Perspective is everything. Fred Marchant approaches the unspeakable horror and loss of life in the Haiti earthquake with a gingerly air of obligation. It’s the poet’s job, he says, to find words and speak them. His instructions came from his teacher of old, Saul Bellow. Bellow said he took them from Keats’ line that art and artists dwell in “the vale of soul-making,” not in the commonplace “vale of tears.”

I find the line in a famous Keats letter from April 21, 1810 — 200 years ago, almost to the day. “Call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making,’ Keats wrote. “Then you will find out the use of the world… I will put it in the most homely form possible–I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read–I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?”

In Fred Marchant’s cheerful radicalism, the impulse then is to take up meaning-making and life-building as a pastoral, virtually sacramental opportunity:

If you believe in language, and you believe in language’s capacity for carrying human experience, both inner and outer dimensions of it, then you have to lean into it and try… Poetry is an art, it’s the art of using this language in ways one hasn’t quite dreamed of yet, that somehow express things that one hasn’t quite yet named even. The degree to which any poet, any writer, can muster the resources of language that would allow or enable you to stand with someone suffering in these kinds of catastrophes. Then, I think, that is the sum total of human good.

I mentioned earlier that Saul Bellow had been a teacher of mine. One of the great things that Saul taught me — he told me to read Keats’ great letter about this world being a vale of soul-making. And Saul said think about what that word means, soul-making. Think about how it implies that the soul could be diminished or could be greater, depending. It was offering a theory of art. The work of art is in fact increasing the dimension of soul in the moment you’re alive. And frankly, there are moments in life when it disappears.

Fred Marchant has the distinction of being the first Marine Corps Officer honorably discharged for conscientious objection, during the war in Vietnam. Fred directs the creative writing program at Suffolk University in Boston and has published three books of poetry.

This reading continues our series with poets, “Whose Words These Are.” Tomorrow: Mariléne Phipps-Kettlewell.

Afaa Michael Weaver leads off a week of poets’ reflections on the catastrophe in Haiti. His poem “Port-au-Prince” is not “news analysis;” it’s a stab at fitting disaster news, now two months old, into a context between heart and history.

Perspective is everything. Michael Weaver worked in the steel factories of Baltimore (the world of “The Wire”) for 15 years before he finished his college education and declared himself a poet — and before “Afaa,” the Ibo honorific meaning “oracle,” was added to his name. Afaa Michael Weaver is widely published and traveled by now, a professor at Simmons College in Boston, though he identifies himself still as “a working-class African American poet from Baltimore.”

I’m coming from what is popular knowledge among black people about the significance and the position of Haiti, which is that we generally understand that Haiti’s position is a matter of being punished for speaking back, for daring to be rebellious. There are all kinds of complexities around the history of Haiti. But it goes back to the original problem presented to the American government of how to deal with the first successful slave rebellion in the Western hemisphere and how to keep that information and that inspiration away from black Americans. It haunted Jefferson. It framed his national policy, and remnants of that national policy are still present. Jefferson came to a final conclusion that he hoped that the expansion of America’s economy and national policy beyond its own borders would somehow compensate for the contradictions in the democratic ideal. So Haiti’s situation begins there. This earthquake seemed to another in a long list of problems. So I had this kind of sad image of being punished for talking back.

Afaa Michael Weaver with Chris Lydon at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, Cambridge, March 9, 2010.

Afaa Michael Weaver’s reading resumes our series with poets, “Whose Words These Are.” What our first score of poets confirmed is that they are still our “unacknowledged legislators,” as Shelley famously elected them. They’re the ones you can trust, after all, to tell you that your coat is on fire, or your country. Tomorrow: Fred Marchant.

Salman Rushdie, no less, finished his packed public talk at Brown three weeks ago with the observation that Pakistan is the globe’s true nightmare nation — that if Pakistan doesn’t rescue itself from political collapse into extremism, “we’re all fucked.” In this “Year of India” at Brown, we are talking again about the Pakistan question next door — about India’s nuclear-armed neighor and sibling, on the verge, some say, of meltdown.

Farzana Shaikh is a child of Pakistan who writes about her country now as the daughter of a distressed family. The thread through her pithy analysis, Making Sense of Pakistan, is that Pakistan’s problem is not fundamentally with India, much less with the United States and the world, but with itself and Islam. She begins:

More than six decades after being carved out of British India, Pakistan remains an enigma. Born in 1947 as the first self-professed Muslim state, it rejected theocracy. Vulnerable to the appeal of political Islam, it aspired to Western constitutionalism. Prone to military dictatorship, it hankered after democracy. Unsure of what it stood for, Pakistan has been left clutching at an identity beset by an ambigous relation to Islam…

Farzana Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan, Columbia University Press.

Salman Rushdie’s irresistible prose is one touchstone of our conversation:

It is well known that the term ‘Pakistan,’ an acronym, was originally thought up in England by a group of Muslim intellectuals. P for the Punjabis. A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind and the ‘tan’, they say, for Balochistan. (No mention of the East West, you notice: Bangladesh never got its name in the title, and so eventually it took the hint and seceded from the secessionists….). So, it was a word born in exile which then went East, was borne across or translated, and imposed itself on history; a returning migrant, settling down on partitioned land, forming a palimpsest on the past. A palimpsest obscures what lies beneath. To build Pakistan it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian centuries lay just beneath the surface.

