want. That is personal freedom. It’s not civic freedom. Civic freedom is what’s been shredded. As Cicero said “freedom is participation in power.” What kind of freedom do we have by that standard? … Right now we have a dystopia on the ground. It’s called the liberal progressive intelligentsia and their flock. They think if they keep writing more books (the way Bill Greider and Bob Kuttner and Jim Hightower and Ralph Nader and others keep writing, exposing, proposing, diagnosing, denouncing and suggesting) that something is going to happen. We have hit a stone wall — one reason I ran for President three times. Congress has shut down. Washington is corporate-occupied territory. That’s the dystopia on the ground… Between that real life dystopia of the progressive liberal intelligentsia and their world, and their least-worst voting for the Democrats over the Republicans and never pulling the Democrats in their direction — between that and my practical utopia I’ll take my proposal as more realistic. CL: That’s a very serious question you’re talking about. And we all know it intuitively around health care. We all know that what Congress is doing has almost nothing to do with what people want, or even what the wonks say are the best provisions of the best policy. it’s about what the healthcare industry will let us have. RN: That’s been documented in books from A to Z. Here’s where this book kicks in. Let’s say ten elderly super-billionaries get together and they say look, enough is enough. 45,000 Americans are dying every year because they can’t afford health insurance. Trillions of dollars lost, claims denied, anxiety, grieving, it’s an incredible mess, a pay or die system in the richest country in the world. Suppose these guys get together at the Four Seasons. They’re on their third martini. They say, “you know, I met a couple of great organizers… and they said if they had a billion dollars they could organize every congressional district and move the thirty-percent of congress who’s already privately for single-payer health insurance to a majority. Obama will sign it because he’s for single-payer, but wasn’t willing to take on the drug and health-insurance companies. That’ll happen in eighteen months.” You wanna argue that with me? A billion dollars organizing the congressional districts the way Donald Ross and others know how to do it. Eighteen months, we’d have single-payer. Eighteen months. No one will die in America because they can’t afford health insurance. Just like no one dies in England, Germany, France, Sweden or Canada because they’re insured from day one when they’re born. That’s what I mean about money. You’ve got people all over the country — the majority support single payer; a majority of doctors support it; even larger majority of nurses support it. And it’s going nowhere because there isn’t one full-time lobbyist on capital hill for single payer, and there are 2000 corporate lobbyists for the drug companies and the Aetnas and the hospital chains. When are we going to face up to the money issue? Money is not enough. You have to have smarts, strategy, determination, humanity, time, diligence — but you can have all those, and if you do not have money it goes nowhere. Ralph Nader with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-02,25386628 Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:35:19 -0800 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25386630-How-God-Came-Back-Gordon-Cox-and-West Click to listen to the “Matters of Faith” conversation with Harvey Cox, Mary Gordon, Cornel West and Chris Lydon. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) This is a book-fair exchange that caught fire around a current version of the old graffiti duel: “God is dead,” signed Nietzsche. Then, “Nietzsche is dead,” signed God. How’s to read the evidence that God is back in an almighty way — in the bookstores, in popular culture, in world affairs? Neo-atheists including Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have given The Big Guy best-selling burials all over again in recent years. But now come Karen Armstrong, Robert Wright, and at the Boston Book Festival last weekend: novelist Mary Gordon, a “progressive Catholic” who leaves plenty of room for doubt; the post-modern Baptist theologian Harvey Cox; and Cornel West, the lay preacher and “blues man in the life of the mind,” as he calls himself – each of them writing and talking up a storm about an insatiab... Click to listen to the “Matters of Faith” conversation with Harvey Cox, Mary Gordon, Cornel West and Chris Lydon. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) This is a book-fair exchange that caught fire around a current version of the old graffiti duel: “God is dead,” signed Nietzsche. Then, “Nietzsche is dead,” signed God. How’s to read the evidence that God is back in an almighty way — in the bookstores, in popular culture, in world affairs? Neo-atheists including Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have given The Big Guy best-selling burials all over again in recent years. But now come Karen Armstrong, Robert Wright, and at the Boston Book Festival last weekend: novelist Mary Gordon, a “progressive Catholic” who leaves plenty of room for doubt; the post-modern Baptist theologian Harvey Cox; and Cornel West, the lay preacher and “blues man in the life of the mind,” as he calls himself – each of them writing and talking up a storm about an insatiable hunger out there for a personal god, or gods, and also for “blessed communities” in His or Her name. In a jammed hall of the Boston Public Library last weekend, I asked the writers not to summarize or sell their books but to imagine we were in a train compartment between, say, Istanbul and Vienna, just talking. Harvey Cox led off for Mary Gordon and Cornel West, who brought it home, as we say in church. Lets go back to three of the great historical sociologists who gave us an analysis of what religion would look like – some were more wrong than right.  Weber said there would be secularization that would become ubiquitous.  There would be a disenchantment of the world that would lead toward an iron cage, where people would be, in fact, yearning for god-talk but giving it up, because science and technology would become so hegemonic, would become so influential, that people would no longer opt for narratives that invoke God or grace.  Now Weber was wrong about secularization, but he was right about the iron cage.  Durkheim said that there’s an eternal in religious sensibilities to a degree that human beings are gonna worship something.  They’re gonna treasure something – the question is, what will it be?  Conrad in Heart of Darkness said: what? It’s idolatry, it’s Kurtz and it’s ivory.  But they’re gonna treasure something.  The question is: will it be something outside of their ego, their tribe, their clan, their nation?  Will it be transcendental, will it be universal, will it be cosmopolitan?  And then here comes Karl Marx, who says all of this religious talk is just a sigh of the oppressed.  Of course people want to live in a world where they have some sense of wholeness.  But like George Santayana who defined religion as what?  Religion as the love of life and the conciousness of impotence.  That’s Santatyana.  He’s a naturalist.  Religious, but in no way Christian or anything else.  He agrees with Marx.  Religion is fundamentally about coming to terms with your limits.  You’re gonna die.  Your bodies will be the culinary delight of terrestial worms one day – can’t get around it.  Can’t get out of space and time… alive! … One of the reasons why I pride myself in being a bluesman in the life of the mind, is because a bluesman or blueswoman has the Keatsian sensibility.  That negative capability… So for example you look at the Christian texts, look at the blues note of Jesus himself – my god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me, on the cross?  That’s a blues moment, that’s a Keatsian moment.  Here God, God’s self, is calling into question the benevolent power of the supposedly ultimate power of the universe.  Now I like that moment, because its humanizing… What do you do in the face of that?  Well the blues say oohhh, wait a minute.  The blues ain’t nothing but an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically anyway.  Nobody loves me but my mama, and she might be jiving too.  That’s B.B. King, that’s the King of the Blues.  That’s Antigone.  Everything’s against you in the darkness, including your blessed mama.  And he does that on the B-side of The Thrill is Gone!  And it comes from a blues people who have dealt with catastrophe in America, American terrorism in the form of slavery, for 244 years.  American terrorism in the form of Jim Crow, Jane Crow, lynching… In the face of that kind of terrorism, you don’t create a black Al Queda, and just counter-terrorize.  You say: no, in the face of slavery, we want freedom for everybody!  In the face of Jim Crow, we want rights and liberties for everybody.  It’s the Love Supreme that John Coltrane talked about.  In the face of that kind of catastrophe, you hold onto some sense of what appears to be impotent – namely love and justice.  Why?  Because even when you’re gangsterized, you don’t wanna get in the gutter with a ganster.  Even if you’re defeated momentarily, you’d rather be defeated with integrity than win with the thugs.  That’s the lesson of the best of Black history in America… Cornel West in conversation with Mary Gordon, Harvey Cox and Chris Lydon at the Boston Book Festival, October 24, 2009. Click to listen to the “Matters of Faith” conversation with Harvey Cox, Mary Gordon, Cornel West and Chris Lydon. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) This is a book-fair exchange that caught fire around a current version of the old graffiti duel: “God is dead,” signed Nietzsche. Then, “Nietzsche is dead,” signed God. How’s to read the evidence that God is back in an almighty way — in the bookstores, in popular culture, in world affairs? Neo-atheists including Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have given The Big Guy best-selling burials all over again in recent years. But now come Karen Armstrong, Robert Wright, and at the Boston Book Festival last weekend: novelist Mary Gordon, a “progressive Catholic” who leaves plenty of room for doubt; the post-modern Baptist theologian Harvey Cox; and Cornel West, the lay preacher and “blues man in the life of the mind,” as he calls himself – each of them writing and talking up a storm about an insatiable hunger out there for a personal god, or gods, and also for “blessed communities” in His or Her name. In a jammed hall of the Boston Public Library last weekend, I asked the writers not to summarize or sell their books but to imagine we were in a train compartment between, say, Istanbul and Vienna, just talking. Harvey Cox led off for Mary Gordon and Cornel West, who brought it home, as we say in church. Lets go back to three of the great historical sociologists who gave us an analysis of what religion would look like – some were more wrong than right.  Weber said there would be secularization that would become ubiquitous.  There would be a disenchantment of the world that would lead toward an iron cage, where people would be, in fact, yearning for god-talk but giving it up, because science and technology would become so hegemonic, would become so influential, that people would no longer opt for narratives that invoke God or grace.  Now Weber was wrong about secularization, but he was right about the iron cage.  Durkheim said that there’s an eternal in religious sensibilities to a degree that human beings are gonna worship something.  They’re gonna treasure something – the question is, what will it be?  Conrad in Heart of Darkness said: what? It’s idolatry, it’s Kurtz and it’s ivory.  But they’re gonna treasure something.  The question is: will it be something outside of their ego, their tribe, their clan, their nation?  Will it be transcendental, will it be universal, will it be cosmopolitan?  And then here comes Karl Marx, who says all of this religious talk is just a sigh of the oppressed.  Of course people want to live in a world where they have some sense of wholeness.  But like George Santayana who defined religion as what?  Religion as the love of life and the conciousness of impotence.  That’s Santatyana.  He’s a naturalist.  Religious, but in no way Christian or anything else.  He agrees with Marx.  Religion is fundamentally about coming to terms with your limits.  You’re gonna die.  Your bodies will be the culinary delight of terrestial worms one day – can’t get around it.  Can’t get out of space and time… alive! … One of the reasons why I pride myself in being a bluesman in the life of the mind, is because a bluesman or blueswoman has the Keatsian sensibility.  That negative capability… So for example you look at the Christian texts, look at the blues note of Jesus himself – my god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me, on the cross?  That’s a blues moment, that’s a Keatsian moment.  Here God, God’s self, is calling into question the benevolent power of the supposedly ultimate power of the universe.  Now I like that moment, because its humanizing… What do you do in the face of that?  Well the blues say oohhh, wait a minute.  The blues ain’t nothing but an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically anyway.  Nobody loves me but my mama, and she might be jiving too.  That’s B.B. King, that’s the King of the Blues.  That’s Antigone.  Everything’s against you in the darkness, including your blessed mama.  And he does that on the B-side of The Thrill is Gone!  And it comes from a blues people who have dealt with catastrophe in America, American terrorism in the form of slavery, for 244 years.  American terrorism in the form of Jim Crow, Jane Crow, lynching… In the face of that kind of terrorism, you don’t create a black Al Queda, and just counter-terrorize.  You say: no, in the face of slavery, we want freedom for everybody!  In the face of Jim Crow, we want rights and liberties for everybody.  It’s the Love Supreme that John Coltrane talked about.  In the face of that kind of catastrophe, you hold onto some sense of what appears to be impotent – namely love and justice.  Why?  Because even when you’re gangsterized, you don’t wanna get in the gutter with a ganster.  Even if you’re defeated momentarily, you’d rather be defeated with integrity than win with the thugs.  That’s the lesson of the best of Black history in America… Cornel West in conversation with Mary Gordon, Harvey Cox and Chris Lydon at the Boston Book Festival, October 24, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-10-27,25386630 Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:50:44 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25377452-Mark-Danner-Scoring-Assymetrical-Warfare If, as guesstimated, Osama Bin Laden spent half a million dollars to recruit, feed and train the perpetrators of 911, and if the US has spent or committed something like $2-trillion on our 8-year response, the asymmetry of costs in this global war on terror is something like 4-million to 1. And that’s just the money. I’m asking the journalist Mark Danner here to take a shot at a moral and political balance sheet. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Mark Danner. (29 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Mark Danner has covered one of the dirtiest stories on earth – torture – with an insistent lack of squeamishness about the injuries to human bodies and to American identity. He wrote the landmark New York Times op-ed, “We Are All Torturers Now,” on the confirmation Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General in 2005. The best of Mark Danner’s work on politics, violence and war is now gathered in a book titled Stripping Bare the Body. He spoke with me in Boston about the ... If, as guesstimated, Osama Bin Laden spent half a million dollars to recruit, feed and train the perpetrators of 911, and if the US has spent or committed something like $2-trillion on our 8-year response, the asymmetry of costs in this global war on terror is something like 4-million to 1. And that’s just the money. I’m asking the journalist Mark Danner here to take a shot at a moral and political balance sheet. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Mark Danner. (29 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Mark Danner has covered one of the dirtiest stories on earth – torture – with an insistent lack of squeamishness about the injuries to human bodies and to American identity. He wrote the landmark New York Times op-ed, “We Are All Torturers Now,” on the confirmation Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General in 2005. The best of Mark Danner’s work on politics, violence and war is now gathered in a book titled Stripping Bare the Body. He spoke with me in Boston about the extra-Constitutional “state of exception,” as he calls it, that isn’t over yet – and what these years of suspended rules, prolonged detentions, and foreign renditions of terror suspects, and torture, have done to our country. CL: Mark Danner, I’m reading David Rohde’s epic accounts of his imprisonment by the Taliban in the New York Times everyday for the past week. I keep wondering: when will we learn that our presence, our mere presence, not to say blowing up weddings, is a main generator of the insurgency? MD: David Rohde, in his account of his captivity explicitly says that there are people who come and express their anger about the people who’ve been imprisoned in Guantanamo indefinitely, and Bagram and Abu Ghraib. This is a major theme in his writing, and a major theme in the grievances he hears from the Taliban. This does not mean that American policy should be guided solely by what our enemies don’t like. It does mean that there are very significant costs, political costs, to some of these policies that have to be weighed against how useful they are and whether they really protect the country. We seem to have a great deal of trouble weighing those costs, because, indeed, they’re not quantifiable as dollars or anything else. CL: Your book keeps raising the question of what is power in a world where an IED may represent a few hundred dollars worth of effort that can blow up a multimillion dollar tank. And it happens all the time. MD: I remember distinctly finding an IED when I was with some troops in Dora in southern Baghdad. This thing, when we finally were able to get it out of the plastic bag — it was disguised as a bit of garbage — was as simple as you can imagine. It was a little mortar shell— millions of which, literally, are around Iraq, Sadaam bought millions of these things — that had been duct-taped to the base of a phone, the kind of mobile phone you have in your house and you can press button on it that will beep the handset if you lose it. An insurgent would stand up in a building, take the handset and beep it. That would blow this thing up. Simple as can be. Easy as can be to make it. Probably cost a couple hundred bucks, depending how you value the mortar shell. And these things are incredibly effective. You cannot stop all of the IEDs from being made. You cannot stop that. You have to at some point stop the people from wanting to make them. You won’t succeed in stopping all of them, but you might succeed in stopping most of them. It is one thing that I think Americans have learned in the last eight years, that the road toward killing every Jihadist is not the road that the United States has to take. It has to be more political, and that’s not simply a matter of money, it’s a matter of effectiveness. We read everyday about these drone attacks. Another theme in the pieces by David Rohde in the New York Times was the extreme anger caused by the civilian deaths that are a side effect, a direct effect of using these missiles to attack targets on the ground in parts of Pakistan. And we think this is surgical warfare, but in fact it is people standing on the ground, suddenly being blown up. And blaming this directly on the United States. So these things do have a political cost. Mark Danner in conversation with Chris Lydon, October 22, 2009. If, as guesstimated, Osama Bin Laden spent half a million dollars to recruit, feed and train the perpetrators of 911, and if the US has spent or committed something like $2-trillion on our 8-year response, the asymmetry of costs in this global war on terror is something like 4-million to 1. And that’s just the money. I’m asking the journalist Mark Danner here to take a shot at a moral and political balance sheet. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Mark Danner. (29 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Mark Danner has covered one of the dirtiest stories on earth – torture – with an insistent lack of squeamishness about the injuries to human bodies and to American identity. He wrote the landmark New York Times op-ed, “We Are All Torturers Now,” on the confirmation Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General in 2005. The best of Mark Danner’s work on politics, violence and war is now gathered in a book titled Stripping Bare the Body. He spoke with me in Boston about the extra-Constitutional “state of exception,” as he calls it, that isn’t over yet – and what these years of suspended rules, prolonged detentions, and foreign renditions of terror suspects, and torture, have done to our country. CL: Mark Danner, I’m reading David Rohde’s epic accounts of his imprisonment by the Taliban in the New York Times everyday for the past week. I keep wondering: when will we learn that our presence, our mere presence, not to say blowing up weddings, is a main generator of the insurgency? MD: David Rohde, in his account of his captivity explicitly says that there are people who come and express their anger about the people who’ve been imprisoned in Guantanamo indefinitely, and Bagram and Abu Ghraib. This is a major theme in his writing, and a major theme in the grievances he hears from the Taliban. This does not mean that American policy should be guided solely by what our enemies don’t like. It does mean that there are very significant costs, political costs, to some of these policies that have to be weighed against how useful they are and whether they really protect the country. We seem to have a great deal of trouble weighing those costs, because, indeed, they’re not quantifiable as dollars or anything else. CL: Your book keeps raising the question of what is power in a world where an IED may represent a few hundred dollars worth of effort that can blow up a multimillion dollar tank. And it happens all the time. MD: I remember distinctly finding an IED when I was with some troops in Dora in southern Baghdad. This thing, when we finally were able to get it out of the plastic bag — it was disguised as a bit of garbage — was as simple as you can imagine. It was a little mortar shell— millions of which, literally, are around Iraq, Sadaam bought millions of these things — that had been duct-taped to the base of a phone, the kind of mobile phone you have in your house and you can press button on it that will beep the handset if you lose it. An insurgent would stand up in a building, take the handset and beep it. That would blow this thing up. Simple as can be. Easy as can be to make it. Probably cost a couple hundred bucks, depending how you value the mortar shell. And these things are incredibly effective. You cannot stop all of the IEDs from being made. You cannot stop that. You have to at some point stop the people from wanting to make them. You won’t succeed in stopping all of them, but you might succeed in stopping most of them. It is one thing that I think Americans have learned in the last eight years, that the road toward killing every Jihadist is not the road that the United States has to take. It has to be more political, and that’s not simply a matter of money, it’s a matter of effectiveness. We read everyday about these drone attacks. Another theme in the pieces by David Rohde in the New York Times was the extreme anger caused by the civilian deaths that are a side effect, a direct effect of using these missiles to attack targets on the ground in parts of Pakistan. And we think this is surgical warfare, but in fact it is people standing on the ground, suddenly being blown up. And blaming this directly on the United States. So these things do have a political cost. Mark Danner in conversation with Chris Lydon, October 22, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-10-26,25377452 Mon, 26 Oct 2009 09:30:37 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25359991-Ted-Sizer-Performance-was-the-only-test Ted Sizer was a master teacher when he first kicked me into shape in the 1950s. He was just out of Yale and the United States Army. I was a driven, impoverished sophomore at the “Marine Corps of the Mind,” as we thought of our venerable, ancient Roxbury Latin School in Boston. He’d been a Yale faculty brat, son of the art historian and Old Blue legend “Tubby” Sizer, who’d hand-designed the heraldic flags of the several Yale colleges. But then Ted had joined the army and fallen in love with the other side of the street. At Roxbury Latin, my classmates and I plotted how to “break” the new teacher on his first civilian job. As it turned out, Ted Sizer broke us on entering the classroom, just by eye-contact, and then by demanding results. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with the late Ted Sizer. (24 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Ted Sizer’s long, brilliant career as a school reformer was based on the notions we felt instantly. He ... Ted Sizer was a master teacher when he first kicked me into shape in the 1950s. He was just out of Yale and the United States Army. I was a driven, impoverished sophomore at the “Marine Corps of the Mind,” as we thought of our venerable, ancient Roxbury Latin School in Boston. He’d been a Yale faculty brat, son of the art historian and Old Blue legend “Tubby” Sizer, who’d hand-designed the heraldic flags of the several Yale colleges. But then Ted had joined the army and fallen in love with the other side of the street. At Roxbury Latin, my classmates and I plotted how to “break” the new teacher on his first civilian job. As it turned out, Ted Sizer broke us on entering the classroom, just by eye-contact, and then by demanding results. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with the late Ted Sizer. (24 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Ted Sizer’s long, brilliant career as a school reformer was based on the notions we felt instantly. He had no doctrine and no gimmicks, but the democratic premise of his life’s work was that if the fundamentals at Harvard, Yale and Phillips Academy at Andover were good enough for him and his kids, they should and could be the model for public schools all over America. His peak experience as a student was being examined over and over for his Ph.D. by Harvard’s reigning American colonial historian, Bernard Bailyn. And so small-school eye-contact education for every kid became Ted Sizer’s standard – to be delivered by hands-on teachers until kids could speak and demonstrate all they’d learned. Ted Sizer was fighting the cancer that killed him this week when I drove out to the family house in the woods of Harvard, Massachuetts last year and we talked about what he’d taught, written and learned, about American schools. TS: Well, the main ideas I came upon as an historian, primarily of American history but also of British and Commonwealth history, which were part of my PhD requirements. I was subjected to written and oral exams so it was a really rugged, typically Harvard effort, no expense spared, and my marvelous adviser, Bernard Bailyn, who now is a retired University Professor at Harvard, he would always say: well, do it again, do it again. Harvard allowed two distinguished philosophers to be part of my committee, these very thoughtful and devoted scholars who would ask the questions over and over and over, again saying do it again, do it again, do it again, until you get it right, by my standards. By the time they are your standards, you’ve learned something CL: Is this the core of Sizer’s lesson, which is to say you don’t know it until you can perform it in a way, and you can’t perform it until you’ve done it over and over and over? TS: Yes, absolutely, for everybody. Even the so-called swiftest student, who may be the sloppiest, who will say something that seems so plausible you forget to challenge it. And when you challenge it, you find he can’t explain where it came from. It just came with his toast in the morning. But of course that whole process slows everything down… Well, what I see at the work of this coalition of essential school is quite conservative. There’s language, our own and at least one other, there’s social studies, our own history, those of others. There’s math and science, which are easier to define, and then there’s art. That’s the most difficult to define. We spend, at our little school, a great deal of time explaining the importance of visual and performing arts and in public exhibitions, the kids show off their grasp and understanding of the importance of these. Ted Sizer in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 11, 2008. Ted Sizer was a master teacher when he first kicked me into shape in the 1950s. He was just out of Yale and the United States Army. I was a driven, impoverished sophomore at the “Marine Corps of the Mind,” as we thought of our venerable, ancient Roxbury Latin School in Boston. He’d been a Yale faculty brat, son of the art historian and Old Blue legend “Tubby” Sizer, who’d hand-designed the heraldic flags of the several Yale colleges. But then Ted had joined the army and fallen in love with the other side of the street. At Roxbury Latin, my classmates and I plotted how to “break” the new teacher on his first civilian job. As it turned out, Ted Sizer broke us on entering the classroom, just by eye-contact, and then by demanding results. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with the late Ted Sizer. (24 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Ted Sizer’s long, brilliant career as a school reformer was based on the notions we felt instantly. He had no doctrine and no gimmicks, but the democratic premise of his life’s work was that if the fundamentals at Harvard, Yale and Phillips Academy at Andover were good enough for him and his kids, they should and could be the model for public schools all over America. His peak experience as a student was being examined over and over for his Ph.D. by Harvard’s reigning American colonial historian, Bernard Bailyn. And so small-school eye-contact education for every kid became Ted Sizer’s standard – to be delivered by hands-on teachers until kids could speak and demonstrate all they’d learned. Ted Sizer was fighting the cancer that killed him this week when I drove out to the family house in the woods of Harvard, Massachuetts last year and we talked about what he’d taught, written and learned, about American schools. TS: Well, the main ideas I came upon as an historian, primarily of American history but also of British and Commonwealth history, which were part of my PhD requirements. I was subjected to written and oral exams so it was a really rugged, typically Harvard effort, no expense spared, and my marvelous adviser, Bernard Bailyn, who now is a retired University Professor at Harvard, he would always say: well, do it again, do it again. Harvard allowed two distinguished philosophers to be part of my committee, these very thoughtful and devoted scholars who would ask the questions over and over and over, again saying do it again, do it again, do it again, until you get it right, by my standards. By the time they are your standards, you’ve learned something CL: Is this the core of Sizer’s lesson, which is to say you don’t know it until you can perform it in a way, and you can’t perform it until you’ve done it over and over and over? TS: Yes, absolutely, for everybody. Even the so-called swiftest student, who may be the sloppiest, who will say something that seems so plausible you forget to challenge it. And when you challenge it, you find he can’t explain where it came from. It just came with his toast in the morning. But of course that whole process slows everything down… Well, what I see at the work of this coalition of essential school is quite conservative. There’s language, our own and at least one other, there’s social studies, our own history, those of others. There’s math and science, which are easier to define, and then there’s art. That’s the most difficult to define. We spend, at our little school, a great deal of time explaining the importance of visual and performing arts and in public exhibitions, the kids show off their grasp and understanding of the importance of these. Ted Sizer in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 11, 2008. tag:odeo.com,2009-10-23,25359991 Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:10:27 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25340607-Whose-Words-These-Are-14-C-D-Wright Prompted by last weekend’s Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? C.D. Wright speaks of her output as “a few reams of freedom.” Father was an Arkansas judge and a nearsighted bookworm, like herself. Mother was a court reporter. “Of the choices revealed to me,” she has written in her memoir of life and craft, Cooling Time , “crime and art were the only ones with any real sex appeal.” I love her take on the local and the global in her head and her poetry: The Ozarks are a fixture in my mindscape, but I did not stay local in every respect. I always think of Miles Davis, “People who don’t change end up like folk musicians playing in museums, local as a motherfucker.” I would not describe my attachment to home as ghostly, but long-distanced. My ear has been licked by so many other tongues. Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil. Copper Canyon, 2005. p. 89 “I believe in a hardheaded art,”... Prompted by last weekend’s Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? C.D. Wright speaks of her output as “a few reams of freedom.” Father was an Arkansas judge and a nearsighted bookworm, like herself. Mother was a court reporter. “Of the choices revealed to me,” she has written in her memoir of life and craft, Cooling Time , “crime and art were the only ones with any real sex appeal.” I love her take on the local and the global in her head and her poetry: The Ozarks are a fixture in my mindscape, but I did not stay local in every respect. I always think of Miles Davis, “People who don’t change end up like folk musicians playing in museums, local as a motherfucker.” I would not describe my attachment to home as ghostly, but long-distanced. My ear has been licked by so many other tongues. Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil. Copper Canyon, 2005. p. 89 “I believe in a hardheaded art,” she has written, “an unremitting, unrepentant practice of one’s own faith in the word in one’s own obstinate terms.” Her terms run to the erotic, the choleric, the comic, in her own “luminously strange idiom,” the New Yorker said, “eerie as a tin whistle.” She read for us and talked with us at the Watson Institute here at Brown, where C. D. Wright and her husband Forrest Gander both teach writers. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with C.D. Wright. (61 minutes, 28 mb mp3) Q: What talent would you most like that you don’t have, yet? A: Well, I can’t cook. That’s a big drag, because Forrest [Gander, my husband] can’t cook very much either. It’s a real let down. We both love to eat. I don’t have another language — I would really like to have a second language. I’ve become very attracted to Spanish. And Spanish is still somewhat doable. I read a lot of Spanish literature in translation. Q: What kind? New, or old, or … ? A: This summer I read prose writers: the Argentine writer César Aira, the Spanish writer Javier Marías, I read Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean. Q: Bolaño speaks to you? A: Yes, he does. For one thing, he was a poet for twenty-five years. All his protagonists and antagonists are poets — they are completely unruly. Q: Who does your work in another medium? A: I love the jazz of the 60s and 70s— Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea — I’ve been missing that lately. In painting, I love Elizabeth Murray and I love Agnes Martin. Agnes Martin said her paintings were for people to look at before daily care strikes. I found that a wonderful phrase. Elizabeth Murray’s work I find very exciting, very alive. Agnes Martin’s makes me feel like I just had a really good cup of tea and I have a fire going and can look at the day ahead. Q: Report to the ancestors. What’s the state of the art? A: American poetry is incredibly various. America’s strength is that is so flexible, compared to other countries. America, as a nation is losing that, though. Q: What is the quality you look for in a poem? A: I love language, I like filthy language, hieratic language, I like obscure language, archaic language, technical language — so I probably have the least affinity for the real minimalist writers. I like people who are kind of besotted by language. Q: What’s the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: Honesty. But I’m not incorruptible. In general, I think that’s the characteristic that I got from my dad, who didn’t believe in any gray areas. I think it’s important to me. Q: What’s your motto? A: “Be brave, be without malice, be as original as you were made to be.” Prompted by last weekend’s Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? C.D. Wright speaks of her output as “a few reams of freedom.” Father was an Arkansas judge and a nearsighted bookworm, like herself. Mother was a court reporter. “Of the choices revealed to me,” she has written in her memoir of life and craft, Cooling Time , “crime and art were the only ones with any real sex appeal.” I love her take on the local and the global in her head and her poetry: The Ozarks are a fixture in my mindscape, but I did not stay local in every respect. I always think of Miles Davis, “People who don’t change end up like folk musicians playing in museums, local as a motherfucker.” I would not describe my attachment to home as ghostly, but long-distanced. My ear has been licked by so many other tongues. Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil. Copper Canyon, 2005. p. 89 “I believe in a hardheaded art,” she has written, “an unremitting, unrepentant practice of one’s own faith in the word in one’s own obstinate terms.” Her terms run to the erotic, the choleric, the comic, in her own “luminously strange idiom,” the New Yorker said, “eerie as a tin whistle.” She read for us and talked with us at the Watson Institute here at Brown, where C. D. Wright and her husband Forrest Gander both teach writers. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with C.D. Wright. (61 minutes, 28 mb mp3) Q: What talent would you most like that you don’t have, yet? A: Well, I can’t cook. That’s a big drag, because Forrest [Gander, my husband] can’t cook very much either. It’s a real let down. We both love to eat. I don’t have another language — I would really like to have a second language. I’ve become very attracted to Spanish. And Spanish is still somewhat doable. I read a lot of Spanish literature in translation. Q: What kind? New, or old, or … ? A: This summer I read prose writers: the Argentine writer César Aira, the Spanish writer Javier Marías, I read Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean. Q: Bolaño speaks to you? A: Yes, he does. For one thing, he was a poet for twenty-five years. All his protagonists and antagonists are poets — they are completely unruly. Q: Who does your work in another medium? A: I love the jazz of the 60s and 70s— Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea — I’ve been missing that lately. In painting, I love Elizabeth Murray and I love Agnes Martin. Agnes Martin said her paintings were for people to look at before daily care strikes. I found that a wonderful phrase. Elizabeth Murray’s work I find very exciting, very alive. Agnes Martin’s makes me feel like I just had a really good cup of tea and I have a fire going and can look at the day ahead. Q: Report to the ancestors. What’s the state of the art? A: American poetry is incredibly various. America’s strength is that is so flexible, compared to other countries. America, as a nation is losing that, though. Q: What is the quality you look for in a poem? A: I love language, I like filthy language, hieratic language, I like obscure language, archaic language, technical language — so I probably have the least affinity for the real minimalist writers. I like people who are kind of besotted by language. Q: What’s the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: Honesty. But I’m not incorruptible. In general, I think that’s the characteristic that I got from my dad, who didn’t believe in any gray areas. I think it’s important to me. Q: What’s your motto? A: “Be brave, be without malice, be as original as you were made to be.” tag:odeo.com,2009-10-21,25340607 Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:22:37 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired, Whose Words These Are http://odeo.com/episodes/25318047-Chris-Hedges-Requiem-for-the-Reading-Republic Chris Hedges is “Mr. Bad News” in our time, the obituary writer for our economy, our culture, our democracy, our media. When I got to the New York Times (some years before Chris Hedges) in the late Sixties, Alden Whitman had the bad news moniker, writing obits of great figures for the paper of record. When Alden Whitman knocked on your door for a long interview about your life, you were supposed to know it was almost over. It’s Chris Hedges’s gig now, observing all of us. After most of 20 years as a war correspondent with the Times, Chris Hedges in 2003 charged his paper and others with “shameful cheerleading” for the war in Iraq, and left to study up again on ancient history, theology and classic literature, and to write his own classic, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning . In his new jeremiad, Empire of Illusion , pro wrestling and pornography are the bookend spectacles in a parody culture all around us now — the grotesque joke represent... Chris Hedges is “Mr. Bad News” in our time, the obituary writer for our economy, our culture, our democracy, our media. When I got to the New York Times (some years before Chris Hedges) in the late Sixties, Alden Whitman had the bad news moniker, writing obits of great figures for the paper of record. When Alden Whitman knocked on your door for a long interview about your life, you were supposed to know it was almost over. It’s Chris Hedges’s gig now, observing all of us. After most of 20 years as a war correspondent with the Times, Chris Hedges in 2003 charged his paper and others with “shameful cheerleading” for the war in Iraq, and left to study up again on ancient history, theology and classic literature, and to write his own classic, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning . In his new jeremiad, Empire of Illusion , pro wrestling and pornography are the bookend spectacles in a parody culture all around us now — the grotesque joke representations of power and eros in the end times. I find these resonant arguments, from the rare daily-news ace who’s trained himself also in the long view: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Chris Hedges. (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3) To believe somehow that we are the culmination, that time is linear, that we are progressing morally, is to ignore human history and human nature, and essentially to remain in a state of infantilism. That’s what illusion is about. If we had an understanding of what the dying days, the twilight hours of great civilizations were like we would be able to see all the flashing lights, the warning signs around us. But I think that the illiteracy which has gripped the country (a third of this country is either illiterate, or is technically literate but doesn’t read anymore); that shift from a print based culture into an image based culture, the belief that how we are made to feel is a form of knowledge, propaganda being a kind of ideology — these are the hallmarks of a totalitarian state. Totalitarian states are image based, spectacle based states. We have set the ground for a seamless transfer from a democracy into a kind of corporate state. With the corporate state always comes the rise of the surveillance or the security state. We lack the capacity, having been unmoored from print, and relying on skillfully manipulated images, to fight back… We see it in the environmental crisis; we are literally destroying the ecosystem that sustains the human species; the gap widens between the illusion of the world we think we live in, and the reality of that world.  What you’ve done is render huge segments of the population into a kind of childishness which makes them emotionally, intellectually and psychologically unprepared for what it is they are about to face. They will react like all children, which is to reach out for demagogues who promise a new glory, vengeance and moral renewal. CL: What survives of American hegemony if in fact it’s over? CH: Well, it is over. We can’t continue to borrow, to sustain either a level of consumption or the empire that we demand. It’s just a question of when, and how do we respond. I don’t think learning to live without the piles of junk that have been bequeathed to us by consumer culture is going to impoverish our lifestyle. I don’t think that learning a new humility as empire is dismantled is a negative. We will have to learn another language other than the language of force by which we speak to most of the rest of the world, certainly those in the Middle East. It doesn’t necessarily mean the end of hope or a life of meaning or a life of richness; it just means a different kind of life. The danger is not grasping this reality. That’s the danger. if we’re not prepared for this reality, if we continue to live as the most delusional nation on the planet, than we we will end up like Yugoslavia. The war in Yugoslavia was caused by the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia — it vomited up figures like Slobodan Milosevic; the Weimar republic did the same; did the collapse of Czarist Russia… What remains? I think that unfortunately American culture (or cultures, for we once had many cultures with their own iconography and aesthetic, and a decentralized press that gave expression to local communities) was dismantled and destroyed in the 20th century and replaced with mass corporate culture… The drive of corporate culture was to implant the need for consumption as a kind of inner compulsion. Drawing on Freud, it was about manipulating people, appealing to subliminal desires and anxieties, often creating those anxieties, to fuel a kind of wild orgy of consumable products that were supposed to sort of ameliorate our alienation and atomization and loneliness and despair. And all of that is falling down around us. And yet we haven’t recognized that reality. It’s not unique. There’s that emotional incapacity to understand how fragile the world is around us and how rapidly it can disintegrate. I think having been a war correspondent, and having lived in societies that did disintegrate, I’m much more conscious. I can walk in my supermarket and imagine all the windows knocked out and the shelves bare and the neon lights hanging, because I’ve seen it. There’s that dual capacity to see how swiftly and quickly any society can collapse. CL: We elected a president who promised literally a kind of transformation. I don’t want to to argue Obama politics, so much as just to ask: is transformation an illusion? CH: Well, we elected a brand. We elected a presidential candidate who campaigned, like his rival, primarily on a personal narrative. You had rallies where people were chanting slogans like “yes we can,” which they stole by the way from FedEx-Kinko’s. It was campaign by experience: it was a very effective way of making us feel a certain way about a candidate. But Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state anymore than George W. Bush threatened the core of the corporate state.  That has been more than evidenced by Obama’s willingness to continue the looting of the American treasury, the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history. In the 17th century in England, speculators were hung. In our society they are given tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, and they run the government. Chris Hedges in conversation with Chris Lydon, October 8, 2009. Chris Hedges is “Mr. Bad News” in our time, the obituary writer for our economy, our culture, our democracy, our media. When I got to the New York Times (some years before Chris Hedges) in the late Sixties, Alden Whitman had the bad news moniker, writing obits of great figures for the paper of record. When Alden Whitman knocked on your door for a long interview about your life, you were supposed to know it was almost over. It’s Chris Hedges’s gig now, observing all of us. After most of 20 years as a war correspondent with the Times, Chris Hedges in 2003 charged his paper and others with “shameful cheerleading” for the war in Iraq, and left to study up again on ancient history, theology and classic literature, and to write his own classic, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning . In his new jeremiad, Empire of Illusion , pro wrestling and pornography are the bookend spectacles in a parody culture all around us now — the grotesque joke representations of power and eros in the end times. I find these resonant arguments, from the rare daily-news ace who’s trained himself also in the long view: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Chris Hedges. (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3) To believe somehow that we are the culmination, that time is linear, that we are progressing morally, is to ignore human history and human nature, and essentially to remain in a state of infantilism. That’s what illusion is about. If we had an understanding of what the dying days, the twilight hours of great civilizations were like we would be able to see all the flashing lights, the warning signs around us. But I think that the illiteracy which has gripped the country (a third of this country is either illiterate, or is technically literate but doesn’t read anymore); that shift from a print based culture into an image based culture, the belief that how we are made to feel is a form of knowledge, propaganda being a kind of ideology — these are the hallmarks of a totalitarian state. Totalitarian states are image based, spectacle based states. We have set the ground for a seamless transfer from a democracy into a kind of corporate state. With the corporate state always comes the rise of the surveillance or the security state. We lack the capacity, having been unmoored from print, and relying on skillfully manipulated images, to fight back… We see it in the environmental crisis; we are literally destroying the ecosystem that sustains the human species; the gap widens between the illusion of the world we think we live in, and the reality of that world.  