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.

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.

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…

Frank Worrell against England, 1950

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.

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.”

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.

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 Obama 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.

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.

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 our 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.

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.

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.