Salman Rushdie, Shame, 1983. p. 87.

Advertising confirms Thomas Levin’s observation that, strange to tell, we have come to embrace Orwell’s worst nightmare in 1984, universal electronic surveillance. A Kenneth Cole billboard in Manhattan makes the unembarrassed point that “On an average day you will be captured on closed-circuit television camers at least a dozen times. Are you dressed for it?” Another print ad proclaims: “Only one out of every 10 New Yorkers who owns a telescope is interested in Astronomy.”

Bob Herbert in the New York Times revealed last week (“Watching Certain People”) that the New York Police Department has stopped, frisked and catalogued just under 3-million people in the city over five recent years — the vast majority of them black or Hispanic and innocent of the slightest offense. “It’s a gruesome, racist practice that should offend all New Yorkers, and it should cease,” the columnist avers, but the people’s outrage seems slow in building.

With Tom Levin, a media theorist at Princeton, we are catching up with not just the everyday “fabulousness” of “surveillent narcissism,” but a wider wave of misgivings about the digital information revoluton — questions, complaints and reassessments being raised by, for example, Jaron Lanier, Daniel Gelernter and Jonathan Zittrain, among others. “The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view,” Lanier writes, “is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable.”

So we are getting a broad-brush review here in James Der Derian’s Watson Institute classroom at Brown of the “data shadows” — the electronic profiles of all of us that can now be bought and sold; of the “surveil me, please” mentality that builds our Facebook files; of the outsourcing of knowledge and memory to Google — and Nicholas Carr’s question whether Google is making us stupid.

Tom Levin is an intrepid activist who refuses to give up an electronic signature at any cash register and who likes to give phony email addresses when the wrong people ask for his. And still he deplores most of the “technodystopic whining” in the air. His mission is bringing up the abysmal level of digital literacy, recalling Walter Benjamin’s line in the Thirties that people who cannot “read” a photograph are “the new illiterates.” The people Tom Levin worries about today are those of us who forget that the data we’re giving up these days will be in somebody else’s hands forever.

We’re getting a personal take on the New India that we haven’t heard before from New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas. When he went “home” after college, from Cleveland to the land of his ancestors, the feeling he confronted was, in effect, hey, your party in America is over, and you may be too late for the party underway in Bombay.

Born in Ohio and educated in Michigan, Anand is a child of that wave of immigration that brought India’s best and brightest out of a bad time back home in the 1970s to the land of milk, honey, high tech and opportunity in America. When Anand returned to do his bit for the mother country, as a McKinsey consultant in the mid-90s, he found not his parent’s stifled old India but rather a swarming entrepreneurial frontier more modern, more gung-ho in many ways than the American Mid-West he grew up in, but also a nation growing less “westernized” and more indigenous on a surging wave of growth.

He carried with him the story of India that his parents had given him, an image of a great civilization trapped in a box; a place where, in his words “No one questioned. No one dreamed. Nothing moved.” He begins this account of that quarter-century transformation through the eyes of his father:

AG: One of the reasons my father left — none of us leaves countries for massive geopolitical reasons, we ultimate leave for personal reasons. His personal situation was working in the 1970s for a company called Tata Motors, selling their trucks and buses in Africa. All he could do to make a judgment about whether he wanted to be in India long term was look around him at work. I will never forget the simple way in which describes why he decided to leave. He said he looked at his bosses twenty years ahead of him in line and concluded he didn’t want to spend his life becoming them.

Now fast forward a quarter century, Tata Motors is today, that same stagnant dead company that in some ways pushed my father out of the country as a whole, is today one of the most admired car companies in the world. Why? Because it no longer only sells rickety trucks and buses in Africa. It has now also made the world’s cheapest car, for about $2,000, in an engineering feat that has wowed every major auto maker.

CL: How did they do it?

AG: There are two ways to think about it. One is to say that they had consultants and advisors who had certainly come back form the West. But here’s another interpretation of what was different. the constraints were in some ways the same. They still had essentially 1 billion poor people around them; they still had engineering constraints; they still had a government that’s not particularly helpful to what business does. But in my father’s day most Indians would have interpreted that context as essentially hindering progress and being an excuse for producing sub optimal stuff. The new language is “we have unique hardships which gives us a unique opportunity to create globally competitive products that are better than anyone else’s products. Because our roads are bumpier, our suspension systems have to be even better than the Americans’ suspension systems. Because people are poor in this country, we have to work twice as hard to bring the price point of a car down to $2000.” It’s the same context, just a different way of looking at it.

Anand Giridharadas in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, March 4, 2010.

Call this a musical-conversational extension on the memoir of a beloved teacher, the historian of Russia at Brown University, Abbott Gleason, known as Tom. We’re connecting dots from Tolstoy to Orwell to Louis Armstrong in a big roomful of friends at Brown’s Watson Institute.

Tom Gleason might be everybody’s dream of an intellectual mentor: there are touches of Mr. Chips about Tom, and of his friend George Kennan, and of my big brother Peter, and your big brother, too, if you’re blessed to have one. It’s my thought anyway that if you assemble a dozen or so people of Tom Gleason’s range and reading and curiosity and conversational talent, you’ve got yourself a university.

