Archive for November, 2009
Whose Words These Are (16): Nick Baker’s Chowder
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Nicholson Baker. (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3)
Nicholson Baker bursts into our poetry series with a passion for form, a longing for four-beat rhythms a la Kipling and rhymes of the kind that Ira Gershwin and Dr. Seuss learned from Swinburne. For a couple of months now we’ve …
Mary Karr on Girls and their Dragons
Mary Karr, the "Liars' Club" memoirist, talks about the electric connection she's made with reckless, ambitious high school girls who want to be Odysseus -- to leave home to get home.
Thomas Balmes on Documentary Democracy
Thomas Balmes, the French documentary film-maker, coaches us in video anthropology: how to see and share what's familiar in the strange, and strange in the familiar.
The Voice of Gandhi in this "Year of India"
Gandhi's grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi stresses the Mahatma's audacity of non-violence as a nation builder -- and an example for our our times.
Whose Words These Are (15): Bloom’s Hart Crane
Harold Bloom demonstrates the "living labyrinth" of his own poetic memory in de-coding the dense modernism of Hart Crane.
David Bromwich on Obama: Looking at Words Closely
David Bromwich, a Yale literature professor, is making a new name for himself as a "close reader" of Barack Obama and his coverage.
"The Wire" Rewired
"The Wire," the HBO reality drama about ghetto Baltimore, is now a college course, still changing the lives of the people who made it.
Ralph Nader's Flight of Fantasy
Ralph Nader's new flight of fantasy is a "utopia" (meaning "nowhere) in which old billionaires like Warren Buffett finance the Nader agenda, starting with single-payer health insurance.