What you’ve done is render huge segments of the population into a kind of childishness which makes them emotionally, intellectually and psychologically unprepared for what it is they are about to face. They will react like all children, which is to reach out for demagogues who promise a new glory, vengeance and moral renewal. CL: What survives of American hegemony if in fact it’s over? CH: Well, it is over. We can’t continue to borrow, to sustain either a level of consumption or the empire that we demand. It’s just a question of when, and how do we respond. I don’t think learning to live without the piles of junk that have been bequeathed to us by consumer culture is going to impoverish our lifestyle. I don’t think that learning a new humility as empire is dismantled is a negative. We will have to learn another language other than the language of force by which we speak to most of the rest of the world, certainly those in the Middle East. It doesn’t necessarily mean the end of hope or a life of meaning or a life of richness; it just means a different kind of life. The danger is not grasping this reality. That’s the danger. if we’re not prepared for this reality, if we continue to live as the most delusional nation on the planet, than we we will end up like Yugoslavia. The war in Yugoslavia was caused by the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia — it vomited up figures like Slobodan Milosevic; the Weimar republic did the same; did the collapse of Czarist Russia… What remains? I think that unfortunately American culture (or cultures, for we once had many cultures with their own iconography and aesthetic, and a decentralized press that gave expression to local communities) was dismantled and destroyed in the 20th century and replaced with mass corporate culture… The drive of corporate culture was to implant the need for consumption as a kind of inner compulsion. Drawing on Freud, it was about manipulating people, appealing to subliminal desires and anxieties, often creating those anxieties, to fuel a kind of wild orgy of consumable products that were supposed to sort of ameliorate our alienation and atomization and loneliness and despair. And all of that is falling down around us. And yet we haven’t recognized that reality. It’s not unique. There’s that emotional incapacity to understand how fragile the world is around us and how rapidly it can disintegrate. I think having been a war correspondent, and having lived in societies that did disintegrate, I’m much more conscious. I can walk in my supermarket and imagine all the windows knocked out and the shelves bare and the neon lights hanging, because I’ve seen it. There’s that dual capacity to see how swiftly and quickly any society can collapse. CL: We elected a president who promised literally a kind of transformation. I don’t want to to argue Obama politics, so much as just to ask: is transformation an illusion? CH: Well, we elected a brand. We elected a presidential candidate who campaigned, like his rival, primarily on a personal narrative. You had rallies where people were chanting slogans like “yes we can,” which they stole by the way from FedEx-Kinko’s. It was campaign by experience: it was a very effective way of making us feel a certain way about a candidate. But Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state anymore than George W. Bush threatened the core of the corporate state.  That has been more than evidenced by Obama’s willingness to continue the looting of the American treasury, the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history. In the 17th century in England, speculators were hung. In our society they are given tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, and they run the government. Chris Hedges in conversation with Chris Lydon, October 8, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-10-19,25318047 Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:13:49 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25312490-Chris-Hedges-Requiem-for-the-Republic Chris Hedges is “Mr. Bad News” in our time, the obituary writer for our economy, our culture, our democracy, our media. When I got to the New York Times (some years before Chris Hedges) in the late Sixties, Alden Whitman had the bad news moniker, writing obits of great figures for the paper of record. When Alden Whitman knocked on your door for a long interview about your life, you were supposed to know it was almost over. It’s Chris Hedges’s gig now, observing all of us. After most of 20 years as a war correspondent with the Times, Chris Hedges in 2003 charged his paper and others with “shameful cheerleading” for the war in Iraq, and left to study up again on ancient history, theology and classic literature, and to write his own classic, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning . In his new jeremiad, Empire of Illusion , pro wrestling and pornography are the bookend spectacles in a parody culture all around us now — the grotesque joke represent... Chris Hedges is “Mr. Bad News” in our time, the obituary writer for our economy, our culture, our democracy, our media. When I got to the New York Times (some years before Chris Hedges) in the late Sixties, Alden Whitman had the bad news moniker, writing obits of great figures for the paper of record. When Alden Whitman knocked on your door for a long interview about your life, you were supposed to know it was almost over. It’s Chris Hedges’s gig now, observing all of us. After most of 20 years as a war correspondent with the Times, Chris Hedges in 2003 charged his paper and others with “shameful cheerleading” for the war in Iraq, and left to study up again on ancient history, theology and classic literature, and to write his own classic, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning . In his new jeremiad, Empire of Illusion , pro wrestling and pornography are the bookend spectacles in a parody culture all around us now — the grotesque joke representations of power and eros in the end times. I find these resonant arguments, from the rare daily-news ace who’s trained himself also in the long view: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Chris Hedges. (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3) To believe somehow that we are the culmination, that time is linear, that we are progressing morally, is to ignore human history and human nature, and essentially to remain in a state of infantilism. That’s what illusion is about. If we had an understanding of what the dying days, the twilight hours of great civilizations were like we would be able to see all the flashing lights, the warning signs around us. But I think that the illiteracy which has gripped the country (a third of this country is either illiterate, or is technically literate but doesn’t read anymore); that shift from a print based culture into an image based culture, the belief that how we are made to feel is a form of knowledge, propaganda being a kind of ideology — these are the hallmarks of a totalitarian state. Totalitarian states are image based, spectacle based states. We have set the ground for a seamless transfer from a democracy into a kind of corporate state. With the corporate state always comes the rise of the surveillance or the security state. We lack the capacity, having been unmoored from print, and relying on skillfully manipulated images, to fight back… We see it in the environmental crisis; we are literally destroying the ecosystem that sustains the human species; the gap widens between the illusion of the world we think we live in, and the reality of that world.  What you’ve done is render huge segments of the population into a kind of childishness which makes them emotionally, intellectually and psychologically unprepared for what it is they are about to face. They will react like all children, which is to reach out for demagogues who promise a new glory, vengeance and moral renewal. CL: What survives of American hegemony if in fact it’s over? CH: Well, it is over. We can’t continue to borrow, to sustain either a level of consumption or the empire that we demand. It’s just a question of when, and how do we respond. I don’t think learning to live without the piles of junk that have been bequeathed to us by consumer culture is going to impoverish our lifestyle. I don’t think that learning a new humility as empire is dismantled is a negative. We will have to learn another language other than the language of force by which we speak to most of the rest of the world, certainly those in the Middle East. It doesn’t necessarily mean the end of hope or a life of meaning or a life of richness; it just means a different kind of life. The danger is not grasping this reality. That’s the danger. if we’re not prepared for this reality, if we continue to live as the most delusional nation on the planet, than we we will end up like Yugoslavia. The war in Yugoslavia was caused by the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia — it vomited up figures like Slobodan Milosevic; the Weimar republic did the same; did the collapse of Czarist Russia… What remains? I think that unfortunately American culture (or cultures, for we once had many cultures with their own iconography and aesthetic, and a decentralized press that gave expression to local communities) was dismantled and destroyed in the 20th century and replaced with mass corporate culture… The drive of corporate culture was to implant the need for consumption as a kind of inner compulsion. Drawing on Freud, it was about manipulating people, appealing to subliminal desires and anxieties, often creating those anxieties, to fuel a kind of wild orgy of consumable products that were supposed to sort of ameliorate our alienation and atomization and loneliness and despair. And all of that is falling down around us. And yet we haven’t recognized that reality. It’s not unique. There’s that emotional incapacity to understand how fragile the world is around us and how rapidly it can disintegrate. I think having been a war correspondent, and having lived in societies that did disintegrate, I’m much more conscious. I can walk in my supermarket and imagine all the windows knocked out and the shelves bare and the neon lights hanging, because I’ve seen it. There’s that dual capacity to see how swiftly and quickly any society can collapse. CL: We elected a president who promised literally a kind of transformation. I don’t want to to argue Obama politics, so much as just to ask: is transformation an illusion? CH: Well, we elected a brand. We elected a presidential candidate who campaigned, like his rival, primarily on a personal narrative. You had rallies where people were chanting slogans like “yes we can,” which they stole by the way from FedEx-Kinko’s. It was campaign by experience: it was a very effective way of making us feel a certain way about a candidate. But Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state anymore than George W. Bush threatened the core of the corporate state.  That has been more than evidenced by Obama’s willingness to continue the looting of the American treasury, the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history. In the 17th century in England, speculators were hung. In our society they are given tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, and they run the government. Chris Hedges in conversation with Chris Lydon, October 8, 2009. Chris Hedges is “Mr. Bad News” in our time, the obituary writer for our economy, our culture, our democracy, our media. When I got to the New York Times (some years before Chris Hedges) in the late Sixties, Alden Whitman had the bad news moniker, writing obits of great figures for the paper of record. When Alden Whitman knocked on your door for a long interview about your life, you were supposed to know it was almost over. It’s Chris Hedges’s gig now, observing all of us. After most of 20 years as a war correspondent with the Times, Chris Hedges in 2003 charged his paper and others with “shameful cheerleading” for the war in Iraq, and left to study up again on ancient history, theology and classic literature, and to write his own classic, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning . In his new jeremiad, Empire of Illusion , pro wrestling and pornography are the bookend spectacles in a parody culture all around us now — the grotesque joke representations of power and eros in the end times. I find these resonant arguments, from the rare daily-news ace who’s trained himself also in the long view: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Chris Hedges. (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3) To believe somehow that we are the culmination, that time is linear, that we are progressing morally, is to ignore human history and human nature, and essentially to remain in a state of infantilism. That’s what illusion is about. If we had an understanding of what the dying days, the twilight hours of great civilizations were like we would be able to see all the flashing lights, the warning signs around us. But I think that the illiteracy which has gripped the country (a third of this country is either illiterate, or is technically literate but doesn’t read anymore); that shift from a print based culture into an image based culture, the belief that how we are made to feel is a form of knowledge, propaganda being a kind of ideology — these are the hallmarks of a totalitarian state. Totalitarian states are image based, spectacle based states. We have set the ground for a seamless transfer from a democracy into a kind of corporate state. With the corporate state always comes the rise of the surveillance or the security state. We lack the capacity, having been unmoored from print, and relying on skillfully manipulated images, to fight back… We see it in the environmental crisis; we are literally destroying the ecosystem that sustains the human species; the gap widens between the illusion of the world we think we live in, and the reality of that world.  What you’ve done is render huge segments of the population into a kind of childishness which makes them emotionally, intellectually and psychologically unprepared for what it is they are about to face. They will react like all children, which is to reach out for demagogues who promise a new glory, vengeance and moral renewal. CL: What survives of American hegemony if in fact it’s over? CH: Well, it is over. We can’t continue to borrow, to sustain either a level of consumption or the empire that we demand. It’s just a question of when, and how do we respond. I don’t think learning to live without the piles of junk that have been bequeathed to us by consumer culture is going to impoverish our lifestyle. I don’t think that learning a new humility as empire is dismantled is a negative. We will have to learn another language other than the language of force by which we speak to most of the rest of the world, certainly those in the Middle East. It doesn’t necessarily mean the end of hope or a life of meaning or a life of richness; it just means a different kind of life. The danger is not grasping this reality. That’s the danger. if we’re not prepared for this reality, if we continue to live as the most delusional nation on the planet, than we we will end up like Yugoslavia. The war in Yugoslavia was caused by the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia — it vomited up figures like Slobodan Milosevic; the Weimar republic did the same; did the collapse of Czarist Russia… What remains? I think that unfortunately American culture (or cultures, for we once had many cultures with their own iconography and aesthetic, and a decentralized press that gave expression to local communities) was dismantled and destroyed in the 20th century and replaced with mass corporate culture… The drive of corporate culture was to implant the need for consumption as a kind of inner compulsion. Drawing on Freud, it was about manipulating people, appealing to subliminal desires and anxieties, often creating those anxieties, to fuel a kind of wild orgy of consumable products that were supposed to sort of ameliorate our alienation and atomization and loneliness and despair. And all of that is falling down around us. And yet we haven’t recognized that reality. It’s not unique. There’s that emotional incapacity to understand how fragile the world is around us and how rapidly it can disintegrate. I think having been a war correspondent, and having lived in societies that did disintegrate, I’m much more conscious. I can walk in my supermarket and imagine all the windows knocked out and the shelves bare and the neon lights hanging, because I’ve seen it. There’s that dual capacity to see how swiftly and quickly any society can collapse. CL: We elected a president who promised literally a kind of transformation. I don’t want to to argue Obama politics, so much as just to ask: is transformation an illusion? CH: Well, we elected a brand. We elected a presidential candidate who campaigned, like his rival, primarily on a personal narrative. You had rallies where people were chanting slogans like “yes we can,” which they stole by the way from FedEx-Kinko’s. It was campaign by experience: it was a very effective way of making us feel a certain way about a candidate. But Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state anymore than George W. Bush threatened the core of the corporate state.  That has been more than evidenced by Obama’s willingness to continue the looting of the American treasury, the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history. In the 17th century in England, speculators were hung. In our society they are given tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, and they run the government. Chris Hedges in conversation with Chris Lydon, October 8, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-10-19,25312490 Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:13:49 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25298837-Whose-Words-These-Are-13-Michael-Ansara In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival , which pops into full bloom tomorrow (Saturday) in the city of Lowell, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Michael Ansara stands for the poet lurking in every one of us, and in this conversation he instructs us — revision by revision — how to liberate our inner Wordsworth. Once upon a Sixties time, Michael Ansara was a famous radical. When the boss of the Vietnam war, Robert McNamara was engulfed by hostile Harvard students in October, 1966, Michael Ansara at the head of SDS was ringleading the rebels. He followed his principles into a stormy career of political and union organizing, and he’s a ringleader still, of the second-annual Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Lowell this weekend. It turns out now he was reading serious poetry all his life and in his fifties decided to write some. In a poem titled “19 Weeks,” for example, he’s reflecting on an ultrasoun... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival , which pops into full bloom tomorrow (Saturday) in the city of Lowell, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Michael Ansara stands for the poet lurking in every one of us, and in this conversation he instructs us — revision by revision — how to liberate our inner Wordsworth. Once upon a Sixties time, Michael Ansara was a famous radical. When the boss of the Vietnam war, Robert McNamara was engulfed by hostile Harvard students in October, 1966, Michael Ansara at the head of SDS was ringleading the rebels. He followed his principles into a stormy career of political and union organizing, and he’s a ringleader still, of the second-annual Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Lowell this weekend. It turns out now he was reading serious poetry all his life and in his fifties decided to write some. In a poem titled “19 Weeks,” for example, he’s reflecting on an ultrasound picture of a grandchild in his daughter’s womb; and then he explains to you and me how he worked through Shakespeare and the Thesaurus and 50 or 60 rewrites before he felt he’d given birth to a poem: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Michael Ansara. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Q: Who is your favorite fictional character of all time? A: I would say, if I were being truthful, the protagonist whose name I cannot remember for you from The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie. Have you ever read that book? It is about mountain men in the 1840s. I think I have read it eight times. Q: Who do you think of, Michael, as kind of a doppelganger out there? Who does the work of your inner man in some other medium? A: I have always thought of Bruce Springsteen as a Walt Whitman of our time. I think it would be way too presumptuous but would I aspire to having Bruce as my doppelganger? You bet. And not just because of the crowds, but because of the music of his lyrics as well as his melodies. He tries hard to sing of America: of its people, its place, its soul, its torments, its virtues. Q: Think of a talent you’d love to have and don’t, yet? A: Music. I have been taking piano lessons for ten years now and I can no more play than I can fly. Q: What is the quality you look for in a poem, any poem? A: I would say it is several. One is music. I want it to sing; I want the lines to sing. The second is vividness of image and I want the image and the line to work with the music of the words so that you hear it in all ways. Q: When somebody spots you walking down the street who do they suppose you are? A: Some older gentleman. A little shaggy. A little rumpled. And a little out of place. Q: What do you think of as the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: The understanding that I have an enormous amount to learn. Striving with humility. And willing to work. Q: How do you want to die? A: I can only answer this way: what I want is to be at ease with dying. I am not. I would like to get there. I would like to die well: with a moment of grace. Q: What is your motto, Michael? A: “Work. Work. Work. And try, aspire, to be nice, to be gentle and to hope for some wisdom. In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival , which pops into full bloom tomorrow (Saturday) in the city of Lowell, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Michael Ansara stands for the poet lurking in every one of us, and in this conversation he instructs us — revision by revision — how to liberate our inner Wordsworth. Once upon a Sixties time, Michael Ansara was a famous radical. When the boss of the Vietnam war, Robert McNamara was engulfed by hostile Harvard students in October, 1966, Michael Ansara at the head of SDS was ringleading the rebels. He followed his principles into a stormy career of political and union organizing, and he’s a ringleader still, of the second-annual Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Lowell this weekend. It turns out now he was reading serious poetry all his life and in his fifties decided to write some. In a poem titled “19 Weeks,” for example, he’s reflecting on an ultrasound picture of a grandchild in his daughter’s womb; and then he explains to you and me how he worked through Shakespeare and the Thesaurus and 50 or 60 rewrites before he felt he’d given birth to a poem: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Michael Ansara. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Q: Who is your favorite fictional character of all time? A: I would say, if I were being truthful, the protagonist whose name I cannot remember for you from The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie. Have you ever read that book? It is about mountain men in the 1840s. I think I have read it eight times. Q: Who do you think of, Michael, as kind of a doppelganger out there? Who does the work of your inner man in some other medium? A: I have always thought of Bruce Springsteen as a Walt Whitman of our time. I think it would be way too presumptuous but would I aspire to having Bruce as my doppelganger? You bet. And not just because of the crowds, but because of the music of his lyrics as well as his melodies. He tries hard to sing of America: of its people, its place, its soul, its torments, its virtues. Q: Think of a talent you’d love to have and don’t, yet? A: Music. I have been taking piano lessons for ten years now and I can no more play than I can fly. Q: What is the quality you look for in a poem, any poem? A: I would say it is several. One is music. I want it to sing; I want the lines to sing. The second is vividness of image and I want the image and the line to work with the music of the words so that you hear it in all ways. Q: When somebody spots you walking down the street who do they suppose you are? A: Some older gentleman. A little shaggy. A little rumpled. And a little out of place. Q: What do you think of as the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: The understanding that I have an enormous amount to learn. Striving with humility. And willing to work. Q: How do you want to die? A: I can only answer this way: what I want is to be at ease with dying. I am not. I would like to get there. I would like to die well: with a moment of grace. Q: What is your motto, Michael? A: “Work. Work. Work. And try, aspire, to be nice, to be gentle and to hope for some wisdom. tag:odeo.com,2009-10-16,25298837 Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:51:50 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired, Whose Words These Are http://odeo.com/episodes/25296579-Whose-Words-These-Are-12-Teresa-Cader In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Teresa Cader used to think of herself as a child of Europe. Walt Whitman made her a poet and an American. Her father was an immigrant from Poland. Her mother’s side is Irish: “my great aunt looks like Seamus Heaney in a black funeral dress,” she has said. Growing up in Trenton, she read Latin and translated Beowulf, and then found in Leaves of Grass a way into her American consciousness. She lives now in Lexington, Massachusetts — a block from the first skirmish in the American Revolution. Her last published collection of poems, History of Hurricanes makes a link at one point between the civil rights movement in the States and the Solidarity movement in Poland, prompted by her visit to a club in Krakow playing James Brown, and by hearing her Polish friends sing all the verses of “We Shall Overcome.” So she is an American poet n... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Teresa Cader used to think of herself as a child of Europe. Walt Whitman made her a poet and an American. Her father was an immigrant from Poland. Her mother’s side is Irish: “my great aunt looks like Seamus Heaney in a black funeral dress,” she has said. Growing up in Trenton, she read Latin and translated Beowulf, and then found in Leaves of Grass a way into her American consciousness. She lives now in Lexington, Massachusetts — a block from the first skirmish in the American Revolution. Her last published collection of poems, History of Hurricanes makes a link at one point between the civil rights movement in the States and the Solidarity movement in Poland, prompted by her visit to a club in Krakow playing James Brown, and by hearing her Polish friends sing all the verses of “We Shall Overcome.” So she is an American poet now of history and the world, and a teacher of young poets at Leslie University in Cambridge. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Teresa Cader. (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Q: What do you learn in the schools? A: Students are hungry for a kind of emotional truth that they’re not getting; they’re hungry to integrate their feelings and their learning— they are hungry to have someone speak truth about life. They are hungry for poetry. Q: Who does your work in another medium? A: I really like sculpture. I get a visceral reaction to sculpture, everything going back to the Greeks, and Romans, the Italians: Donatello, Brancusi, Giacometti. I like the whimsy of Calder, and of people like Henry Moore. If I could have another life in a different medium, it would be sculpture. Q: What is the keynote of your poetry? A: I like to inhabit the mystery and the unknown. I like to push beyond what’s comfortable to a place where I don’t know where I am. Q: What is the talent you’d most love to have that you don’t, yet? A: I want to close the gap between my voice and the page. Q: What quality do you love in a poem? A: I need to be emotionally moved by a poem, though it should not set out to do so. I have a metaphysical sensibility. I look for the marriage between intellect and emotions. That is why I love [John] Donne and [Robert] Pinsky. Q: What is your motto? A: “Push beyond what you know. The process is where the discoveries happen. Trust it” In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Teresa Cader used to think of herself as a child of Europe. Walt Whitman made her a poet and an American. Her father was an immigrant from Poland. Her mother’s side is Irish: “my great aunt looks like Seamus Heaney in a black funeral dress,” she has said. Growing up in Trenton, she read Latin and translated Beowulf, and then found in Leaves of Grass a way into her American consciousness. She lives now in Lexington, Massachusetts — a block from the first skirmish in the American Revolution. Her last published collection of poems, History of Hurricanes makes a link at one point between the civil rights movement in the States and the Solidarity movement in Poland, prompted by her visit to a club in Krakow playing James Brown, and by hearing her Polish friends sing all the verses of “We Shall Overcome.” So she is an American poet now of history and the world, and a teacher of young poets at Leslie University in Cambridge. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Teresa Cader. (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Q: What do you learn in the schools? A: Students are hungry for a kind of emotional truth that they’re not getting; they’re hungry to integrate their feelings and their learning— they are hungry to have someone speak truth about life. They are hungry for poetry. Q: Who does your work in another medium? A: I really like sculpture. I get a visceral reaction to sculpture, everything going back to the Greeks, and Romans, the Italians: Donatello, Brancusi, Giacometti. I like the whimsy of Calder, and of people like Henry Moore. If I could have another life in a different medium, it would be sculpture. Q: What is the keynote of your poetry? A: I like to inhabit the mystery and the unknown. I like to push beyond what’s comfortable to a place where I don’t know where I am. Q: What is the talent you’d most love to have that you don’t, yet? A: I want to close the gap between my voice and the page. Q: What quality do you love in a poem? A: I need to be emotionally moved by a poem, though it should not set out to do so. I have a metaphysical sensibility. I look for the marriage between intellect and emotions. That is why I love [John] Donne and [Robert] Pinsky. Q: What is your motto? A: “Push beyond what you know. The process is where the discoveries happen. Trust it” tag:odeo.com,2009-10-16,25296579 Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:22:34 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired, Whose Words These Are http://odeo.com/episodes/25285848-Whose-Words-These-Are-11-Lloyd-Schwartz In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? You can hear it in Lloyd Schwartz’s reading of “Six Words” that he thought of being an actor. “Speech is his muse,” says his friend Robert Pinsky, noting the gifts that have brought vast affection and staying power to Lloyd and his work. There’s “observation of personality,” Pinsky remarked in a review of Goodnight, Gracie nearly 20 years ago. And “loving attention to homely turns of language, neglected as stray cats; a moral generosity that cannot be called ‘forgiving’ because it declines to condemn in the first place…” Lloyd Schwartz is self-consciously Americanist, a grateful child of Emily Dickinson, for twisting the rules; of Walt Whitman, for breaking them; of William Carlos Williams, for consolidating an “American” language; of Robert Frost, for... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? You can hear it in Lloyd Schwartz’s reading of “Six Words” that he thought of being an actor. “Speech is his muse,” says his friend Robert Pinsky, noting the gifts that have brought vast affection and staying power to Lloyd and his work. There’s “observation of personality,” Pinsky remarked in a review of Goodnight, Gracie nearly 20 years ago. And “loving attention to homely turns of language, neglected as stray cats; a moral generosity that cannot be called ‘forgiving’ because it declines to condemn in the first place…” Lloyd Schwartz is self-consciously Americanist, a grateful child of Emily Dickinson, for twisting the rules; of Walt Whitman, for breaking them; of William Carlos Williams, for consolidating an “American” language; of Robert Frost, for incorporating American speech into traditional forms; and most specially of Elizabeth Bishop, whose work he collected and edited for the Library of America. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Lloyd Schwartz. (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Q: Which talent would you like to have that you don’t, yet? A: I would be an actor. I was an actor for a while, that was my great ambition. And I miss it. That’s probably the reason that I still write monologues, character pieces. Q: Who is your ideal artist in another medium? A: Got to say Shakespeare, got to say Rembrandt. But also Vermeer. Q: How do people perceive you walking down the street? A: Some old guy with a lot of gray hair. People say that guy looks like a professor. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? A: I would like people to think honesty and a sense of humor. Q: What is the furthest subject of interest to you from your ability to write about it? A: Sports or science. Q: What is the quality you most love in a poem? A: Immediacy. I want to be moved. I want to be in the world that the poet is writing about; I want to be in the experience. Q: What is your motto? A: “I’m up for anything.” The “American” marks on his own poems, Lloyd has said, include “Cheekiness. Humor. Jokes. Perversity for perversity’s sake (that is, to write against the grain of assumptions about what poetry should be).” But can you also hear in his reading that Lloyd Schwartz is the keeper of Boston’s conscience in classical music? That he won the Pulitzer prize in 1994 for his music criticism in The Boston Phoenix? These People was Lloyd Schwartz’s first book of poetry in 1981. Then Goodnight, Gracie in 1992. He read to us at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop from his latest, Cairo Traffic (University of Chicago Press, 2000). In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? You can hear it in Lloyd Schwartz’s reading of “Six Words” that he thought of being an actor. “Speech is his muse,” says his friend Robert Pinsky, noting the gifts that have brought vast affection and staying power to Lloyd and his work. There’s “observation of personality,” Pinsky remarked in a review of Goodnight, Gracie nearly 20 years ago. And “loving attention to homely turns of language, neglected as stray cats; a moral generosity that cannot be called ‘forgiving’ because it declines to condemn in the first place…” Lloyd Schwartz is self-consciously Americanist, a grateful child of Emily Dickinson, for twisting the rules; of Walt Whitman, for breaking them; of William Carlos Williams, for consolidating an “American” language; of Robert Frost, for incorporating American speech into traditional forms; and most specially of Elizabeth Bishop, whose work he collected and edited for the Library of America. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Lloyd Schwartz. (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Q: Which talent would you like to have that you don’t, yet? A: I would be an actor. I was an actor for a while, that was my great ambition. And I miss it. That’s probably the reason that I still write monologues, character pieces. Q: Who is your ideal artist in another medium? A: Got to say Shakespeare, got to say Rembrandt. But also Vermeer. Q: How do people perceive you walking down the street? A: Some old guy with a lot of gray hair. People say that guy looks like a professor. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? A: I would like people to think honesty and a sense of humor. Q: What is the furthest subject of interest to you from your ability to write about it? A: Sports or science. Q: What is the quality you most love in a poem? A: Immediacy. I want to be moved. I want to be in the world that the poet is writing about; I want to be in the experience. Q: What is your motto? A: “I’m up for anything.” The “American” marks on his own poems, Lloyd has said, include “Cheekiness. Humor. Jokes. Perversity for perversity’s sake (that is, to write against the grain of assumptions about what poetry should be).” But can you also hear in his reading that Lloyd Schwartz is the keeper of Boston’s conscience in classical music? That he won the Pulitzer prize in 1994 for his music criticism in The Boston Phoenix? These People was Lloyd Schwartz’s first book of poetry in 1981. Then Goodnight, Gracie in 1992. He read to us at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop from his latest, Cairo Traffic (University of Chicago Press, 2000). tag:odeo.com,2009-10-14,25285848 Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:34:49 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25281706-Donald-Pease-Obama%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9CTransnational%E2%80%9D-Presidency Herman Melville, C. L. R. James & Donald Pease: deep dreams of America as the utopian world-nation Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Donald Pease. (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Re-read Moby-Dick and be cured of these absurd Nobel blues. The Nobel Peace Prize for Barack Obama underlines the world’s idea of our “transnational” President, our transnational country and our transnational moment. So does Moby-Dick, the mother of all literary imaginings of America in crisis. My teacher in conversation here is the Dartmouth analyst of novels and dreams, Donald Pease. His teacher in turn is the Caribbean prophet of post-colonialism and Melville commentator, the late great C. L. R. James (1901 – 1989). Joseph O’Neill, the post-11 novelist of cricket-in-New-York, Netherland gets invoked for his confirmation that the deepest dreams of humanity play themselves out in games, too. A modern key into Melville turns on seeing that the hero of his masterwo... Herman Melville, C. L. R. James & Donald Pease: deep dreams of America as the utopian world-nation Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Donald Pease. (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Re-read Moby-Dick and be cured of these absurd Nobel blues. The Nobel Peace Prize for Barack Obama underlines the world’s idea of our “transnational” President, our transnational country and our transnational moment. So does Moby-Dick, the mother of all literary imaginings of America in crisis. My teacher in conversation here is the Dartmouth analyst of novels and dreams, Donald Pease. His teacher in turn is the Caribbean prophet of post-colonialism and Melville commentator, the late great C. L. R. James (1901 – 1989). Joseph O’Neill, the post-11 novelist of cricket-in-New-York, Netherland gets invoked for his confirmation that the deepest dreams of humanity play themselves out in games, too. A modern key into Melville turns on seeing that the hero of his masterwork is not the narrator and only survivor Ishmael — that was “the Cold War reading.” Neither do the feckless New England mates Starbuck, Stubb and Flask come close to checking the mad totalitarian Ahab or saving the ship or the day. Rather it’s the motley, polyglot sailors and whale hunters, Melville’s “mariners, renegades and castaways,” who sense what’s going on and stand for an alternative. It’s the crew from every nation and corner of the world who are victims of the tale and the only heroes in it. They’re not just the most skillful seamen but “the most generous and magnificent human beings on board,” in C. L. R. James words. Above all it’s the South Sea pagan Queequeg who embodies the universal ideals of skill, brotherhood, courage, heart. Melville drew on that first and deepest dream of America, as a global utopia of transnationals — America as a trans-nation before it was a nation. Kansan-Kenyan-Hawaiian Barack Obama mined the same dream as a candidate. I was struck in the moment by how boldly, beamingly he put forth the basic premise in his campaign digression to Berlin in July ‘08, where a vast crowd cheered his self-introduction “as a citizen,” he said, “a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.” He was drawing on the dream of his father, whose father had been a cook and house servant to the British, until America “answered his prayer for a better life.” Obama was holding up a renewed dream of America not as world’s policeman, much less world ruler, but as the world’s story. Obama’s opposition picks up on the transnational theme, too, and turns it upside down. The rabid right feeds fantasies that Obama wasn’t even born here, that he’s a closet Muslim, an immigrant without papers, and/or a “soft terrorist,” a European implant or maybe a space alien. But the taunts surely say less about Obama than about the failed, fear-stricken voices that are reduced to nutbag versions of nativism and neo-imperialism. Donald Pease leads me to believe that’s what the Nobel Committee was saying, and celebrating from the world’s perspective: that America has found it voice of glory just in time to face the transnational catastrophes: war, hunger, environmental ruin. DP: Barack Obama is a man of dreams, a figure who solicits fantasy work. He knows how transpose waking dream work into a recognizable representation of a goal. So when Obama took the deepest American dream: that everyone can achieve prosperity–and said that I embody that, and then linked it to the deferred dream–the raisin in the sun, and then associated that with one of the most memorable of Sam Cooke’s songs–an anthem from the sixties, “A Change is Gonna Come,” he condensed all of those dream objects into a persona whereby he did not have to do anything except address the audience as you. “You.” However you project me, I will be that projection, that fantasy projection, for you. When he had done that, he was not defeatable. The Republicans ran a very savvy campaign: McCain constructed himself as a P.O.W from Viet Nam. He tried to erase Abu Ghraib from the American public consciousness by saying that he was the figure they did it to… He was working at the level of the dream figure. When they chose Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin became the equivalent of the pioneer mother. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan regressed the nation to colonial settlers in relation to the Indians. Sarah Palin was the ur-colonial mother who said she would willingly sacrifice not only the son who was already fighting in Iraq; she would sacrifice any child she bore in the name of the security of the homeland…” CL: Donald Pease, I thought you were a literary critic. It turns out you’re a psychoanalyst. DP: Literary critics are bed partners of psychoanalysts. You can’t be a decent literary critic without believing in the psyche… CL: You’re known as a champion of the “trend” in “American Studies” on campus toward the “transnational.” DP: The transnational is a fact of life. The disappearance of the Cold War enabled everybody to see that America was the node in a network of transnational relays, of economic circulation across the planet. Transnational is not a trend; it is an accurate description of the way this planet is in 2009. Barack Obama needs a global event—that is, an event that solicits the interest of everyone who is, as he puts it, a citizen of this planet—in order to connect his person with his vision. The problem with what happened with the Olympics, the reason that event was taken as such a terrible loss, was that he was supposed to be the transnational leader who would immediately solicit everyone’s agreement for whatever he asked. But he knew, or he should have known, that there were places in the Americas that needed the Olympics, both culturally and socially, much more than Chicago. What he needs now is an event that requires Obama as the figure who can respond to it responsibly. CL: Like what? DP: Part of it is linked now to the so-called green revolution. If and when he goes to China you will see, or I hope we will see, an event, an encounter take place, that will spell out the significance of every country across this globe living for the sake of the green revolution. The Chinese are right now embracing this as primarily a commercial venture but they are also embracing it as a planetary ideal. Obama shares that ideal, not just with the Chinese, but with everyone. That, I believe, can become the other face, the locus, of Obama. Herman Melville, C. L. R. James & Donald Pease: deep dreams of America as the utopian world-nation Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Donald Pease. (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Re-read Moby-Dick and be cured of these absurd Nobel blues. The Nobel Peace Prize for Barack Obama underlines the world’s idea of our “transnational” President, our transnational country and our transnational moment. So does Moby-Dick, the mother of all literary imaginings of America in crisis. My teacher in conversation here is the Dartmouth analyst of novels and dreams, Donald Pease. His teacher in turn is the Caribbean prophet of post-colonialism and Melville commentator, the late great C. L. R. James (1901 – 1989). Joseph O’Neill, the post-11 novelist of cricket-in-New-York, Netherland gets invoked for his confirmation that the deepest dreams of humanity play themselves out in games, too. A modern key into Melville turns on seeing that the hero of his masterwork is not the narrator and only survivor Ishmael — that was “the Cold War reading.” Neither do the feckless New England mates Starbuck, Stubb and Flask come close to checking the mad totalitarian Ahab or saving the ship or the day. Rather it’s the motley, polyglot sailors and whale hunters, Melville’s “mariners, renegades and castaways,” who sense what’s going on and stand for an alternative. It’s the crew from every nation and corner of the world who are victims of the tale and the only heroes in it. They’re not just the most skillful seamen but “the most generous and magnificent human beings on board,” in C. L. R. James words. Above all it’s the South Sea pagan Queequeg who embodies the universal ideals of skill, brotherhood, courage, heart. Melville drew on that first and deepest dream of America, as a global utopia of transnationals — America as a trans-nation before it was a nation. Kansan-Kenyan-Hawaiian Barack Obama mined the same dream as a candidate. I was struck in the moment by how boldly, beamingly he put forth the basic premise in his campaign digression to Berlin in July ‘08, where a vast crowd cheered his self-introduction “as a citizen,” he said, “a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.” He was drawing on the dream of his father, whose father had been a cook and house servant to the British, until America “answered his prayer for a better life.” Obama was holding up a renewed dream of America not as world’s policeman, much less world ruler, but as the world’s story. Obama’s opposition picks up on the transnational theme, too, and turns it upside down. The rabid right feeds fantasies that Obama wasn’t even born here, that he’s a closet Muslim, an immigrant without papers, and/or a “soft terrorist,” a European implant or maybe a space alien. But the taunts surely say less about Obama than about the failed, fear-stricken voices that are reduced to nutbag versions of nativism and neo-imperialism. Donald Pease leads me to believe that’s what the Nobel Committee was saying, and celebrating from the world’s perspective: that America has found it voice of glory just in time to face the transnational catastrophes: war, hunger, environmental ruin. DP: Barack Obama is a man of dreams, a figure who solicits fantasy work. He knows how transpose waking dream work into a recognizable representation of a goal. So when Obama took the deepest American dream: that everyone can achieve prosperity–and said that I embody that, and then linked it to the deferred dream–the raisin in the sun, and then associated that with one of the most memorable of Sam Cooke’s songs–an anthem from the sixties, “A Change is Gonna Come,” he condensed all of those dream objects into a persona whereby he did not have to do anything except address the audience as you. “You.” However you project me, I will be that projection, that fantasy projection, for you. When he had done that, he was not defeatable. The Republicans ran a very savvy campaign: McCain constructed himself as a P.O.W from Viet Nam. He tried to erase Abu Ghraib from the American public consciousness by saying that he was the figure they did it to… He was working at the level of the dream figure. When they chose Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin became the equivalent of the pioneer mother. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan regressed the nation to colonial settlers in relation to the Indians. Sarah Palin was the ur-colonial mother who said she would willingly sacrifice not only the son who was already fighting in Iraq; she would sacrifice any child she bore in the name of the security of the homeland…” CL: Donald Pease, I thought you were a literary critic. It turns out you’re a psychoanalyst. DP: Literary critics are bed partners of psychoanalysts. You can’t be a decent literary critic without believing in the psyche… CL: You’re known as a champion of the “trend” in “American Studies” on campus toward the “transnational.” DP: The transnational is a fact of life. The disappearance of the Cold War enabled everybody to see that America was the node in a network of transnational relays, of economic circulation across the planet. Transnational is not a trend; it is an accurate description of the way this planet is in 2009. Barack Obama needs a global event—that is, an event that solicits the interest of everyone who is, as he puts it, a citizen of this planet—in order to connect his person with his vision. The problem with what happened with the Olympics, the reason that event was taken as such a terrible loss, was that he was supposed to be the transnational leader who would immediately solicit everyone’s agreement for whatever he asked. But he knew, or he should have known, that there were places in the Americas that needed the Olympics, both culturally and socially, much more than Chicago. What he needs now is an event that requires Obama as the figure who can respond to it responsibly. CL: Like what? DP: Part of it is linked now to the so-called green revolution. If and when he goes to China you will see, or I hope we will see, an event, an encounter take place, that will spell out the significance of every country across this globe living for the sake of the green revolution. The Chinese are right now embracing this as primarily a commercial venture but they are also embracing it as a planetary ideal. Obama shares that ideal, not just with the Chinese, but with everyone. That, I believe, can become the other face, the locus, of Obama. tag:odeo.com,2009-10-13,25281706 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:17:50 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25261014-Whose-Words-These-Are-10-Stephen-Burt In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Stephen Burt makes you think of Samuel Johnson and also “The Simpsons.” If Harold Bloom were a precocious thirty-something again, if he loved science fiction and underground rock ‘n’ roll, if he wrote for American newspapers as well as the great London reviews, if he kept blogs on contemporary poetry and separately on his family life, mightn’t he sound something like this? Tenured and popular at Harvard, boyish Steve Burt seems to have read and formed a strong opinion on everything in print, in the same way Alex Ross of the New Yorker and The Rest is Noise seems to have heard and pronounced on every measure of music. Burt also writes a lot of poetry — a lot of it playful, like Kermit the Frog’s “Self Portrait as Felt Amphibian,” but aiming also at a civic note, even a political vision as... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Stephen Burt makes you think of Samuel Johnson and also “The Simpsons.” If Harold Bloom were a precocious thirty-something again, if he loved science fiction and underground rock ‘n’ roll, if he wrote for American newspapers as well as the great London reviews, if he kept blogs on contemporary poetry and separately on his family life, mightn’t he sound something like this? Tenured and popular at Harvard, boyish Steve Burt seems to have read and formed a strong opinion on everything in print, in the same way Alex Ross of the New Yorker and The Rest is Noise seems to have heard and pronounced on every measure of music. Burt also writes a lot of poetry — a lot of it playful, like Kermit the Frog’s “Self Portrait as Felt Amphibian,” but aiming also at a civic note, even a political vision as poets like Yeats and Lowell once did. In conversation at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, Steve Burt called his own sensibility more “modern” than “post-modern.” It’s the modernist attitude, he says, that “if we read well enough, if we make our art good enough” we might yet resolve some of the fear and disquiet of our times. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Stephen Burt. (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Q: Who is your all time favorite character in fiction? A: Can I give you a list of finalists? Clarissa Dalloway. The older women in James Tiptree’s Brightness Falls from the Air . The computer programmer in Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 . Barry in Lorrie Moore’s Frog Hospital . Dorothea Casaubon née Brooke is quite hard to forget when you’ve read Middlemarch. Theophrastus Such, the wiser-than-you voice of George Eliot in her essays. Q: Which three poems would you take to a desert island? A: “Sphere” by A.R. Ammons. “Paradise Lost” and I hope it would come with “Paradise Regained.” John Ashbery’s “Three Poems.” Q: What is the talent you’d most love to have that you don’t, yet? A: I would like to be a competent rock drummer. Peter Prescott from the Volcano Suns, maybe. Q: Who is doing Steve Burt’s work in another medium, perhaps in another century entirely? A: If I am doing what I want to do when I write about poetry for relatively large, rather than scholarly audiences, then I am doing something remotely like what Douglas Wolk has been doing for graphic novels and comic books, and what Alex Ross has been doing for composed music. Q: What is the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: I am the last person who would know… I’d want people to see a man writing poems that are clearly unlike one another and yet are all thoughtful and all sound like him. Q: When you walk down the street who do people think you are? A: Someone who is picking up his little guy. Someone who has either a three and a half year old next to me or a backpack full of books. Q: What quality do you love in a poem? A: Abandon, wild nuttiness, something that’s not already been done. Helen Vendler reminds you that poems want to be unklike one another. Q: What is your motto? A: “I’m not sure.” That’s the motto. Stephen’s new book of poems is Parallel Play ; he has published two other volumes, Close Calls with Nonsense and The Forms of Youth . In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Stephen Burt makes you think of Samuel Johnson and also “The Simpsons.” If Harold Bloom were a precocious thirty-something again, if he loved science fiction and underground rock ‘n’ roll, if he wrote for American newspapers as well as the great London reviews, if he kept blogs on contemporary poetry and separately on his family life, mightn’t he sound something like this? Tenured and popular at Harvard, boyish Steve Burt seems to have read and formed a strong opinion on everything in print, in the same way Alex Ross of the New Yorker and The Rest is Noise seems to have heard and pronounced on every measure of music. Burt also writes a lot of poetry — a lot of it playful, like Kermit the Frog’s “Self Portrait as Felt Amphibian,” but aiming also at a civic note, even a political vision as poets like Yeats and Lowell once did. In conversation at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, Steve Burt called his own sensibility more “modern” than “post-modern.” It’s the modernist attitude, he says, that “if we read well enough, if we make our art good enough” we might yet resolve some of the fear and disquiet of our times. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Stephen Burt. (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Q: Who is your all time favorite character in fiction? A: Can I give you a list of finalists? Clarissa Dalloway. The older women in James Tiptree’s Brightness Falls from the Air . The computer programmer in Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 . Barry in Lorrie Moore’s Frog Hospital . Dorothea Casaubon née Brooke is quite hard to forget when you’ve read Middlemarch. Theophrastus Such, the wiser-than-you voice of George Eliot in her essays. Q: Which three poems would you take to a desert island? A: “Sphere” by A.R. Ammons. “Paradise Lost” and I hope it would come with “Paradise Regained.” John Ashbery’s “Three Poems.” Q: What is the talent you’d most love to have that you don’t, yet? A: I would like to be a competent rock drummer. Peter Prescott from the Volcano Suns, maybe. Q: Who is doing Steve Burt’s work in another medium, perhaps in another century entirely? A: If I am doing what I want to do when I write about poetry for relatively large, rather than scholarly audiences, then I am doing something remotely like what Douglas Wolk has been doing for graphic novels and comic books, and what Alex Ross has been doing for composed music. Q: What is the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: I am the last person who would know… I’d want people to see a man writing poems that are clearly unlike one another and yet are all thoughtful and all sound like him. Q: When you walk down the street who do people think you are? A: Someone who is picking up his little guy. Someone who has either a three and a half year old next to me or a backpack full of books. Q: What quality do you love in a poem? A: Abandon, wild nuttiness, something that’s not already been done. Helen Vendler reminds you that poems want to be unklike one another. Q: What is your motto? A: “I’m not sure.” That’s the motto. Stephen’s new book of poems is Parallel Play ; he has published two other volumes, Close Calls with Nonsense and The Forms of Youth . tag:odeo.com,2009-10-09,25261014 Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:45:35 -0700 no Open Source Shows http://odeo.com/episodes/25251178-Whose-Words-These-Are-9-Sarah-Kay In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Before she could write, spoken word poet Sarah Kay began dictating poems to her mother. Today, at 21, Sarah has become a successful, artful practitioner of spoken word. Sarah’s poem “Hands,” rocketed her to 18-year-old fame when it, and she, were featured on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam . Sarah is a senior at Brown now, a teacher of spoken-work poetry at Hope High School in Providence, and a coach of students of all ages. She founded Project V.O.I.C.E. to encourage teenagers toward creative self-expression. She tell us how her own voice is the product of a Japanese American mother, a Brooklynese photographer father, of New York City and the influence of “page poets” ranging from William Carlos Williams and Adrienne Rich to Rumi. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Sarah Kay. (44 minutes, 20 mb m... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Before she could write, spoken word poet Sarah Kay began dictating poems to her mother. Today, at 21, Sarah has become a successful, artful practitioner of spoken word. Sarah’s poem “Hands,” rocketed her to 18-year-old fame when it, and she, were featured on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam . Sarah is a senior at Brown now, a teacher of spoken-work poetry at Hope High School in Providence, and a coach of students of all ages. She founded Project V.O.I.C.E. to encourage teenagers toward creative self-expression. She tell us how her own voice is the product of a Japanese American mother, a Brooklynese photographer father, of New York City and the influence of “page poets” ranging from William Carlos Williams and Adrienne Rich to Rumi. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Sarah Kay. (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Q: What were the poems that made you want to write poetry, and told you you could, or had to? A: In the page world: William Carlos Williams, Rumi, Wislawa Szymborska, Adrienne Rich, Billy Collins — all over the map, really. In the spoken world: Taylor Mali, Buddy Wakefield, Rives, Anis Mojgani, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz. Q: Which talent would you like to have that you don’t, yet? A: A thicker skin. I don’t know if that counts as a talent. I would love to be athletic, which I am utterly not. Q: Who’s your favorite character of all time in fiction? A: Does Winnie the Pooh count? My favorite book, my favorite piece of fiction is 100 Years in Solitude. That’s the only book that I have memorized the first line of the book: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums? A: My father is a photographer; he and I share a love of finding the moment and trying to capture it. He does it visually, I do it with words. I love Renee Magritte. I think that his work is very playful and often dark, but also he’s very concrete. He uses things that I can see and recognize and feel, and that’s something I try to do. There’s a filmmaker named Wong Kar-wai, from Hong Kong, who made the film In the Mood for Love, and 2046. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? A: There’s a saying which is “write what you know” and I was taught “don’t write what you know, write what you don’t know and are trying to figure out.” For that reason, it comes from a very personal place. Q: What quality do you look for and love in a poem? A: I love a good ending — if you have a killer last line, that’s really something. Q: What’s your motto? A: “Say Thank You.” Hear more of Sarah Kay’s poetry here. In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Before she could write, spoken word poet Sarah Kay began dictating poems to her mother. Today, at 21, Sarah has become a successful, artful practitioner of spoken word. Sarah’s poem “Hands,” rocketed her to 18-year-old fame when it, and she, were featured on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam . Sarah is a senior at Brown now, a teacher of spoken-work poetry at Hope High School in Providence, and a coach of students of all ages. She founded Project V.O.I.C.E. to encourage teenagers toward creative self-expression. She tell us how her own voice is the product of a Japanese American mother, a Brooklynese photographer father, of New York City and the influence of “page poets” ranging from William Carlos Williams and Adrienne Rich to Rumi. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Sarah Kay. (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Q: What were the poems that made you want to write poetry, and told you you could, or had to? A: In the page world: William Carlos Williams, Rumi, Wislawa Szymborska, Adrienne Rich, Billy Collins — all over the map, really. In the spoken world: Taylor Mali, Buddy Wakefield, Rives, Anis Mojgani, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz. Q: Which talent would you like to have that you don’t, yet? A: A thicker skin. I don’t know if that counts as a talent. I would love to be athletic, which I am utterly not. Q: Who’s your favorite character of all time in fiction? A: Does Winnie the Pooh count? My favorite book, my favorite piece of fiction is 100 Years in Solitude. That’s the only book that I have memorized the first line of the book: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums? A: My father is a photographer; he and I share a love of finding the moment and trying to capture it. He does it visually, I do it with words. I love Renee Magritte. I think that his work is very playful and often dark, but also he’s very concrete. He uses things that I can see and recognize and feel, and that’s something I try to do. There’s a filmmaker named Wong Kar-wai, from Hong Kong, who made the film In the Mood for Love, and 2046. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? A: There’s a saying which is “write what you know” and I was taught “don’t write what you know, write what you don’t know and are trying to figure out.” For that reason, it comes from a very personal place. Q: What quality do you look for and love in a poem? A: I love a good ending — if you have a killer last line, that’s really something. Q: What’s your motto? A: “Say Thank You.” Hear more of Sarah Kay’s poetry here. tag:odeo.com,2009-10-07,25251178 Wed, 07 Oct 2009 19:30:21 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25245532-Whose-Words-These-Are-8-Rosanna-Warren In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Rosanna Warren says it’s a tremendous relief to meet people who know her work and don’t know that she’s the daughter of the triple-threat poet, critic and novelist Robert Penn Warren (1905 – 1989). He was a Kentuckian, and a Louisianan by virtue of his masterpiece, All The King’s Men. But Rosanna is also a Parisian, a child of the lycee, of European languages and the classical tradition going back through her early favorites, Blake, Tennyson and Housman, to Sappho, Catullus, Horace and Virgil. Antiquarianism is not her interest, but rather the fierce modernizing agony of fitting experience to architecture. “Yes,” she insists in conversation, “I think of poetry in a violent way. I want to pull out an animal’s heart while it is still beating!” The poetry she reads to us is filled with near violent conflict... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Rosanna Warren says it’s a tremendous relief to meet people who know her work and don’t know that she’s the daughter of the triple-threat poet, critic and novelist Robert Penn Warren (1905 – 1989). He was a Kentuckian, and a Louisianan by virtue of his masterpiece, All The King’s Men. But Rosanna is also a Parisian, a child of the lycee, of European languages and the classical tradition going back through her early favorites, Blake, Tennyson and Housman, to Sappho, Catullus, Horace and Virgil. Antiquarianism is not her interest, but rather the fierce modernizing agony of fitting experience to architecture. “Yes,” she insists in conversation, “I think of poetry in a violent way. I want to pull out an animal’s heart while it is still beating!” The poetry she reads to us is filled with near violent conflicts: tenderness and rage, restriction and explosion, stress and death. She speaks, she says, to the agonies and confusions of a flailing, failing American empire. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rosanna Warren. (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3) Q: What were the poems that made you want to write poetry, and told you you could, or had to? A: The poems I grew up on: Blake, Tennyson and Housman. I remember being at home alone and almost at random taking down a volume of Poe. I read “Annabel Lee” lying down on my tummy in the library. This was the first time no one had given me a poem and I wanted so badly to have it—memorize it, dance to it. It felt like a theft. Q: Which talent would you like to have that you don’t? A: I’d love to be able to ride a horse, really well, bareback. Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums? A: Matisse. He was bringing to the two-dimensional canvas a three-dimensional awareness, he is making wholeness on a flat surface. I’m not even speaking of his extraordinary sense of color, in which he is, I believe, unrivaled: a gray by Matisse is a work of genius, let alone his reds. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? A: Stress. And that’s a metrical term, too, the word for accent. To me poetry is a highly stressful formal response to life, which I regard as highly stressful. Q: What is the state of the art, in our time? A: I think it’s exciting. I do think it’s international — I read greedily poetry from Ireland, from England, from the Caribbean, from North America. The heterogeneity of what’s being composed is quite thrilling. Q: How do people perceive you walking down the street? A: I imagine that I am perceived as a slightly vague-looking middle-aged matron trying to look respectable. Q: What quality do you look for and love in a poem? A: Drama. Q: How would you like to die? A: Painlessly. I’m a coward. Q: Who’s the audience in your head as you write? A: My first intimate sounding boards are the poets I love from the past. So, Sappho, Catullus, Baudelaire, Hardy… I just imagine what sonar my poems would send of to them, to their poems. Q: What’s your motto? A: “To write in the light of death.” In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Rosanna Warren says it’s a tremendous relief to meet people who know her work and don’t know that she’s the daughter of the triple-threat poet, critic and novelist Robert Penn Warren (1905 – 1989). He was a Kentuckian, and a Louisianan by virtue of his masterpiece, All The King’s Men. But Rosanna is also a Parisian, a child of the lycee, of European languages and the classical tradition going back through her early favorites, Blake, Tennyson and Housman, to Sappho, Catullus, Horace and Virgil. Antiquarianism is not her interest, but rather the fierce modernizing agony of fitting experience to architecture. “Yes,” she insists in conversation, “I think of poetry in a violent way. I want to pull out an animal’s heart while it is still beating!” The poetry she reads to us is filled with near violent conflicts: tenderness and rage, restriction and explosion, stress and death. She speaks, she says, to the agonies and confusions of a flailing, failing American empire. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rosanna Warren. (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3) Q: What were the poems that made you want to write poetry, and told you you could, or had to? A: The poems I grew up on: Blake, Tennyson and Housman. I remember being at home alone and almost at random taking down a volume of Poe. I read “Annabel Lee” lying down on my tummy in the library. This was the first time no one had given me a poem and I wanted so badly to have it—memorize it, dance to it. It felt like a theft. Q: Which talent would you like to have that you don’t? A: I’d love to be able to ride a horse, really well, bareback. Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums? A: Matisse. He was bringing to the two-dimensional canvas a three-dimensional awareness, he is making wholeness on a flat surface. I’m not even speaking of his extraordinary sense of color, in which he is, I believe, unrivaled: a gray by Matisse is a work of genius, let alone his reds. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? A: Stress. And that’s a metrical term, too, the word for accent. To me poetry is a highly stressful formal response to life, which I regard as highly stressful. Q: What is the state of the art, in our time? A: I think it’s exciting. I do think it’s international — I read greedily poetry from Ireland, from England, from the Caribbean, from North America. The heterogeneity of what’s being composed is quite thrilling. Q: How do people perceive you walking down the street? A: I imagine that I am perceived as a slightly vague-looking middle-aged matron trying to look respectable. Q: What quality do you look for and love in a poem? A: Drama. Q: How would you like to die? A: Painlessly. I’m a coward. Q: Who’s the audience in your head as you write? A: My first intimate sounding boards are the poets I love from the past. So, Sappho, Catullus, Baudelaire, Hardy… I just imagine what sonar my poems would send of to them, to their poems. Q: What’s your motto? A: “To write in the light of death.” tag:odeo.com,2009-10-06,25245532 Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:04:08 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25239127-Whose-Words-These-Are-7-Vendler%E2%80%99s-Stevens What is it about Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955), that such a variety of our contemporaries speak of an attachment that does not hang on “meaning”? Ask who or what drew them to poetry and, over and over, the answer is: Wallace Stevens. Typically it was long before they quite knew what he was up to. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Helen Vendler. (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Helen Vendler, the eminent “close reader,” gifts us here in her Harvard office with a short course on her “closest” poet. Her cool sage of Hartford was a Harvard-educated lawyer and vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He was an aloof patrician and sometimes pugnacious martini drinker. In private life he was a discreetly, resolutely unhappy husband; he was a post-religious modernist who seems to have reversed field and chosen a Catholic baptism on his deathbed. It’s a big clue, I think, that Wallace Stevens was a museum goer who ... What is it about Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955), that such a variety of our contemporaries speak of an attachment that does not hang on “meaning”? Ask who or what drew them to poetry and, over and over, the answer is: Wallace Stevens. Typically it was long before they quite knew what he was up to. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Helen Vendler. (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Helen Vendler, the eminent “close reader,” gifts us here in her Harvard office with a short course on her “closest” poet. Her cool sage of Hartford was a Harvard-educated lawyer and vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He was an aloof patrician and sometimes pugnacious martini drinker. In private life he was a discreetly, resolutely unhappy husband; he was a post-religious modernist who seems to have reversed field and chosen a Catholic baptism on his deathbed. It’s a big clue, I think, that Wallace Stevens was a museum goer who loved the formal near-abstractions of the Swiss painter Paul Klee (1879 – 1940). Stevens was himself a “cubist” inventor of his own forms in poetry, as in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” He was a fine jeweler in immortal phrases: “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.” “Death is the mother of beauty.” “We say God and the imagination are one.” And he was a genius not least in his unforgettable titles, like “The Auroras of Autumn” and “Tea at the Palace of Hoon.” He was a poet of ideas who, according to his friend the composer John Gruen, “told me that he didn’t know what his poetry meant at times, that he really had to think hard as to what he meant by that image or that phrase or that word, even.” I asked Professor Vendler to do as she did with William Butler Yeats last year: take a few of the Stevens poems she loves and talk about them, as the spirit led her. The poems turned out to be “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man,” “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” and “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself.” Helen Vendler makes it all clear, but not too clear. Shouldn’t Stevens be taken as proof of the wisdom that poetry can communicate before it is understood? Or, as he wrote in many different ways: that imagination goes ahead of reason. And still, the great Vendler has answered our question: HV: He is a great poet of Modernity and of American-ness. Eliot and Pound tried to turn themselves into European poets. Even Frost had to go to London to be published. I mean nobody was going to publish him in this country. They felt repudiated by the indifference to poetry that this country has always shown. It was connected, with the other arts, to an elite tradition and seemed to be the decadent occupation of aristocrats instead of something practical Americans should engage in. That was true of music, of course, as well. I was told it took a full vote of the board of trustees at Swarthmore in 1879 or something to allow a piano on campus. It was that severe.   CL: It’s true of jazz, too. Duke Ellington was not taken seriously until he went to London in the 30s.   HV: You couldn’t get an audience for native American productions, except at the popular level, but not at the reflective level, which Stevens is occupying. It was true of novelists too… Like Faulkner, Stevens stayed home, and thought of it as part of his duty to become a poet of America and not to give up on America and go over to London or Paris or wherever else there was to go, Sao Paolo. So that I think that’s one reason why he seems so attractive to contemporary poets, because he took on what they’re taking on. You really can’t be an Anglophile poet any longer, or go and live in Paris and think you can write from there as an American. Of course it could be done; anyone can go anywhere and do wonderful work. But the impulse now is to try to create an American art that can be viable on its own terms. He and Faulkner are the two big examples of that. Helen Vendler with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 1, 2009.   What is it about Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955), that such a variety of our contemporaries speak of an attachment that does not hang on “meaning”? Ask who or what drew them to poetry and, over and over, the answer is: Wallace Stevens. Typically it was long before they quite knew what he was up to. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Helen Vendler. (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Helen Vendler, the eminent “close reader,” gifts us here in her Harvard office with a short course on her “closest” poet. Her cool sage of Hartford was a Harvard-educated lawyer and vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He was an aloof patrician and sometimes pugnacious martini drinker. In private life he was a discreetly, resolutely unhappy husband; he was a post-religious modernist who seems to have reversed field and chosen a Catholic baptism on his deathbed. It’s a big clue, I think, that Wallace Stevens was a museum goer who loved the formal near-abstractions of the Swiss painter Paul Klee (1879 – 1940). Stevens was himself a “cubist” inventor of his own forms in poetry, as in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” He was a fine jeweler in immortal phrases: “The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.” “Death is the mother of beauty.” “We say God and the imagination are one.” And he was a genius not least in his unforgettable titles, like “The Auroras of Autumn” and “Tea at the Palace of Hoon.” He was a poet of ideas who, according to his friend the composer John Gruen, “told me that he didn’t know what his poetry meant at times, that he really had to think hard as to what he meant by that image or that phrase or that word, even.” I asked Professor Vendler to do as she did with William Butler Yeats last year: take a few of the Stevens poems she loves and talk about them, as the spirit led her. The poems turned out to be “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man,” “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” and “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself.” Helen Vendler makes it all clear, but not too clear. Shouldn’t Stevens be taken as proof of the wisdom that poetry can communicate before it is understood? Or, as he wrote in many different ways: that imagination goes ahead of reason. And still, the great Vendler has answered our question: HV: He is a great poet of Modernity and of American-ness. Eliot and Pound tried to turn themselves into European poets. Even Frost had to go to London to be published. I mean nobody was going to publish him in this country. They felt repudiated by the indifference to poetry that this country has always shown. It was connected, with the other arts, to an elite tradition and seemed to be the decadent occupation of aristocrats instead of something practical Americans should engage in. That was true of music, of course, as well. I was told it took a full vote of the board of trustees at Swarthmore in 1879 or something to allow a piano on campus. It was that severe.   CL: It’s true of jazz, too. Duke Ellington was not taken seriously until he went to London in the 30s.   HV: You couldn’t get an audience for native American productions, except at the popular level, but not at the reflective level, which Stevens is occupying. It was true of novelists too… Like Faulkner, Stevens stayed home, and thought of it as part of his duty to become a poet of America and not to give up on America and go over to London or Paris or wherever else there was to go, Sao Paolo. So that I think that’s one reason why he seems so attractive to contemporary poets, because he took on what they’re taking on. You really can’t be an Anglophile poet any longer, or go and live in Paris and think you can write from there as an American. Of course it could be done; anyone can go anywhere and do wonderful work. But the impulse now is to try to create an American art that can be viable on its own terms. He and Faulkner are the two big examples of that. Helen Vendler with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 1, 2009.   tag:odeo.com,2009-10-05,25239127 Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:03:05 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25221790-Whose-Words-These-Are-6-Ron-Slate In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Ron Slate is the poet who flies business class. He’s also the corporate strategist of darting eye and allusive readings with nothing of the boardroom or the brochure about himself or his language. Wallace Stevens was his heroic poet in college and his Olympian model of the New England business burgher who writes, gorgeously. He remembers, too, an aphorism from the late Amherst poet, Robert Francis, who said: “it’s not for me to save poetry; it’s for poetry to save me.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ron Slate. (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Ron Slate took James Tate’s seminar at UMass Amherst. In mid-life he became a student again with Louise Gluck, and found a teacher, editor and champion. In his books — The Incentive of the Maggot , at age 55, in 2004, and his second, The Great Wave this year — and in... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Ron Slate is the poet who flies business class. He’s also the corporate strategist of darting eye and allusive readings with nothing of the boardroom or the brochure about himself or his language. Wallace Stevens was his heroic poet in college and his Olympian model of the New England business burgher who writes, gorgeously. He remembers, too, an aphorism from the late Amherst poet, Robert Francis, who said: “it’s not for me to save poetry; it’s for poetry to save me.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ron Slate. (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Ron Slate took James Tate’s seminar at UMass Amherst. In mid-life he became a student again with Louise Gluck, and found a teacher, editor and champion. In his books — The Incentive of the Maggot , at age 55, in 2004, and his second, The Great Wave this year — and in his reading for us, Ron Slate is an inquiring man of the world in the global marketplace of technology and culture. His poem “Coconut Grove” is a self-conscious reconsideration of his family history of the infamous Boston nighclub fire in 1942. Ron’s website, On the Seawall, is a mainstay of the contemporary poetry world, graced by his own close readings of essays and literary fiction as well as new poetry. Q: Which poem got you started? A: Wallace Stevens is my touchstone. Jim Tate came in one day and read Stevens’ “The Man on the Dump”. Recited it. I said: that’s what I want to do. I want to be able to be with people and use this kind of language to get them agitated. Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums? A: In photography: Walker Evans. He gives you that sense of this pure vision of humanity and the images themselves are very rich. And Robert Frank. With him, you get that, but you also get the energy of his eye. When he shoots the city, not only is it in motion, he seems to know where it is headed. In music: I’m a drummer who always wanted to be a piano player. Astor Piazzolla, who created the new tango music. Ennio Morricone, who writes music for the movies. Q: What’s the quality you love in a poem? A: The feeling of unresolved conflict: a clash of forces that is becoming apparent as you move through the poem. When you get to the end of the poem, you are vibrating with that sense of unfinished business. The poem keeps on going, because the thought keeps on going. There isn’t closure, and yet formally, the poem ends. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? A: Nervous uncertainty. Q: What talent do you covet that you don’t have, yet? A: I wish I could swim. I’m not very buoyant. Q: What’s your motto? A: “We do what we want.” The fact is I don’t want to dive into water, and that’s why I don’t swim. In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Ron Slate is the poet who flies business class. He’s also the corporate strategist of darting eye and allusive readings with nothing of the boardroom or the brochure about himself or his language. Wallace Stevens was his heroic poet in college and his Olympian model of the New England business burgher who writes, gorgeously. He remembers, too, an aphorism from the late Amherst poet, Robert Francis, who said: “it’s not for me to save poetry; it’s for poetry to save me.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ron Slate. (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Ron Slate took James Tate’s seminar at UMass Amherst. In mid-life he became a student again with Louise Gluck, and found a teacher, editor and champion. In his books — The Incentive of the Maggot , at age 55, in 2004, and his second, The Great Wave this year — and in his reading for us, Ron Slate is an inquiring man of the world in the global marketplace of technology and culture. His poem “Coconut Grove” is a self-conscious reconsideration of his family history of the infamous Boston nighclub fire in 1942. Ron’s website, On the Seawall, is a mainstay of the contemporary poetry world, graced by his own close readings of essays and literary fiction as well as new poetry. Q: Which poem got you started? A: Wallace Stevens is my touchstone. Jim Tate came in one day and read Stevens’ “The Man on the Dump”. Recited it. I said: that’s what I want to do. I want to be able to be with people and use this kind of language to get them agitated. Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums? A: In photography: Walker Evans. He gives you that sense of this pure vision of humanity and the images themselves are very rich. And Robert Frank. With him, you get that, but you also get the energy of his eye. When he shoots the city, not only is it in motion, he seems to know where it is headed. In music: I’m a drummer who always wanted to be a piano player. Astor Piazzolla, who created the new tango music. Ennio Morricone, who writes music for the movies. Q: What’s the quality you love in a poem? A: The feeling of unresolved conflict: a clash of forces that is becoming apparent as you move through the poem. When you get to the end of the poem, you are vibrating with that sense of unfinished business. The poem keeps on going, because the thought keeps on going. There isn’t closure, and yet formally, the poem ends. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? A: Nervous uncertainty. Q: What talent do you covet that you don’t have, yet? A: I wish I could swim. I’m not very buoyant. Q: What’s your motto? A: “We do what we want.” The fact is I don’t want to dive into water, and that’s why I don’t swim. tag:odeo.com,2009-10-02,25221790 Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:27:35 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25215800-Tracy-Kidder-%E2%80%9C%E2%80%A6faith-that-looks-through-death%E2%80%9D Tracy Kidder actually finds a needle in the haystack — a kernel of inspiration in a continent of bad news — in his virtually irresistible new saga (with a Wordsworth title) Strength in What Remains . The bad news is the ongoing massacres and underlying misery in East Central Africa – in the neighborhood of Rwanda, hard by the killing fields in the Congo today. The inspiration in Tracy Kidder’s sudden best-seller is a young man named Deo – short for the Latin “Deogratias,” meaning “thanks be to God” – who goes back to his blighted roots in Burundi to found Village Health Works, putting his medical education at the service of war’s survivors. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tracy Kidder. (51 minutes, 23 mb mp3) How we long — writers, book-buyers, interviewers, too — for bulletins from abroad without US Marines or drones in the picture. I like the moment in our conversation when I refer to one of Deo’s signature stories, about the ... Tracy Kidder actually finds a needle in the haystack — a kernel of inspiration in a continent of bad news — in his virtually irresistible new saga (with a Wordsworth title) Strength in What Remains . The bad news is the ongoing massacres and underlying misery in East Central Africa – in the neighborhood of Rwanda, hard by the killing fields in the Congo today. The inspiration in Tracy Kidder’s sudden best-seller is a young man named Deo – short for the Latin “Deogratias,” meaning “thanks be to God” – who goes back to his blighted roots in Burundi to found Village Health Works, putting his medical education at the service of war’s survivors. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tracy Kidder. (51 minutes, 23 mb mp3) How we long — writers, book-buyers, interviewers, too — for bulletins from abroad without US Marines or drones in the picture. I like the moment in our conversation when I refer to one of Deo’s signature stories, about the need to build a six-kilometer road to his new health clinic in Kayanza. Tracy Kidder leaps up. “Can I read this?” he asks, reaching for his own book. In the anecdote, Deo, in Africa, was saying that a Belgian construction company would want US$50,000 to build the road, when a Burundian woman with a baby crying on her back interrupted him. She said: “You will not pay a penny for this road. We become so much sick because we are poor, but we are not poor because we are lazy. We will work on this road with our own hands.” The next day a hundred sixty-six people showed up with pickaxes, hoes, machetes, and other tools. The road was finished before the Belgian road builders got to bid on the job. “Who did it?” the professionals asked. “We are the only road construction company in the entire region!” “Not anymore,” Deo responded. From Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains, pages 255-6. What I am asking Tracy Kidder here is how to generalize that Deo story to the scale of Africa’s problem and the policies from Washington, the West, and now China, that have been anything but a solution: It’s not tremendously complicated but it is difficult work. And it’s not the kind of work that some people like to do [because] you can’t do it in Washington D.C. Too often what happens is that people start out with good intentions and raise substantial sums of money to do their work. Then things start to go wrong: they buy fleets of SUVs for their own use in that country, they call for big huge conferences with experts who don’t speak the language, and then they realize that it is really hard to work in a place like Haiti or Burundi and pretty quickly declare defeat. Before they leave they blame the people they had come to help … I don’t think the conclusion should be that we give up because it is impossible. I consider effective foreign aid as a debt that is owed by the West to many of these countries, such as Haiti, which has been a virtual colony of the United States. Certainly Europe owes some big debts to many countries in Africa … The fact is that to have a Burundian leading this effort in Burundi is a really important aspect … I mean you’ve really got to speak the language. You have got to understand connotation and so on. You’ve got to be able to cultivate a local base: people you can trust. I think the effective projects are the ones that, while they have big goals, start with the individual. Let the individual patient teach you how to treat their family, and let that family teach you how to treat a village, and let that village teach you how to treat a province and the province: the nation. You can be working from both ends but you can’t forget the essential part: the local. I mean it’s where we all live. Tracy Kidder with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, September 22, 2009. Tracy Kidder actually finds a needle in the haystack — a kernel of inspiration in a continent of bad news — in his virtually irresistible new saga (with a Wordsworth title) Strength in What Remains . The bad news is the ongoing massacres and underlying misery in East Central Africa – in the neighborhood of Rwanda, hard by the killing fields in the Congo today. The inspiration in Tracy Kidder’s sudden best-seller is a young man named Deo – short for the Latin “Deogratias,” meaning “thanks be to God” – who goes back to his blighted roots in Burundi to found Village Health Works, putting his medical education at the service of war’s survivors. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tracy Kidder. (51 minutes, 23 mb mp3) How we long — writers, book-buyers, interviewers, too — for bulletins from abroad without US Marines or drones in the picture. I like the moment in our conversation when I refer to one of Deo’s signature stories, about the need to build a six-kilometer road to his new health clinic in Kayanza. Tracy Kidder leaps up. “Can I read this?” he asks, reaching for his own book. In the anecdote, Deo, in Africa, was saying that a Belgian construction company would want US$50,000 to build the road, when a Burundian woman with a baby crying on her back interrupted him. She said: “You will not pay a penny for this road. We become so much sick because we are poor, but we are not poor because we are lazy. We will work on this road with our own hands.” The next day a hundred sixty-six people showed up with pickaxes, hoes, machetes, and other tools. The road was finished before the Belgian road builders got to bid on the job. “Who did it?” the professionals asked. “We are the only road construction company in the entire region!” “Not anymore,” Deo responded. From Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains, pages 255-6. What I am asking Tracy Kidder here is how to generalize that Deo story to the scale of Africa’s problem and the policies from Washington, the West, and now China, that have been anything but a solution: It’s not tremendously complicated but it is difficult work. And it’s not the kind of work that some people like to do [because] you can’t do it in Washington D.C. Too often what happens is that people start out with good intentions and raise substantial sums of money to do their work. Then things start to go wrong: they buy fleets of SUVs for their own use in that country, they call for big huge conferences with experts who don’t speak the language, and then they realize that it is really hard to work in a place like Haiti or Burundi and pretty quickly declare defeat. Before they leave they blame the people they had come to help … I don’t think the conclusion should be that we give up because it is impossible. I consider effective foreign aid as a debt that is owed by the West to many of these countries, such as Haiti, which has been a virtual colony of the United States. Certainly Europe owes some big debts to many countries in Africa … The fact is that to have a Burundian leading this effort in Burundi is a really important aspect … I mean you’ve really got to speak the language. You have got to understand connotation and so on. You’ve got to be able to cultivate a local base: people you can trust. I think the effective projects are the ones that, while they have big goals, start with the individual. Let the individual patient teach you how to treat their family, and let that family teach you how to treat a village, and let that village teach you how to treat a province and the province: the nation. You can be working from both ends but you can’t forget the essential part: the local. I mean it’s where we all live. Tracy Kidder with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, September 22, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-10-01,25215800 Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:25:58 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25209701-Whose-Words-These-Are-5-Jericho-Brown In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Jericho Brown was born and raised in Shreveport, but did his growing-up in New Orleans. Library daycare introduced him to Shelley’s love poetry; the black church introduced him to call-and-response testimony and poetic performance. Fresh out of Dillard University, Jericho wrote speeches for New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial. But poetry kept calling. In his new book, Please , Jericho channels the powerful voices of the great girl singers of pop — Diana Ross, Janis Joplin, Minnie Riperton and others — to write his unique strain of love poetry. Jericho teaches poetry at UC San Diego; he is spending this year in Boston, as a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jericho Brown. (35 minutes, 16 mb mp3) Q: Give us a signature poem. A: “Track 5: Summertime, as performed by Janis Joplin.&#822... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Jericho Brown was born and raised in Shreveport, but did his growing-up in New Orleans. Library daycare introduced him to Shelley’s love poetry; the black church introduced him to call-and-response testimony and poetic performance. Fresh out of Dillard University, Jericho wrote speeches for New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial. But poetry kept calling. In his new book, Please , Jericho channels the powerful voices of the great girl singers of pop — Diana Ross, Janis Joplin, Minnie Riperton and others — to write his unique strain of love poetry. Jericho teaches poetry at UC San Diego; he is spending this year in Boston, as a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jericho Brown. (35 minutes, 16 mb mp3) Q: Give us a signature poem. A: “Track 5: Summertime, as performed by Janis Joplin.” Q: How do you see yourself in the great poetic chain of being? A: I always hope to be the love child of T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes. [They] had my aunts Lucille Clifton and Louise Glück raise me, and then I got old enough I went to a college with only one teacher: Jean Valentine. Q: Who lives in your poetic neighborhood now? A: Katie Peterson. Dawn Lundy Martin. James Allen Hall. Q: Who are the ancestors you have to live up to? A: Langston Hughes. When I write and do the things I do all day everyday I wonder if he would be proud. Are these the things he would patron in any way? His essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” was freeing for me. His legacy is one I aspire to everyday. Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums? A: Daniel Minter — look at his images. He is amazing. I hope that my poems sound like what Daniel Minter’s art looks like. Q: What talent do you covet that you don’t have, yet? A: Singing. Q: Who are your favorite singers? A: Donny Hathaway. Freddie Jackson, Jeffery Osborne. Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross. I like singers who have a story attached to their singing. Not just biography, but a story. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? A: My favorite color is orange. I try to get that color out in all of my poems. Q: What’s your motto? A: “The world is ugly but it is our job to make it sexy.” In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Jericho Brown was born and raised in Shreveport, but did his growing-up in New Orleans. Library daycare introduced him to Shelley’s love poetry; the black church introduced him to call-and-response testimony and poetic performance. Fresh out of Dillard University, Jericho wrote speeches for New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial. But poetry kept calling. In his new book, Please , Jericho channels the powerful voices of the great girl singers of pop — Diana Ross, Janis Joplin, Minnie Riperton and others — to write his unique strain of love poetry. Jericho teaches poetry at UC San Diego; he is spending this year in Boston, as a fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jericho Brown. (35 minutes, 16 mb mp3) Q: Give us a signature poem. A: “Track 5: Summertime, as performed by Janis Joplin.” Q: How do you see yourself in the great poetic chain of being? A: I always hope to be the love child of T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes. [They] had my aunts Lucille Clifton and Louise Glück raise me, and then I got old enough I went to a college with only one teacher: Jean Valentine. Q: Who lives in your poetic neighborhood now? A: Katie Peterson. Dawn Lundy Martin. James Allen Hall. Q: Who are the ancestors you have to live up to? A: Langston Hughes. When I write and do the things I do all day everyday I wonder if he would be proud. Are these the things he would patron in any way? His essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” was freeing for me. His legacy is one I aspire to everyday. Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums? A: Daniel Minter — look at his images. He is amazing. I hope that my poems sound like what Daniel Minter’s art looks like. Q: What talent do you covet that you don’t have, yet? A: Singing. Q: Who are your favorite singers? A: Donny Hathaway. Freddie Jackson, Jeffery Osborne. Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross. I like singers who have a story attached to their singing. Not just biography, but a story. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? A: My favorite color is orange. I try to get that color out in all of my poems. Q: What’s your motto? A: “The world is ugly but it is our job to make it sexy.” tag:odeo.com,2009-09-30,25209701 Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:35:17 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25204294-Whose-Words-These-Are-4-Joan-Houlihan In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Joan Houlihan has rebuilt a poetry nest in Concord, Massachusetts — home of the “American Renaissance” of Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott & Co. in the 1850s, the town where, in Susan Cheever’s line, “most of American Literature was written in three houses over a period of five years.” On the chance lightning could strike twice, Joan Houlihan founded The Concord Poetry Center to nurture a big open network of writers at many stages of growth. Joan has been a passionate critic of poetry criticism — of what seems to her more like blurbs and fans’ notes, a manifold failure to arbitrate the landscape of contemporary poetry. Joan teaches in MFA programs at Lesley University, in Boston, and at Columbia in New York. She reads to us here from her latest book of poems, The Us , a public epic for our times. Click to listen to Chr... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Joan Houlihan has rebuilt a poetry nest in Concord, Massachusetts — home of the “American Renaissance” of Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott & Co. in the 1850s, the town where, in Susan Cheever’s line, “most of American Literature was written in three houses over a period of five years.” On the chance lightning could strike twice, Joan Houlihan founded The Concord Poetry Center to nurture a big open network of writers at many stages of growth. Joan has been a passionate critic of poetry criticism — of what seems to her more like blurbs and fans’ notes, a manifold failure to arbitrate the landscape of contemporary poetry. Joan teaches in MFA programs at Lesley University, in Boston, and at Columbia in New York. She reads to us here from her latest book of poems, The Us , a public epic for our times. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Joan Houlihan. (22 minutes, 10 mb mp3) Q: The poetry that got you into the game? A: “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The sound of Gerard Manley Hopkins, both poet and priest. A lot of my ‘poetic learning’ came from parochial school — in the form of ritual and song and psalm and parable and story — all very useful, after the religious part. That Hopkins was so talented and had such a voice and could also be a priest was a puzzle that interested me — the power of voice and music. I am interested in the ear and sound, in sonic textures. Also Sylvia Plath & Emily Dickinson. These women poets gave me a way to be part of the poetry pantheon. Up until then, reading prescribed literature, I saw it as male oriented kind of life. In other words, something that I saw as not related to me. Q: Describe the state of American Poetry. A: A reader going into a bookstore and pulling down a book of poetry could try five times and come up with five very different ways of approaching the art. Q: What quality do you look for in a poem? A: A sweeping sense of humanity. I love a great poem, a poem that works on so many levels you never tire of it. A poem you can revisit and re-experience. Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums? A: I’ve always had a kinship with the absurdist playwrights: Pinter, Albee and Beckett were a huge influence on me and my work. Q: What talent do you covet that you don’t have, yet? A: Musical ability would be neat. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? A: A need to see things as clearly and honestly as possible. I like the reality of things. Q: What do you learn from teaching? I learn that the drive to be a poet is primal. The voice of youth in this art is through song. My sons listen to music. I like Coldplay. Young people see the poem-in-a-book as an artifact. Q: What’s your motto? A: “Be Prepared.” In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Joan Houlihan has rebuilt a poetry nest in Concord, Massachusetts — home of the “American Renaissance” of Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott & Co. in the 1850s, the town where, in Susan Cheever’s line, “most of American Literature was written in three houses over a period of five years.” On the chance lightning could strike twice, Joan Houlihan founded The Concord Poetry Center to nurture a big open network of writers at many stages of growth. Joan has been a passionate critic of poetry criticism — of what seems to her more like blurbs and fans’ notes, a manifold failure to arbitrate the landscape of contemporary poetry. Joan teaches in MFA programs at Lesley University, in Boston, and at Columbia in New York. She reads to us here from her latest book of poems, The Us , a public epic for our times. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Joan Houlihan. (22 minutes, 10 mb mp3) Q: The poetry that got you into the game? A: “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The sound of Gerard Manley Hopkins, both poet and priest. A lot of my ‘poetic learning’ came from parochial school — in the form of ritual and song and psalm and parable and story — all very useful, after the religious part. That Hopkins was so talented and had such a voice and could also be a priest was a puzzle that interested me — the power of voice and music. I am interested in the ear and sound, in sonic textures. Also Sylvia Plath & Emily Dickinson. These women poets gave me a way to be part of the poetry pantheon. Up until then, reading prescribed literature, I saw it as male oriented kind of life. In other words, something that I saw as not related to me. Q: Describe the state of American Poetry. A: A reader going into a bookstore and pulling down a book of poetry could try five times and come up with five very different ways of approaching the art. Q: What quality do you look for in a poem? A: A sweeping sense of humanity. I love a great poem, a poem that works on so many levels you never tire of it. A poem you can revisit and re-experience. Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums? A: I’ve always had a kinship with the absurdist playwrights: Pinter, Albee and Beckett were a huge influence on me and my work. Q: What talent do you covet that you don’t have, yet? A: Musical ability would be neat. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? A: A need to see things as clearly and honestly as possible. I like the reality of things. Q: What do you learn from teaching? I learn that the drive to be a poet is primal. The voice of youth in this art is through song. My sons listen to music. I like Coldplay. Young people see the poem-in-a-book as an artifact. Q: What’s your motto? A: “Be Prepared.” tag:odeo.com,2009-09-29,25204294 Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:35:17 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25200528-James-Morone-What-healthcare-politics-lays-bare From FDR to Barack Obama, James Morone’s revelatory history of presidents and healthcare policy lays out some basic rules — the conditions, in short, that Lyndon Johnson met to pass Medicare in 1965, but that asked too much of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton in the losing campaigns of 1977 and 1994 for universal insurance. The bare essentials:Passion, personal and sustained. Speed in the legislative drive. Keep-it-simple engagement of the public. Suppression of economists, wonks and budget numbers. An opportunistic mix of muscle and deference with kingpins in Congress, who must inevitably write the final law. And the foresight, in case of defeat, to leave the issue in good shape for the next try, as Harry Truman did for Johnson, and Bill Clinton entirely failed to do for Barack Obama. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Morone. (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Obama hasn’t flunked any of the core tests so far, in Jim Morone’s judgment. But then, he&... From FDR to Barack Obama, James Morone’s revelatory history of presidents and healthcare policy lays out some basic rules — the conditions, in short, that Lyndon Johnson met to pass Medicare in 1965, but that asked too much of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton in the losing campaigns of 1977 and 1994 for universal insurance. The bare essentials:Passion, personal and sustained. Speed in the legislative drive. Keep-it-simple engagement of the public. Suppression of economists, wonks and budget numbers. An opportunistic mix of muscle and deference with kingpins in Congress, who must inevitably write the final law. And the foresight, in case of defeat, to leave the issue in good shape for the next try, as Harry Truman did for Johnson, and Bill Clinton entirely failed to do for Barack Obama. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Morone. (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Obama hasn’t flunked any of the core tests so far, in Jim Morone’s judgment. But then, he’s a long way from a victory that would have been automatic in a parliamentary system and may actually be impossible in the American labyrinth of a special-interest Congress. We will repair early and often to Jim Marone, a born color commentator on politics and chairman of the political science department at Brown, for reviews of the Obamacare scorecare. Meantime, Morone the story-teller is letting us in on some of the striking original themes of his new book, with David Blumenthal of the Harvard Medical School, The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office . Health policy, Marone argues persuasively, lays bare the soul as well as the working temperament of presidents as almost nothing else does. Our presidents tend to be “sick men,” he writes, with complex medical histories and poorer health than American males in general. But in fact they all have two health stories: first of their own submerged afflictions (FDR’s polio, Eisenhower’s grave heart problems, Kennedy’s wrecked adrenal system and drug dependency) and then: the family memories of health and medicine (Ike’s agitation about his mother-in-law’s ruinous bills for years of round-the-clock nursing care, or JFK’s devastation by his father’s major stroke in 1962). Surprise: it’s not their own medical charts but rather the imprinted stories of near-and-dear exposure to medicine that drives our presidents on healthcare. It may not matter much that, on and off the basketball court, Barack Obama looks like the healthiest president we’ve ever had. The well of his passion is the tearful memory of his grandmother’s battles with insurance companies before she died of cancer just as he got elected. “Every president changes the conversation about health care in America,” Morone and Blumenthal write in The Heart of Power. It’s a point that leaves me less impressed than Jim Morone is with the Obama drive so far. Obama’s opposition has made it a conversation about socialism and death panels. The media coverage has made it a conversation about Obama: will he bend, or be broken by, the lobbies? Can he dominate the Congress as Lyndon Johnson did? Can he win the big one? Even people who love Obama as I do have doubts that he has addressed the exclusions from care, the fee-for-service racket or the ruinous rise of costs to the whole economy. So we root more for him than for his plan, which is not the way it’s supposed to be. This is the start of a continuing conversation with Jim Marone, about a battle just well begun: If you talked to the Obama people ahead of time, they would have said “Oh, we’re girded, we’re ready, whatever they throw at us, we know it’s going to be ugly” — but not this ugly. Why is it so deep? That’s the interesting question here, really. What does this touch? I’ve got two answers… One, this is the thing that Franklin Roosevelt never fought for in the New Deal. He gets unemployment compensation, he gets welfare, he gets Social Security, he gets the whole list of good welfare-state stuff, but he pulls back on healthcare. So for Democrats this is the lost reform that the New Deal never won. And for the Republicans, this is what distinguishes the United States from all those other welfare states, like Denmark, like Canada, like France. So that this is in the DNA, in the genetic code of each party. Ask a Democrat, and they’ll say, shamefully, “we are the only industrialized country without national health insurance.” Republicans: “We’re the only country without national health insurance!!” So this is a battle about America. That’s one level. That’s bad enough. Add to that, this is the battle for the high ground in Washington. If Obama wins something significant — if he wins, if it’s significant, two very big ifs — he has done something that Truman, that Carter, that Kennedy, that Clinton couldn’t get done. He emerges from this a star. If the Republicans manage either to make this a very weak bill, or to defeat it, Obama becomes Carter. He’s defeated. This is Waterloo. James DeMint, Senator from South Carolina is absolutely right. But remember, Waterloo had both Wellington and Napoleon: there’s a winner that comes out of this, and the winner is dominating the Washington conversation for the next year. So we are met on the great battlefield. Of course it’s ugly. Of course it’s bloody. Control of our politics is at stake. From FDR to Barack Obama, James Morone’s revelatory history of presidents and healthcare policy lays out some basic rules — the conditions, in short, that Lyndon Johnson met to pass Medicare in 1965, but that asked too much of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton in the losing campaigns of 1977 and 1994 for universal insurance. The bare essentials:Passion, personal and sustained. Speed in the legislative drive. Keep-it-simple engagement of the public. Suppression of economists, wonks and budget numbers. An opportunistic mix of muscle and deference with kingpins in Congress, who must inevitably write the final law. And the foresight, in case of defeat, to leave the issue in good shape for the next try, as Harry Truman did for Johnson, and Bill Clinton entirely failed to do for Barack Obama. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Morone. (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Obama hasn’t flunked any of the core tests so far, in Jim Morone’s judgment. But then, he’s a long way from a victory that would have been automatic in a parliamentary system and may actually be impossible in the American labyrinth of a special-interest Congress. We will repair early and often to Jim Marone, a born color commentator on politics and chairman of the political science department at Brown, for reviews of the Obamacare scorecare. Meantime, Morone the story-teller is letting us in on some of the striking original themes of his new book, with David Blumenthal of the Harvard Medical School, The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office . Health policy, Marone argues persuasively, lays bare the soul as well as the working temperament of presidents as almost nothing else does. Our presidents tend to be “sick men,” he writes, with complex medical histories and poorer health than American males in general. But in fact they all have two health stories: first of their own submerged afflictions (FDR’s polio, Eisenhower’s grave heart problems, Kennedy’s wrecked adrenal system and drug dependency) and then: the family memories of health and medicine (Ike’s agitation about his mother-in-law’s ruinous bills for years of round-the-clock nursing care, or JFK’s devastation by his father’s major stroke in 1962). Surprise: it’s not their own medical charts but rather the imprinted stories of near-and-dear exposure to medicine that drives our presidents on healthcare. It may not matter much that, on and off the basketball court, Barack Obama looks like the healthiest president we’ve ever had. The well of his passion is the tearful memory of his grandmother’s battles with insurance companies before she died of cancer just as he got elected. “Every president changes the conversation about health care in America,” Morone and Blumenthal write in The Heart of Power. It’s a point that leaves me less impressed than Jim Morone is with the Obama drive so far. Obama’s opposition has made it a conversation about socialism and death panels. The media coverage has made it a conversation about Obama: will he bend, or be broken by, the lobbies? Can he dominate the Congress as Lyndon Johnson did? Can he win the big one? Even people who love Obama as I do have doubts that he has addressed the exclusions from care, the fee-for-service racket or the ruinous rise of costs to the whole economy. So we root more for him than for his plan, which is not the way it’s supposed to be. This is the start of a continuing conversation with Jim Marone, about a battle just well begun: If you talked to the Obama people ahead of time, they would have said “Oh, we’re girded, we’re ready, whatever they throw at us, we know it’s going to be ugly” — but not this ugly. Why is it so deep? That’s the interesting question here, really. What does this touch? I’ve got two answers… One, this is the thing that Franklin Roosevelt never fought for in the New Deal. He gets unemployment compensation, he gets welfare, he gets Social Security, he gets the whole list of good welfare-state stuff, but he pulls back on healthcare. So for Democrats this is the lost reform that the New Deal never won. And for the Republicans, this is what distinguishes the United States from all those other welfare states, like Denmark, like Canada, like France. So that this is in the DNA, in the genetic code of each party. Ask a Democrat, and they’ll say, shamefully, “we are the only industrialized country without national health insurance.” Republicans: “We’re the only country without national health insurance!!” So this is a battle about America. That’s one level. That’s bad enough. Add to that, this is the battle for the high ground in Washington. If Obama wins something significant — if he wins, if it’s significant, two very big ifs — he has done something that Truman, that Carter, that Kennedy, that Clinton couldn’t get done. He emerges from this a star. If the Republicans manage either to make this a very weak bill, or to defeat it, Obama becomes Carter. He’s defeated. This is Waterloo. James DeMint, Senator from South Carolina is absolutely right. But remember, Waterloo had both Wellington and Napoleon: there’s a winner that comes out of this, and the winner is dominating the Washington conversation for the next year. So we are met on the great battlefield. Of course it’s ugly. Of course it’s bloody. Control of our politics is at stake. tag:odeo.com,2009-09-28,25200528 Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:50:56 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25184556-Whose-Words-These-Are-3-Franz-Wright In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Franz Wright grew up as an estranged son of a famous American poet. At 18, he’d read everything, found an addictive pleasure writing poetry (”like a first shot of heroin”), and learned “there was something wrong with me.” Nowadays he writes — in a sustained ten-year burst of celebrated work — with the goal of seeing the world through the eyes of suffering outsiders, in particular the severely mentally ill, and to use his own life as material — to mine his own suffering, as T. S. Eliot said of Beaudelaire, “for theoretical purposes.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Franz Wright. (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Q: Give us a signature poem. A: “‘My Peace I Leave.’” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: There was this incredible generation of poets — miraculous, l... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Franz Wright grew up as an estranged son of a famous American poet. At 18, he’d read everything, found an addictive pleasure writing poetry (”like a first shot of heroin”), and learned “there was something wrong with me.” Nowadays he writes — in a sustained ten-year burst of celebrated work — with the goal of seeing the world through the eyes of suffering outsiders, in particular the severely mentally ill, and to use his own life as material — to mine his own suffering, as T. S. Eliot said of Beaudelaire, “for theoretical purposes.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Franz Wright. (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Q: Give us a signature poem. A: “‘My Peace I Leave.’” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: There was this incredible generation of poets — miraculous, like the Elizabethan Age or the Renaissance — poets born in the late 20s. You can count them: Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Jean Valentine. But many poets have found themselves living in that shadow. We have our own: Mark Doty … Louise Glück is probably the best poet writing in this country today. Fanny Howe and Jean Valentine are the two poets right now in America most representative of a powerful and unabashed spirituality in their work. I have infinite admiration for them. Q: What quality do you look for in a poem? Primal sincerity is what I am interested in, and that is very quaint to some young people. We’ll see what they do. I believe, like [Ezra] Pound that only emotion endures. Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums? Brian Eno is someone very precious to me, the great inventor of ambient music. I love the actress Cate Blanchett very much. The novelist Denis Johnson and I are friends. I love him. He has an almost Dickensian ability to create the notion of who the character is by simply the language they use, by the way they talk. It reminds me of Shakespeare, it reminds me of Dickens. Q: Talk about the times. A: I think it’s a very lost, drifting sort of time. Most of the world’s leaders aren’t worth the ink it would take to write their names. Q: What talent do you covet that you don’t have, yet? Most of them, I think. But if someone were to offer me the chance to live my life all over again I would do exactly the same thing. I feel very blessed. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? Sympathy. Q: What’s your motto? Work, man. Inspiration is not something that occurs to you, it is something you strive for. I think of Franz Wright as a man who’d have invented the Catholic Mass if it hadn’t presented itself to him: the daily ritual of the savior’s sacrifice, death, resurrection and our forgiveness. “The central symbol of the Eucharist,” he explains, “is a family or friends sitting down at a table to eat, raised to a cosmic level… It represents the last supper of Jesus with his friends… There’s nothing more moving in the world to me. I could not have made that up.” Franz Wright’s poems speak with that wonder and thanks, also with an often searing wit. His new collection is Wheeling Motel . In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Franz Wright grew up as an estranged son of a famous American poet. At 18, he’d read everything, found an addictive pleasure writing poetry (”like a first shot of heroin”), and learned “there was something wrong with me.” Nowadays he writes — in a sustained ten-year burst of celebrated work — with the goal of seeing the world through the eyes of suffering outsiders, in particular the severely mentally ill, and to use his own life as material — to mine his own suffering, as T. S. Eliot said of Beaudelaire, “for theoretical purposes.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Franz Wright. (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Q: Give us a signature poem. A: “‘My Peace I Leave.’” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: There was this incredible generation of poets — miraculous, like the Elizabethan Age or the Renaissance — poets born in the late 20s. You can count them: Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Jean Valentine. But many poets have found themselves living in that shadow. We have our own: Mark Doty … Louise Glück is probably the best poet writing in this country today. Fanny Howe and Jean Valentine are the two poets right now in America most representative of a powerful and unabashed spirituality in their work. I have infinite admiration for them. Q: What quality do you look for in a poem? Primal sincerity is what I am interested in, and that is very quaint to some young people. We’ll see what they do. I believe, like [Ezra] Pound that only emotion endures. Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other mediums? Brian Eno is someone very precious to me, the great inventor of ambient music. I love the actress Cate Blanchett very much. The novelist Denis Johnson and I are friends. I love him. He has an almost Dickensian ability to create the notion of who the character is by simply the language they use, by the way they talk. It reminds me of Shakespeare, it reminds me of Dickens. Q: Talk about the times. A: I think it’s a very lost, drifting sort of time. Most of the world’s leaders aren’t worth the ink it would take to write their names. Q: What talent do you covet that you don’t have, yet? Most of them, I think. But if someone were to offer me the chance to live my life all over again I would do exactly the same thing. I feel very blessed. Q: What’s the keynote of your character as a poet? Sympathy. Q: What’s your motto? Work, man. Inspiration is not something that occurs to you, it is something you strive for. I think of Franz Wright as a man who’d have invented the Catholic Mass if it hadn’t presented itself to him: the daily ritual of the savior’s sacrifice, death, resurrection and our forgiveness. “The central symbol of the Eucharist,” he explains, “is a family or friends sitting down at a table to eat, raised to a cosmic level… It represents the last supper of Jesus with his friends… There’s nothing more moving in the world to me. I could not have made that up.” Franz Wright’s poems speak with that wonder and thanks, also with an often searing wit. His new collection is Wheeling Motel . tag:odeo.com,2009-09-25,25184556 Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:32:43 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25183005-Whose-Words-These-Are-2-Regie-Gibson In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Chicagoan poet Regie Gibson places himself “somewhere between page and stage,” writing and speaking about life, art and philosophy. He won the 1998 National Slam Competition and founded the Church of The Funky Word, a literary and musical arts ensemble utilizing ancient, contemporary and original literary text combined with world music. He has taught, lectured and performed in seven countries. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Regie Gibson. (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Q: Give us the poem that got you into the game. A: “The Raven” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: Emily Dickinson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Pablo Neruda… Q: Give us a signature poem. A: “It’s A Teen Age Thang.” Q: What’s your preferred mode of delivering a poem? A: Somewhere between page and stage. We’re creatures of sound. We listen before we’re born. Q: Who’s doing o... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Chicagoan poet Regie Gibson places himself “somewhere between page and stage,” writing and speaking about life, art and philosophy. He won the 1998 National Slam Competition and founded the Church of The Funky Word, a literary and musical arts ensemble utilizing ancient, contemporary and original literary text combined with world music. He has taught, lectured and performed in seven countries. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Regie Gibson. (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Q: Give us the poem that got you into the game. A: “The Raven” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: Emily Dickinson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Pablo Neruda… Q: Give us a signature poem. A: “It’s A Teen Age Thang.” Q: What’s your preferred mode of delivering a poem? A: Somewhere between page and stage. We’re creatures of sound. We listen before we’re born. Q: Who’s doing or did your kind of work in other arts? A: Jimi Hendrix, Caravaggio, Rothko, Dali, Ayi Kwei Armah … Q: What is the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: I lean towards the shamanic. Q: What talent would you most like to have that you don’t? A: Facility with higher mathematics. Ability to play violin. Q: What quality do you look for in a poem? A: Imagination. Q: What’s the general state of the art? A: On the upswing, especially after 9.11. People turned to poetry for succor … Q: What do you learn from high school students? A: Stay honest— they can sniff when you’re not. Q: What’s your motto? A: “We’re individual flames that tend to burn the brightest together.” Click to hear Regie speak more of his work. In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Chicagoan poet Regie Gibson places himself “somewhere between page and stage,” writing and speaking about life, art and philosophy. He won the 1998 National Slam Competition and founded the Church of The Funky Word, a literary and musical arts ensemble utilizing ancient, contemporary and original literary text combined with world music. He has taught, lectured and performed in seven countries. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Regie Gibson. (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Q: Give us the poem that got you into the game. A: “The Raven” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: Emily Dickinson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Pablo Neruda… Q: Give us a signature poem. A: “It’s A Teen Age Thang.” Q: What’s your preferred mode of delivering a poem? A: Somewhere between page and stage. We’re creatures of sound. We listen before we’re born. Q: Who’s doing or did your kind of work in other arts? A: Jimi Hendrix, Caravaggio, Rothko, Dali, Ayi Kwei Armah … Q: What is the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: I lean towards the shamanic. Q: What talent would you most like to have that you don’t? A: Facility with higher mathematics. Ability to play violin. Q: What quality do you look for in a poem? A: Imagination. Q: What’s the general state of the art? A: On the upswing, especially after 9.11. People turned to poetry for succor … Q: What do you learn from high school students? A: Stay honest— they can sniff when you’re not. Q: What’s your motto? A: “We’re individual flames that tend to burn the brightest together.” Click to hear Regie speak more of his work. tag:odeo.com,2009-09-24,25183005 Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:55:14 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25179092-Whose-Words-These-Are-Regie-Gibson In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Chicagoan poet Regie Gibson places himself “somewhere between page and stage,” writing and speaking about life, art and philosophy. He won the 1998 National Slam Competition and founded the Church of The Funky Word, a literary and musical arts ensemble utilizing ancient, contemporary and original literary text combined with world music. He has taught, lectured and performed in seven countries. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Regie Gibson. (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Q: Give us the poem that got you into the game. A: “The Raven” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: Emily Dickinson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Pablo Neruda… Q: Give us a signature poem. A: “It’s A Teen Age Thang.” Q: What’s your preferred mode of delivering a poem? A: Somewhere between page and stage. We’re creatures of sound. We listen before we’re born. Q: Who’s doing o... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Chicagoan poet Regie Gibson places himself “somewhere between page and stage,” writing and speaking about life, art and philosophy. He won the 1998 National Slam Competition and founded the Church of The Funky Word, a literary and musical arts ensemble utilizing ancient, contemporary and original literary text combined with world music. He has taught, lectured and performed in seven countries. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Regie Gibson. (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Q: Give us the poem that got you into the game. A: “The Raven” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: Emily Dickinson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Pablo Neruda… Q: Give us a signature poem. A: “It’s A Teen Age Thang.” Q: What’s your preferred mode of delivering a poem? A: Somewhere between page and stage. We’re creatures of sound. We listen before we’re born. Q: Who’s doing or did your kind of work in other arts? A: Jimi Hendrix, Caravaggio, Rothko, Dali, Ayi Kwei Armah … Q: What is the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: I lean towards the shamanic. Q: What talent would you most like to have that you don’t? A: Facility with higher mathematics. Ability to play violin. Q: What quality do you look for in a poem? A: Imagination. Q: What’s the general state of the art? A: On the upswing, especially after 9.11. People turned to poetry for succor … Q: What do you learn from high school students? A: Stay honest— they can sniff when you’re not. Q: What’s your motto? A: “We’re individual flames that tend to burn the brightest together.” Click to hear Regie speak more of his work. In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Chicagoan poet Regie Gibson places himself “somewhere between page and stage,” writing and speaking about life, art and philosophy. He won the 1998 National Slam Competition and founded the Church of The Funky Word, a literary and musical arts ensemble utilizing ancient, contemporary and original literary text combined with world music. He has taught, lectured and performed in seven countries. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Regie Gibson. (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Q: Give us the poem that got you into the game. A: “The Raven” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: Emily Dickinson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Pablo Neruda… Q: Give us a signature poem. A: “It’s A Teen Age Thang.” Q: What’s your preferred mode of delivering a poem? A: Somewhere between page and stage. We’re creatures of sound. We listen before we’re born. Q: Who’s doing or did your kind of work in other arts? A: Jimi Hendrix, Caravaggio, Rothko, Dali, Ayi Kwei Armah … Q: What is the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: I lean towards the shamanic. Q: What talent would you most like to have that you don’t? A: Facility with higher mathematics. Ability to play violin. Q: What quality do you look for in a poem? A: Imagination. Q: What’s the general state of the art? A: On the upswing, especially after 9.11. People turned to poetry for succor … Q: What do you learn from high school students? A: Stay honest— they can sniff when you’re not. Q: What’s your motto? A: “We’re individual flames that tend to burn the brightest together.” Click to hear Regie speak more of his work. tag:odeo.com,2009-09-24,25179092 Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:55:14 -0700 no Open Source Shows, Whose Words These Are http://odeo.com/episodes/25160968-Whose-Words-These-Are-Jill-McDonough In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jill McDonough. (26 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Jill McDonough is reverent about traditional form, raucously funny and often dark about much else. Her first book, Habeas Corpus, gives line and meter to four centuries of legal American executions, from Mary Dyer (1660) to Timothy McVeigh (2001). McDonough’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Slate. She lives in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, and teaches at Harvard, UMass Boston and the state prison at Norfolk, MA. Q: The poem that got you into the game. A: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: Eavan Boland, Robert Pinsky, Shakespeare … Q: A signature poem of your own? A: “June 11, 2001. Timothy McVeigh” Q: Who are your brother and sister... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jill McDonough. (26 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Jill McDonough is reverent about traditional form, raucously funny and often dark about much else. Her first book, Habeas Corpus, gives line and meter to four centuries of legal American executions, from Mary Dyer (1660) to Timothy McVeigh (2001). McDonough’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Slate. She lives in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, and teaches at Harvard, UMass Boston and the state prison at Norfolk, MA. Q: The poem that got you into the game. A: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: Eavan Boland, Robert Pinsky, Shakespeare … Q: A signature poem of your own? A: “June 11, 2001. Timothy McVeigh” Q: Who are your brother and sister artists in other mediums? A: Mark Rothko — those enormous chapel paintings. When you stand close enough you can’t tell if your eyes are open or closed. That kind of suspension or flooding … I’d like to be able to recreate that sense of losing yourself. Q: What is the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: Humor / Empathy. It depends which side of the street I am walking on that day. Q: What’s the talent you most covet that you don’t have, yet? A: Boxing … I’d like to beat the hell out of somebody. Q: What quality do you look for in a poem? A: Saturation. It is a dark time, it is terrific to be able to open up a book and leave the room. A poem can be a magic ticket. Q: Expand on the times. A: I’m so disappointed in Obama. There is a lot of stuff we are [still] doing on the world stage that I am really ashamed of. I love my country but it is a hard time to be proud to be an American. I love my country. Q: What’s the general state of the art? A: Poetry is not just alive. It is thriving Q: What do you learn from high school students? A: They are desperate for tradition. They want to place themselves in a trajectory, they want to ground themselves in their poetic heritage. Q: What’s your motto? A: “Writers write.” In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jill McDonough. (26 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Jill McDonough is reverent about traditional form, raucously funny and often dark about much else. Her first book, Habeas Corpus, gives line and meter to four centuries of legal American executions, from Mary Dyer (1660) to Timothy McVeigh (2001). McDonough’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Slate. She lives in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, and teaches at Harvard, UMass Boston and the state prison at Norfolk, MA. Q: The poem that got you into the game. A: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: Eavan Boland, Robert Pinsky, Shakespeare … Q: A signature poem of your own? A: “June 11, 2001. Timothy McVeigh” Q: Who are your brother and sister artists in other mediums? A: Mark Rothko — those enormous chapel paintings. When you stand close enough you can’t tell if your eyes are open or closed. That kind of suspension or flooding … I’d like to be able to recreate that sense of losing yourself. Q: What is the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: Humor / Empathy. It depends which side of the street I am walking on that day. Q: What’s the talent you most covet that you don’t have, yet? A: Boxing … I’d like to beat the hell out of somebody. Q: What quality do you look for in a poem? A: Saturation. It is a dark time, it is terrific to be able to open up a book and leave the room. A poem can be a magic ticket. Q: Expand on the times. A: I’m so disappointed in Obama. There is a lot of stuff we are [still] doing on the world stage that I am really ashamed of. I love my country but it is a hard time to be proud to be an American. I love my country. Q: What’s the general state of the art? A: Poetry is not just alive. It is thriving Q: What do you learn from high school students? A: They are desperate for tradition. They want to place themselves in a trajectory, they want to ground themselves in their poetic heritage. Q: What’s your motto? A: “Writers write.” tag:odeo.com,2009-09-21,25160968 Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:16:06 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25183006-Whose-Words-These-Are-1-Jill-McDonough In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jill McDonough. (26 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Jill McDonough is reverent about traditional form, raucously funny and often dark about much else. Her first book, Habeas Corpus, gives line and meter to four centuries of legal American executions, from Mary Dyer (1660) to Timothy McVeigh (2001). McDonough’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Slate. She lives in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, and teaches at Harvard, UMass Boston and the state prison at Norfolk, MA. Q: The poem that got you into the game. A: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: Eavan Boland, Robert Pinsky, Shakespeare … Q: A signature poem of your own? A: “June 11, 2001. Timothy McVeigh” Q: Who are your brother and sister... In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jill McDonough. (26 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Jill McDonough is reverent about traditional form, raucously funny and often dark about much else. Her first book, Habeas Corpus, gives line and meter to four centuries of legal American executions, from Mary Dyer (1660) to Timothy McVeigh (2001). McDonough’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Slate. She lives in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, and teaches at Harvard, UMass Boston and the state prison at Norfolk, MA. Q: The poem that got you into the game. A: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: Eavan Boland, Robert Pinsky, Shakespeare … Q: A signature poem of your own? A: “June 11, 2001. Timothy McVeigh” Q: Who are your brother and sister artists in other mediums? A: Mark Rothko — those enormous chapel paintings. When you stand close enough you can’t tell if your eyes are open or closed. That kind of suspension or flooding … I’d like to be able to recreate that sense of losing yourself. Q: What is the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: Humor / Empathy. It depends which side of the street I am walking on that day. Q: What’s the talent you most covet that you don’t have, yet? A: Boxing … I’d like to beat the hell out of somebody. Q: What quality do you look for in a poem? A: Saturation. It is a dark time, it is terrific to be able to open up a book and leave the room. A poem can be a magic ticket. Q: Expand on the times. A: I’m so disappointed in Obama. There is a lot of stuff we are [still] doing on the world stage that I am really ashamed of. I love my country but it is a hard time to be proud to be an American. I love my country. Q: What’s the general state of the art? A: Poetry is not just alive. It is thriving Q: What do you learn from high school students? A: They are desperate for tradition. They want to place themselves in a trajectory, they want to ground themselves in their poetic heritage. Q: What’s your motto? A: “Writers write.” In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jill McDonough. (26 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Jill McDonough is reverent about traditional form, raucously funny and often dark about much else. Her first book, Habeas Corpus, gives line and meter to four centuries of legal American executions, from Mary Dyer (1660) to Timothy McVeigh (2001). McDonough’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Slate. She lives in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, and teaches at Harvard, UMass Boston and the state prison at Norfolk, MA. Q: The poem that got you into the game. A: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Q: Who’s in the conversation with you? A: Eavan Boland, Robert Pinsky, Shakespeare … Q: A signature poem of your own? A: “June 11, 2001. Timothy McVeigh” Q: Who are your brother and sister artists in other mediums? A: Mark Rothko — those enormous chapel paintings. When you stand close enough you can’t tell if your eyes are open or closed. That kind of suspension or flooding … I’d like to be able to recreate that sense of losing yourself. Q: What is the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: Humor / Empathy. It depends which side of the street I am walking on that day. Q: What’s the talent you most covet that you don’t have, yet? A: Boxing … I’d like to beat the hell out of somebody. Q: What quality do you look for in a poem? A: Saturation. It is a dark time, it is terrific to be able to open up a book and leave the room. A poem can be a magic ticket. Q: Expand on the times. A: I’m so disappointed in Obama. There is a lot of stuff we are [still] doing on the world stage that I am really ashamed of. I love my country but it is a hard time to be proud to be an American. I love my country. Q: What’s the general state of the art? A: Poetry is not just alive. It is thriving Q: What do you learn from high school students? A: They are desperate for tradition. They want to place themselves in a trajectory, they want to ground themselves in their poetic heritage. Q: What’s your motto? A: “Writers write.” tag:odeo.com,2009-09-21,25183006 Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:16:06 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25135727-Rory-Stewart-%E2%80%9Cnonsense%E2%80%9D-policy-in-Afghanistan Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rory Stewart. (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Rory Stewart in professorial mode The Kiplingesque adventurer and writer Rory Stewart – the man who walked alone across Afghanistan and made a best-seller of The Places In Between — was quoted by Nicholas Kristoff in the Times the other day dismissing the Obama rationale for escalating the war as “nonsense.” In our second annual conversation yesterday, in Boston, Rory Stewart expanded on the theme. He teaches now at Harvard’s Kennedy School when he’s not running a model redevelopment project in the heart of old Kabul. I am listening respectfully here to what sounds like the voice of a recovering imperialist. Short form: It’s a “mistaken” hope and theory that heavy doses of American money and military power can build a legitimate state in Afghanistan or defeat the Taliban. Rory Stewart in seven-league boots These are worthy objectives but they&... Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rory Stewart. (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Rory Stewart in professorial mode The Kiplingesque adventurer and writer Rory Stewart – the man who walked alone across Afghanistan and made a best-seller of The Places In Between — was quoted by Nicholas Kristoff in the Times the other day dismissing the Obama rationale for escalating the war as “nonsense.” In our second annual conversation yesterday, in Boston, Rory Stewart expanded on the theme. He teaches now at Harvard’s Kennedy School when he’s not running a model redevelopment project in the heart of old Kabul. I am listening respectfully here to what sounds like the voice of a recovering imperialist. Short form: It’s a “mistaken” hope and theory that heavy doses of American money and military power can build a legitimate state in Afghanistan or defeat the Taliban. Rory Stewart in seven-league boots These are worthy objectives but they’re tasks that really can only be peformed by Afghans, not by foreigners, and which are probably very long-term goals — a question of maybe years, or much more, decades. I think that in so far as Obama’s aim is simply to prevent Al Qaeda from becoming stronger, it’s not necessary for him to defeat the Taliban, or build a legitimate, effective, stable state. The Taliban is not very strong. The Taliban is not in a position to take a major city. It’s not the Taliban of ‘94. And even were they in the very unlikely event to take a city, it’s extremely unlikely that they’d invite Al Qaeda back… In fact the lesson of the last seven years is that Osama Bin Laden prefers to be in Pakistan than in Afghanistan, in part because Pakistan is a more established state and because Pakistani state sovereignty prevents US Special Forces from operating freely in their territory. A very fragmentary failed state of the sort the Taliban would be participating in if they were to increase their position in Afghanistan is not likely to provide much protection for Al Qaeda, and probably therefore unlikely to pose a considerably increased danger to the United States. What worries me most about the troop increases is that they’re likely to precipitate … withdrawal. We tend to lurch from engagement to isolation, and from increases to withdrawal. My dream has always been to define a very limited ‘light footprint,’ because I believe a light footprint is a more sustainable footprint. What Afghanistan needs with the international community is a long-term, patient, tolerant relationship; not electroshock therapy, huge amounts of cash, huge numbers of troops, in an attempt to turn it around on a ninepin. The international community is now in a bind… The United States has said ‘I can’t affort to fail in Afghanistan; this is the Number One threat to the world,’ and therefore it doesn’t really have much leverage over an Afghan administration. They can’t really threaten to reduce troops or leave Karzai to the Taliban so long as they say this is our front line on the War on Terror… It’s very dangerous in any relationship or situation to say failure is not an option, because it effectively renders you impotent. In order to deal with Afghanistan or Pakistan we need to be able to say our interests are not identical with yours. We don’t need to be here… The current situation, suggesting we have no alternative other than the current strategy, simply exposes us to being perpetually exploited. One way of putting is: if the Afghan administration has, as I believe, caught on to the fact that the reason we’re pumping so much money into their country is because they’re perceived to have the Taliban and Terrorists and Drugs, and that if they didn’t have those things we would treat them like Nepal, what possible incentive do they have to get rid of those things? I think the entire political culture suffers from an inability to be passionate about a moderate solution. The political culture finds it almost impossible to envisage anything other than increases or total withdrawal. Stuck in that binary opposition and taking into account both our obligations to the Afghan people and the risks posed by Afghanistan, you can see why the president is going for increases. Personally, though, I think he’s wrong. I think the light footprint we had in 2002 – 2003, when we were taking few casualties, when we weren’t pretending to be involved in nation building, when our troops didn’t go much outside the capital, and when at the same Afghanistan was relatively secure and prospering, was the correct posture. And that we have been misled by our ambitions. We’ve bitten off more than we can chew. We’ve provided fuel for the Taliban insurgency by allowing them to present themselves as fighting for Afghanistan against foreign military occupation. And that our current policy is going to make all of those things worse. The much longer form was delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today. The still longer text is at the London Review of Books. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rory Stewart. (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Rory Stewart in professorial mode The Kiplingesque adventurer and writer Rory Stewart – the man who walked alone across Afghanistan and made a best-seller of The Places In Between — was quoted by Nicholas Kristoff in the Times the other day dismissing the Obama rationale for escalating the war as “nonsense.” In our second annual conversation yesterday, in Boston, Rory Stewart expanded on the theme. He teaches now at Harvard’s Kennedy School when he’s not running a model redevelopment project in the heart of old Kabul. I am listening respectfully here to what sounds like the voice of a recovering imperialist. Short form: It’s a “mistaken” hope and theory that heavy doses of American money and military power can build a legitimate state in Afghanistan or defeat the Taliban. Rory Stewart in seven-league boots These are worthy objectives but they’re tasks that really can only be peformed by Afghans, not by foreigners, and which are probably very long-term goals — a question of maybe years, or much more, decades. I think that in so far as Obama’s aim is simply to prevent Al Qaeda from becoming stronger, it’s not necessary for him to defeat the Taliban, or build a legitimate, effective, stable state. The Taliban is not very strong. The Taliban is not in a position to take a major city. It’s not the Taliban of ‘94. And even were they in the very unlikely event to take a city, it’s extremely unlikely that they’d invite Al Qaeda back… In fact the lesson of the last seven years is that Osama Bin Laden prefers to be in Pakistan than in Afghanistan, in part because Pakistan is a more established state and because Pakistani state sovereignty prevents US Special Forces from operating freely in their territory. A very fragmentary failed state of the sort the Taliban would be participating in if they were to increase their position in Afghanistan is not likely to provide much protection for Al Qaeda, and probably therefore unlikely to pose a considerably increased danger to the United States. What worries me most about the troop increases is that they’re likely to precipitate … withdrawal. We tend to lurch from engagement to isolation, and from increases to withdrawal. My dream has always been to define a very limited ‘light footprint,’ because I believe a light footprint is a more sustainable footprint. What Afghanistan needs with the international community is a long-term, patient, tolerant relationship; not electroshock therapy, huge amounts of cash, huge numbers of troops, in an attempt to turn it around on a ninepin. The international community is now in a bind… The United States has said ‘I can’t affort to fail in Afghanistan; this is the Number One threat to the world,’ and therefore it doesn’t really have much leverage over an Afghan administration. They can’t really threaten to reduce troops or leave Karzai to the Taliban so long as they say this is our front line on the War on Terror… It’s very dangerous in any relationship or situation to say failure is not an option, because it effectively renders you impotent. In order to deal with Afghanistan or Pakistan we need to be able to say our interests are not identical with yours. We don’t need to be here… The current situation, suggesting we have no alternative other than the current strategy, simply exposes us to being perpetually exploited. One way of putting is: if the Afghan administration has, as I believe, caught on to the fact that the reason we’re pumping so much money into their country is because they’re perceived to have the Taliban and Terrorists and Drugs, and that if they didn’t have those things we would treat them like Nepal, what possible incentive do they have to get rid of those things? I think the entire political culture suffers from an inability to be passionate about a moderate solution. The political culture finds it almost impossible to envisage anything other than increases or total withdrawal. Stuck in that binary opposition and taking into account both our obligations to the Afghan people and the risks posed by Afghanistan, you can see why the president is going for increases. Personally, though, I think he’s wrong. I think the light footprint we had in 2002 – 2003, when we were taking few casualties, when we weren’t pretending to be involved in nation building, when our troops didn’t go much outside the capital, and when at the same Afghanistan was relatively secure and prospering, was the correct posture. And that we have been misled by our ambitions. We’ve bitten off more than we can chew. We’ve provided fuel for the Taliban insurgency by allowing them to present themselves as fighting for Afghanistan against foreign military occupation. And that our current policy is going to make all of those things worse. The much longer form was delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today. The still longer text is at the London Review of Books. tag:odeo.com,2009-09-16,25135727 Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:27:55 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25124793-Isaac-Newton-drops-in-at-MIT Alexander Pope’s couplet about Isaac Newton gives me goosebumps: Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said: Let Newton be! and all was light. Epitaph… Intended for Sir Isaac Newton, in Westminster Abbey   Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tom Levenson. (29 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Isaac Newton: probing the mind of God If the “foundational scientist” Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) turned up one day at MIT, a sort of figment of Newton’s imagination, where might the conversation go these days? We are bandying questions with the master journalist Tom Levenson, the only man I know who has studied every word of Principia Mathematica . Who at MIT would engage Isaac Newton on the subject of God? Lots of people, Levenson believes. Would Newton not take the “big bang” theory as an analog of the Bible’s story of Creaton? Probably. What would intrigue him most in science today? The biological sciences of mind and self. Who could ... Alexander Pope’s couplet about Isaac Newton gives me goosebumps: Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said: Let Newton be! and all was light. Epitaph… Intended for Sir Isaac Newton, in Westminster Abbey   Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tom Levenson. (29 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Isaac Newton: probing the mind of God If the “foundational scientist” Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) turned up one day at MIT, a sort of figment of Newton’s imagination, where might the conversation go these days? We are bandying questions with the master journalist Tom Levenson, the only man I know who has studied every word of Principia Mathematica . Who at MIT would engage Isaac Newton on the subject of God? Lots of people, Levenson believes. Would Newton not take the “big bang” theory as an analog of the Bible’s story of Creaton? Probably. What would intrigue him most in science today? The biological sciences of mind and self. Who could persuade Newton that evolutionary psychology is true science? Maybe nobody. Who’d you introduce him to on his first day at MIT? Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Wolfgang Ketterle, experimental atomic physicist. Marvin Minsky, scientist of mind and artificial intelligence. Rodney Brooks, roboticist. Nancy Hopkins, gene biologist… In the miracle years of his early twenties, through the London plague of the mid-1660s, Isaac Newton codified most of what you and I know about apples, planets and moons in motion… about inertia, gravity and calculus, the mathematics of motion and change. In Newton and the Counterfeiter , Tom Levenson, who runs the science-writing course at MIT, has extended the story to encompass Newton’s late career as Warden of the Royal Mint and remorseless detective and prosecutor of the notorious William Chaloner. Chaloner’s fatal sin was trying to debase not only England’s currency but also Newton’s beloved quasi-religious art and science of alchemy. Thomas Levenson: in Newton’s playground In conversation, I asked Tom Levenson to extend the yarn by another long imaginative leap. A guided tour, please, Tom, for the father of mathematical and rational science, around its sprawling citadel, from MIT’s brain labs to the departments of architecture and nanotechnology. Remembering specially that Newton — part medieval, part modern — was not exactly a Newtonian. The father of the Enlightenment was equally an alchemist, bent turning dross to gold, and a fervent, argumentative Unitarian Christian. TL: I think where he would have been most intrigued, perhaps horrified, possibly even deeply saddened, is in the revolution in the biological sciences, the sciences of mind and self. I don’t think there was anything in 17th and early 18th century science, philosophy or theology that really prepared you, prepared anyone, for the impact of Darwin, the impact of Mendel, and for the impact of the truly rigorous application of the materialistic world view to who we are, how our bodies work, how our minds work; that’s were I think he would have had the greatest difficulty, not necessarily comprehending the underlying ideas, but dealing with the success of the results of this extraordinarily important line of inquiry. CL: What is it that would trouble him? Is it the banishing of not only God, but of a deep mystery? TL: I don’t think Isaac Newton wept much for the banishing of mysteries. I think he was committed to that as a proposition. But I do think he had a profound sense of himself as an agent of God. One of the scholars whom I most respect in this area, and whose work I drew upon, Simon Schaffer, at Cambridge, is writing now a book about angels in 17th century English thinking. And he argues, persuasively to me, that Newton saw himself as a kind of angel of the Lord. It’s very, very hard to hold onto that conception when you see how powerful the hypothesis that mind is a phenomenon of material brain, when you see how well that works, how much you can explain, how wonderfully we can intervene in the miseries of people using that as our basic presumption. The sense that there is a self that is not just my body, but a self that is my ideas, my thoughts, my emotions, my feelings, is one that we all hold very deeply, and that is being at least modified, if not entirely threatened by modern neurobiology. I think Newton would have found that difficult, very difficult. Many, many people do. He’s not unique. He has plenty of company today. Thomas Levenson in conversation with Chris Lydon at MIT, September 3, 2009. Alexander Pope’s couplet about Isaac Newton gives me goosebumps: Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said: Let Newton be! and all was light. Epitaph… Intended for Sir Isaac Newton, in Westminster Abbey   Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tom Levenson. (29 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Isaac Newton: probing the mind of God If the “foundational scientist” Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) turned up one day at MIT, a sort of figment of Newton’s imagination, where might the conversation go these days? We are bandying questions with the master journalist Tom Levenson, the only man I know who has studied every word of Principia Mathematica . Who at MIT would engage Isaac Newton on the subject of God? Lots of people, Levenson believes. Would Newton not take the “big bang” theory as an analog of the Bible’s story of Creaton? Probably. What would intrigue him most in science today? The biological sciences of mind and self. Who could persuade Newton that evolutionary psychology is true science? Maybe nobody. Who’d you introduce him to on his first day at MIT? Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Wolfgang Ketterle, experimental atomic physicist. Marvin Minsky, scientist of mind and artificial intelligence. Rodney Brooks, roboticist. Nancy Hopkins, gene biologist… In the miracle years of his early twenties, through the London plague of the mid-1660s, Isaac Newton codified most of what you and I know about apples, planets and moons in motion… about inertia, gravity and calculus, the mathematics of motion and change. In Newton and the Counterfeiter , Tom Levenson, who runs the science-writing course at MIT, has extended the story to encompass Newton’s late career as Warden of the Royal Mint and remorseless detective and prosecutor of the notorious William Chaloner. Chaloner’s fatal sin was trying to debase not only England’s currency but also Newton’s beloved quasi-religious art and science of alchemy. Thomas Levenson: in Newton’s playground In conversation, I asked Tom Levenson to extend the yarn by another long imaginative leap. A guided tour, please, Tom, for the father of mathematical and rational science, around its sprawling citadel, from MIT’s brain labs to the departments of architecture and nanotechnology. Remembering specially that Newton — part medieval, part modern — was not exactly a Newtonian. The father of the Enlightenment was equally an alchemist, bent turning dross to gold, and a fervent, argumentative Unitarian Christian. TL: I think where he would have been most intrigued, perhaps horrified, possibly even deeply saddened, is in the revolution in the biological sciences, the sciences of mind and self. I don’t think there was anything in 17th and early 18th century science, philosophy or theology that really prepared you, prepared anyone, for the impact of Darwin, the impact of Mendel, and for the impact of the truly rigorous application of the materialistic world view to who we are, how our bodies work, how our minds work; that’s were I think he would have had the greatest difficulty, not necessarily comprehending the underlying ideas, but dealing with the success of the results of this extraordinarily important line of inquiry. CL: What is it that would trouble him? Is it the banishing of not only God, but of a deep mystery? TL: I don’t think Isaac Newton wept much for the banishing of mysteries. I think he was committed to that as a proposition. But I do think he had a profound sense of himself as an agent of God. One of the scholars whom I most respect in this area, and whose work I drew upon, Simon Schaffer, at Cambridge, is writing now a book about angels in 17th century English thinking. And he argues, persuasively to me, that Newton saw himself as a kind of angel of the Lord. It’s very, very hard to hold onto that conception when you see how powerful the hypothesis that mind is a phenomenon of material brain, when you see how well that works, how much you can explain, how wonderfully we can intervene in the miseries of people using that as our basic presumption. The sense that there is a self that is not just my body, but a self that is my ideas, my thoughts, my emotions, my feelings, is one that we all hold very deeply, and that is being at least modified, if not entirely threatened by modern neurobiology. I think Newton would have found that difficult, very difficult. Many, many people do. He’s not unique. He has plenty of company today. Thomas Levenson in conversation with Chris Lydon at MIT, September 3, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-09-14,25124793 Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:19:22 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25108799-Patrick-Keefe%E2%80%99s-Snakehead-to-the-US-through-Hell In Patrick Keefe’s saga of The Snakehead , it’s the migrants and refugees scoffing at our immigration rules, and breaking them at risk of their lives, who pose the moral challenge to those of us who got here the easy way – that is, were born here. How many of us would take the route they’ve chosen, through Hell, to call ourselves Americans? Are we missing something about the allure of our country? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Patrick Keefe. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) “What is it about this place?” as painter-storyteller Maira Kalman put it in her New York Times blog the other day, about this adopted country of hers that welcomes nearly a million new citizens every year. “Whose home is this?” Patrick Radden Keefe: to be an American Patrick Radden Keefe, reporter at large for the New Yorker, recounts the story of a single human brokerage in The Snakehead. “An epic tale of the Chinatown underworld and the American dream,” in Keefe’s subtitle, it is a great summ... In Patrick Keefe’s saga of The Snakehead , it’s the migrants and refugees scoffing at our immigration rules, and breaking them at risk of their lives, who pose the moral challenge to those of us who got here the easy way – that is, were born here. How many of us would take the route they’ve chosen, through Hell, to call ourselves Americans? Are we missing something about the allure of our country? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Patrick Keefe. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) “What is it about this place?” as painter-storyteller Maira Kalman put it in her New York Times blog the other day, about this adopted country of hers that welcomes nearly a million new citizens every year. “Whose home is this?” Patrick Radden Keefe: to be an American Patrick Radden Keefe, reporter at large for the New Yorker, recounts the story of a single human brokerage in The Snakehead. “An epic tale of the Chinatown underworld and the American dream,” in Keefe’s subtitle, it is a great summer read that wakes you screaming from the buried immigration nightmare. It begins in a sort of shipwreck of a tramp steamer, Golden Venture, and mass drownings off the Rockaway Peninsula on New York’s Long Island in June, 1993. It ends in long prison sentences and deportations for the survivors. But the insistent theme music under all of it is the unconquerable drive that thousands, maybe millions, feel to get to America. “Snakehead” means people-trafficker. Sister Peng in her Chinatown variety shop and bank was the mother of all snakeheads. The FBI and immigration cops hounded her for a decade before Judge Michael Mukasey in 2006 put her away for 35 years. Today, her standing in China’s Fujian province and on the fringes of Chinatown, Patrick Keefe suggests, is something like Harriet Tubman’s of Underground Railroad fame in African-America. Justice and morality have all been double-reversed and trashed before the tale is all told, but something in the glowing torch of Miss Liberty in New York harbor has won the day. There is no question that there is a kind of magic out there… What we want to be is this beacon of liberty and opportunity. We boast about it, and I think we all, to some extent, congratulate ourselves for it. And then we’re puzzled that we have 12 million illegal immigrants and more coming every year. Which seems rather bizarre to me: I mean, of course we do. For me the really striking thing, and the question, the sort of humbling and troubling question was: what does it mean to be a citizen, really? Is it a piece of paper? Is it that you own property here, that you pay taxes, that you fight for your country? I wonder if there is not a way of thinking about it, to some extent, as: what kind of sacrifices did you make to be here? And this, for me, was the issue with the Golden Venture passengers, for people like Sean Chen. Sean is still not a legal immigrant in the United States; he is still not a permanent resident. He works as a bartender outside of Philadelphia today. He doesn’t take planes anywhere, because he’d rather drive across the country than have to be confronted by officials at airports who want to see his documents. And I think about what he’s gone through. And it’s something that I know, without a shadow of a doubt, I couldn’t go through. And it does seem cruel and unusual, and also kind of perverse, that this guy, who to my mind has earned it, and is American, is not allowed to be, doesn’t have that piece of paper. Patrick Radden Keefe in conversation with Chris Lydon, New York and Providence, September 4, 2009. In Patrick Keefe’s saga of The Snakehead , it’s the migrants and refugees scoffing at our immigration rules, and breaking them at risk of their lives, who pose the moral challenge to those of us who got here the easy way – that is, were born here. How many of us would take the route they’ve chosen, through Hell, to call ourselves Americans? Are we missing something about the allure of our country? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Patrick Keefe. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) “What is it about this place?” as painter-storyteller Maira Kalman put it in her New York Times blog the other day, about this adopted country of hers that welcomes nearly a million new citizens every year. “Whose home is this?” Patrick Radden Keefe: to be an American Patrick Radden Keefe, reporter at large for the New Yorker, recounts the story of a single human brokerage in The Snakehead. “An epic tale of the Chinatown underworld and the American dream,” in Keefe’s subtitle, it is a great summer read that wakes you screaming from the buried immigration nightmare. It begins in a sort of shipwreck of a tramp steamer, Golden Venture, and mass drownings off the Rockaway Peninsula on New York’s Long Island in June, 1993. It ends in long prison sentences and deportations for the survivors. But the insistent theme music under all of it is the unconquerable drive that thousands, maybe millions, feel to get to America. “Snakehead” means people-trafficker. Sister Peng in her Chinatown variety shop and bank was the mother of all snakeheads. The FBI and immigration cops hounded her for a decade before Judge Michael Mukasey in 2006 put her away for 35 years. Today, her standing in China’s Fujian province and on the fringes of Chinatown, Patrick Keefe suggests, is something like Harriet Tubman’s of Underground Railroad fame in African-America. Justice and morality have all been double-reversed and trashed before the tale is all told, but something in the glowing torch of Miss Liberty in New York harbor has won the day. There is no question that there is a kind of magic out there… What we want to be is this beacon of liberty and opportunity. We boast about it, and I think we all, to some extent, congratulate ourselves for it. And then we’re puzzled that we have 12 million illegal immigrants and more coming every year. Which seems rather bizarre to me: I mean, of course we do. For me the really striking thing, and the question, the sort of humbling and troubling question was: what does it mean to be a citizen, really? Is it a piece of paper? Is it that you own property here, that you pay taxes, that you fight for your country? I wonder if there is not a way of thinking about it, to some extent, as: what kind of sacrifices did you make to be here? And this, for me, was the issue with the Golden Venture passengers, for people like Sean Chen. Sean is still not a legal immigrant in the United States; he is still not a permanent resident. He works as a bartender outside of Philadelphia today. He doesn’t take planes anywhere, because he’d rather drive across the country than have to be confronted by officials at airports who want to see his documents. And I think about what he’s gone through. And it’s something that I know, without a shadow of a doubt, I couldn’t go through. And it does seem cruel and unusual, and also kind of perverse, that this guy, who to my mind has earned it, and is American, is not allowed to be, doesn’t have that piece of paper. Patrick Radden Keefe in conversation with Chris Lydon, New York and Providence, September 4, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-09-09,25108799 Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:27:14 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/25035127-Jackson-Lears-on-Obama%E2%80%99s-Sorrows-of-Empire Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jackson Lears (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Jackson Lears‘ cultural history, Rebirth of a Nation , from the Civil War to World War One, is the flip side of Louis Menand’s dazzling take on the same period, The Metaphysical Club (2001). Jackson Lears: “our historian of yearning” Menand wrote about the invention of Pragmatism. What became known as the American philosophy was conceived deliberately as an antidote to the unbridled passions that had just taken more than 600,000 American lives and nearly broke the Union. Lears is writing about the war virus that survived the pragmatists’ “cure.” Menand’s heroes were Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James and John Dewey. In Lears’ rueful reconsideration of the story, Teddy Roosevelt reemerges as the poster-face of the era: the first captain of American empire and true ancestor of the bathetic George W. Bush. The first Gilded Age and its lingerin... Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jackson Lears (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Jackson Lears‘ cultural history, Rebirth of a Nation , from the Civil War to World War One, is the flip side of Louis Menand’s dazzling take on the same period, The Metaphysical Club (2001). Jackson Lears: “our historian of yearning” Menand wrote about the invention of Pragmatism. What became known as the American philosophy was conceived deliberately as an antidote to the unbridled passions that had just taken more than 600,000 American lives and nearly broke the Union. Lears is writing about the war virus that survived the pragmatists’ “cure.” Menand’s heroes were Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James and John Dewey. In Lears’ rueful reconsideration of the story, Teddy Roosevelt reemerges as the poster-face of the era: the first captain of American empire and true ancestor of the bathetic George W. Bush. The first Gilded Age and its lingering effects are almost reducible to a contest of ideas and temperaments between a great teacher and his student who became a giant president. “Unless we keep the barbarian virtues,” Teddy Roosevelt wrote in 1899, “gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.” William James, who’d tutored Roosevelt at Harvard, made precisely the opposite point in The Moral Equivalent of War (1910) : that the claw-and-fang ferocity that bred the species was now undoing us. “And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the sciences of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity.” Vice President Roosevelt promoted the US war in the Philippines (1899 – 1902), then as President inherited the waging of it. James — in league with Mark Twain, Samuel Gompers, Andrew Carnegie and others — denounced America’s colonial venture, anticipating the over-the-top curses of President Obama’s onetime pastor in Chicago, Jeremiah Wright. “God dam the U.S. for its vile conduct” in the Philippines, said James, our greatest public intellectual. American intervention would destroy “the one sacred thing in the world, the spontaneous budding of a national life” among the Filipinos. “We can destroy their ideals, but we can’t give them ours.” But this story of the two cordial enemies, Professor James and President Roosevelt, is just a piece the contest over Republic and Empire, as old as the European settlement of the continent: were we to be a city on a hill, or an empire of liberty? It is an argument that raged recently through the punditry around the war in Iraq, with Paul Krugman, Jon Stewart, Gore Vidal and Andrew Bacevich in what could be called (but never is) the Party of the Republic, and Christopher Hitchens, George Packer, Robert Kagan and Tom Friedman in the Party of Empire. It is a story as current today as Barack Obama’s difficulty reconciling the health of the people (call it: healthcare for all) and extended war in Afghanistan. Jackson Lears explains that he undertook his new book “in sadness and anger” in 2003, asking why Americans keep talking themselves into faraway wars of choice – to wit: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – knowing the horrific price in blood and treasure and reputation. Lears’ answer took him back more than a century to an American longing for regeneration after the Civil War: it’s a longing to start over, maybe to be born again, one-by-one and as a nation, to exercise a manly, muscular Christianity, with a wispy wish that maybe war makes us stronger, no matter the evidence to the contrary. In our conversation, Lears’ answer extends to a melancholy reflection on the Obama dolrums of August, 2009: JL: Like a lot of other people, I was moved profoundly by the victory of Obama. Moved to tears, in fact, about the sense of possibility that this seemed to restore. I kept thinking about the term ‘deliverance’ — I thought of this as a deliverance from a nightmarish period in our history, and a period where really there had been a kind of unfolding coup d’etat, [the Bush administration] running roughshod over civil liberties and certainly the republican tradition. And Obama seemed to promise, certainly in his campaign rhetoric, a fundamental departure from the kind of imperial abuses that Bush and company had specialized in and had deployed so effectively and relentlessly while they were in power. Obama seemed to promise deliverance. That was the word that came to mind for me. And regeneration, of course, along with that. CL: You’re putting a lot of those Obama hopes in the past tense… JL: I don’t see the kind of leadership that Obama had a mandate to provide. He could have made more things happen, certainly with respect to health care, and could have taken command of the debate and framed it more effectively rather than bending over backwards to create this bipartisan solution that I think is an utter delusion when you are dealing with the kind of rabid free market ideologues that are left on the Republican side, now that all of the moderates have been defeated by Democrats. I am very dispirited by this—I haven’t given up hope altogether because I think that Obama represents, in some ways, the soft imperial side of the American imperial tradition rather than the hard Teddy Roosevelt side. He represents the Woodrow Wilson side, the side that, at least, sees war as a last resort, rather than something that is actually desirable. It is less bellicose in rhetoric and it can be persuaded to sit down and talk about things in ways that the more extreme militarists cannot. Nevertheless, in its very benign quality, the humanitarian interventionist argument can be quite seductive and ultimately quite dangerous as well, and that is what I fear I see happening in Afghanistan… I am concerned that even as he embodies a more multicultural and more pluralistic perspective, and certainly a more diplomatic perspective than a militarist one, his willingness to talk to Iran, for example, is a sign for some cause for hope. But I also think the universalist aims — the old Wilsonian tradition — is not dead by any means: we can go marching abroad in search of monsters with the best of intentions and those adventures can go horribly awry. There is a great deal of hubris involved in either case, it seems, whether you are taking the harder line or the softer line. Jackson Lears in conversation with Chris Lydon, New Brunswick, NJ and Boston, August 27, 2009. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jackson Lears (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Jackson Lears‘ cultural history, Rebirth of a Nation , from the Civil War to World War One, is the flip side of Louis Menand’s dazzling take on the same period, The Metaphysical Club (2001). Jackson Lears: “our historian of yearning” Menand wrote about the invention of Pragmatism. What became known as the American philosophy was conceived deliberately as an antidote to the unbridled passions that had just taken more than 600,000 American lives and nearly broke the Union. Lears is writing about the war virus that survived the pragmatists’ “cure.” Menand’s heroes were Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James and John Dewey. In Lears’ rueful reconsideration of the story, Teddy Roosevelt reemerges as the poster-face of the era: the first captain of American empire and true ancestor of the bathetic George W. Bush. The first Gilded Age and its lingering effects are almost reducible to a contest of ideas and temperaments between a great teacher and his student who became a giant president. “Unless we keep the barbarian virtues,” Teddy Roosevelt wrote in 1899, “gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.” William James, who’d tutored Roosevelt at Harvard, made precisely the opposite point in The Moral Equivalent of War (1910) : that the claw-and-fang ferocity that bred the species was now undoing us. “And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the sciences of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity.” Vice President Roosevelt promoted the US war in the Philippines (1899 – 1902), then as President inherited the waging of it. James — in league with Mark Twain, Samuel Gompers, Andrew Carnegie and others — denounced America’s colonial venture, anticipating the over-the-top curses of President Obama’s onetime pastor in Chicago, Jeremiah Wright. “God dam the U.S. for its vile conduct” in the Philippines, said James, our greatest public intellectual. American intervention would destroy “the one sacred thing in the world, the spontaneous budding of a national life” among the Filipinos. “We can destroy their ideals, but we can’t give them ours.” But this story of the two cordial enemies, Professor James and President Roosevelt, is just a piece the contest over Republic and Empire, as old as the European settlement of the continent: were we to be a city on a hill, or an empire of liberty? It is an argument that raged recently through the punditry around the war in Iraq, with Paul Krugman, Jon Stewart, Gore Vidal and Andrew Bacevich in what could be called (but never is) the Party of the Republic, and Christopher Hitchens, George Packer, Robert Kagan and Tom Friedman in the Party of Empire. It is a story as current today as Barack Obama’s difficulty reconciling the health of the people (call it: healthcare for all) and extended war in Afghanistan. Jackson Lears explains that he undertook his new book “in sadness and anger” in 2003, asking why Americans keep talking themselves into faraway wars of choice – to wit: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – knowing the horrific price in blood and treasure and reputation. Lears’ answer took him back more than a century to an American longing for regeneration after the Civil War: it’s a longing to start over, maybe to be born again, one-by-one and as a nation, to exercise a manly, muscular Christianity, with a wispy wish that maybe war makes us stronger, no matter the evidence to the contrary. In our conversation, Lears’ answer extends to a melancholy reflection on the Obama dolrums of August, 2009: JL: Like a lot of other people, I was moved profoundly by the victory of Obama. Moved to tears, in fact, about the sense of possibility that this seemed to restore. I kept thinking about the term ‘deliverance’ — I thought of this as a deliverance from a nightmarish period in our history, and a period where really there had been a kind of unfolding coup d’etat, [the Bush administration] running roughshod over civil liberties and certainly the republican tradition. And Obama seemed to promise, certainly in his campaign rhetoric, a fundamental departure from the kind of imperial abuses that Bush and company had specialized in and had deployed so effectively and relentlessly while they were in power. Obama seemed to promise deliverance. That was the word that came to mind for me. And regeneration, of course, along with that. CL: You’re putting a lot of those Obama hopes in the past tense… JL: I don’t see the kind of leadership that Obama had a mandate to provide. He could have made more things happen, certainly with respect to health care, and could have taken command of the debate and framed it more effectively rather than bending over backwards to create this bipartisan solution that I think is an utter delusion when you are dealing with the kind of rabid free market ideologues that are left on the Republican side, now that all of the moderates have been defeated by Democrats. I am very dispirited by this—I haven’t given up hope altogether because I think that Obama represents, in some ways, the soft imperial side of the American imperial tradition rather than the hard Teddy Roosevelt side. He represents the Woodrow Wilson side, the side that, at least, sees war as a last resort, rather than something that is actually desirable. It is less bellicose in rhetoric and it can be persuaded to sit down and talk about things in ways that the more extreme militarists cannot. Nevertheless, in its very benign quality, the humanitarian interventionist argument can be quite seductive and ultimately quite dangerous as well, and that is what I fear I see happening in Afghanistan… I am concerned that even as he embodies a more multicultural and more pluralistic perspective, and certainly a more diplomatic perspective than a militarist one, his willingness to talk to Iran, for example, is a sign for some cause for hope. But I also think the universalist aims — the old Wilsonian tradition — is not dead by any means: we can go marching abroad in search of monsters with the best of intentions and those adventures can go horribly awry. There is a great deal of hubris involved in either case, it seems, whether you are taking the harder line or the softer line. Jackson Lears in conversation with Chris Lydon, New Brunswick, NJ and Boston, August 27, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-08-27,25035127 Thu, 27 Aug 2009 21:58:30 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24962149-New-Music-at-Tanglewood-Beauty%E2%80%99s-Turn Check my ears here: I hear a turning toward humanity among the rising star composers at the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood this week. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with composers Augusta Read Thomas, Aaron Travers, Cynthia Lee Wong and Jacob Bancks at Tanglewood (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Augusta Read Thomas Michael Lutch photo I go out to the new-music feast listening not just for unfamiliar sounds but for clues about whatever it is we are all going through in the globalizing Age of Obama. For young musicians it is more particularly the age of universal access to musics new and old, the age of YouTube and file-sharing, an age past any aesthetic orthodoxy when every combination of sounds is possible, when nobody’s left to decree what is good. The expansive moment for the composer class is an engaging time for listeners, too. Through a 5-day festival of nearly 40 works, I kept asking: is it me? or is the music less off-putting than it sounded 10 or 20... Check my ears here: I hear a turning toward humanity among the rising star composers at the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood this week. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with composers Augusta Read Thomas, Aaron Travers, Cynthia Lee Wong and Jacob Bancks at Tanglewood (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Augusta Read Thomas Michael Lutch photo I go out to the new-music feast listening not just for unfamiliar sounds but for clues about whatever it is we are all going through in the globalizing Age of Obama. For young musicians it is more particularly the age of universal access to musics new and old, the age of YouTube and file-sharing, an age past any aesthetic orthodoxy when every combination of sounds is possible, when nobody’s left to decree what is good. The expansive moment for the composer class is an engaging time for listeners, too. Through a 5-day festival of nearly 40 works, I kept asking: is it me? or is the music less off-putting than it sounded 10 or 20 years ago? Maybe it’s the times: with capitalism and climate change careening toward ruin, how could mere man-made music add much to the cosmic dread? Our conversation mid-Festival is with its director, Augusta Read Thomas, and three among the younger artists strutting their stuff at Tanglewood. I am wondering with them: what is it about our times that their composing reflects? Who do they imagine as their counterparts in other expressive fields? As Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony finished a 50-th anniversary performance of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto (1959), I was asking them how the new music of 2009 will sound in fifty years? and what it will tell us in times to come about the era that produced it? Aaron Travers , 33, looks like an MLB second baseman and talks like a student of Latin and other classical poetry. He grew up in Florida, wanting to write music for movies, then music to match the craft of his favorite poets, like the 19th Century American Stephen Crane and Portugal’s Eugénio de Andrade. The music scene feels like buzzing chaos. “We’re in a period of weird Brownian (random) motion in which everything is almost at a standstill; there’s so much going on, on a small scale… everything is swarming all at once, yet there is no large-scale trajectory in all this. I’m still discovering where I fit into that.” One of the reasons I compose music, or that I compose the music that I do, is that I think it is important to keep creating art that puts us in a poetic mindset, as opposed to a prosaic one. I remember Robert Graves — a very interesting personality– saying that we have lost our ability to think poetically. I think that music has that ability to bring us into that mindset. If we are able to bring back that poetic way of thinking, I think we can engage with our world in a more meaningful way. Cynthia Lee Wong , 26, a Juilliard piano graduate, writes what one German review called “shamelessly beautiful” music, beyond any rules of the old avant-garde. From a Chinese family deeply rooted in the States, she fends off the market’s “Asian” label with music that reaches into the universals of human fear and fantasy. I like to read the poems of [Rainer Maria] Rilke. I love to read in general… any sort of classics, any sort of poetry… In terms of music, I love Stravinsky. When I was young, in high school, I would listen obsessively to Rite of Spring, and I would wake up to the music; I set my alarm to the fast movements… I love Stravinsky because of his boldness… And I love Rilke because of his awareness of his interior self. Jacob Bancks , 26, is a child of rural Fairmont, Minnesota. In Chicago now, he is going urban in a hurry, as in the orchestral piece “Rapid Transit” which had its premier this week at Tanglewood. His closest artistic counterpart, he says, may be the Chicago photographer Becky Foley, who makes images without a camera by exposing hydrangeas, for example, or fireflies, to photographic paper. He gets the last word here on what is or isn’t “scary” about the new music. In the world of music today there is no real orthodoxy… I find that it’s much more exciting to be a composer than I imagine it was in other points in history… It’s never been easier to reach a global audience, and as we are more aware of the differences across cultures, I think we have more in common than we used to… I love scary music. So, the scarier the better as far as I’m concerned. I could listen to scary music and beautiful music, and I think that’s where we’re at right now. We can hear it all, and not be scared by any of it. Check my ears here: I hear a turning toward humanity among the rising star composers at the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood this week. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with composers Augusta Read Thomas, Aaron Travers, Cynthia Lee Wong and Jacob Bancks at Tanglewood (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Augusta Read Thomas Michael Lutch photo I go out to the new-music feast listening not just for unfamiliar sounds but for clues about whatever it is we are all going through in the globalizing Age of Obama. For young musicians it is more particularly the age of universal access to musics new and old, the age of YouTube and file-sharing, an age past any aesthetic orthodoxy when every combination of sounds is possible, when nobody’s left to decree what is good. The expansive moment for the composer class is an engaging time for listeners, too. Through a 5-day festival of nearly 40 works, I kept asking: is it me? or is the music less off-putting than it sounded 10 or 20 years ago? Maybe it’s the times: with capitalism and climate change careening toward ruin, how could mere man-made music add much to the cosmic dread? Our conversation mid-Festival is with its director, Augusta Read Thomas, and three among the younger artists strutting their stuff at Tanglewood. I am wondering with them: what is it about our times that their composing reflects? Who do they imagine as their counterparts in other expressive fields? As Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony finished a 50-th anniversary performance of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto (1959), I was asking them how the new music of 2009 will sound in fifty years? and what it will tell us in times to come about the era that produced it? Aaron Travers , 33, looks like an MLB second baseman and talks like a student of Latin and other classical poetry. He grew up in Florida, wanting to write music for movies, then music to match the craft of his favorite poets, like the 19th Century American Stephen Crane and Portugal’s Eugénio de Andrade. The music scene feels like buzzing chaos. “We’re in a period of weird Brownian (random) motion in which everything is almost at a standstill; there’s so much going on, on a small scale… everything is swarming all at once, yet there is no large-scale trajectory in all this. I’m still discovering where I fit into that.” One of the reasons I compose music, or that I compose the music that I do, is that I think it is important to keep creating art that puts us in a poetic mindset, as opposed to a prosaic one. I remember Robert Graves — a very interesting personality– saying that we have lost our ability to think poetically. I think that music has that ability to bring us into that mindset. If we are able to bring back that poetic way of thinking, I think we can engage with our world in a more meaningful way. Cynthia Lee Wong , 26, a Juilliard piano graduate, writes what one German review called “shamelessly beautiful” music, beyond any rules of the old avant-garde. From a Chinese family deeply rooted in the States, she fends off the market’s “Asian” label with music that reaches into the universals of human fear and fantasy. I like to read the poems of [Rainer Maria] Rilke. I love to read in general… any sort of classics, any sort of poetry… In terms of music, I love Stravinsky. When I was young, in high school, I would listen obsessively to Rite of Spring, and I would wake up to the music; I set my alarm to the fast movements… I love Stravinsky because of his boldness… And I love Rilke because of his awareness of his interior self. Jacob Bancks , 26, is a child of rural Fairmont, Minnesota. In Chicago now, he is going urban in a hurry, as in the orchestral piece “Rapid Transit” which had its premier this week at Tanglewood. His closest artistic counterpart, he says, may be the Chicago photographer Becky Foley, who makes images without a camera by exposing hydrangeas, for example, or fireflies, to photographic paper. He gets the last word here on what is or isn’t “scary” about the new music. In the world of music today there is no real orthodoxy… I find that it’s much more exciting to be a composer than I imagine it was in other points in history… It’s never been easier to reach a global audience, and as we are more aware of the differences across cultures, I think we have more in common than we used to… I love scary music. So, the scarier the better as far as I’m concerned. I could listen to scary music and beautiful music, and I think that’s where we’re at right now. We can hear it all, and not be scared by any of it. tag:odeo.com,2009-08-14,24962149 Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:57:43 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24914789-Jeff-Klein%E2%80%99s-Excellent-Adventure-in-Gaza Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Jeff Klein (50 minutes, 25 mb mp3) Jeff Klein’s excellent adventure this summer was a mission to Gaza, the Palestinian beachhead between Egypt and Israel, to witness resilience, as he says, amidst horrific destruction. From Jones Hill in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Jeff Klein is a retired machinist and union leader. He’s an almost regular working-class hero from the heart of the Boston melting-pot, with a highly irregular susceptibility to strangers and suffering, and a need to see things for himself. He was going to a place that most of us Americans have chosen, or been persuaded, to put out of mind. It’s part of the charm of Jeff Klein’s voice to get us there matter-of-factly: The Gaza Strip, he notes, has roughly the size, shape and sandiness (and roughly ten times the population) of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. But his great gift is his eye for the human essentials. Most of his fellow-travelers on this trip w... Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Jeff Klein (50 minutes, 25 mb mp3) Jeff Klein’s excellent adventure this summer was a mission to Gaza, the Palestinian beachhead between Egypt and Israel, to witness resilience, as he says, amidst horrific destruction. From Jones Hill in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Jeff Klein is a retired machinist and union leader. He’s an almost regular working-class hero from the heart of the Boston melting-pot, with a highly irregular susceptibility to strangers and suffering, and a need to see things for himself. He was going to a place that most of us Americans have chosen, or been persuaded, to put out of mind. It’s part of the charm of Jeff Klein’s voice to get us there matter-of-factly: The Gaza Strip, he notes, has roughly the size, shape and sandiness (and roughly ten times the population) of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. But his great gift is his eye for the human essentials. Most of his fellow-travelers on this trip were Palestinian-Americans. Mohammed, an environmental consultant from Illinois, was going to see his 90-year-old mother in Gaza. Abu Raouf, who called himself Ralph, was going from Tampa to see his mother and brother. The most heart-rending story was about Maher, an engineer in Kansas City who’d left his American family in Gaza before the warfare last year. And then the siege began, and his family, all American citizens, were effectively trapped in Gaza. They could not get out. And he was going both to see them – he had not seen them in over a year, and to try and bring them out… At the border there was this horrific confrontation. Here he was with his wife and small children, and told that they couldn’t leave. He could leave, but they couldn’t leave… In the end, he decided the only thing he could do was leave himself, and hope to go to Cairo and make some arrangements to get some pressure from the U.S. embassy to get them out. He was in tears, his children were hysterical. The oldest one looked to be 11 or 12. This was our departure from Gaza. Jeff Klein in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, July 30, 2009.   The beauty of the human voice is that your ears can judge the authenticity of Jeff Klein’s story. He’s tried it on the neighbors: My neighbors are curious – they say, you went to Gaza, why? To people who aren’t politically active it’s something odd, something out of the ordinary. So it takes a little bit of explaining, but people you have a relationship with, your neighbors, they’re prepared to listen to you in a way they wouldn’t otherwise… My neighbor knows now that his tax money is going to buy bombs to kill people in Gaza. And he doesn’t like it. And that’s the reaction I generally have: if you can get their ear, when you talk to people about it, I find they’re universally understanding and sympathetic about this issue, because as human beings there’s an empathy we have with people who are suffering. And if you make them human, people will respond as human beings. For people to accept the brutality against other people, part of it requires not considering them fully human. As human beings, we can’t be that cruel to people whose humanity we recognize.   Jeff Klein in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, July 30, 2009. It seems to Jeff Klein “a miracle,” and a tangible reality, that the Palestinians have been able to sustain their national identity through generations of hardship and diaspora around the world. And the second and third generations in the United States who’ve never even been to Palestine have this strong sense of identity with the land of their ancestors. It’s a little bit ironic that in some ways the Palestinians of today are what the Jews were of yesterday… Adversity has made them stronger… Soomood is an Arabic word that you’ll learn if you go to the West Bank. Soomood means steadfastedness, sticking to it. They have that, and they have kind of a determination and a calmness about it which is quite remarkable. Whenever I visit the West Bank, and I have friends there, I always feel like I’m the angriest person on the scene among my Palestinian friends… They’re in it for the duration, and getting angry doesn’t help. So they’re calm and determined. I’m more of an American – we want instant gratification. And I’m furious – every time I get to an Israeli checkpoint with my friends and see what people undergo, I’m angry, but they’re calm and steadfast. Of course, if they get angry it could cost them their lives – it’s a different situation for me, I have my american passport to protect me and they don’t. Jeff Klein in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, July 30, 2009. Jeff Klein finds it “almost embarrassing” to have found so much joy in a journey through a lot of misery and pain. Slow paperwork and delays let him digress to the pyramids at Giza and to the desk and chair of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy in Alexandria. Jeff had a copy of Cavafy’s poems along for the ride, and the Egyptian caretaker at Cavafy’s house inscribed it: From a human being who was born in an area which is turbulent and full of problems, who has struggled since birth with bad news every day, and I keep asking myself how long I will be hearing bad news, I found the answer with common sense and logic: that each human should respect the other regardless of ethnicity, color or belief. God has created us to choose. He didn’t create to choose for us. All the thanks to Mr. Jeff in the path of goodness and love. Inscription by Mohammed El Said in Jeff Klein’s book of Cavafy poems, July 2009. “Can you beat that?” Jeff says. “I feel blessed.” Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Jeff Klein (50 minutes, 25 mb mp3) Jeff Klein’s excellent adventure this summer was a mission to Gaza, the Palestinian beachhead between Egypt and Israel, to witness resilience, as he says, amidst horrific destruction. From Jones Hill in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Jeff Klein is a retired machinist and union leader. He’s an almost regular working-class hero from the heart of the Boston melting-pot, with a highly irregular susceptibility to strangers and suffering, and a need to see things for himself. He was going to a place that most of us Americans have chosen, or been persuaded, to put out of mind. It’s part of the charm of Jeff Klein’s voice to get us there matter-of-factly: The Gaza Strip, he notes, has roughly the size, shape and sandiness (and roughly ten times the population) of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. But his great gift is his eye for the human essentials. Most of his fellow-travelers on this trip were Palestinian-Americans. Mohammed, an environmental consultant from Illinois, was going to see his 90-year-old mother in Gaza. Abu Raouf, who called himself Ralph, was going from Tampa to see his mother and brother. The most heart-rending story was about Maher, an engineer in Kansas City who’d left his American family in Gaza before the warfare last year. And then the siege began, and his family, all American citizens, were effectively trapped in Gaza. They could not get out. And he was going both to see them – he had not seen them in over a year, and to try and bring them out… At the border there was this horrific confrontation. Here he was with his wife and small children, and told that they couldn’t leave. He could leave, but they couldn’t leave… In the end, he decided the only thing he could do was leave himself, and hope to go to Cairo and make some arrangements to get some pressure from the U.S. embassy to get them out. He was in tears, his children were hysterical. The oldest one looked to be 11 or 12. This was our departure from Gaza. Jeff Klein in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, July 30, 2009.   