A Liberal Education is the title of his memoir. It’s the private side of a career in Russian studies coinciding with four decades of Cold War. It warms and deepens my pleasure in the book to have known Tom well from odd angles: our daughters were college roommates; we’ve listened to jazz bands many Monday nights at Bovi’s Tavern in East Providence; we read War and Peace together in a small group two summers ago, then Moby Dick last summer. The Brothers Karamazov is next, in summer of 2010…

The fun of the book is in the disgressions — to the Tolstoyan family farm in Connecticut where young Tom spent his summers, where “workhorses… and a team of massive white oxen lingered, long after tractors and hayloaders were the rule on the more serious farms in the neighborhood… The haying was all done manually, with pitchforks, and many a wobbly load slid or topped off the wagon before it could be brought home to the barn. Farm work was usually over in time for drinks at the Big House before the sun had sunk much below the yardarm…”

The fun of our conversation is in our version of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, as Tom Gleason free-associates on the music of Bela Bartok, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane and Tom’s Harvard roommate John Harbison.

Maybe the meat of things is a reflection on the academic wars that came with Tom Gleason’s job:

CL: You we born into the Cold War, in a certain sense. You kept your powder dry in it. But in the book, as in life, you observed all the high and low politics of it, the ideological and academic politics of the Cold War period. So in the end, Tom, what the hell was it all about? Over here and over there, who got it right? Who, in retrospect, had wisdom on that huge subject?

TG:  Well, I’m not sure that getting it right and being wise are exactly the same thing. As far as getting it right goes, I tend to think — and I was a sort of left center person on the Cold War — the people on the two extremes, further to my right and further to my left, got it more interestingly at least, if not absolutely more right. By that I mean people like my colleague the British historian Michael Cox, who teaches at the University of Wales, and his Trotskyite friends always had a view that the Soviet Union was conceived in sin and betrayal, and it didn’t really belong in the world and it would someday pass away — and of course from their point of view, be replaced by something that was truly revolutionary, as Trotsky had believed.  And on the other side, my more conservative colleagues Adam Ulam, Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, also from a quite different point of view believed that the Soviet Union did not belong in the modern world.  They believed that any nation or any empire which denied the market and denied the economic realities of the world, would not ultimately survive.  So in a certain sense the two extremes met, behind my back, so to speak, and in many ways they were the people who were sort of least surprised – Martin Malia being another one of the conservative ones.  But I think the two extremes were not necessarily the wisest people.  I think the wisest people in dealing with the cold war were those who tried to question their own motives and tried to question themselves and tried to take it one step at a time… I think the cold war got us into places where rhetorical flights could take us out of ourselves and get us well beyond where we wanted to be.  Once in a while I would catch myself saying something and my little super-ego would sort of pick itself up and rub its eyes and say “I’ve been asleep all this time, did I hear what you just said?”

Abbott (Tom) Gleason in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, March 1, 2010.

It’s a nice Gleasonesque thought that the folks who saw the Cold War prophetically were his adversaries at far opposite ends of the argument, and the very last people you’d have asked to do something about it.

Yehudi Wyner is an approachable guy in a forbidding field: contemporary “serious” music. He gives us an opening here to ask where new sounds come from. In his case new music comes out of a sort of compost of the canon, from Bach to Bartok, and then everything else he’s heard over 80 years, from his father’s Yiddish art songs to boogie-woogie and gospel music. “Somehow it registers in the brain and has an effect,” he says of the past. The other big thing you’ll be hearing from Yehudi Wyner is that his music has its very bodily beginning in his hands. It’s a physical, almost gymnastic test of what ten fingers can do, want to do, find themselves doing.

The centerpiece here is the Pulitzer Prize piano concerto that was a Grammy finalist this year, “Chiavi in Mano” (or “Keys in the Hand”). Yehudi Wyner wrote it for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the pianist Robert Levin, “Mozart’s nephew,” as we call him here, the man who has presumed to fill in some missing elements in the “unfinished Mozart.” The one-movement “Chiavi in Mano” begins with an introspective piano solo and ends with an orchestral boogie-woogie. In between is a roaring contest of the elements. “For Bob Levin,” the composer laughs, “it’s just a skirmish, a war game with dull bayonets.” But all of it — in Yehudi Wyner’s unveiling of his process — stems from the simplest contrast of intervals between keys on the piano: the major and minor “third” between, say, C and E, then C and E-flat. It’s as simple and as grand as that: using a cellular structure to build something new and various, as different and connected in its parts as your nose and your toes.

The privilege here is to sit at the piano with a man who can think and play and talk all at once:

CL: You were playing a Bach Partita when we walked in. What does that daily dose do for a man?

YW: It gives him the feeling that he’s in touch with the greatest possible art: physical, mental, spiritual, integrated, and above all, healthy. Bach was really, I think, the greatest artist and possibly the greatest specimen of human being and thinker who ever was conceived on earth.

CL: Does the composing happen, Yehudi, between hands and ear, or do you write it with eye and pencil?

YW: Hands and ear. Hands, ear and pencil. And instrument. I work at the piano. The model for me is the indescribable, sensuous, as well as intellectual joy of dealing with Bach or Mozart. Other composers too, of course, but they above all, where every moment at whatever level of struggle… has a satisfaction, always is nourishing. I do this at the instrument and test it and feel how durable it is, how much I can stand repeating something without finding it exhausting or boring, then I think I have achieved something, I’ve found something, I’ve stumbled on some material that’s worthwhile.

CL: Is there a gold-standard “perfect” piece of music out there for you?

