Archive for 2007
At Home with Harold Bloom: (3) The Jazz Bridge
Not the least of Harold Bloom’s many charms for me is that he bridges poetry and jazz, to which our conversation turns. Bloom combines ardent fan-hood and that incomparable gift for assimilating and synthesizing all he’s heard as well as all he’s read, and making meaning of it.
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with
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At Home with Harold Bloom: (2) on the Humanities
Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, prescribes for the "ghastly condition ... sellout ... suicide" of Humanities education today.
At Home with Harold Bloom: (1) on Walt Whitman
Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, puts Walt Whitman on the top tier with Shakespeare -- "the two threads in the labyrinth" -- in his grand summing-up.
Helen Vendler: Reading and Riffing on W. B. Yeats
Poetry critic Helen Vendler shows us how to see the shape so as to hear the sound of a poem. W. B. Yeats' "An Airman Foresees His Death" is a 4 x 4 x 4 "cube," which has everything to do with its meaning.
Philip Gura’s American Transcendentalism
Historian Philip Gura's "American Transcendentalism" reminds you of -- take your pick -- the pollution or the surging vitality of the old headwaters of American thinking.
Speaking of Music: Alex Ross’s 20th Century
Alex Ross's history of the 20th Century according to its music, or: How the home address of musical composition moved from Vienna to the Hollywood.
Juan Cole: from Bonaparte to Bush
Middle East Historian Juan Cole recounts the story of Napoleon Bonaparte's 1798 invasion of Egypt, and connects it with the "bookend" fiasco of the Bush war in Iraq today.
A Free Life: Ha Jin’s Immigration Story
In the Americanization process that Ha Jin writes about there is no baseball, no Abraham Lincoln or FDR, no Paul Bunyan or American camp-fire songs, no Grand Canyon, no interest in our local or national politics... and no outward sentiment about a golden path toward the citizenship moment and pledge of allegiance. Is this part of what upsets us about immigration -- that these strangers are so wrapped up in old languages, and their own damned dramas?
Chavismo with some new brakes on it
The near-tie vote Sunday against the Chavez's idea of constitutional "reform" for Venezula confirms the sense of Chavez as a man on the edge, in a dangerous conflict of self and ideals, a character out a Garcia Marquez novel, in a "headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams." Is this the story? I've asking square-one sorts of questions about Chavismo : about his ideas of "participatory democracy" , about "21st Century Socialism," which may be quite different from the 19th and 20th Century versions, about the populist economic nationalism that Chavez has thrown up against the "neo-liberalism" of the "Washington consensus" on free markets, free trade, and multinational investments. Our guests here are Julia Buxton of the University of Bradford in the UK. She writes extensively (and sympathetically) about Chavez and Chavismo on openDemocracy. Jennifer McCoy of Georgia State Universty and the Carter Center, both in Atlanta. And James Green, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Brown University.
"This was the worst war ever" : Ken Burns
PBS documentarian Ken Burns reflects on his World War 2 epic -- and the possibility that war histories extend the innate human fascination with combat.