The beauty of the human voice is that your ears can judge the authenticity of Jeff Klein’s story. He’s tried it on the neighbors: My neighbors are curious – they say, you went to Gaza, why? To people who aren’t politically active it’s something odd, something out of the ordinary. So it takes a little bit of explaining, but people you have a relationship with, your neighbors, they’re prepared to listen to you in a way they wouldn’t otherwise… My neighbor knows now that his tax money is going to buy bombs to kill people in Gaza. And he doesn’t like it. And that’s the reaction I generally have: if you can get their ear, when you talk to people about it, I find they’re universally understanding and sympathetic about this issue, because as human beings there’s an empathy we have with people who are suffering. And if you make them human, people will respond as human beings. For people to accept the brutality against other people, part of it requires not considering them fully human. As human beings, we can’t be that cruel to people whose humanity we recognize.   Jeff Klein in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, July 30, 2009. It seems to Jeff Klein “a miracle,” and a tangible reality, that the Palestinians have been able to sustain their national identity through generations of hardship and diaspora around the world. And the second and third generations in the United States who’ve never even been to Palestine have this strong sense of identity with the land of their ancestors. It’s a little bit ironic that in some ways the Palestinians of today are what the Jews were of yesterday… Adversity has made them stronger… Soomood is an Arabic word that you’ll learn if you go to the West Bank. Soomood means steadfastedness, sticking to it. They have that, and they have kind of a determination and a calmness about it which is quite remarkable. Whenever I visit the West Bank, and I have friends there, I always feel like I’m the angriest person on the scene among my Palestinian friends… They’re in it for the duration, and getting angry doesn’t help. So they’re calm and determined. I’m more of an American – we want instant gratification. And I’m furious – every time I get to an Israeli checkpoint with my friends and see what people undergo, I’m angry, but they’re calm and steadfast. Of course, if they get angry it could cost them their lives – it’s a different situation for me, I have my american passport to protect me and they don’t. Jeff Klein in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, July 30, 2009. Jeff Klein finds it “almost embarrassing” to have found so much joy in a journey through a lot of misery and pain. Slow paperwork and delays let him digress to the pyramids at Giza and to the desk and chair of the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy in Alexandria. Jeff had a copy of Cavafy’s poems along for the ride, and the Egyptian caretaker at Cavafy’s house inscribed it: From a human being who was born in an area which is turbulent and full of problems, who has struggled since birth with bad news every day, and I keep asking myself how long I will be hearing bad news, I found the answer with common sense and logic: that each human should respect the other regardless of ethnicity, color or belief. God has created us to choose. He didn’t create to choose for us. All the thanks to Mr. Jeff in the path of goodness and love. Inscription by Mohammed El Said in Jeff Klein’s book of Cavafy poems, July 2009. “Can you beat that?” Jeff says. “I feel blessed.” tag:odeo.com,2009-08-05,24914789 Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:07:18 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24859463-Shahriar-Mandanipour-The-%E2%80%98Love%E2%80%99-Cure-for-Iran Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel from exile, Censoring an Iranian Love Story , is the back-story of the shockingly brave green-banded resistance we watched on TV till the regime cracked down on reporting… and Michael Jackson died. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Shahriar Mandanipour (68 minutes, 31 mb mp3) CNN pictures of a botched election and a nation, a mullocracy, in turmoil are one thing. The darker, more satisfying novelist’s version gives you a deep ecosystem of paranoia, both earned and embellished — a sort of Thousand and One Nights version of Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), anticipating revolutionary chaos. Mandanipour’s Iran is eternally a young people’s country (80 percent under 30, nowadays) where the revolutionary generations don’t much listen or learn from each other. “My generation sacrificed, but didn’t know what democracy was. To get killed was an honor… We got rid of the Shah, but didn’t know what we wante... Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel from exile, Censoring an Iranian Love Story , is the back-story of the shockingly brave green-banded resistance we watched on TV till the regime cracked down on reporting… and Michael Jackson died. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Shahriar Mandanipour (68 minutes, 31 mb mp3) CNN pictures of a botched election and a nation, a mullocracy, in turmoil are one thing. The darker, more satisfying novelist’s version gives you a deep ecosystem of paranoia, both earned and embellished — a sort of Thousand and One Nights version of Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), anticipating revolutionary chaos. Mandanipour’s Iran is eternally a young people’s country (80 percent under 30, nowadays) where the revolutionary generations don’t much listen or learn from each other. “My generation sacrificed, but didn’t know what democracy was. To get killed was an honor… We got rid of the Shah, but didn’t know what we wanted. This new generation wants freedom to walk together, and the future right now.” From antiquity Mandanipour’s Iran stands for inspired story-telling, with a contrary bad old habit of censoring its best writers. And then there’s a love problem at the heart of the Mandanipour diagnosis of Iranian culture: it’s the over-refinement of pomegranate-and-nightingale metaphors and fantasy, matched by a deathly dread of the real thing: of boys and girls holding hands in a picture show. “In this book I am trying to write a brighter story about love… to remind Iranians that there is love in the world, that it is our right to be lovers.” Shahriar Mandanipour, who was black-listed and unpublishable in Iran, came to the US three years ago. He wrote his new novel, in Farsi, as an artist in residence at Brown University’s Watson Institute. Up the road in Cambridge the other day, he talked with me about the whole web of life, love and literature in Iran and maybe elsewhere. He also unlocked for us the Iranian code on three key dates in the history Iran shares with the US: 1953 was the year of Operation Ajax, the “original sin” in postwar bullying that Americans insist on forgetting. Kermit Roosevelt, plying an infinite supply of CIA dollar bills, roused the rabble against Iran’s model post-colonial democracy led by Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh (for the sin of repatriating the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) and seated Reza Shah Pahlavi, the King of Kings and Light of the Aryans, on the Peacock Throne. “My kind of Shah!” marveled Dave Powers, court jester in the Kennedy White House. We Americans were coached at liking the puppet “modernizer,” but Iranians like Shahriar Mandanipour called it a “cout d’etat” and despised the Shah for smashing their golden opportunity for self-rule and then for the depraved tortures and killings by Savak, the Shah’s secret police. Though no Iranians were involved in 911, “It is not far-fetched,” as Steve Kinzer has told us, “to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York.” Iranians and Americans are all still paying, in blind purgatorial agony, for the unmentionable sin of 1953. 1979 was the year when Jimmy Carter, under pressure from Henry Kissinger and the Rockefeller Brothers, admitted the ousted Shah to the US for medical treatment. It was the year when Iranians like Shahriar Mandanipour wanted the US to hand over the Shah to Iran for trial and, presumably, execution. When Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran in protest, 1979 became the start of more than a year of “America Held Hostage.” In Iran it was crucially the moment when democrats and moderates like Mahdi Bazargan were unmercifully squeezed out of office, when as Shahriar Mandanipour put it in conversation, “the liberal government resigned and the clerics got all the power.” 2003 was the year of mind-melting absurdity, when the Bush invasion of Iraq toppled America’s vicious old friend and Iran’s worst enemy, Saddam Hussein. The Mandanipour version stems from his own “long hot summer” of army service at the front of Iran’s war with Iraq in the 1980s. His personal discovery as a reluctant soldier was that he could not fire on an Iraqi who wasn’t firing at him, yet further that he hated above all Saddam Hussein, “a foolish dictator who had started a ridiculous war.” When the US finally turned on Saddam, “in the depth of myself, I was happy,” Mandanipour admits, though he knew he would come to hate the war. It was a war, of course, that extended Iran’s influence through Iraq’s Shia majority. It was a US-Iraq war, I volunteered, that Iran won. “That the regime won,” Mandanipour corrected me. “Not the people.” Mostly, though, Shahriar Mandanipour is talking here about books and literature — about the burdens on a writer who’s been forced out of his language zone, and the tricks he has called on here to surmount the problem. The assignment he gave his dark self in a dark time was to write “a love story” with “an ending that will not make my reader afraid of falling in love.” His post-modern construction is a novel of four essential characters in cross-conversation: the virgin lovers Sara and Dara, the author who is trying to tell their story and the official censor who is trying to thwart it. The question is whether the censor can be induced to fall in love with the lovers. My answer is that Shahriar Mandanipour is in the Scheherazade class of story tellers, for our time. Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel from exile, Censoring an Iranian Love Story , is the back-story of the shockingly brave green-banded resistance we watched on TV till the regime cracked down on reporting… and Michael Jackson died. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Shahriar Mandanipour (68 minutes, 31 mb mp3) CNN pictures of a botched election and a nation, a mullocracy, in turmoil are one thing. The darker, more satisfying novelist’s version gives you a deep ecosystem of paranoia, both earned and embellished — a sort of Thousand and One Nights version of Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), anticipating revolutionary chaos. Mandanipour’s Iran is eternally a young people’s country (80 percent under 30, nowadays) where the revolutionary generations don’t much listen or learn from each other. “My generation sacrificed, but didn’t know what democracy was. To get killed was an honor… We got rid of the Shah, but didn’t know what we wanted. This new generation wants freedom to walk together, and the future right now.” From antiquity Mandanipour’s Iran stands for inspired story-telling, with a contrary bad old habit of censoring its best writers. And then there’s a love problem at the heart of the Mandanipour diagnosis of Iranian culture: it’s the over-refinement of pomegranate-and-nightingale metaphors and fantasy, matched by a deathly dread of the real thing: of boys and girls holding hands in a picture show. “In this book I am trying to write a brighter story about love… to remind Iranians that there is love in the world, that it is our right to be lovers.” Shahriar Mandanipour, who was black-listed and unpublishable in Iran, came to the US three years ago. He wrote his new novel, in Farsi, as an artist in residence at Brown University’s Watson Institute. Up the road in Cambridge the other day, he talked with me about the whole web of life, love and literature in Iran and maybe elsewhere. He also unlocked for us the Iranian code on three key dates in the history Iran shares with the US: 1953 was the year of Operation Ajax, the “original sin” in postwar bullying that Americans insist on forgetting. Kermit Roosevelt, plying an infinite supply of CIA dollar bills, roused the rabble against Iran’s model post-colonial democracy led by Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh (for the sin of repatriating the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) and seated Reza Shah Pahlavi, the King of Kings and Light of the Aryans, on the Peacock Throne. “My kind of Shah!” marveled Dave Powers, court jester in the Kennedy White House. We Americans were coached at liking the puppet “modernizer,” but Iranians like Shahriar Mandanipour called it a “cout d’etat” and despised the Shah for smashing their golden opportunity for self-rule and then for the depraved tortures and killings by Savak, the Shah’s secret police. Though no Iranians were involved in 911, “It is not far-fetched,” as Steve Kinzer has told us, “to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York.” Iranians and Americans are all still paying, in blind purgatorial agony, for the unmentionable sin of 1953. 1979 was the year when Jimmy Carter, under pressure from Henry Kissinger and the Rockefeller Brothers, admitted the ousted Shah to the US for medical treatment. It was the year when Iranians like Shahriar Mandanipour wanted the US to hand over the Shah to Iran for trial and, presumably, execution. When Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran in protest, 1979 became the start of more than a year of “America Held Hostage.” In Iran it was crucially the moment when democrats and moderates like Mahdi Bazargan were unmercifully squeezed out of office, when as Shahriar Mandanipour put it in conversation, “the liberal government resigned and the clerics got all the power.” 2003 was the year of mind-melting absurdity, when the Bush invasion of Iraq toppled America’s vicious old friend and Iran’s worst enemy, Saddam Hussein. The Mandanipour version stems from his own “long hot summer” of army service at the front of Iran’s war with Iraq in the 1980s. His personal discovery as a reluctant soldier was that he could not fire on an Iraqi who wasn’t firing at him, yet further that he hated above all Saddam Hussein, “a foolish dictator who had started a ridiculous war.” When the US finally turned on Saddam, “in the depth of myself, I was happy,” Mandanipour admits, though he knew he would come to hate the war. It was a war, of course, that extended Iran’s influence through Iraq’s Shia majority. It was a US-Iraq war, I volunteered, that Iran won. “That the regime won,” Mandanipour corrected me. “Not the people.” Mostly, though, Shahriar Mandanipour is talking here about books and literature — about the burdens on a writer who’s been forced out of his language zone, and the tricks he has called on here to surmount the problem. The assignment he gave his dark self in a dark time was to write “a love story” with “an ending that will not make my reader afraid of falling in love.” His post-modern construction is a novel of four essential characters in cross-conversation: the virgin lovers Sara and Dara, the author who is trying to tell their story and the official censor who is trying to thwart it. The question is whether the censor can be induced to fall in love with the lovers. My answer is that Shahriar Mandanipour is in the Scheherazade class of story tellers, for our time. tag:odeo.com,2009-07-24,24859463 Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:24:41 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24823494-Ronald-Prinn-and-MIT%E2%80%99s-Wheel-of-Fortune Ronald Prinn is talking about what was arguably the biggest little news story on earth so far this year. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ronald Prinn (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Ronald Prinn: it’s a planet changer It came from MIT’s global climate project: which reported in effect that the warming of the planet is not a 2-alarm fire, after all, but a four-alarm fire… that in the lifetime of my grandchildren, the average temperature in this membrane of life around the earth will be warmer not by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, but 4 to 6 degrees Celsius, or as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit. A planet-changer, as they said. Play the “wheel of fortune” game here. Zoom in here on a irresistible Google map project of all the coasts in the world to see if your house will be underwater in 50 years. You can set the rising sea level as high or low as you dare. The default is 7 meters. The MIT report in May had everything to do with the House vote in Washington i... Ronald Prinn is talking about what was arguably the biggest little news story on earth so far this year. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ronald Prinn (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Ronald Prinn: it’s a planet changer It came from MIT’s global climate project: which reported in effect that the warming of the planet is not a 2-alarm fire, after all, but a four-alarm fire… that in the lifetime of my grandchildren, the average temperature in this membrane of life around the earth will be warmer not by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, but 4 to 6 degrees Celsius, or as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit. A planet-changer, as they said. Play the “wheel of fortune” game here. Zoom in here on a irresistible Google map project of all the coasts in the world to see if your house will be underwater in 50 years. You can set the rising sea level as high or low as you dare. The default is 7 meters. The MIT report in May had everything to do with the House vote in Washington in June: the first ever to fix an American limit on the emission of greenhouse gases that are changing the climate. The vote was a squeaker – a seven vote spread for the Waxman-Markey bill that embodied the Obama climate policy. With Senate vote coming up and very much in doubt, I asked the chief of the MIT study, Ronald Prinn, to walk us through his research and the Wheel of Fortune gimmick that simulates a risk assessment for the only home that we – that any organic life we know about – ever had. We’re talking about something not way in the future. We’re talking about young people born today. They’re going to see the results of the heritage we left them, the inheritance if you like of the planet… I would show [skeptics in the Senate] the wheel, and say: “Here are the odds, the best that we can do with the knowledge we have, here are the odds.” And then just explain that if we landed on that 6-to-7 degree Centigrade warming by 2100, what it means simply for sea levels… It’s going to cause strife that is not just economic strife but it is the possibility of widespread strife associated with just simply the changing coast lines. Bangladesh is largely — a significant fraction of the country — only one meter above sea level. What are they going to do? They’re going to move into India, I presume. And what if the Indus River dries up in the middle of one of the most politically delicate and dangerous places in the world. There it is. It is not just economic loss, it’s the possibility of wide-spread strife. Those are the sorts of things I’d talk about. I’d talk about risk, and say what do they want to leave their children and grandchildren now, what is it they really want to be known for when people look back and say “they did something about this issue and thank goodness they did.” Ronald Prinn of MIT with Chris Lydon, Cambridge, July 17, 2009. Ronald Prinn is talking about what was arguably the biggest little news story on earth so far this year. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ronald Prinn (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Ronald Prinn: it’s a planet changer It came from MIT’s global climate project: which reported in effect that the warming of the planet is not a 2-alarm fire, after all, but a four-alarm fire… that in the lifetime of my grandchildren, the average temperature in this membrane of life around the earth will be warmer not by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, but 4 to 6 degrees Celsius, or as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit. A planet-changer, as they said. Play the “wheel of fortune” game here. Zoom in here on a irresistible Google map project of all the coasts in the world to see if your house will be underwater in 50 years. You can set the rising sea level as high or low as you dare. The default is 7 meters. The MIT report in May had everything to do with the House vote in Washington in June: the first ever to fix an American limit on the emission of greenhouse gases that are changing the climate. The vote was a squeaker – a seven vote spread for the Waxman-Markey bill that embodied the Obama climate policy. With Senate vote coming up and very much in doubt, I asked the chief of the MIT study, Ronald Prinn, to walk us through his research and the Wheel of Fortune gimmick that simulates a risk assessment for the only home that we – that any organic life we know about – ever had. We’re talking about something not way in the future. We’re talking about young people born today. They’re going to see the results of the heritage we left them, the inheritance if you like of the planet… I would show [skeptics in the Senate] the wheel, and say: “Here are the odds, the best that we can do with the knowledge we have, here are the odds.” And then just explain that if we landed on that 6-to-7 degree Centigrade warming by 2100, what it means simply for sea levels… It’s going to cause strife that is not just economic strife but it is the possibility of widespread strife associated with just simply the changing coast lines. Bangladesh is largely — a significant fraction of the country — only one meter above sea level. What are they going to do? They’re going to move into India, I presume. And what if the Indus River dries up in the middle of one of the most politically delicate and dangerous places in the world. There it is. It is not just economic loss, it’s the possibility of wide-spread strife. Those are the sorts of things I’d talk about. I’d talk about risk, and say what do they want to leave their children and grandchildren now, what is it they really want to be known for when people look back and say “they did something about this issue and thank goodness they did.” Ronald Prinn of MIT with Chris Lydon, Cambridge, July 17, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-07-17,24823494 Fri, 17 Jul 2009 13:53:16 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24738530-Juan-Enriquez-The-Next-Boom-by-Zipcode There is no rescuing this economy from our debt, denial and epic implosions like General Motors and the city of Detroit. The only hope is that our unfinished season of disaster will be inundated (and the new economy floated) by a flood of invention. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Juan Enriquez. (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Juan Enriquez: the only bet is on brains Juan Enriquez’s vision makes you want pray for a rain-out, bet on the flood. Especially if you live in one of the research and teaching centers of the world — best of all in MIT’s zipcode: 02139. Recovery, jobs and money are all fuctions, in the Enriquez brief, of zipcode concentrations of brain cells and emerging new “life science” industries. Juan Enriquez is an investor, teacher, writer and sometime politician who’s famous now on YouTube and the conference circuit for riffs like this one. We’re picking up on, first, a TED talk he gave this Spring in California, and... There is no rescuing this economy from our debt, denial and epic implosions like General Motors and the city of Detroit. The only hope is that our unfinished season of disaster will be inundated (and the new economy floated) by a flood of invention. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Juan Enriquez. (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Juan Enriquez: the only bet is on brains Juan Enriquez’s vision makes you want pray for a rain-out, bet on the flood. Especially if you live in one of the research and teaching centers of the world — best of all in MIT’s zipcode: 02139. Recovery, jobs and money are all fuctions, in the Enriquez brief, of zipcode concentrations of brain cells and emerging new “life science” industries. Juan Enriquez is an investor, teacher, writer and sometime politician who’s famous now on YouTube and the conference circuit for riffs like this one. We’re picking up on, first, a TED talk he gave this Spring in California, and then a grand Boston boast that the Red Sox playing field is the epicenter of the next economy. At TED, he pictured a race underway between the crashing of car companies and newspapers and other branded industries and the simultaneous blooming of super-tech invention: the Big Dog carry-all robots, implantable organs and shoe leather man-made without cows. I asked Juan Enriquez in his Boston office tower for a sort of scorecard as of late spring in year one of the Age of Obama. The bad news is that we’re in real danger of sinking ourselves (not our kids — us!) with debt we cannot pay. We’ve been through some tentative confession of our sins, but atonement is still to come. Here’s the good news: I’ve never seen a better time to invest: things are cheap, there’s a lot of smart people around, there’s a lot of technology we’ve been investing in for 15, 20 years in life sciences that is incredibly exciting right now. And Boston is the center of the universe for that stuff. Per capita, there isn’t a smarter place than Boston right now… Half facetiously, I claim that the center of the universe is the pitcher’s mound at Fenway. And the reason for that is because you’ve got Boston University sitting on one axis, Harvard on another, MIT on another, then Boston College and Harvard Medical School… Within a three to five mile radius of that pitcher’s mound you have an awful lot of what the new economy looks like. Of the known universe, at this point, the corner of Vassar St. and Main St. may be the single most interesting corner anywhere and the reason why is because you’re sitting in the middle of a zipcode, 02139, that has generated one the largest economies on the planet in terms of the companies that the faculty and students that graduated MIT have done. The second reason is that you have a huge concentration of life-science powerbases that around the Whitehead and the Broad Institutes and the Human Genome Project. You have a new neuro-cognitive center, the Picower Institute where they’re bringing together in one building everybody who’s thinking about the brain. So if you’re a psychologist or a psychiatrist, if you’re a neurosurgeon or a brain imager, if you’re a computer scientist, anybody who’s thinking about brain circuitry or how this thing works, you’re all talking to one another in a building, which is highly unusual for academia. And then right across the street from that you’ve got a Frank Gehry building that has possibly the next generation of computing, the next generation of artificial intelligence, and the next generation of robotics. And you bring those three things together — and you think of single professors’ labs — a lab the size of your house — generating market caps of five or 10 billion or 20 billion dollars in the students that are graduating and the companies they found… When I want to show somebody why the US is still a really important power despite the debt, despite a certain sabbatical from governance, I drive them through the area… As you go past the Stop & Shop, you’ll see the old NECCO candy factory, which has now become the global research headquarters for Novartis. In three other huge buildings next to it they’ve taken the three big Swiss Pharma companies – Ciba, Geigy, Sandoz – merged them and offshored almost all of the R and D to Cambridge, MA, which is a big deal! That’s offshoring probably five percent of the future of the Swiss GDP. That’s what the bet is… And then you hit the Charles River, which is lovely, right? Juan Enriquez in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, June, 2009. There is no rescuing this economy from our debt, denial and epic implosions like General Motors and the city of Detroit. The only hope is that our unfinished season of disaster will be inundated (and the new economy floated) by a flood of invention. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Juan Enriquez. (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Juan Enriquez: the only bet is on brains Juan Enriquez’s vision makes you want pray for a rain-out, bet on the flood. Especially if you live in one of the research and teaching centers of the world — best of all in MIT’s zipcode: 02139. Recovery, jobs and money are all fuctions, in the Enriquez brief, of zipcode concentrations of brain cells and emerging new “life science” industries. Juan Enriquez is an investor, teacher, writer and sometime politician who’s famous now on YouTube and the conference circuit for riffs like this one. We’re picking up on, first, a TED talk he gave this Spring in California, and then a grand Boston boast that the Red Sox playing field is the epicenter of the next economy. At TED, he pictured a race underway between the crashing of car companies and newspapers and other branded industries and the simultaneous blooming of super-tech invention: the Big Dog carry-all robots, implantable organs and shoe leather man-made without cows. I asked Juan Enriquez in his Boston office tower for a sort of scorecard as of late spring in year one of the Age of Obama. The bad news is that we’re in real danger of sinking ourselves (not our kids — us!) with debt we cannot pay. We’ve been through some tentative confession of our sins, but atonement is still to come. Here’s the good news: I’ve never seen a better time to invest: things are cheap, there’s a lot of smart people around, there’s a lot of technology we’ve been investing in for 15, 20 years in life sciences that is incredibly exciting right now. And Boston is the center of the universe for that stuff. Per capita, there isn’t a smarter place than Boston right now… Half facetiously, I claim that the center of the universe is the pitcher’s mound at Fenway. And the reason for that is because you’ve got Boston University sitting on one axis, Harvard on another, MIT on another, then Boston College and Harvard Medical School… Within a three to five mile radius of that pitcher’s mound you have an awful lot of what the new economy looks like. Of the known universe, at this point, the corner of Vassar St. and Main St. may be the single most interesting corner anywhere and the reason why is because you’re sitting in the middle of a zipcode, 02139, that has generated one the largest economies on the planet in terms of the companies that the faculty and students that graduated MIT have done. The second reason is that you have a huge concentration of life-science powerbases that around the Whitehead and the Broad Institutes and the Human Genome Project. You have a new neuro-cognitive center, the Picower Institute where they’re bringing together in one building everybody who’s thinking about the brain. So if you’re a psychologist or a psychiatrist, if you’re a neurosurgeon or a brain imager, if you’re a computer scientist, anybody who’s thinking about brain circuitry or how this thing works, you’re all talking to one another in a building, which is highly unusual for academia. And then right across the street from that you’ve got a Frank Gehry building that has possibly the next generation of computing, the next generation of artificial intelligence, and the next generation of robotics. And you bring those three things together — and you think of single professors’ labs — a lab the size of your house — generating market caps of five or 10 billion or 20 billion dollars in the students that are graduating and the companies they found… When I want to show somebody why the US is still a really important power despite the debt, despite a certain sabbatical from governance, I drive them through the area… As you go past the Stop & Shop, you’ll see the old NECCO candy factory, which has now become the global research headquarters for Novartis. In three other huge buildings next to it they’ve taken the three big Swiss Pharma companies – Ciba, Geigy, Sandoz – merged them and offshored almost all of the R and D to Cambridge, MA, which is a big deal! That’s offshoring probably five percent of the future of the Swiss GDP. That’s what the bet is… And then you hit the Charles River, which is lovely, right? Juan Enriquez in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, June, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-06-25,24738530 Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:18:53 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24738531-Alfred-Gusenbauer-Euro-Socialism-in-America Maybe Newt Gingrich is right — that Americans are getting used to something like European Socialism in this Bush-to-Obama bankruptcy and bailout era. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Alfred Gusenbauer. (38 minutes, 17 mb mp3) Alfred Gusenbauer: desperate? serious? Alfred Gusenbauer seems to think so. Austria’s hearty 49-year-old former chancellor, who may be typical of the left-of-center professionals in European politics, likes everything he sees on his American sojourn, starting with the Obama stimulus package, the borrowed budget, and the push for big public investments in health, education and green technology: “What the US government is doing now compared with all the others in Europe is the best one could do,” he says in conversation. Europeans may be cushioned by a stronger social safety net, but Gusenbauer is struck by a sort of “optimism net” in America. We are blessed, at last, with “a government in which the peop... Maybe Newt Gingrich is right — that Americans are getting used to something like European Socialism in this Bush-to-Obama bankruptcy and bailout era. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Alfred Gusenbauer. (38 minutes, 17 mb mp3) Alfred Gusenbauer: desperate? serious? Alfred Gusenbauer seems to think so. Austria’s hearty 49-year-old former chancellor, who may be typical of the left-of-center professionals in European politics, likes everything he sees on his American sojourn, starting with the Obama stimulus package, the borrowed budget, and the push for big public investments in health, education and green technology: “What the US government is doing now compared with all the others in Europe is the best one could do,” he says in conversation. Europeans may be cushioned by a stronger social safety net, but Gusenbauer is struck by a sort of “optimism net” in America. We are blessed, at last, with “a government in which the people trust.” Habitually, perhaps, self-reliant Americans tend to look confidently to their families and their own initiatives, he remarks. Americans take six months or a year to believe that their sinking economy is in serious trouble. Europeans will take six months or a year to believe the good news, if a recovery ever comes. Gusenberg, visiting at the Watson Insitute, leads our conversation with a quip — German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s joke about the difference between Communism and Capitalism. “In Communism, first they are going to nationalize everything, and then destroy it. In Capitalism, it’s the other way round.” Germans and Austrians, proverbially, take different views of a crisis like this world economic shutdown: in Berlin the situation is supposed to look “serious but not desperate;” in Vienna, rather, “desperate but not serious.” The Gusenbauer view, in our non-technical ramble, is that what’s deeply serious in the crisis is the economics of it — the stark imbalances (East and West and within every society) of production and consumption, savings and debt, health and hunger. What could be desperate is the social rancor and far-out politics fermenting even in Europe among people feeling abandoned — among workers who’ll never work again, among young people who don’t believe Europe’s “paradigm of progress,” and among politicians who will put the European project at risk to save their national bacon. We are just at the beginning of real consequences for real people. I see two vulnerable groups: Those that are older than 50. Most of the old jobs and the old qualifications are gone. The huge danger is that people over 50 losing their jobs right now won’t be able to enter the market again… The second group is the youngsters, because with this enormous increase of unemployment that we are facing right now, all those that are leaving nowadays universities, grammar schools, technical education schemes, they will enter the labor market and find closed doors. And we cannot predict what this might mean for their social and political behavior… In Greece last year, among university students… this went quite far in terms of public violence and in terms of challenging the state authority. So nobody can predict right now which social and political effects a longer duration of the crisis might have upon different groups. This will be the real challenge for European democracy and for the European welfare state, to hold the social fabric together in times when it is fundamentally challenged… An Austrian Socialist makes a model of development and redistribution and social justice in the near neighborhood of South-Eastern Europe — the West Balkan states of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, Bulgaria and Rumania — whose GDP altogether is smaller than Austria’s today: Within Europe, I think it’s very clear; our hope is in the East, because from there the demand will come, from there the energy will come, from there the dynamics for the future economic development will come. And we are free to decide, are we going to support such a development, with a clear redistribution of resources that we have in Europe going to the East? … Our problem is that we are losing our markets. If we are not selling cars you are going to lose your job, so we have to sell our cars. We need people that are ready to buy our cars. Where are the best, most regulated, based on rule-of-law markets in our vicinity? It’s the new member states of the European Union. And therefore I tell you, it’s much better to spend one Euro in Romania than to spend a Euro in Austria, because a Euro spent in Austria will directly go into the saving rate, not in an increase in the sales of cars. Alfred Gusenbauer in conversation with Chris Lydon, Providence, June 11, 2009. Maybe Newt Gingrich is right — that Americans are getting used to something like European Socialism in this Bush-to-Obama bankruptcy and bailout era. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Alfred Gusenbauer. (38 minutes, 17 mb mp3) Alfred Gusenbauer: desperate? serious? Alfred Gusenbauer seems to think so. Austria’s hearty 49-year-old former chancellor, who may be typical of the left-of-center professionals in European politics, likes everything he sees on his American sojourn, starting with the Obama stimulus package, the borrowed budget, and the push for big public investments in health, education and green technology: “What the US government is doing now compared with all the others in Europe is the best one could do,” he says in conversation. Europeans may be cushioned by a stronger social safety net, but Gusenbauer is struck by a sort of “optimism net” in America. We are blessed, at last, with “a government in which the people trust.” Habitually, perhaps, self-reliant Americans tend to look confidently to their families and their own initiatives, he remarks. Americans take six months or a year to believe that their sinking economy is in serious trouble. Europeans will take six months or a year to believe the good news, if a recovery ever comes. Gusenberg, visiting at the Watson Insitute, leads our conversation with a quip — German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s joke about the difference between Communism and Capitalism. “In Communism, first they are going to nationalize everything, and then destroy it. In Capitalism, it’s the other way round.” Germans and Austrians, proverbially, take different views of a crisis like this world economic shutdown: in Berlin the situation is supposed to look “serious but not desperate;” in Vienna, rather, “desperate but not serious.” The Gusenbauer view, in our non-technical ramble, is that what’s deeply serious in the crisis is the economics of it — the stark imbalances (East and West and within every society) of production and consumption, savings and debt, health and hunger. What could be desperate is the social rancor and far-out politics fermenting even in Europe among people feeling abandoned — among workers who’ll never work again, among young people who don’t believe Europe’s “paradigm of progress,” and among politicians who will put the European project at risk to save their national bacon. We are just at the beginning of real consequences for real people. I see two vulnerable groups: Those that are older than 50. Most of the old jobs and the old qualifications are gone. The huge danger is that people over 50 losing their jobs right now won’t be able to enter the market again… The second group is the youngsters, because with this enormous increase of unemployment that we are facing right now, all those that are leaving nowadays universities, grammar schools, technical education schemes, they will enter the labor market and find closed doors. And we cannot predict what this might mean for their social and political behavior… In Greece last year, among university students… this went quite far in terms of public violence and in terms of challenging the state authority. So nobody can predict right now which social and political effects a longer duration of the crisis might have upon different groups. This will be the real challenge for European democracy and for the European welfare state, to hold the social fabric together in times when it is fundamentally challenged… An Austrian Socialist makes a model of development and redistribution and social justice in the near neighborhood of South-Eastern Europe — the West Balkan states of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, Bulgaria and Rumania — whose GDP altogether is smaller than Austria’s today: Within Europe, I think it’s very clear; our hope is in the East, because from there the demand will come, from there the energy will come, from there the dynamics for the future economic development will come. And we are free to decide, are we going to support such a development, with a clear redistribution of resources that we have in Europe going to the East? … Our problem is that we are losing our markets. If we are not selling cars you are going to lose your job, so we have to sell our cars. We need people that are ready to buy our cars. Where are the best, most regulated, based on rule-of-law markets in our vicinity? It’s the new member states of the European Union. And therefore I tell you, it’s much better to spend one Euro in Romania than to spend a Euro in Austria, because a Euro spent in Austria will directly go into the saving rate, not in an increase in the sales of cars. Alfred Gusenbauer in conversation with Chris Lydon, Providence, June 11, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-06-23,24738531 Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:57:23 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24717383-Joseph-O%E2%80%99Neill%E2%80%99s-Netherland-the-Novel-of-the-Age I make two guesses here: that Barack Obama knows almost as little about cricket as I do (which is: zero); and further (much more interesting) that the president has found in Joseph O’Neill’s cricket-in-New York novel Netherland a sort of founding text for this turnabout era, this reconciling moment we seem to have entered, this Age of Obama. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Joseph O’Neill. (40 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Joseph O’Neill: “Think fantastic!” Everybody knows by now that Netherland has been Mr. Obama’s bedtime reading this spring. This is said to mean that our president is not all-wonk, that he still has a writer’s appetite for imaginative prose. To me it’s downright strange that nobody goes on to ask: but why this book? and what might it mean to him? These are the questions I’m chasing down here with the author. The affinities between O’Neill and O’Bama are delicious. O’Neill, like t... I make two guesses here: that Barack Obama knows almost as little about cricket as I do (which is: zero); and further (much more interesting) that the president has found in Joseph O’Neill’s cricket-in-New York novel Netherland a sort of founding text for this turnabout era, this reconciling moment we seem to have entered, this Age of Obama. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Joseph O’Neill. (40 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Joseph O’Neill: “Think fantastic!” Everybody knows by now that Netherland has been Mr. Obama’s bedtime reading this spring. This is said to mean that our president is not all-wonk, that he still has a writer’s appetite for imaginative prose. To me it’s downright strange that nobody goes on to ask: but why this book? and what might it mean to him? These are the questions I’m chasing down here with the author. The affinities between O’Neill and O’Bama are delicious. O’Neill, like the president a fine amateur athlete, had been playing cricket on Staten Island less than 48 hours before we met in Boston. Like the president, O’Neill is a hybrid of two cultures: his father comes of a family of IRA tough guys from West Cork; his mother is the daughter of a Syrian-Christian-Turkish hotel keeper on the Eastern Mediterranean port town, Mersin, in Turkey. O’Neill grew up mainly in The Hague in Holland. He went to mainly English schools and has a law degree from Cambridge. O’Neill’s great work of non-fiction, Blood-Dark Track , a “family history,” could have been subtitled Dreams, and Nightmares, from my Grandfathers. At a White House ceremony recently, O’Neill told me that not the least of what he shared with the president was a raging urge to step outside for a cigarette. In the near background of our conversation is the immortal Trinidadian cricket aficionado C. L. R. James (1901 - 1989) and his autobiographical masterpiece, Beyond a Boundary . People keep commenting on Joseph O’Neill’s debt to F. Scott Fitgerald and The Great Gatsby for this novel about a climber and halfway gangster, Netherland’s Trinidadian-American Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreams a new American dream and ends up, like Gatsby, literally dead in the water. But O’Neill is in much deeper debt to C. L. R. James for his cricket vision. James was an inspiring writer in the pan-African liberationist movements of the 1930s and after. He was a fierce anti-imperialist and, contrarily, an ardent champion of pre-imperial English culture (he had virtually memorized Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in his teens) and most especially of cricket, the country sport that the Empire took to the colonies. “Cricket is much more than a game for Mr. James,” as Neville Cardus of the Guardian put it; “it is a way of life.” # 1 on sports, the West Indes, colonialism “Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle,” James wrote in Beyond a Boundary . “It belongs with the theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.” Embedded in it, moreover, is a universal code of fair struggle and honor. Common phrases like “a straight bat” and “it isn’t cricket” became “watchwords of manners and virtue and the guardians of freedom and power.” James, who called himself “a British intellectual long before I was ten,” came to think that games were more expressive of a culture than poetry, drama and music, and that W. G. Grace, the Babe Ruth of 19th Century cricket, was a higher monument of English life than Queen Victoria. The game itself, he decided, was “the only contribution of the English educational system of the nineteenth century to the general educational ideas of Western civilization.” For black and brown West Indians, specifically, James found that schoolboy cricket had everything to do with self-mastery and liberation among a subject people. Club cricket and the international game turned out to be wide open to transformation by West Indian virtuosity. The starting point for C. L. R. James, as Joseph O’Neill recounts in our conversation, was that Learie Constantine bats for the West Indes …if you were one of the members of a colonized race in Trinidad — there are two in Trinidad: an African population and a South Asian population, almost 50-50 — you were allowed very few forms of self expression. And one of those was cricket. It was one of the arenas where certain hierarchies were abolished. A lot of sports have that in common. And he thought that was a great thing, where people could have access to their souls on the cricket field… Also the trajectory of Trinidad in particular towards independence went hand in hand with the West Indies cricket team, gradually becoming a team which reflected the West Indian population and not of the colonists. Quite separately from those local things, he took it as a given that cricket, as he said, is like art. It’s a wonderful thing, and why should we diminish ourselves – we being the colonized people in this case – by persisting to see it as being owned by the colonizer? Why can’t we own this sport? So what if they made it up? Are we not just as entitled to the particular bliss and gratifications that this sport offers? And that is quite a big important statement to make. It’s a way of throwing off colonial categories of the world and it’s a way of laying claim to what the world has to offer. We see now in the way cricket is organized around the world that India is the main power in cricket, and will undoubtedly remain in that position for many years. And the old seat of power in London is not what it was… This is the thinking that Joseph O’Neill has learned from C. L. R. James, puts regularly into practice on the cricket grounds of New York, and has embodied in Chuck Ramkissoon, the most beguiling character in Netherland . It’s the thinking that feels like such a good fit with the First Reader in the White House. If a novel confronts the American reader with the other, namely cricket, that is something that would obviously appeal to this President, who it seems to me is extremely interested in the tension between oneself and the other, and sees it as a very fruitful tension. I’ll put it another way: if there’s any American who could understand cricket, it is Barack Obama. And in many ways his platform is a Ramkisoonian platform, namely that the current boundaries (again the reference to James is intentional) of American vision have proved to be defective. They just have. And the Bush years represented a kind of catastrophic shrinkage of what it means to be American, and the idea of what the role of America in the wider world might be. Barack Obama, for autobiographical and intellectual reasons, is in a position to make another argument. I think so far he’s made it rather persuasively. Joseph O’Neill in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, June 15, 2009. I make two guesses here: that Barack Obama knows almost as little about cricket as I do (which is: zero); and further (much more interesting) that the president has found in Joseph O’Neill’s cricket-in-New York novel Netherland a sort of founding text for this turnabout era, this reconciling moment we seem to have entered, this Age of Obama. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Joseph O’Neill. (40 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Joseph O’Neill: “Think fantastic!” Everybody knows by now that Netherland has been Mr. Obama’s bedtime reading this spring. This is said to mean that our president is not all-wonk, that he still has a writer’s appetite for imaginative prose. To me it’s downright strange that nobody goes on to ask: but why this book? and what might it mean to him? These are the questions I’m chasing down here with the author. The affinities between O’Neill and O’Bama are delicious. O’Neill, like the president a fine amateur athlete, had been playing cricket on Staten Island less than 48 hours before we met in Boston. Like the president, O’Neill is a hybrid of two cultures: his father comes of a family of IRA tough guys from West Cork; his mother is the daughter of a Syrian-Christian-Turkish hotel keeper on the Eastern Mediterranean port town, Mersin, in Turkey. O’Neill grew up mainly in The Hague in Holland. He went to mainly English schools and has a law degree from Cambridge. O’Neill’s great work of non-fiction, Blood-Dark Track , a “family history,” could have been subtitled Dreams, and Nightmares, from my Grandfathers. At a White House ceremony recently, O’Neill told me that not the least of what he shared with the president was a raging urge to step outside for a cigarette. In the near background of our conversation is the immortal Trinidadian cricket aficionado C. L. R. James (1901 - 1989) and his autobiographical masterpiece, Beyond a Boundary . People keep commenting on Joseph O’Neill’s debt to F. Scott Fitgerald and The Great Gatsby for this novel about a climber and halfway gangster, Netherland’s Trinidadian-American Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreams a new American dream and ends up, like Gatsby, literally dead in the water. But O’Neill is in much deeper debt to C. L. R. James for his cricket vision. James was an inspiring writer in the pan-African liberationist movements of the 1930s and after. He was a fierce anti-imperialist and, contrarily, an ardent champion of pre-imperial English culture (he had virtually memorized Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in his teens) and most especially of cricket, the country sport that the Empire took to the colonies. “Cricket is much more than a game for Mr. James,” as Neville Cardus of the Guardian put it; “it is a way of life.” # 1 on sports, the West Indes, colonialism “Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle,” James wrote in Beyond a Boundary . “It belongs with the theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.” Embedded in it, moreover, is a universal code of fair struggle and honor. Common phrases like “a straight bat” and “it isn’t cricket” became “watchwords of manners and virtue and the guardians of freedom and power.” James, who called himself “a British intellectual long before I was ten,” came to think that games were more expressive of a culture than poetry, drama and music, and that W. G. Grace, the Babe Ruth of 19th Century cricket, was a higher monument of English life than Queen Victoria. The game itself, he decided, was “the only contribution of the English educational system of the nineteenth century to the general educational ideas of Western civilization.” For black and brown West Indians, specifically, James found that schoolboy cricket had everything to do with self-mastery and liberation among a subject people. Club cricket and the international game turned out to be wide open to transformation by West Indian virtuosity. The starting point for C. L. R. James, as Joseph O’Neill recounts in our conversation, was that Learie Constantine bats for the West Indes …if you were one of the members of a colonized race in Trinidad — there are two in Trinidad: an African population and a South Asian population, almost 50-50 — you were allowed very few forms of self expression. And one of those was cricket. It was one of the arenas where certain hierarchies were abolished. A lot of sports have that in common. And he thought that was a great thing, where people could have access to their souls on the cricket field… Also the trajectory of Trinidad in particular towards independence went hand in hand with the West Indies cricket team, gradually becoming a team which reflected the West Indian population and not of the colonists. Quite separately from those local things, he took it as a given that cricket, as he said, is like art. It’s a wonderful thing, and why should we diminish ourselves – we being the colonized people in this case – by persisting to see it as being owned by the colonizer? Why can’t we own this sport? So what if they made it up? Are we not just as entitled to the particular bliss and gratifications that this sport offers? And that is quite a big important statement to make. It’s a way of throwing off colonial categories of the world and it’s a way of laying claim to what the world has to offer. We see now in the way cricket is organized around the world that India is the main power in cricket, and will undoubtedly remain in that position for many years. And the old seat of power in London is not what it was… This is the thinking that Joseph O’Neill has learned from C. L. R. James, puts regularly into practice on the cricket grounds of New York, and has embodied in Chuck Ramkissoon, the most beguiling character in Netherland . It’s the thinking that feels like such a good fit with the First Reader in the White House. If a novel confronts the American reader with the other, namely cricket, that is something that would obviously appeal to this President, who it seems to me is extremely interested in the tension between oneself and the other, and sees it as a very fruitful tension. I’ll put it another way: if there’s any American who could understand cricket, it is Barack Obama. And in many ways his platform is a Ramkisoonian platform, namely that the current boundaries (again the reference to James is intentional) of American vision have proved to be defective. They just have. And the Bush years represented a kind of catastrophic shrinkage of what it means to be American, and the idea of what the role of America in the wider world might be. Barack Obama, for autobiographical and intellectual reasons, is in a position to make another argument. I think so far he’s made it rather persuasively. Joseph O’Neill in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, June 15, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-06-16,24717383 Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:53:32 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24684907-Thoreau%E2%80%99s-Fire-the-Spark-of-%E2%80%9CWalden%E2%80%9D Baskin’s Thoreau: nickel first-class (1967) Is it too late to celebrate Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) with an honest, unblushing American face? Have we laid too much pavement, built too many Cheesecake Factories in too many malls, imprisoned and executed too many harmless rejects and overextended our military rule too far ever to put Thoreau on our postage again? That’s the major reservation in this otherwise festive gab about the making of one of the universally cherished American writing minds, Henry David Thoreau – to this day an exemplar of simplicity, conscience, naturalism, non-conformity, the power of solitude and great prose. John Pipkin’s argument in the form of a novel, Woodsburner, is that what fired young Thoreau to bust out of his father’s pencil factory, to hole up in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts and eventually to write the secular scripture known as Walden, was strangely enough, a real raging wildfire that Thoreau himself carelessly started – a ... Baskin’s Thoreau: nickel first-class (1967) Is it too late to celebrate Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) with an honest, unblushing American face? Have we laid too much pavement, built too many Cheesecake Factories in too many malls, imprisoned and executed too many harmless rejects and overextended our military rule too far ever to put Thoreau on our postage again? That’s the major reservation in this otherwise festive gab about the making of one of the universally cherished American writing minds, Henry David Thoreau – to this day an exemplar of simplicity, conscience, naturalism, non-conformity, the power of solitude and great prose. John Pipkin’s argument in the form of a novel, Woodsburner, is that what fired young Thoreau to bust out of his father’s pencil factory, to hole up in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts and eventually to write the secular scripture known as Walden, was strangely enough, a real raging wildfire that Thoreau himself carelessly started – a fire that burned 300 acres and could have destroyed his town. Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with John Pipkin about young Henry David Thoreau. (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) John Pipkin: never too late John Pipkin’s take is that the fire in fact rescued the 26-year-old Thoreau from what was beginning to look like a life of failure. With his doomed brother John, Henry had paddled through their famous week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, but he hadn’t yet composed any of its signature wisdom. As for instance: ” …steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one’s style, both of speaking and writing.” It was the shock and embarrassment of the fire he started — the “woodsburner!” whispers in Concord — that got Thoreau in gear as a writer, Pipkin supposes. The Pipkin premise makes Thoreau (who admitted being thrilled by the blaze) more socially sensitive than the “hermit and stoic” that Emerson recalled in his brilliant memorial essay. “It cost him nothing to say No,” Emerson wrote. “Indeed, he found it much easier than to say Yes… Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure and guileless. ‘I love Henry,’ said one of his friends, ‘but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.’” Whatever effect the fire had on Thoreau, it may have been part of what prompted Emerson to buy the land at Walden Pond where he then invited his friend to build his writing camp. Even then they were both vexed by the intrusion of the railroad through Concord and the pace of “development” in their woods. So the fire makes a plausible moment to reimagine the hatching of American doctrine. John Pipkin (born in Baltimore, now a Texan) was a student at the University of North Carolina of Philip Gura, keeper of the Transcendentalist flame. Professor Gura’s lament on Open Source not so long ago was that we have traduced Thoreau and Emerson not just by ignoring their earnest advice but spinning them into literary abstractions. Pipkin’s rejoinder is that the environmental emergency arrived with the first European settlers in America and that the model activist, even at this late date, is still Thoreau. “He was the attorney of the indigenous plants,” as Emerson said, “and owned to a preference of the weeds to the imported plants, as of the Indian to the civilized man.” Baskin’s Thoreau: nickel first-class (1967) Is it too late to celebrate Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) with an honest, unblushing American face? Have we laid too much pavement, built too many Cheesecake Factories in too many malls, imprisoned and executed too many harmless rejects and overextended our military rule too far ever to put Thoreau on our postage again? That’s the major reservation in this otherwise festive gab about the making of one of the universally cherished American writing minds, Henry David Thoreau – to this day an exemplar of simplicity, conscience, naturalism, non-conformity, the power of solitude and great prose. John Pipkin’s argument in the form of a novel, Woodsburner, is that what fired young Thoreau to bust out of his father’s pencil factory, to hole up in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts and eventually to write the secular scripture known as Walden, was strangely enough, a real raging wildfire that Thoreau himself carelessly started – a fire that burned 300 acres and could have destroyed his town. Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with John Pipkin about young Henry David Thoreau. (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) John Pipkin: never too late John Pipkin’s take is that the fire in fact rescued the 26-year-old Thoreau from what was beginning to look like a life of failure. With his doomed brother John, Henry had paddled through their famous week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, but he hadn’t yet composed any of its signature wisdom. As for instance: ” …steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one’s style, both of speaking and writing.” It was the shock and embarrassment of the fire he started — the “woodsburner!” whispers in Concord — that got Thoreau in gear as a writer, Pipkin supposes. The Pipkin premise makes Thoreau (who admitted being thrilled by the blaze) more socially sensitive than the “hermit and stoic” that Emerson recalled in his brilliant memorial essay. “It cost him nothing to say No,” Emerson wrote. “Indeed, he found it much easier than to say Yes… Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure and guileless. ‘I love Henry,’ said one of his friends, ‘but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.’” Whatever effect the fire had on Thoreau, it may have been part of what prompted Emerson to buy the land at Walden Pond where he then invited his friend to build his writing camp. Even then they were both vexed by the intrusion of the railroad through Concord and the pace of “development” in their woods. So the fire makes a plausible moment to reimagine the hatching of American doctrine. John Pipkin (born in Baltimore, now a Texan) was a student at the University of North Carolina of Philip Gura, keeper of the Transcendentalist flame. Professor Gura’s lament on Open Source not so long ago was that we have traduced Thoreau and Emerson not just by ignoring their earnest advice but spinning them into literary abstractions. Pipkin’s rejoinder is that the environmental emergency arrived with the first European settlers in America and that the model activist, even at this late date, is still Thoreau. “He was the attorney of the indigenous plants,” as Emerson said, “and owned to a preference of the weeds to the imported plants, as of the Indian to the civilized man.” tag:odeo.com,2009-06-10,24684907 Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:58:06 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24655835-Ken-Robinson-John-Maeda-Creativity-for-Breakfast Sir Ken Robinson does most of the talking, over breakfast here, on the sketchy matter of “creativity” and the teaching of it. John Maeda, in the gossamer blazer and scarf, is the work in progress. Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with John Maeda and Sir Ken Robinson. (24 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Both men are titans of the TED conference style of presenting “ideas worth spreading” to the Web. John Maeda emerged at TED two winters ago talking about The Laws of Simplicity , while inside he was reeling toward his own future, head still spinning from Ken Robinson’s TED talk a year earlier on education as a standardized way of crushing invention. Maeda, a star at MIT’s Media Lab, still in his thirties, heard a call from the heavens to “change my life.” And so he did, moving from MIT and the engineering of technology to the presidency of the Rhode Island School of Design and the teaching of art and innovation. After a RISD year that ... Sir Ken Robinson does most of the talking, over breakfast here, on the sketchy matter of “creativity” and the teaching of it. John Maeda, in the gossamer blazer and scarf, is the work in progress. Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with John Maeda and Sir Ken Robinson. (24 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Both men are titans of the TED conference style of presenting “ideas worth spreading” to the Web. John Maeda emerged at TED two winters ago talking about The Laws of Simplicity , while inside he was reeling toward his own future, head still spinning from Ken Robinson’s TED talk a year earlier on education as a standardized way of crushing invention. Maeda, a star at MIT’s Media Lab, still in his thirties, heard a call from the heavens to “change my life.” And so he did, moving from MIT and the engineering of technology to the presidency of the Rhode Island School of Design and the teaching of art and innovation. After a RISD year that he’s been blogging at every turn, Maeda’s invitation to Robinson to give the commencement address felt like a personal thank-you and maybe an appeal for confirmation. Early on RISD’s graduation day, we had a three-way gab at the Hope Club in Providence about expressiveness and originality, in art and life, across the board. Well, I think it’s helpful to start with a definition. And John’s right, there are all kinds of misconceptions about the creative process, people think it’s just sitting around waiting for inspiration to hit you, it’s about special gifts, it’s about luck, some people have it, some people don’t. It’s unfairly distributed. And I think all this is nonsense. Firstly: everybody has tremendous natural creative capacities, everybody. It’s an endowment of being a human being that you’re born with. The truth is that some people discover their real creative possibilities and others don’t, and that’s partly because of how we educate people. The second big misconception is that it’s about special things, that there are only certain activities which are inherently creative. And that is equally mythical. You can be creative with anything, absolutely anything that involves your intelligence. I put together a large scale strategy for the British government about ten years ago and I know that the government thought, when they asked me to do this, that I was going to get a commission together exclusively of artists. Well, you know the arts can be tremendously creative, but so can science and so can mathematics, and so can business and so can broadcasting and so can anything. So one of my campaigning issues for a long time was being able to get creativity out of the ghetto and to get the arts integrated with a bigger argument. And the third misconception is there’s not much you can do about it, creatively enough, and that’s the end of it and good luck with it. And what RISD testifies to, and all great institutions like this, is that you can create conditions onto which capabilities will grow and flourish. That you can teach some of the essential processes of creative achievement that it takes application and work and control of the mathematics and discipline. So my definition - I remember some politicians in Britain saying the problem is “you can’t define creativity” and, I said “No, I think the problem is you can’t define it. So let me define it for you.” So my definition is: it’s the process of having original ideas that have value and, all three bits of that to me are important. Firstly, it’s a process, it’s not an event, I mean it occasionally happens that some idea hits you fully-formed and that’s the end of it. But much more often an idea may stare itself in your mind and it’s the beginning of something, not the end of it, you then have to work on it, and evolve it. And often doing that is a very material business – you’re working with physical materials, it could be steel or clay or it could be words or numbers. It could be a conceptual process. It always is to some degree a conceptual process, but it’s a process. It’s very rarely the case, I think, that what comes out of the far end is what you began with. I remember someone saying that art is a surprise, not a prediction. And, it’s part because of the way this process evolves. But it’s as true of science as it would be of the visual arts or music or theater. The second thing is it’s about originality, it’s thinking new thoughts and trying to make something fresh and original. And that’s a real job of work for all the reasons we’re saying: because our minds quickly become kind-of enthralled in assumptions that we don’t question anymore. And the third thing is it’s about critical judgment, it’s about value. And I think this is a really important part of the conversation, because not any original idea is any good. Some original ideas are actually not even worth pursuing, they’re original but they’re kind of worthless. But then often mature works are produced and the culture as a whole thinks this is a waste of time. And that’s because there’s a difference of value being applied to it. And my point is just to say that every creative process isn’t just about thinking fresh things, it’s acting critically on the ideas, it’s a kind-of reciprocal process of hypothesizing and critique. Sir Ken Robinson in conversation with John Maeda and Chris Lydon, in Providence, R.I., May 29, 2009. Sir Ken Robinson does most of the talking, over breakfast here, on the sketchy matter of “creativity” and the teaching of it. John Maeda, in the gossamer blazer and scarf, is the work in progress. Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with John Maeda and Sir Ken Robinson. (24 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Both men are titans of the TED conference style of presenting “ideas worth spreading” to the Web. John Maeda emerged at TED two winters ago talking about The Laws of Simplicity , while inside he was reeling toward his own future, head still spinning from Ken Robinson’s TED talk a year earlier on education as a standardized way of crushing invention. Maeda, a star at MIT’s Media Lab, still in his thirties, heard a call from the heavens to “change my life.” And so he did, moving from MIT and the engineering of technology to the presidency of the Rhode Island School of Design and the teaching of art and innovation. After a RISD year that he’s been blogging at every turn, Maeda’s invitation to Robinson to give the commencement address felt like a personal thank-you and maybe an appeal for confirmation. Early on RISD’s graduation day, we had a three-way gab at the Hope Club in Providence about expressiveness and originality, in art and life, across the board. Well, I think it’s helpful to start with a definition. And John’s right, there are all kinds of misconceptions about the creative process, people think it’s just sitting around waiting for inspiration to hit you, it’s about special gifts, it’s about luck, some people have it, some people don’t. It’s unfairly distributed. And I think all this is nonsense. Firstly: everybody has tremendous natural creative capacities, everybody. It’s an endowment of being a human being that you’re born with. The truth is that some people discover their real creative possibilities and others don’t, and that’s partly because of how we educate people. The second big misconception is that it’s about special things, that there are only certain activities which are inherently creative. And that is equally mythical. You can be creative with anything, absolutely anything that involves your intelligence. I put together a large scale strategy for the British government about ten years ago and I know that the government thought, when they asked me to do this, that I was going to get a commission together exclusively of artists. Well, you know the arts can be tremendously creative, but so can science and so can mathematics, and so can business and so can broadcasting and so can anything. So one of my campaigning issues for a long time was being able to get creativity out of the ghetto and to get the arts integrated with a bigger argument. And the third misconception is there’s not much you can do about it, creatively enough, and that’s the end of it and good luck with it. And what RISD testifies to, and all great institutions like this, is that you can create conditions onto which capabilities will grow and flourish. That you can teach some of the essential processes of creative achievement that it takes application and work and control of the mathematics and discipline. So my definition - I remember some politicians in Britain saying the problem is “you can’t define creativity” and, I said “No, I think the problem is you can’t define it. So let me define it for you.” So my definition is: it’s the process of having original ideas that have value and, all three bits of that to me are important. Firstly, it’s a process, it’s not an event, I mean it occasionally happens that some idea hits you fully-formed and that’s the end of it. But much more often an idea may stare itself in your mind and it’s the beginning of something, not the end of it, you then have to work on it, and evolve it. And often doing that is a very material business – you’re working with physical materials, it could be steel or clay or it could be words or numbers. It could be a conceptual process. It always is to some degree a conceptual process, but it’s a process. It’s very rarely the case, I think, that what comes out of the far end is what you began with. I remember someone saying that art is a surprise, not a prediction. And, it’s part because of the way this process evolves. But it’s as true of science as it would be of the visual arts or music or theater. The second thing is it’s about originality, it’s thinking new thoughts and trying to make something fresh and original. And that’s a real job of work for all the reasons we’re saying: because our minds quickly become kind-of enthralled in assumptions that we don’t question anymore. And the third thing is it’s about critical judgment, it’s about value. And I think this is a really important part of the conversation, because not any original idea is any good. Some original ideas are actually not even worth pursuing, they’re original but they’re kind of worthless. But then often mature works are produced and the culture as a whole thinks this is a waste of time. And that’s because there’s a difference of value being applied to it. And my point is just to say that every creative process isn’t just about thinking fresh things, it’s acting critically on the ideas, it’s a kind-of reciprocal process of hypothesizing and critique. Sir Ken Robinson in conversation with John Maeda and Chris Lydon, in Providence, R.I., May 29, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-06-05,24655835 Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:24:33 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24650832-Calabash-2009-A-View-of-Us-in-the-Age-of-Obama Jamaican wisdom: “When a black man becomes President of the USA, pigs will fly. And then what happened? Swine flu.” In Philip Womack’s dispatch from Calabash in the London Telegraph, June 2, 2009. Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Melvin Van Peebles, Xu Xi, Robert Pinsky and Kwame Dawes. (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3) This last roundup of memorable voices at the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica is about us — the second of the big reasons I come. The first is to hear Caribbean writers at home – even the ones who’ve become famous in America like Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat, sounding off in the islands of Bob Marley and Derek Walcott. Xu Xi and Melvin Van Peebles at Calabash The second mission, for me, is to see the States from a penetrating gaze just offshore — something like the old Irish wisdom on the world of the British empire. So as the Calabash gab winds down, I’m gathering up conversations with Jamaicans and visitors from all over about the... Jamaican wisdom: “When a black man becomes President of the USA, pigs will fly. And then what happened? Swine flu.” In Philip Womack’s dispatch from Calabash in the London Telegraph, June 2, 2009. Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Melvin Van Peebles, Xu Xi, Robert Pinsky and Kwame Dawes. (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3) This last roundup of memorable voices at the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica is about us — the second of the big reasons I come. The first is to hear Caribbean writers at home – even the ones who’ve become famous in America like Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat, sounding off in the islands of Bob Marley and Derek Walcott. Xu Xi and Melvin Van Peebles at Calabash The second mission, for me, is to see the States from a penetrating gaze just offshore — something like the old Irish wisdom on the world of the British empire. So as the Calabash gab winds down, I’m gathering up conversations with Jamaicans and visitors from all over about the US and the world early in the age of Obama. The impressions here are from the breakthrough filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, the Hong Kong novelist Xu Xi, the repeat poet laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky, and the world citizen and poet Kwame Dawes. Melvin Van Peebles came to Calabash to show his new movie Confessions of an Ex-Doofus Itchy-Footed Mutha , nearly 40 years after he inaugurated the “blaxploitation” movie tradition with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasss Song . With me Melvin Van Peebles is just short of exultant about the direction of things at home: I think the States is on the right track, oddly enough. Things are coming to fruition. On election night, I went to a swank party on Central Park West. The cab driver who took me home wouldn’t take any money. He says: “we won, man, we won. He was from Sri Lanka. When a New York cab driver won’t take money from you, maybe things are changing. It was a seminal moment in my life… It can never go back. The guy is not messing up. He sure doesn’t give fodder to the stereotype of how a person of African descent can’t find his way out of the cotton patch. That’s changed. Over. Out. Can’t be discussed anymore. That’s an immense change. You can’t go back there. Melvin Van Peebles in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009. Xu Xi is a literary light of a changing Hong Kong view. She’s both novelist and essayist – minding the gap between Hong Kong, the British colony for a century, and now China’s booming gateway for all kinds of commerce and cultural traffic East and West. This is a woman who grew up, as she writes, between Confucius and Catcher in the Rye. The thing that is interesting since Obama’s taken office is the shift I’ve seen, especially in Hong Kong among friends who were always dissing America — you know, British friends, Australian friends, Chinese friends, who are suddenly so much more sympathetic towards America. It’s like: Oh, the U. S. of A. is not all that bad… I’m thinking of a British friend of mine in Hong Kong, a very smart man who’s never been to the States and never had much desire to go until Obama got elected. He’s the sort of person who should be coming to take a look, you know? Xu Xi in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009. Robert Pinsky: poems of place that travel Robert Pinsky writes poems of place, starting in New Jersey, melodic poems with palpable images that travel easily. He read his signature piece, Shirt, beginning “The back, the yoke, the yardage…” and the Calabash crowd would have listened all afternoon. Pinsky was the poet laureate who got many thousands of Americans reading their favorite poems aloud; at Calabash he heard scores of Jamaicans reading their own strong verses in Open Mike sessions. I am seeing in the island rather a promising vision of the next steps for American culture, and what we think of as the American project of becoming a people… One of the most moving passages in Dreams from My Father deals with the part in that boy’s life when he has assimilated himself to Indonesian society–he is flying kites, he knows the language. His mother is seeing her husband diminished, frustrated and ossified. He is a good man but something is very wrong for him because he is living in a totalitarian country. So she gets the boy up at four thirty in the morning because she has realized that she needs him to get an American education. He must be an American in effect. And the kid complains because he is sleepy, and she tells him that this is no picnic for her either… There is a great model here for American art and for American life. She wants him to be like Odysseus, the most interesting of the heroes. In the first lines of the Odyssey, it says that Odysseus, though he failed to get his men home, he traveled to many places and learned the manners of many people. She made sure that the compass, or the core, or the guiding vision, had to do with this project of being an American people. Robert Pinsky in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009. Kwame Dawes “an anthem for possibility” Finally, Kwame Dawes, a prime mover at Calabash, had a big question on his mind. If the Age of Obama really is what it feels like, a new time, a watershed for black, brown and white people in the world, what is the opportunity, the invitation, for artists and writers, like himself. Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana, schooled in Jamaica and Canada. He now teaches at the University of South Carolina, and writes an astonishing variety of poems, essays and oral histories. I became an American citizen last year, after Obam won the election… so as a Ghanaian-American, I am starting a journey along with this Obama guy, who for all of his African-Americanness is a kind of immigrant in America… and I think he understands the immigrant experience and that narrative. For Americans choosing to be led by an African American, it means that America, particularly White America, has to be engaged imaginatively with the idea of who this man is… I become a beneficiary of that because they have to engage with me and who I am. We have to find a point of connection and possibility. It is a moment. And it is a moment that we do not completely understand but it is significant because the equations have began to change. Kwame Dawes in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009. Jamaican wisdom: “When a black man becomes President of the USA, pigs will fly. And then what happened? Swine flu.” In Philip Womack’s dispatch from Calabash in the London Telegraph, June 2, 2009. Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Melvin Van Peebles, Xu Xi, Robert Pinsky and Kwame Dawes. (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3) This last roundup of memorable voices at the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica is about us — the second of the big reasons I come. The first is to hear Caribbean writers at home – even the ones who’ve become famous in America like Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat, sounding off in the islands of Bob Marley and Derek Walcott. Xu Xi and Melvin Van Peebles at Calabash The second mission, for me, is to see the States from a penetrating gaze just offshore — something like the old Irish wisdom on the world of the British empire. So as the Calabash gab winds down, I’m gathering up conversations with Jamaicans and visitors from all over about the US and the world early in the age of Obama. The impressions here are from the breakthrough filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, the Hong Kong novelist Xu Xi, the repeat poet laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky, and the world citizen and poet Kwame Dawes. Melvin Van Peebles came to Calabash to show his new movie Confessions of an Ex-Doofus Itchy-Footed Mutha , nearly 40 years after he inaugurated the “blaxploitation” movie tradition with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasss Song . With me Melvin Van Peebles is just short of exultant about the direction of things at home: I think the States is on the right track, oddly enough. Things are coming to fruition. On election night, I went to a swank party on Central Park West. The cab driver who took me home wouldn’t take any money. He says: “we won, man, we won. He was from Sri Lanka. When a New York cab driver won’t take money from you, maybe things are changing. It was a seminal moment in my life… It can never go back. The guy is not messing up. He sure doesn’t give fodder to the stereotype of how a person of African descent can’t find his way out of the cotton patch. That’s changed. Over. Out. Can’t be discussed anymore. That’s an immense change. You can’t go back there. Melvin Van Peebles in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009. Xu Xi is a literary light of a changing Hong Kong view. She’s both novelist and essayist – minding the gap between Hong Kong, the British colony for a century, and now China’s booming gateway for all kinds of commerce and cultural traffic East and West. This is a woman who grew up, as she writes, between Confucius and Catcher in the Rye. The thing that is interesting since Obama’s taken office is the shift I’ve seen, especially in Hong Kong among friends who were always dissing America — you know, British friends, Australian friends, Chinese friends, who are suddenly so much more sympathetic towards America. It’s like: Oh, the U. S. of A. is not all that bad… I’m thinking of a British friend of mine in Hong Kong, a very smart man who’s never been to the States and never had much desire to go until Obama got elected. He’s the sort of person who should be coming to take a look, you know? Xu Xi in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009. Robert Pinsky: poems of place that travel Robert Pinsky writes poems of place, starting in New Jersey, melodic poems with palpable images that travel easily. He read his signature piece, Shirt, beginning “The back, the yoke, the yardage…” and the Calabash crowd would have listened all afternoon. Pinsky was the poet laureate who got many thousands of Americans reading their favorite poems aloud; at Calabash he heard scores of Jamaicans reading their own strong verses in Open Mike sessions. I am seeing in the island rather a promising vision of the next steps for American culture, and what we think of as the American project of becoming a people… One of the most moving passages in Dreams from My Father deals with the part in that boy’s life when he has assimilated himself to Indonesian society–he is flying kites, he knows the language. His mother is seeing her husband diminished, frustrated and ossified. He is a good man but something is very wrong for him because he is living in a totalitarian country. So she gets the boy up at four thirty in the morning because she has realized that she needs him to get an American education. He must be an American in effect. And the kid complains because he is sleepy, and she tells him that this is no picnic for her either… There is a great model here for American art and for American life. She wants him to be like Odysseus, the most interesting of the heroes. In the first lines of the Odyssey, it says that Odysseus, though he failed to get his men home, he traveled to many places and learned the manners of many people. She made sure that the compass, or the core, or the guiding vision, had to do with this project of being an American people. Robert Pinsky in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009. Kwame Dawes “an anthem for possibility” Finally, Kwame Dawes, a prime mover at Calabash, had a big question on his mind. If the Age of Obama really is what it feels like, a new time, a watershed for black, brown and white people in the world, what is the opportunity, the invitation, for artists and writers, like himself. Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana, schooled in Jamaica and Canada. He now teaches at the University of South Carolina, and writes an astonishing variety of poems, essays and oral histories. I became an American citizen last year, after Obam won the election… so as a Ghanaian-American, I am starting a journey along with this Obama guy, who for all of his African-Americanness is a kind of immigrant in America… and I think he understands the immigrant experience and that narrative. For Americans choosing to be led by an African American, it means that America, particularly White America, has to be engaged imaginatively with the idea of who this man is… I become a beneficiary of that because they have to engage with me and who I am. We have to find a point of connection and possibility. It is a moment. And it is a moment that we do not completely understand but it is significant because the equations have began to change. Kwame Dawes in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-06-04,24650832 Thu, 04 Jun 2009 08:32:11 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24621210-Marlon-James-%E2%80%9CYou%E2%80%99re-headless-without-history%E2%80%A6%E2%80%9D Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Marlon James. (50 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Poets and writers come to the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica from every corner of the world, and still the overpowering voice in the fiction readings belongs to a native son from down the road in Kingston. Marlon James, in his second novel, The Book of Night Women , has conjured a teen-age female narrator, also a green-eyed black-skinned heroine named Lilith, and a blood-curdling conspiracy of female slaves in Jamaica in the year 1800. Their mission is to burn, kill and destroy a merciless slave plantation with the same rapacious cruelty that the British masters (and a very Irish overlord) use to run it. The Book of Night Women is not so much a historical novel as a very modern elaboration of violence that strips the souls of people. You feel you’re not just reading it; you’re becoming a witness to sexual, verbal and physical ferocity that scars and reduces everybody; and then you’r... Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Marlon James. (50 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Poets and writers come to the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica from every corner of the world, and still the overpowering voice in the fiction readings belongs to a native son from down the road in Kingston. Marlon James, in his second novel, The Book of Night Women , has conjured a teen-age female narrator, also a green-eyed black-skinned heroine named Lilith, and a blood-curdling conspiracy of female slaves in Jamaica in the year 1800. Their mission is to burn, kill and destroy a merciless slave plantation with the same rapacious cruelty that the British masters (and a very Irish overlord) use to run it. The Book of Night Women is not so much a historical novel as a very modern elaboration of violence that strips the souls of people. You feel you’re not just reading it; you’re becoming a witness to sexual, verbal and physical ferocity that scars and reduces everybody; and then you’re a witness also to love — unnamed, but exquisitely articulated — where you least expected it. “I didn’t want to let anybody off the hook in this book, including the victims,” Marlon James remarks in our conversation. There’s a writer here with a book and a “dynamism of spoken language” that are very much for us and our world. Marlon James: out with myths and nostalgia One of the concerns from critics was why in such a forward-looking time I was writing a backward-looking novel? You know: “Black is the new president,” “we’re post-racial” and all of that. There are a lot of answers to that, and not just the very typical one, that you need to know your history and so on. But I wasn’t writing a historical novel. There are many ways, I hope, in which this novel is in dialogue with the President. The first is the ownership of language. The story is old, but the idea of telling a story in the voices of the people who went through it is still a pretty new thing. The idea of a slave’s story or the story of urban poverty being in the voice of the people who experienced it is new, and it’s pretty radical when you look at the British West Indies. The first publisher to see The Book of Night Women was a British publisher who turned it down. And her request to me was to reconsider writing it in the third-person in standard English. And what struck me there was that even in 2007, people still refuse to have stories told by the people who experienced it, in a language that breaks standard English, that accepts lyricism, that breaks words here, that joins words here. It is a slavery novel but it is also a novel that acknowledges the dynamism of spoken dialect English. And owning it… I didn’t want to let anybody off the hook in this novel, including the victims. And I think that it is something that had to be said. It’s too easy. I always say it and I say this sometimes when I lecture: if blacks accuse whites of denial, then blacks could accuse themselves of myth-making — that that there were all oppressive whites and all oppressed blacks. So that is why the idea of slaves owning slaves is so painful for some people to read. It’s a fact; it happened. Slaves themselves became the masters after the rebellions. I knew I could have written a very black and white story and probably still have been praised for it, largely–it must be said–out of guilt. I know I could have written about horrendous white masters beating poor slaves and have gotten away with it. To me that is intellectually dishonest. I think the more humane thing, but also a dialogue that has more to do with what is going on now, is one that recognizes all the ambiguities: that even such a dark world is still pretty gray… It is not just a matter of knowing history so that you don’t repeat it. It is that you are headless without history. And I don’t think it is being taught enough. If I thought it was being taught enough I wouldn’t have written the book… Toni Morrison has said she writes the books that she wanted to read but could never find. And I agree with that totally. There is certainly a rich tradition of slave narratives and so on, but it is still not enough. Even the most enduring and the most lauded works about slavery tend to be about American Slavery– like Beloved. And Caribbean slavery was such a radically different thing: it was so violent. You can’t help but be hyper-violent when you are talking about West Indian slavery. And it is not even the violence itself, but the uncertainty that makes it even more violent…the slaves were not beaten into submission, they were very proud warriors from kingdoms who were just defeated in war. They were prisoners of a war of sorts, not necessarily victims who were waiting to be captured. And when you put that in a mix with people who come from Britain, mostly men, who are being thrust into this world where anything goes, it is bound to be explosive. And I think that story hasn’t been told enough. Marlon James in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Marlon James. (50 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Poets and writers come to the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica from every corner of the world, and still the overpowering voice in the fiction readings belongs to a native son from down the road in Kingston. Marlon James, in his second novel, The Book of Night Women , has conjured a teen-age female narrator, also a green-eyed black-skinned heroine named Lilith, and a blood-curdling conspiracy of female slaves in Jamaica in the year 1800. Their mission is to burn, kill and destroy a merciless slave plantation with the same rapacious cruelty that the British masters (and a very Irish overlord) use to run it. The Book of Night Women is not so much a historical novel as a very modern elaboration of violence that strips the souls of people. You feel you’re not just reading it; you’re becoming a witness to sexual, verbal and physical ferocity that scars and reduces everybody; and then you’re a witness also to love — unnamed, but exquisitely articulated — where you least expected it. “I didn’t want to let anybody off the hook in this book, including the victims,” Marlon James remarks in our conversation. There’s a writer here with a book and a “dynamism of spoken language” that are very much for us and our world. Marlon James: out with myths and nostalgia One of the concerns from critics was why in such a forward-looking time I was writing a backward-looking novel? You know: “Black is the new president,” “we’re post-racial” and all of that. There are a lot of answers to that, and not just the very typical one, that you need to know your history and so on. But I wasn’t writing a historical novel. There are many ways, I hope, in which this novel is in dialogue with the President. The first is the ownership of language. The story is old, but the idea of telling a story in the voices of the people who went through it is still a pretty new thing. The idea of a slave’s story or the story of urban poverty being in the voice of the people who experienced it is new, and it’s pretty radical when you look at the British West Indies. The first publisher to see The Book of Night Women was a British publisher who turned it down. And her request to me was to reconsider writing it in the third-person in standard English. And what struck me there was that even in 2007, people still refuse to have stories told by the people who experienced it, in a language that breaks standard English, that accepts lyricism, that breaks words here, that joins words here. It is a slavery novel but it is also a novel that acknowledges the dynamism of spoken dialect English. And owning it… I didn’t want to let anybody off the hook in this novel, including the victims. And I think that it is something that had to be said. It’s too easy. I always say it and I say this sometimes when I lecture: if blacks accuse whites of denial, then blacks could accuse themselves of myth-making — that that there were all oppressive whites and all oppressed blacks. So that is why the idea of slaves owning slaves is so painful for some people to read. It’s a fact; it happened. Slaves themselves became the masters after the rebellions. I knew I could have written a very black and white story and probably still have been praised for it, largely–it must be said–out of guilt. I know I could have written about horrendous white masters beating poor slaves and have gotten away with it. To me that is intellectually dishonest. I think the more humane thing, but also a dialogue that has more to do with what is going on now, is one that recognizes all the ambiguities: that even such a dark world is still pretty gray… It is not just a matter of knowing history so that you don’t repeat it. It is that you are headless without history. And I don’t think it is being taught enough. If I thought it was being taught enough I wouldn’t have written the book… Toni Morrison has said she writes the books that she wanted to read but could never find. And I agree with that totally. There is certainly a rich tradition of slave narratives and so on, but it is still not enough. Even the most enduring and the most lauded works about slavery tend to be about American Slavery– like Beloved. And Caribbean slavery was such a radically different thing: it was so violent. You can’t help but be hyper-violent when you are talking about West Indian slavery. And it is not even the violence itself, but the uncertainty that makes it even more violent…the slaves were not beaten into submission, they were very proud warriors from kingdoms who were just defeated in war. They were prisoners of a war of sorts, not necessarily victims who were waiting to be captured. And when you put that in a mix with people who come from Britain, mostly men, who are being thrust into this world where anything goes, it is bound to be explosive. And I think that story hasn’t been told enough. Marlon James in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-05-28,24621210 Thu, 28 May 2009 14:13:50 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24616811-Pico-Iyer-in-Jamaica-center-of-word-and-world Calabash, the Caribbean literary festival, is an outdoor church of the written word, rocking and resonating on the south coast of Jamaica with the voices of poets and writers from Hong Kong, New York, Barbados, Nigeria, London, San Diego and Boston, among other home addresses. In this first of our conversations from Treasure Beach, Pico Iyer is preaching. All his life, the Dalai Lama has been friend and inspiration. Zadie Smith is queen of his literary realm. And now Barack Obama is his “global soul in the White House.” Pico is our model of “global attitude,” in short. Born in England of Indian parents, he went to school and university in the United States and has lived 21 years now in rural Japan, on a tourist visa. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Pico Iyer. (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3) Pico Iyer: a more fruitful creolizing culture We’re at the center of the word, and the center of the world, now. When I was born, everyone would have said... Calabash, the Caribbean literary festival, is an outdoor church of the written word, rocking and resonating on the south coast of Jamaica with the voices of poets and writers from Hong Kong, New York, Barbados, Nigeria, London, San Diego and Boston, among other home addresses. In this first of our conversations from Treasure Beach, Pico Iyer is preaching. All his life, the Dalai Lama has been friend and inspiration. Zadie Smith is queen of his literary realm. And now Barack Obama is his “global soul in the White House.” Pico is our model of “global attitude,” in short. Born in England of Indian parents, he went to school and university in the United States and has lived 21 years now in rural Japan, on a tourist visa. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Pico Iyer. (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3) Pico Iyer: a more fruitful creolizing culture We’re at the center of the word, and the center of the world, now. When I was born, everyone would have said the center was London or New York. The world has grown so much more interestingly complex, so quickly, that a literary event in Jamaica finds a much larger audience than a literary event in London or New York would. A 21st-century novel is much more likely to be set in Bombay, than London or New York. I think of London as the capital of the 19th-century novel, New York as the capital of the 20th-century novel, and Bombay — by which I also mean Kingston, and Port of Spain, Lahore and Lagos and other places — those are the capitals of the 21st-century novel in the English language. Before coming to Jamaica, I might have thought of it as a marginal place. Now that I’ve been here, I can’t say that. It’s not at the margins. You’re right that it’s on the edge of the great America as Ireland was on the edge of Britain, but it’s as central as New York. It has the same number of influences coming here - you an Irish-American person, and here’s me, an Indian-Japanese person. We’re converging by the sea in Jamaica, surrounded by other mongrels, like ourselves. And the conversation is at least as rich here, as in New York, but perhaps richer. We can’t talk anymore about a center of empire and a victim of empire. The empire is global and Jamaica is having its say, to London and New York, and London and New York have to attend to it. It’s interesting that the writer that you and I have most celebrated during this conversation, Zadie Smith, is half Jamaican, half English - she lives in New York. But in her life, because she’s such an accomplished novelist and essayist at her young age, she is a way of saying, “I’m going to bring my Jamaican heritage as well as my English and American heritage into the center of Western thinking, and the center of Western writing,” in exactly the same way that Barack Obama willy nilly is bringing Kenya into the White House, and into the center of traditional power. So that Kenya now can say, “We have guy in the White House. The most powerful man in the world is from our little tribe.” They can legitimately say it as much as somebody from Kansas can say it. And I think Jamaica now is empowered in that same way. They can say that one of most exciting novelists in the English language, Zadie Smith, is coming from Jamaica, and is channeling Jamaica into, and bringing it together with her English part, and now her American life. And I think that that’s the excitement: that Jamaica is now a center of the world, and there isn’t the center of the world, there isn’t one center of the world. The center of the world is everywhere. Pico Iyer in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009. Calabash, the Caribbean literary festival, is an outdoor church of the written word, rocking and resonating on the south coast of Jamaica with the voices of poets and writers from Hong Kong, New York, Barbados, Nigeria, London, San Diego and Boston, among other home addresses. In this first of our conversations from Treasure Beach, Pico Iyer is preaching. All his life, the Dalai Lama has been friend and inspiration. Zadie Smith is queen of his literary realm. And now Barack Obama is his “global soul in the White House.” Pico is our model of “global attitude,” in short. Born in England of Indian parents, he went to school and university in the United States and has lived 21 years now in rural Japan, on a tourist visa. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Pico Iyer. (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3) Pico Iyer: a more fruitful creolizing culture We’re at the center of the word, and the center of the world, now. When I was born, everyone would have said the center was London or New York. The world has grown so much more interestingly complex, so quickly, that a literary event in Jamaica finds a much larger audience than a literary event in London or New York would. A 21st-century novel is much more likely to be set in Bombay, than London or New York. I think of London as the capital of the 19th-century novel, New York as the capital of the 20th-century novel, and Bombay — by which I also mean Kingston, and Port of Spain, Lahore and Lagos and other places — those are the capitals of the 21st-century novel in the English language. Before coming to Jamaica, I might have thought of it as a marginal place. Now that I’ve been here, I can’t say that. It’s not at the margins. You’re right that it’s on the edge of the great America as Ireland was on the edge of Britain, but it’s as central as New York. It has the same number of influences coming here - you an Irish-American person, and here’s me, an Indian-Japanese person. We’re converging by the sea in Jamaica, surrounded by other mongrels, like ourselves. And the conversation is at least as rich here, as in New York, but perhaps richer. We can’t talk anymore about a center of empire and a victim of empire. The empire is global and Jamaica is having its say, to London and New York, and London and New York have to attend to it. It’s interesting that the writer that you and I have most celebrated during this conversation, Zadie Smith, is half Jamaican, half English - she lives in New York. But in her life, because she’s such an accomplished novelist and essayist at her young age, she is a way of saying, “I’m going to bring my Jamaican heritage as well as my English and American heritage into the center of Western thinking, and the center of Western writing,” in exactly the same way that Barack Obama willy nilly is bringing Kenya into the White House, and into the center of traditional power. So that Kenya now can say, “We have guy in the White House. The most powerful man in the world is from our little tribe.” They can legitimately say it as much as somebody from Kansas can say it. And I think Jamaica now is empowered in that same way. They can say that one of most exciting novelists in the English language, Zadie Smith, is coming from Jamaica, and is channeling Jamaica into, and bringing it together with her English part, and now her American life. And I think that that’s the excitement: that Jamaica is now a center of the world, and there isn’t the center of the world, there isn’t one center of the world. The center of the world is everywhere. Pico Iyer in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-05-27,24616811 Wed, 27 May 2009 16:11:26 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24589902-Aleksandar-Hemon-through-bi-focals-darkly Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Aleksandar Hemon (25 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Aleksandar Hemon: funny people, sad tales What the Bosnian-American fictionist Aleksandar Hemon loves about being compared to Vladimir Nabokov is not the part about mastering English as a new language — praise Hemon doesn’t feel he’s earned quite yet. What pleases Hemon is a deeper Slavic kinship that readers have noted — the same kinship that Nabokov felt with Chekhov and “the subtle humor” of “this Chekhovian dove-gray world,” as Nabokov put it. Hemon writes “sad books for humorous people,” he says, and perhaps “humorous books for sad people” as well. Our conversation is with the novelist of The Lazarus Project , the story-teller of Love and Obstacles . Hemon is a favorite of The New Yorker magazine for his very typically bi-focal new-century identity. He is about equally rooted in Sarajevo and Chicago by now – about eq... Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Aleksandar Hemon (25 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Aleksandar Hemon: funny people, sad tales What the Bosnian-American fictionist Aleksandar Hemon loves about being compared to Vladimir Nabokov is not the part about mastering English as a new language — praise Hemon doesn’t feel he’s earned quite yet. What pleases Hemon is a deeper Slavic kinship that readers have noted — the same kinship that Nabokov felt with Chekhov and “the subtle humor” of “this Chekhovian dove-gray world,” as Nabokov put it. Hemon writes “sad books for humorous people,” he says, and perhaps “humorous books for sad people” as well. Our conversation is with the novelist of The Lazarus Project , the story-teller of Love and Obstacles . Hemon is a favorite of The New Yorker magazine for his very typically bi-focal new-century identity. He is about equally rooted in Sarajevo and Chicago by now – about equally drawn, for example, to gaudy gangster histories in either place. The Lazarus Project made a surreal link between a historic murder in Chicago in 1908 and the carnage in Sarajevo at the end of the 20th Century. He writes a very stylish immigrant English for one part of his audience, but the interesting thing in the Internet age is that Aleksandar Hemon also writes a political column online in Bosnian, not just for Sarajevo but for Bosnians in the US who wouldn’t – maybe couldn’t – read him in English. Like the Bosnian man now living in St. Louis who watches pictures of the snow falling in Sarajevo, on the Web. He’s not writing about exile, Hemon says, because he can and does go back to Bosnia. Rather he’s writing the stories and moral discoveries that come with displacement. I asked him to surface his theory about the continuities of violence in the world. AH: I don’t believe in human atavism, that we’re savages waiting to be activated. I think what turns people into killers on a vast scale is a kind of misguided historical project. These things are well organized. The Nazis, obviously, were not savages. Genocide is a technology, it is a very complicated operation, and they needed a vast, well trained force to do that. Similarly, in the Balkans. A lot of people have represented the conflict in the Balkans as, you know, tribes at each other’s throats, which was a lie in so many ways. But it also misses the point of genocide, the technology of genocide. To kill seven thousand men in Srebenica, you need a large number of buses to transport people from Point A to Point B, so they can be shot. Someone has to organize those busses. There is an army hierarchy and so on. So, for the worst in us to be brought out, there has to be a historical project. In that vein, not quite a genocidal project obviously, the Bush administration, for example, brought out the worst in Americans. They had a misguided horrible project which somehow we’re still at. We’re still doing it, in many ways. And this brought out the worst things in America, and I hated that experience. Which is also to say that opposing such projects becomes a necessary ethical position for each citizen, including writers. CL: There is a moment in The Lazarus Project that many have noted, where Brik is in a fight with his wife. She is American and she’s kind of defending the innocence of the kids at Abu Ghraib. And the Brik character, who has a lot in common with you, tells her: “I hate the normal people, in the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave… I told her that to be American you have to know nothing, and understand even less. And that I didn’t want to be American…” What has happened to that anger in you, what has happened to that in us? AH: Well, I have had my anger. It never quite reached that point. Brik is very, very angry with the whole notion of being American. So I could write him, because during the Bush years I had a hard time being American. I was more of an American in ’99, when I wasn’t even a citizen, than I was during the Bush years. Because it seemed to me that if you were an American, you had to sign up for these projects, and I didn’t want to sign up. CL In The Lazarus Project, Chicago in 1908 is the site of a kind of nativist hysteria. 100 years later, precisely, it became the seat of the new almost transnational American politics. What has happened to us, what has happened to Chicago? AH: Well, Chicago, like America, was never one thing. It is not a monolithic thing, absolute and primitive… You know, as long as there has been a history of racism in this country there has been a history of opposition to racism. As long as there was an injustice, there were people fighting that injustice. The question is who has a higher hand. That is what I love about America: that vitality. And it can never be reduced to one thing, and the Bush regime tried to reduce it to one thing, we can stand united and question nothing. But it is too big, it is too complicated, it is too democratic. And what happened in Chicago and the United States is this: people like myself, who were playing defense, moved over and started attacking the opponents goal to score. And we scored. Aleksandar Hemon in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, May 15, 2009. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Aleksandar Hemon (25 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Aleksandar Hemon: funny people, sad tales What the Bosnian-American fictionist Aleksandar Hemon loves about being compared to Vladimir Nabokov is not the part about mastering English as a new language — praise Hemon doesn’t feel he’s earned quite yet. What pleases Hemon is a deeper Slavic kinship that readers have noted — the same kinship that Nabokov felt with Chekhov and “the subtle humor” of “this Chekhovian dove-gray world,” as Nabokov put it. Hemon writes “sad books for humorous people,” he says, and perhaps “humorous books for sad people” as well. Our conversation is with the novelist of The Lazarus Project , the story-teller of Love and Obstacles . Hemon is a favorite of The New Yorker magazine for his very typically bi-focal new-century identity. He is about equally rooted in Sarajevo and Chicago by now – about equally drawn, for example, to gaudy gangster histories in either place. The Lazarus Project made a surreal link between a historic murder in Chicago in 1908 and the carnage in Sarajevo at the end of the 20th Century. He writes a very stylish immigrant English for one part of his audience, but the interesting thing in the Internet age is that Aleksandar Hemon also writes a political column online in Bosnian, not just for Sarajevo but for Bosnians in the US who wouldn’t – maybe couldn’t – read him in English. Like the Bosnian man now living in St. Louis who watches pictures of the snow falling in Sarajevo, on the Web. He’s not writing about exile, Hemon says, because he can and does go back to Bosnia. Rather he’s writing the stories and moral discoveries that come with displacement. I asked him to surface his theory about the continuities of violence in the world. AH: I don’t believe in human atavism, that we’re savages waiting to be activated. I think what turns people into killers on a vast scale is a kind of misguided historical project. These things are well organized. The Nazis, obviously, were not savages. Genocide is a technology, it is a very complicated operation, and they needed a vast, well trained force to do that. Similarly, in the Balkans. A lot of people have represented the conflict in the Balkans as, you know, tribes at each other’s throats, which was a lie in so many ways. But it also misses the point of genocide, the technology of genocide. To kill seven thousand men in Srebenica, you need a large number of buses to transport people from Point A to Point B, so they can be shot. Someone has to organize those busses. There is an army hierarchy and so on. So, for the worst in us to be brought out, there has to be a historical project. In that vein, not quite a genocidal project obviously, the Bush administration, for example, brought out the worst in Americans. They had a misguided horrible project which somehow we’re still at. We’re still doing it, in many ways. And this brought out the worst things in America, and I hated that experience. Which is also to say that opposing such projects becomes a necessary ethical position for each citizen, including writers. CL: There is a moment in The Lazarus Project that many have noted, where Brik is in a fight with his wife. She is American and she’s kind of defending the innocence of the kids at Abu Ghraib. And the Brik character, who has a lot in common with you, tells her: “I hate the normal people, in the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave… I told her that to be American you have to know nothing, and understand even less. And that I didn’t want to be American…” What has happened to that anger in you, what has happened to that in us? AH: Well, I have had my anger. It never quite reached that point. Brik is very, very angry with the whole notion of being American. So I could write him, because during the Bush years I had a hard time being American. I was more of an American in ’99, when I wasn’t even a citizen, than I was during the Bush years. Because it seemed to me that if you were an American, you had to sign up for these projects, and I didn’t want to sign up. CL In The Lazarus Project, Chicago in 1908 is the site of a kind of nativist hysteria. 100 years later, precisely, it became the seat of the new almost transnational American politics. What has happened to us, what has happened to Chicago? AH: Well, Chicago, like America, was never one thing. It is not a monolithic thing, absolute and primitive… You know, as long as there has been a history of racism in this country there has been a history of opposition to racism. As long as there was an injustice, there were people fighting that injustice. The question is who has a higher hand. That is what I love about America: that vitality. And it can never be reduced to one thing, and the Bush regime tried to reduce it to one thing, we can stand united and question nothing. But it is too big, it is too complicated, it is too democratic. And what happened in Chicago and the United States is this: people like myself, who were playing defense, moved over and started attacking the opponents goal to score. And we scored. Aleksandar Hemon in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, May 15, 2009. tag:odeo.com,2009-05-21,24589902 Thu, 21 May 2009 02:22:33 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24582295-Colm-Toibin-the-living-spell-of-Henry-James Colm Toibin at the James family graves: “hallowed ground” of novels, diaries, sacrifice. “It’s very rare.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with novelist Colm Toibin. (44 minutes, 22 mb mp3) After The Master , his breakthrough meditation on Henry James, there’s no detaching the Irish novelist Colm Toibin from James’ own “dramatizations of secrecy.” Toibin’s new novel Brooklyn will remind you oddly of The Portrait of a Lady , as his modest Irish heroine, Eilis Lacey, arriving in the States from County Wexford in the early 1950s, can be read as a re-casting (in a different direction) of Isabel Archer. I suppose I was aware that I was dealing with a young woman, as Henry James said about Isabel Archer, “confronting her destiny” but doing so almost ironically in the sense that she doesn’t really confront anything and she doesn’t really have a destiny; and that I was dealing with something th... Colm Toibin at the James family graves: “hallowed ground” of novels, diaries, sacrifice. “It’s very rare.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with novelist Colm Toibin. (44 minutes, 22 mb mp3) After The Master , his breakthrough meditation on Henry James, there’s no detaching the Irish novelist Colm Toibin from James’ own “dramatizations of secrecy.” Toibin’s new novel Brooklyn will remind you oddly of The Portrait of a Lady , as his modest Irish heroine, Eilis Lacey, arriving in the States from County Wexford in the early 1950s, can be read as a re-casting (in a different direction) of Isabel Archer. I suppose I was aware that I was dealing with a young woman, as Henry James said about Isabel Archer, “confronting her destiny” but doing so almost ironically in the sense that she doesn’t really confront anything and she doesn’t really have a destiny; and that I was dealing with something that is one of those great, almost hidden subjects, oddly enough, which is the subject of Irish immigration. Though we know so much about it, we end up knowing so little about it. There are very few novels about it, for example… The James thing was interesting to me, too, in that James deals with dramatizations of secrecy and of people having things they keep to themselves and that, if known, will be explosive. So too, in this book there are two sisters and they keep things deep in themselves. And I was interested in that dramatic power of withholding, which is something I think I learned a lot about from James — in his own life and perhaps moreso in his work. Colm Toibin in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, May 2009. Our fresh conversation on Brooklyn is topping up a sort of seance Colm Toibin and I enjoyed five years ago at the James family burial plot — on the fringe lawn, oddly enough, of the lesser Mount Auburn immortals. For me, nothing summons the ghost of the great Jameses, all of them, more studiously and more persuasively, than the melodious Irish voice of Colm Toibin. On Henry, for example: You begin by admiring the work. But then I found that the life is so ambiguous and so interesting. His relationship to his family is constantly in a state of flux. He himself — in London, say — longs to go out. He longs for society; he gets an enormous number of stories from duchesses and archbishops. But he also longs to be alone. He never longs for the same thing twice. The next day he wants something else. He is a very fluid and mysterious character. He sexuality remains mysterious. What sort of erotic life he must have had, what sort of dream life, remains entirely mysterious. It’s a pre-Freudian existence as Freud is coming into vogue. It’s a pre-Wildean existence as Wilde is coming into vogue. He exile is also strange: the way in which he never really wrote about the English very well. His English characters don’t work for me. And yet he couldn’t write about a settled Boston. The Boston of the Metaphysical Club — that is lost on him, too. So he realized in his last years that he could actually go and describe those Americans in Europe again — the disruptive presence of Americans whose wealth or whose ambitions would fit against an older and much more duplicitous society. He knew about duplicity, just as he knew about secrecy… His life as lived — the level of industry, the level of care taken with work, the secret suffering and also the secret glamor, the going to Italy, the living in palaces — all that is what he had. Colm Toibin in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, 2004. Colm Toibin at the James family graves: “hallowed ground” of novels, diaries, sacrifice. “It’s very rare.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with novelist Colm Toibin. (44 minutes, 22 mb mp3) After The Master , his breakthrough meditation on Henry James, there’s no detaching the Irish novelist Colm Toibin from James’ own “dramatizations of secrecy.” Toibin’s new novel Brooklyn will remind you oddly of The Portrait of a Lady , as his modest Irish heroine, Eilis Lacey, arriving in the States from County Wexford in the early 1950s, can be read as a re-casting (in a different direction) of Isabel Archer. I suppose I was aware that I was dealing with a young woman, as Henry James said about Isabel Archer, “confronting her destiny” but doing so almost ironically in the sense that she doesn’t really confront anything and she doesn’t really have a destiny; and that I was dealing with something that is one of those great, almost hidden subjects, oddly enough, which is the subject of Irish immigration. Though we know so much about it, we end up knowing so little about it. There are very few novels about it, for example… The James thing was interesting to me, too, in that James deals with dramatizations of secrecy and of people having things they keep to themselves and that, if known, will be explosive. So too, in this book there are two sisters and they keep things deep in themselves. And I was interested in that dramatic power of withholding, which is something I think I learned a lot about from James — in his own life and perhaps moreso in his work. Colm Toibin in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, May 2009. Our fresh conversation on Brooklyn is topping up a sort of seance Colm Toibin and I enjoyed five years ago at the James family burial plot — on the fringe lawn, oddly enough, of the lesser Mount Auburn immortals. For me, nothing summons the ghost of the great Jameses, all of them, more studiously and more persuasively, than the melodious Irish voice of Colm Toibin. On Henry, for example: You begin by admiring the work. But then I found that the life is so ambiguous and so interesting. His relationship to his family is constantly in a state of flux. He himself — in London, say — longs to go out. He longs for society; he gets an enormous number of stories from duchesses and archbishops. But he also longs to be alone. He never longs for the same thing twice. The next day he wants something else. He is a very fluid and mysterious character. He sexuality remains mysterious. What sort of erotic life he must have had, what sort of dream life, remains entirely mysterious. It’s a pre-Freudian existence as Freud is coming into vogue. It’s a pre-Wildean existence as Wilde is coming into vogue. He exile is also strange: the way in which he never really wrote about the English very well. His English characters don’t work for me. And yet he couldn’t write about a settled Boston. The Boston of the Metaphysical Club — that is lost on him, too. So he realized in his last years that he could actually go and describe those Americans in Europe again — the disruptive presence of Americans whose wealth or whose ambitions would fit against an older and much more duplicitous society. He knew about duplicity, just as he knew about secrecy… His life as lived — the level of industry, the level of care taken with work, the secret suffering and also the secret glamor, the going to Italy, the living in palaces — all that is what he had. Colm Toibin in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, 2004. tag:odeo.com,2009-05-19,24582295 Tue, 19 May 2009 14:10:52 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24550600-George-Scialabba-the-untethered-untenured-mind In this world of overrated pleasures and underrated treasures, as the songwriter said, I’m glad there is George Scialabba. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with George Scialabba (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3) George Scialabba: ideas as life, not a living In the din, that is, of over-caffeinated wonks and touts who pass for thinkers, I rejoice in a modern guy from the old neighborhood who reads around the clock in Matthew Arnold’s realm of “the best that has been said and thought in the world” and keeps writing what he thinks. What Are Intellectuals Good For? is his new collection. The first answer to the question is his subtitle: “Essays and Reviews by George Scialabba.” With a vocation but not a speciality, George Scialabba meets the Irving Howe standard of the public intellectual: “By impulse, if not definition,” Howe wrote of the New York circle in the 1950s, “the intellectual is a man who writes about subjects outside h... In this world of overrated pleasures and underrated treasures, as the songwriter said, I’m glad there is George Scialabba. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with George Scialabba (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3) George Scialabba: ideas as life, not a living In the din, that is, of over-caffeinated wonks and touts who pass for thinkers, I rejoice in a modern guy from the old neighborhood who reads around the clock in Matthew Arnold’s realm of “the best that has been said and thought in the world” and keeps writing what he thinks. What Are Intellectuals Good For? is his new collection. The first answer to the question is his subtitle: “Essays and Reviews by George Scialabba.” With a vocation but not a speciality, George Scialabba meets the Irving Howe standard of the public intellectual: “By impulse, if not definition,” Howe wrote of the New York circle in the 1950s, “the intellectual is a man who writes about subjects outside his field. He has no field.” No tenure, either. No tank to think in, no social circle, no genius grant (yet), no seat in the opinion industry or on cable TV — “no province, no clique, no church,” as Whitman said of Emerson — not even a blog. Though yes, a website. George Scialabba’s “credentials” are only the steady heart and critical pen he brings to the ecstatic discipline of ideas. Ideas seduced George as a Catholic kid in the Italian-American working class precincts of East Boston, the harbor neighborhood often mistaken for an airport. Affirmative action brought him to Harvard (Class of 1969). A half-conscious zeal to be a “divine secret agent” brought him into the narrow way of the lay order, Opus Dei. “Intellectual concupiscence, I guess” brought him out of the church onto the wide path of modernism. The gods and demi-gods in George’s cast include Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Orwell; in America, Randolph Bourne and Dwight Macdonald, Susan Sontag, Walter Karp and Ralph Nader. The tilt is often but not always to the left. George’s deeper enthusiasm is for self-conscious humanists in the public square. “By that,” he writes, “I mean that their primary training and frame of reference were the humanities, usually literature or philosophy, and that they habitually employed values and ideals derived from the humanities to criticize contemporary politics… Their ’specialty’ lay not in unearthing generally unavailable facts but in penetrating especially deeply into the common culture, in grasping and articulating its contemporary moral/political relevance with special originality and force.” Scott McLemee says it well in Inside Higher Ed: “If you can imagine a blend of Richard Rorty’s skeptical pragmatism and Noam Chomsky’s geopolitical worldview — and it’s a bit of a stretch to reconcile them, though somehow he does this — then you have a reasonable sense of Scialabba’s own politics. In short, it is the belief that life would be better, both in the United States and elsewhere, with more economic equality, a stronger sense of the common good, and the end of that narcissistic entitlement fostered by the American military-industrial complex.” My conversation with George Scialabba is about whatever happened to the Williams James lineage of public intellectuals — to Emerson’s ideal of “Man Thinking” in his “American Scholar” essay. I ask him toward the end for his own specifications of the post-modern intellectual, a description of the ideal he’s seeking today: GS: I think post-modernity is premature. I think we ought to postpone post-modernity for a few centuries, at least. I don’t think that modernity has exhausted its potential and the very sad fact is that nine tenths of the world, or eight tenths, or seven tenths, hasn’t yet entered modernity. This is a great, terrible indictment of us who have. We need to stop improving our lifestyles and just start inviting, at least pulling up, people who are trying to climb into the modern political and literary and intellectual and scientific culture. When nobody is getting less than two thousand calories of food or culture a day, then we can take off into the post-modern future—together. But now it just looks like we are really heading for a species division: some people are on such a fast-track to the future that, when other people are sunk in pre-modern misery, and its just not a healthy prognosis for the species. CL: So who, then, are we looking for in the way of an example? GS: Well, culturally I would say Wendell Berry and Sven Birkerts. People who have the sense of the vast, unexplored riches in the printed word, in the case of Birkerts, and in the natural world, in the case of Berry. People like Ralph Nader, who have a sense of the vast riches of the civic realm. They seem to be the exemplary modern men, and I don’t think that we should try to extend or go beyond their example so much as we should try to emulate it. George Scialabba in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Boston, May 6, 2009. It’s easy to see George Scialabba as the exception that proves the rule that “public intellectualism” is dead — stifled by the “power elite” in corporate universities and government, by television and the tyranny of advertising — “the modern substitute for argument,” as Santayana said; “its function is to make the worse appear the better.” But I don’t buy the line. I don’t even buy George’s discouragement. The open architecture of the Web has diversified and, at many sites, enriched and intensified the play of accessible ideas, beyond our imagining, say, ten years ago. Among the exemplary great ones: edge.org, which keeps freshening the argument that biologists and brain scientists are now the critical source of public ideas; 3 Quarks, the best of global magazine racks; George’s favorite, Crooked Timber; my favorite, perhaps: Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, where a Middle East historian at Michigan became the Thucydides of the Iraq War. Yet clearly something is missing — some point of connection, some contemporary version of Chatauqua. Our moment of crisis and broad popular disillusionment might be a dream time for independent thinkers, but it isn’t yet. Is the fault in our stars or in ourselves, that we don’t have a bolder, more robust public culture? In this world of overrated pleasures and underrated treasures, as the songwriter said, I’m glad there is George Scialabba. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with George Scialabba (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3) George Scialabba: ideas as life, not a living In the din, that is, of over-caffeinated wonks and touts who pass for thinkers, I rejoice in a modern guy from the old neighborhood who reads around the clock in Matthew Arnold’s realm of “the best that has been said and thought in the world” and keeps writing what he thinks. What Are Intellectuals Good For? is his new collection. The first answer to the question is his subtitle: “Essays and Reviews by George Scialabba.” With a vocation but not a speciality, George Scialabba meets the Irving Howe standard of the public intellectual: “By impulse, if not definition,” Howe wrote of the New York circle in the 1950s, “the intellectual is a man who writes about subjects outside his field. He has no field.” No tenure, either. No tank to think in, no social circle, no genius grant (yet), no seat in the opinion industry or on cable TV — “no province, no clique, no church,” as Whitman said of Emerson — not even a blog. Though yes, a website. George Scialabba’s “credentials” are only the steady heart and critical pen he brings to the ecstatic discipline of ideas. Ideas seduced George as a Catholic kid in the Italian-American working class precincts of East Boston, the harbor neighborhood often mistaken for an airport. Affirmative action brought him to Harvard (Class of 1969). A half-conscious zeal to be a “divine secret agent” brought him into the narrow way of the lay order, Opus Dei. “Intellectual concupiscence, I guess” brought him out of the church onto the wide path of modernism. The gods and demi-gods in George’s cast include Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Orwell; in America, Randolph Bourne and Dwight Macdonald, Susan Sontag, Walter Karp and Ralph Nader. The tilt is often but not always to the left. George’s deeper enthusiasm is for self-conscious humanists in the public square. “By that,” he writes, “I mean that their primary training and frame of reference were the humanities, usually literature or philosophy, and that they habitually employed values and ideals derived from the humanities to criticize contemporary politics… Their ’specialty’ lay not in unearthing generally unavailable facts but in penetrating especially deeply into the common culture, in grasping and articulating its contemporary moral/political relevance with special originality and force.” Scott McLemee says it well in Inside Higher Ed: “If you can imagine a blend of Richard Rorty’s skeptical pragmatism and Noam Chomsky’s geopolitical worldview — and it’s a bit of a stretch to reconcile them, though somehow he does this — then you have a reasonable sense of Scialabba’s own politics. In short, it is the belief that life would be better, both in the United States and elsewhere, with more economic equality, a stronger sense of the common good, and the end of that narcissistic entitlement fostered by the American military-industrial complex.” My conversation with George Scialabba is about whatever happened to the Williams James lineage of public intellectuals — to Emerson’s ideal of “Man Thinking” in his “American Scholar” essay. I ask him toward the end for his own specifications of the post-modern intellectual, a description of the ideal he’s seeking today: GS: I think post-modernity is premature. I think we ought to postpone post-modernity for a few centuries, at least. I don’t think that modernity has exhausted its potential and the very sad fact is that nine tenths of the world, or eight tenths, or seven tenths, hasn’t yet entered modernity. This is a great, terrible indictment of us who have. We need to stop improving our lifestyles and just start inviting, at least pulling up, people who are trying to climb into the modern political and literary and intellectual and scientific culture. When nobody is getting less than two thousand calories of food or culture a day, then we can take off into the post-modern future—together. But now it just looks like we are really heading for a species division: some people are on such a fast-track to the future that, when other people are sunk in pre-modern misery, and its just not a healthy prognosis for the species. CL: So who, then, are we looking for in the way of an example? GS: Well, culturally I would say Wendell Berry and Sven Birkerts. People who have the sense of the vast, unexplored riches in the printed word, in the case of Birkerts, and in the natural world, in the case of Berry. People like Ralph Nader, who have a sense of the vast riches of the civic realm. They seem to be the exemplary modern men, and I don’t think that we should try to extend or go beyond their example so much as we should try to emulate it. George Scialabba in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Boston, May 6, 2009. It’s easy to see George Scialabba as the exception that proves the rule that “public intellectualism” is dead — stifled by the “power elite” in corporate universities and government, by television and the tyranny of advertising — “the modern substitute for argument,” as Santayana said; “its function is to make the worse appear the better.” But I don’t buy the line. I don’t even buy George’s discouragement. The open architecture of the Web has diversified and, at many sites, enriched and intensified the play of accessible ideas, beyond our imagining, say, ten years ago. Among the exemplary great ones: edge.org, which keeps freshening the argument that biologists and brain scientists are now the critical source of public ideas; 3 Quarks, the best of global magazine racks; George’s favorite, Crooked Timber; my favorite, perhaps: Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, where a Middle East historian at Michigan became the Thucydides of the Iraq War. Yet clearly something is missing — some point of connection, some contemporary version of Chatauqua. Our moment of crisis and broad popular disillusionment might be a dream time for independent thinkers, but it isn’t yet. Is the fault in our stars or in ourselves, that we don’t have a bolder, more robust public culture? tag:odeo.com,2009-05-14,24550600 Thu, 14 May 2009 19:28:40 -0700 no Open Source podcast, Shows, Aired http://odeo.com/episodes/24550602-Reif-Larsen-the-Making-of-the-%E2%80%9CSpivet%E2%80%9D-Legend Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Reif Larsen (45 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Reif Larsen: stories, pictures and margins! Maybe there are two Reif Larsens. One is, at 29, the precocious savior of the collapsing book business — the game-changer, anyway, who in a desperately down market got $900,000 for his first novel, with foreign rights on top of that. His assignment, apparently, is to do with his story-telling, illustrations and marginal commentary in The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet roughly what Yo-Yo Ma, with his tangos and Appalachian tunes and the Silk Road Project on top of his Bach cello suites, did for classical recording. This is Reif Larsen, the hope of an industry. The other Reif Larsen is the young man in our conversation, in his mother’s art studio in a three-flat house on the Cambridge-Somerville line near Boston. We are sitting in front of one of his mother’s images: black-and-white female figures with slides projected onto their skin. &#... Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Reif Larsen (45 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Reif Larsen: stories, pictures and margins! Maybe there are two Reif Larsens. One is, at 29, the precocious savior of the collapsing book business — the game-changer, anyway, who in a desperately down market got $900,000 for his first novel, with foreign rights on top of that. His assignment, apparently, is to do with his story-telling, illustrations and marginal commentary in The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet roughly what Yo-Yo Ma, with his tangos and Appalachian tunes and the Silk Road Project on top of his Bach cello suites, did for classical recording. This is Reif Larsen, the hope of an industry. The other Reif Larsen is the young man in our conversation, in his mother’s art studio in a three-flat house on the Cambridge-Somerville line near Boston. We are sitting in front of one of his mother’s images: black-and-white female figures with slides projected onto their skin. “You can see,” he says, deadpan, “how I became fascinated with scientific diagramming.” This Larsen is the child, as he says, of “an extraordinary collision of naturing and nurturing,” whose devoted parents and teachers have been getting out of his way all his life to let him be who he really is. This is the boy who drew ant anatomies for the sociobiologist and preeminent ant scientist E. O. Wilson. He’s the boy who never forgets the 7th grade teacher, Lois Hetland, who instructed him to draw his own detailed map of the globe; the same boy who hasn’t forgotten the coastlines of all the continents. The wonder of this Reif Larsen, you sense, isn’t really that he emerged so young. It’s rather that he took his time and poured all 29 years of his life so far into producing the Spivet yarn, about a 12-year-old mapmaker on a ranch in Montana who wins a grown-up prize from the Smithsonian Institution and wends his way to Washington to claim his victory. Spivet is a multi-media journey through a young man’s multiple intelligences. Here is Reif Larsen, the experimental story-teller, who would have found his own way, no matter what. Reif Larsen speaks about literary influences, early and late, from Tedd Arnold’s No More Jumping on the Bed to Salinger’s stories, to Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, to Conrad and Garcia Marquez, to Tolstoy and Gogol, and now the Bosnian-American Aleksandar Hemon. He speaks also of the modern writer’s inescapable entangements with technology, and in particular of his resistance to the “hypertext” fiction that Robert “The End of Books” Coover was advocating when Larsen was a student at Brown a decade ago. Of course the great irony is that [Spivet] is really an exploded hypertext book. I’ve come back. Thank you, Coover, is the moral of this. So, yes, I wanted the tenets ot narrative and character to be in place, but within that format I found… Originally all of the subtexts were in the footnotes. I had almost no images in the first draft. I have a love-hate relationship with footnotes… With some writers like Junot Diaz and Nicholson Baker and some of David Foster Wallace’s stuff, it really works. But often it’s an authorial intrusion where the author is saying “I know so much more about this.” There’s almost a pompousness in the writer saying: “you’ve got to do this, reader.” And as someone who’s interested in narrative and how we read, how we form stories in our head, the footnote didn’t feel right. Also T.S. wouldn’t have liked it. T.S. is a spatial thinker. He would have seen the page as a sort of map. So at some point in the process I made this really key breakthrough: They’re not footnotes! They’re going to be marginalia! From a reading point of view, the real breakthrough was the arrows, because suddenly you’re following a kind of diagram, you’re following a map, but you’re also doing a lot of lateral movement which mimics (at least in Western culture) the eye reading, how the eye reads. So I quickly found there was a key relationship between the main text and the subtext, or the sidebars. In that T. S. is almost most comfortable in these exploding diagrams, or in these annotations; and he’s willing to make observations, or risk a sort of emotional literacy that he wouldn’t in the main text if it’s tucked away. He dips his toe into the pond of adultness, often in the last line of a sidebar. So seeing how these two things react to each other was really interesting from a writer’s point of view. And pretty early on I wanted the reader to know: I can’t skip the margins! Reif Larsen in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 8, 2009. His next book, Reif Larsen says, will be “about an underground troupe of puppeteers, traveling around to places under siege, performing strange shows about particle physics, for the masses!” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Reif Larsen (45 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Reif Larsen: stories, pictures and margins! Maybe there are two Reif Larsens. One is, at 29, the precocious savior of the collapsing book business — the game-changer, anyway, who in a desperately down market got $900,000 for his first novel, with foreign rights on top of that. His assignment, apparently, is to do with his story-telling, illustrations and marginal commentary in The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet roughly what Yo-Yo Ma, with his tangos and Appalachian tunes and the Silk Road Project on top of his Bach cello suites, did for classical recording. This is Reif Larsen, the hope of an industry. The other Reif Larsen is the young man in our conversation, in his mother’s art studio in a three-flat house on the Cambridge-Somerville line near Boston. We are sitting in front of one of his mother’s images: black-and-white female figures with slides projected onto their skin. “You can see,” he says, deadpan, “how I became fascinated with scientific diagramming.” This Larsen is the child, as he says, of “an extraordinary collision of naturing and nurturing,” whose devoted parents and teachers have been getting out of his way all his life to let him be who he really is. This is the boy who drew ant anatomies for the sociobiologist and preeminent ant scientist E. O. Wilson. He’s the boy who never forgets the 7th grade teacher, Lois Hetland, who instructed him to draw his own detailed map of the globe; the same boy who hasn’t forgotten the coastlines of all the continents. The wonder of this Reif Larsen, you sense, isn’t really that he emerged so young. It’s rather that he took his time and poured all 29 years of his life so far into producing the Spivet yarn, about a 12-year-old mapmaker on a ranch in Montana who wins a grown-up prize from the Smithsonian Institution and wends his way to Washington to claim his victory. Spivet is a multi-media journey through a young man’s multiple intelligences. Here is Reif Larsen, the experimental story-teller, who would have found his own way, no matter what. Reif Larsen speaks about literary influences, early and late, from Tedd Arnold’s No More Jumping on the Bed to Salinger’s stories, to Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, to Conrad and Garcia Marquez, to Tolstoy and Gogol, and now the Bosnian-American Aleksandar Hemon. He speaks also of the modern writer’s inescapable entangements with technology, and in particular of his resistance to the “hypertext” fiction that Robert “The End of Books” Coover was advocating when Larsen was a student at Brown a decade ago. Of course the great irony is that [Spivet] is really an exploded hypertext book. I’ve come back. Thank you, Coover, is the moral of this. So, yes, I wanted the tenets ot narrative and character to be in place, but within that format I found… Originally all of the subtexts were in the footnotes. I had almost no images in the first draft. I have a love-hate relationship with footnotes… With some writers like Junot Diaz and Nicholson Baker and some of David Foster Wallace’s stuff, it really works. But often it’s an authorial intrusion where the author is saying “I know so much more about this.” There’s almost a pompousness in the writer saying: “you’ve got to do this, reader.” And as someone who’s interested in narrative and how we read, how we form stories in our head, the footnote didn’t feel right. Also T.S. wouldn’t have liked it. T.S. is a spatial thinker. He would have seen the page as a sort of map. So at some point in the process I made this really key breakthrough: They’re not footnotes! They’re going to be marginalia! From a reading point of view, the real breakthrough was the arrows, because suddenly you’re following a kind of diagram, you’re following a map, but you’re also doing a lot of lateral movement which mimics (at least in Western culture) the eye reading, how the eye reads. So I quickly found there was a key relationship between the main text and the subtext, or the sidebars. In that T. S. is almost most comfortable in these exploding diagrams, or in these annotations; and he’s willing to make observations, or risk a sort of emotional literacy that he wouldn’t in the main text if it’s tucked away. He dips his toe into the pond of adultness, often in the last line of a sidebar. So seeing how these two things react to each other was really interesting from a writer’s point of view. And pretty early on I wanted the reader to know: I can’t skip the margins! Reif Larsen in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 8, 2009. His next book, Reif Larsen says, will be “about an underground troupe of puppeteers, traveling around to places under siege, performing strange shows about particle physics, for the masses!” tag:odeo.com,2009-05-12,24550602 Tue, 12 May 2009 13:54:5