YW: No. If you want to say, are there 1000 pieces from the canon that I love beyond description and can find no fault with, I would say yes. But I do not feel there is one.

CL: Yehudi, give us a report to the ancestors, so to speak. A decade into the 21st Century, what’s the state of this art?

YW: I came back from the Grammys two weeks ago feeling there is very little affirmative music in contemporary America, and has not been for the last fifty years, because what passes as affirmative is really rather imperial and militaristic. It all comes from a kind of big-band, I mean marching-band society, and it blares and it proclaims, but it doesn’t really affirm. It ascribes to the affirmation that Beethoven would have, but it fails all the time because it’s very superficial and aggressive. And that applies even to the music of people we admire, like Copland and others. But it occurred to me — with all the jazz references in “Chiavi in Mano” — that that’s where the true affirmation in American music is. It’s in popular music, it’s in jazz, it’s in gospel. That music is so self-sufficient, it never proclaims its affect, or its message. It just is the message.

The music that is being promulgated, that is being produced and broadcast most widely, is aggressive, very shiny, very egocentric, very repetitive, and noisy, busy, and in some ways, mindless. It’s very physical. The problem not that that music exists, it’s that that music has inundated our culture and our youth. When you finish being conditioned by that music, there’s very little capability of any kind of other sensibility. You’re no longer sensitive to things that move at a slower pace, things that are nuanced, things that have complication and things that have lots of reference to the past.

CL: What’s the chance that we’ll get composers’ music in the public ear again — even in the manner of Copland and Gershwin?

YW: I think for the foreseeable future the chances are very slim. In the long term, things change. Certain cultures collapse and others come up, the convention of the concert hall and the function of concert music and art music is not a permanent given. The audience is certainly shrinking and certainly aging. Those things are incontrovertible. The thing that persuades us that there are possibilities for other things is the ubiquitous presence of music: people have it on their iTunes, they have it constantly at their beck and call. There is this phenomenon… people coming out of schools and forming small groups here and there, and somehow keeping the art alive, perhaps as the monks kept ancient art alive in the monasteries, in isolation during the middle ages. But I think for the foreseeable future there is no possibility for an Igor Stravinsky or a Shostakovich, or an Aaron Copland, or even an Ives on the general public screen.

Yehudi Wyner at his piano bench with Chris Lydon in Medford, Massachusetts, February 18, 2010.

An underlying question through this experimental week in Ghana is: what more would it take to podcast conversations as direct as these from India, or Israel, or the West Bank? Or China, or Congo, for that matter?

Mike Serwornoo, in our exchange here about radio in Ghana, strikes me as the sort of modern practitioner I’d want to engage with almost anywhere to enlist the Web’s boundary-jumping tools in service of “that fabulous instrument,” as Studs Terkel used to call it, the human voice.

Mike Serwornoo is the ambitious young general manager of ATL-FM, the multi-purpose radio voice of the University of Cape Coast in Ghana. It’s one of the scores of community radio stations working like democratic yeast for a decade now in West Africa generally, not Ghana especially. Mike’s boast to me is that popular trust in radio is now so powerful that the rule in a street emergency is “don’t call the police, call the radio station.”

ATL-FM carries news, talk, music and the Voice of America. In the local politics of Cape Coast, my impression is that ATL-FM vents the views more of the mainstay fishermen (for public pensions, for example) than of college students and teachers. We’re talking — Mike Serwornoo and I — about ways to combine some flavors of their gab with some of ours.

One thing most of us in Ghana don’t want is Euro-centric or American-centric solutions to Afro-centric problems. We don’t want a solution brewed in the United States. We want solutions brewed in Ghana, in Africa, with the guidance of someone who has been through our experience… The dream here is that the great things we do in Ghana can get to the people in the diaspora… that we converse with the world at large, without boundary, without color.

Mike Serwornoo with Chris Lydon, at ATL-FM in Cape Coast, Ghana, January 27, 2010.

Sounds astonishingly like my dream, too.

Click to listen to Chris’s visit with Koo Nimo (60 minutes, 36 meg mp3)

It is 7:30 a.m. on the last Saturday in January, a warm winter morning in Ghana, and we are privileged to be hanging out for an hour of music and a few well-chosen words with a aristocrat of sound and four accompanists in his studio in Kumasi, the old Ashanti tribal capital.

Ghana’s guitar treasure Koo Nimo has the air, it’s been well said, of an “Ashanti Segovia, proud of his heritage and of the instrument he has adopted.” He also reminds you immediately of the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. He smiles warmly with the simplicity of the infinitely accomplished — the disarming modesty of ultimate celebrity. These charismatic string-players both have a way of telling you that, in truth, they are humble heirs of ancient musical cultures and disciplines. Both embody the highest refinement of music at its widest reach — Yo-Yo in his Silk Road Project linking North Africa to East Asia; Koo Nimo in representing the circular Gulf Stream of musical influences from West Africa to Brazil, the Caribbean, Havana, New Orleans and New York — and endlessly back and around.

Koo Nimo is a peculiarly Ghanaian figure, in that he’s a musical child of the royal Ashanti court, who came of age as a public performer at precisely the moment in the late 1950s when newly independent Ghana was searching for a nation-building sound.

He’s the personification, at the same time, of “world music,” in the way he encompasses all. In his conversation and his playing, you can hear that nothing human is foreign to Koo Nimo.

Among the names respectfully dropped in an hour’s rambling talk of friends and inspirations are: Fela Kuti, as in the current Broadway show celebrating the late great Nigerian Afrobeat star; Hugh Masakela of South Africa; Ghana’s late “divine drummer” “Ghanaba;” the American jazz immortals Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders; the harmonica blues man Sonny Boy Williamson; Memphis Slim; great soloists of the Ellington band he heard and met in London in the early ’70s, including Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Cat Anderson and Clark Terry; Ellington himself, though Koo Nimo never got to shake Duke’s hand — “we would go to the dressing room and just look at him;” the very different guitar geniuses Charlie Christian of Oklahoma City and the Virginian Charlie Byrd of samba fame; the rock legend Jimi Hendrix, for his guitar chord voicings; and the Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim — two of whose songs find their way into Koo Nimo’s performances here.

But here’s the beauty of “world music” as the great Koo Nimo embraces it: his sound is never remotely a soup. And he himself is never to be confused with any of the people he admires so generously. “They are all influences,” as he says to me, “but I have a way of keeping the influences light… I listen to Latin calypso a lot,” he adds, and you’ll hear it in his playing, “but I use all these influences, all these techniques, to do justice to our own.”

Click to listen to Chris’s visit with Dr. Kofi Sam to the village of Aburanza (28 minutes, 17 meg mp3)

We are making the full village rounds here in Aburanza, near Cape Coast, with a strong-minded, strong-willed modern chief. From furniture works to dress-making class to palm-nut oil pots, Dr. Kofi Sam is barking out variations on his evangelical theme: West Africa can provide the essentials for itself (food, clothing, shelter and healthcare) if only it first licks a second AIDS crisis — the Acquired Import Dependency Syndrome.

Kofi Sam, who graduated from high school in the 1950s with Kofi Annan of the UN, is a cheerful misfit in the Ghanaian elite. He is an engineer with English training and now a compelling Ghanaian vision, however eccentric. He ran steel works in Ghana back in the day, and held the Housing ministry in Jerry Rawlings’ military government in the 1980s. But he was all the while getting more focused on “appropriate technology” for tropical Africa — on finding modern designs and materials, that is, for the climate and culture of a hot, poor place. Tight denim blue jeans make an interesting Western fashion statement, as he might say, but what is their place in Africa? And what is all that Scandinavian concrete doing in new Ghanaian housing?

How is it, Kofi Sam asks, that “for 50 years we haven’t been able to design a building that doesn’t use air conditioners?” Kofi Sam laughs a lot through what can sound like a stand-up routine getting heavy and deep:

Why is Africa waiting for Germany and Japan to go solar? Because we are copy cats.

Whatever the master in England does, we copy it. Our buildings should have big open windows. That’s how the imperialists, the white men, built their bungalows. We knocked them down and replaced them with glass houses, sealed glass.

Africans wear suits with neckties! With socks! With underwear! We cover ourselves so we feel the heat, then we go to the office and call our secretaries to bring us hot coffee, not cool cocoa, using an air conditioner that could light forty homes…

We only wear what we make on Fridays — Friday wear! That’s the problem…

There is a tunnel called ‘Western education.’ We enter it and learn how to forget. We go to Accra and forget about the village…

The African intellectual is like a bee who has forgotten how to make honey.

The governmental system in Africa only caters to Western-educated people, even though they’re less than 15 percent of the population. From the president right down to the teacher, they get paid at the end of every month.

No villager gets paid for anything. They get up in the morning, they go to their farms, they produce their cassava or yam or plaintain. Nobody guarantees them a market. Nobody gives them loans. All the taxes raised in the country are for Western-educated people, like Kofi Sam.

The villagers don’t get anything.

Dr. Kofi Sam with Chris Lydon, in Aburanza on the Atlantic coast of Ghana, January 28, 2010.

We spend the day surveying some good old alternatives. At one smoky, blistering-hot open-air work site, a dozen women are time-sharing a machine that cracks palm nuts, and in their individual vats they’re slowly cooking the cherished red oil that Africa uses for soap and cooking. No corn oil here, thank you. In his home village of Aburanza, Kofi Sam has sponsored a cane furniture works, hand-weaving of kente cloth, and machine-assisted grinding of cassava flour. His sister’s henhouse looks spotless and contented. “You asked what should aid agencies do,” Kofi Sam remarks. “How about a little capital so that my sister and her kind can each construct 100 henhouses and start with ten layers apiece. Whole villages improve that way.”

At a hilltop prayer meeting at mid-day in Aburanza, families answer my greeting (“He’s real! He’s alive! He’s on time!”) with “Hallelujah!” A pastor is offering pint-sized bottles of an herbal remedy. As for those basic necessities that Africa can provide itself, I challenge my host on one big point: “Native medicine isn’t going to cure malaria, Dr. Sam,” I say. “You’re wrong,” he fires back. “I made the same mistake you’re making.” What he learned eventually is that malaria wiped out mainly white newcomers; West Africans had developed an immunity and boosted it with natural medicines. Malaria was a weapon, he said, that forced the British to adopt “indirect rule” in West Africa, rather than settle as they did in Kenya and Southern Africa.

You’ll hear Kofi Sam inviting me back to Aburanza — and me promising to return before Christmas. “I want people like you here,” he says, “to let the world know that the aid they give doesn’t get to us. It’s in Accra — in the swimming pools of Accra, in the golf courses of Accra, in the lawn tennis courts of Accra, in the restaurants of Accra…”

And then, for $20, he sells me that striking handmade blue shirt off his beautiful brown back. Thank you, Kofi Sam. We will meet again.

Click to listen to Chris’s visit to Kwabeng with Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang (31 minutes, 19 meg mp3)

I’m going “home” here with my friend Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang to “where my belly button is buried,” to the seat of his fondest memories and his first great love, his grandmother. And I’m concluding presumptuously, on a day’s visit, that there is much good living yet to be done in village Ghana.

The burdens on ten-thousand villagers in Kwabeng, in Ghana’s Eastern Region, begin with infectious diseases: malaria, typhus, HIV. They have no hospital, no resident doctor. Listen and you will hear a village leader tell me: “people over here are not feeling fine at all.” Another: “when someone falls ill, sometimes you lose the person on the way to finding help.” The gold digging company that skipped town two years ago left a contaminated water supply and no benefits. The leading farmers in Kwabeng fret openly about backward methods and bad markets. They should be planting more trees. They are not sustaining their own environment.

But it’s the robust strengths of the village that astonish and stick. Handsome men gather and gab in the breezy open air at their own self-started NGO, the Kwabeng Development Foundation. Some in work clothes, some in traditional robes, they all glow with calmly Emersonian self-reliance. “It is now generally understood,” one farmer explains, “that government by itself cannot solve the problems of life. We need to depend on ourselves.” Projects like the village hospital “have to start with us.”

“Our life is good,” says a man in the chief’s council of elders, and the supporting evidence is all around us in Kwabeng, whose name means literally “the forest that was cooked red.” A host of little children and teenagers play noisy games at the heart of town. The air is familiar, confident, safe without a second thought. Kwabeng seems delighted to meet a stray American. “It’s as if the government of America is here,” a woman marvels. She has heard I do radio, and when I ask “if we had our own radio station in Kwabeng, what would we talk about?” she says: “farming, and education!”

These are people of breathtaking physical beauty, and twinkling humor, too. The name Barack Obama brings out affection and a touch of mischef. “He is our brother,” says an elder. “He’s our friend. He’s our son. He’s everything to Ghanaians.” So why did they all laugh when I first mentioned our president? Because, they explain, Obama had handed Ghana a sweet victory with his first sub-Saharan visit, a score as delicious as Ghana’s futbol win against Nigeria just before I arrived. “If Obama can send some American doctors to this district, and help us build a hospital, we will be pleased.”

We’re all in on the irony that Ghana, in fact, exports medical doctors to England and the US. I was shocked to hear reliably that there are more Ghana-trained doctors working in London and New York than in Ghana. Can it be? Ghana’s home network of healthcare is held together, just barely, by a couple of hundred Cuban doctors. It is one of Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang’s assignments, as a local boy made good at the University of Cape Coast, to get a Cuban doctor assigned to Kwabeng for one day every weekend.

It comes clear, as teenagers drift up to Professor Opoku-Agyemang with their college applications and their test scores, that he is also the village’s higher education chief. All afternoon he is giving students discreet advice and encouragement, showing me how the village works, and aspires. Kwabeng, with an immemorial past, looks to the future, too. Of course, the fantasist in me is scheming: how do I get back here — to live?

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang (30 minutes, 18 meg mp3)

I’m in Ghana for a week — starting from Cape Coast, toward the western end of Ghana’s Atlantic shore. Cape Coast is a university town and a major fishing center in West Africa. It’s the spot where First Lady Michelle Obama locates her ancestors. It is the site of the Castle that President Obama and his family visited last July. No ordinary tourist attration, the Castle is the place that haunts human history eternally as the point where millions of Africans were warehoused, then shipped in the infamous Middle Passage to slavery in the new worlds of North and South America.

I am picking up many threads (starting with slavery) of a conversation that began most of ten years ago with the poet and teacher Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, at the University of Cape Coast. His voice has become for me one of the beautiful deep songs of Africa. Before I’d ever met Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, his book of poetry and prose, Cape Coast Castle jumped into my hands off a bookstore table in Accra, and many of his lines seemed to clutch my heart and never let go:

Slavery is the living wound under the patchwork of scars. A lot of time has passed, yet whole nations cry, sometimes softly, sometimes harshly, often without knowing why…

… perhaps the most horrendous experience of the victim society belonged to a group hardly ever mentioned in the literature: the damned who survived, those deprived relatives of the captured African. These included parents, brothers and sisters, uncles and other relatives and friends who knew and cared for the captive. In a way, theirs was a lot de profoundis, a lost of deepest death. For they were denied the cathartic benefit of a burial for their loved ones. Olaudah Equiano, the 18th century African abolitionist, tells the story in his autobiography of 1789 of how, as a greening youth, he and his sister were kidnapped from their Igbo village by slavers while their parents were at the farm… And yet what we read is not the full story, only a portion of it. For Equiano’s mother came home from the farm one evening to find her only daughter and youngest son stolen, never to be heard from again. We do not know her story. Nobody knows the story of her grief…

The Castle is a standing provocation to thought and action: upon its disarming rests a whole people’s freedom. Cape Coast Castle, the metaphor and the edifice, is a society in itself, a society of experiences, a system or order whose fundamental concepts are planted in the disordering of our society. We kneel because it stands, and it stands for a system of production, distribution and exchange. But it does not tend what it produces, does not nurture what it distributes, does not value what it exchanges. There is no tending, no nurturing, no valuing…

The fact is that the pressures of our societies today, the tributes we play in blood — colonialism, neo-colonialism, even poverty in the lopsided world order — are largely the effects of the slave trade. In the trade, societies were ransacked, the land was gutted, its human loam was washed to the sea, its potential was stunted…

Slavery gives the enslaved nothing but a legacy of pain, alienation, fear, and worst of all, a fetish erected around the denial of the fact and lasting effects of enlavement. It is a fetish that allows us to pretend that our world is whole; thus we nullify the castle by incorporating, then ignoring it. And so we live in a shattered world with an eroded sense of history in a world we swear is whole.

Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang, Cape Coast Castle, A Collection of Poems, 1996. Pages 1 – 10.

I associate Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang with a broad and deep unofficial drive in Ghana to break an old silence around slavery. About the time his book was published, a troupe of Jamaican musicians and dancers refused to perform at Ghana’s first Pan-African Arts Festival, precisely because it was being held in the Castle where their forebears had been stockpiled in chains. In public and private, Ghana’s conversation about itself has never been the same again. In my first Cape Coast reunion with Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang we’re trying to keep the inquiry perpetually open-ended, as he says, “so that every new generation may visit it to quarry its lessons.”

Robert McChesney and John Nichols are grappling with the question: what would Thomas Jefferson do about the death of the American newspaper? Better, Jefferson said, to have newspapers without a government than to have government without newspapers. Yet here we are two centuries later, and the papers are disappearing. What is to sustain essential journalism in the digital age?

Core doctrine among the Founders, in the McChesney-Nichols argument, was not just that the press must be free of interference and censorship but that its vigor and variety should be sustained by subsidized access to printing and the mails. Some of the freshest parts of their book, The Death and Life of American Journalism, recount how Generals MacArthur in Japan and Eisenhower in Germany designed and built new institutions of free open journalism on the theory, as McChesney and Nichols put it, that “creating a viable free press is the first duty … of the democratic state.”

Thirty billion dollars a year is the subsidy figure that McChesney and Martin are proposing today — their projection of the support that Jefferson & Company gave to the press two centuries ago. They insist they are thinking of rebuilding a culture, not bailing out dying newspapers. They embrace Dean Baker’s idea of a Citizenship News Voucher which would let people direct the spending of, say, $200 a year, to the local, global or specialized journalism they value, so long as it’s non-profit and non-commercial.

My question — my reservation really — is the thought that the Internet is already the government’s accidental gift that keeps on giving. It’s worth much more than $30 billion to have wiped out the cost of paper, printing, delivery and all the capital barriers to a worldwide marketplace of ideas. My guess is that Thomas Jefferson, a blogger in retirement, would be reading and reveling in the digital miracle that has enabled kindred spirits like Glenn Greenwald, Juan Cole, Joshua Micah Marshall and Arianna Huffington… not to mention Robert McChesney, John Nichols and their admirable creation, FreePress. Net.

Post up, please, on what more you’d spend and where, to sustain the contentious journalism Jefferson had in mind.

Harold Evans, doubtless the finest English newspaper editor of his time, could make you weep in his memoir of formative days in Manchester and glory years (1965 – 1981) with the Sunday Times of London. Weep, that is, not so much for the anemic papers so close to death today, but weep for those cheeky deadline artists, the newspaper writers and “subs” on the copy desk who are disappearing into memory and mythology, like the American cowboy.

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times is the story of Harold Evans’ addiction to printed news, and of the characters whose trade he lifted — newspaper guys (and they were all guys, long before Evans met Tina Brown) with nicknames like Nifty, Bow Tie, “Big Tom” Henry, “Beachcomber” of the Daily Express, and “Mr. Will” on the Northern Echo, Evans’ first paper. “Curiosity is the thing in journalism,” Mr. Will said. “Ask questions, Evans.” And then there are the giant by-lines of the Sunday Times, like Godfrey Hodgson in America, John Barry in Ireland, David Leitch in Vietnam, and the investigator Bruce Page, everywhere.

Harold Evans spins my head around just when I’d begun to think we could do without the papers, which we may just have to. But what about those people — those “rag and bone men of the opinion trade,” where Evans located himself; those lightning desk editors on the Manchester Evening News, “hunched men in cardigans reducing cataclysms to column inches,” and all those reporters gifted, as one of them said, with “ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.”

The thread in our conversation is: how long can free democratic people survive without those faithful wretches?

We are a mixed bunch. One of the great strengths of the Sunday Times, when I edited it, was how variegated the characters were. I mean we had a former antique dealer, who actually led us to the first exposé of the antique dealers’ rings. We had a microbiologist. We had a woman who gutted chickens who later became Anne Robinson … so we had a really variegated staff. That is one thing that I think is missing today. That heterogeneity that we celebrated is slightly disappearing… I think the business of discovering truth is much assisted by different perceptions of renegades. At the same time, I had all these these very clever PhD’s in my office. So, whichever way you spun it, it seems a very bohemian bunch of people, some of them drinking a lot, some of them smoking a lot, some of them not doing either of those things. We had a few aesthetes on my papers, in my time. But out of this multi-faceted approach to our complicated world came something very close to the truth from time to time…

It’s more important to find out than to sound off. And we get a vast amount of sounding-off today, without anybody knowing what the hell they’re talking about. Just think how different our last ten years would have been if we’d done the proper job of reporting on Iraq before we went into it… This era overlapped with the web. And I love the web. The point is that not even the web, not all the famous bloggers really got onto this.

So we have a situation, we’re entering now a world where we’re going to have cascades and cascades and cascades of information, like rain, and none of it will reach the flower of truth.

Harold Evans in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 19, 2009

Who knew that the God question is burning bright in our university neighborhood of brain scientists, mathematicians, computer geniuses, game theorists, physicists and literary folk, too? — that is, in the postmodern precincts around Boston that I call “the frontal lobe of the universe.”

Photo Credit: Steven Pinker

The philosopher-novelist Rebecca Goldstein, both playful and stone-serious, has caught the chatter and mapped the territory in and around Brandeis, Harvard and MIT in 36 Arguments for the Existence of God — A Work of Fiction. The arguments rage in the head of the novel’s protagonist, Cass Seltzer, a best-selling psychologist of religion, a latter-day William James. TIME magazine has dubbed him “the atheist with a soul.” Career-climbing from Brandeis to Harvard, Cass (like Goldstein) is trying to triangulate a position between the death of God and the ecstasy of belief — at a safe distance from neo-atheists like, say, Sam Harris, and neo-believers like, say, Cornel West:

RG: Both sides will often offend me, and I think that’s why I felt I had to write the novel. I agree with Sam Harris. I’m on his board, of the Reason Foundation. I agree with him: our metaphysics is the same. But I’m very uncomfortable with some of the belittling descriptions of religious people. Not saying that he does it. But sometimes I hear it: “this is the fallacy that they make, this is their mistake, if we can point out where their reasoning goes astray.”

Religion and religious emotion are so much more complicated than that. One of the things that Spinoza taught us, and it’s being validated finally in neuroscientific labs, is that emotions and intellect, cognitions and passion, are inextricably bound up with one another. Cognitive states are also emotional states, and emotional states make cognitive claims.

So even for those of us who believe in reason — and again this is pure Spinoza — this itself is an emotional experience. I break into tears at beautiful mathematical proofs. This kind of intertwining is something that we all share. And so the notion that we could, on the reason side, just go through the arguments and show what’s wrong and people would stop believing is very, very false. There are reasons other than just strict logical arguments for people to be believing.

CL: Why draw a hard line between your experience of a mathematic truth, or beauty that brings you to tears, and a Dostoyevskean epiphany of the Almighty?

RG: I do believe ultimately, in terms of establishing truth, in objective means… The history of our species is filled with people being enraptured and enthralled and having private revelations that are completely counter to each other, and slaughtering each other because of these things. The Enlightenment grew out of it. John Locke, for example, has an essay “On Enthusiasm,” on religious enthusiasm, saying: look, it’s not a source of truth. It is powerful and it is ecstatic. I’m very prone to it myself. I often say ‘I spend more time out of my mind than in my mind.’ I’m extremely prone to this sort of thing.

There are all sorts of intellectual gifts that give us this feeling. For me, it’s science, math, art, music, philosophy… And it’s a kind of religious experience, you know, but for me these are much safer than trying to answer the nature of the universe… That God-almighty important question can’t be entrusted to enthusiasm. 

Rebecca Goldstein in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 16, 2009

Click here for a high resolution JPEG of the painting.

Erica Hirshler and I are standing in many shades of awe in this conversation, in front of Boston’s favorite painting by Boston’s favorite painter. Hirshler’s compact little book, Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting is a compendium of ways to look at a picture — at social and family history written in matador stabs of paint.

John Singer Sargent was just 26, an expatriate marvel in Paris, driven to sustain his meteoric trajectory in the Paris Salon of 1883 with this eccentric composition, 8 feet square, titled, “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.” To the often astringent eye of Henry James at the time, young Sargent presented the “slightly ‘uncanny’ spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn.”

The most famous and esteemed of American painters a century ago, Sargent’s reputation fell precipitously (except in Boston) after his death in 1925. In comparisons with Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and J. M. Whistler and then the moderns, Sargent was fashionably slighted as soulless, superficial, even un-American — much as Henry James, too, was slashed for an “instinct for the capillaries,” for being “one of the nicest old ladies I ever met,” as William Faulkner once put it.

But time and your own naked eye have their way of righting these judgments. I was astonished not long ago to see Sargent and the Boit Daughters on the walls of the Metropolitan museum in New York, standing tall alongside the best of Manet and Velazquez in a 2003 show on “The French Taste for Spanish Painting.” And it’s common now to see both Sargent and James less as masterful scholars of the past, which they were, but more as proto moderns in psychology and technique. The contemporary abstractionist painter Robert Baart joins our conversation to detail Sargent’s bold magic with “juicy paint,” with an expressionistic brush that anticipates Willem de Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn.

The emotional readings of the four Boit sisters get juicier all the time: four girls “homeless in their own home,” Sister Wendy judges. Was Sargent imagining four versions of What Maisie Knew, Henry James’ child’s-eye reflections on a disastrous marriage and “the rites of passage from wonder to knowledge,” or perhaps What Maisie Would Find Out. Sargent presents, I think, four “stages” of girlhood, with the youngest, Julia, in the foreground with her doll, playing at a fifth stage, motherhood. Yet none of these girls married or bore a child. Not the least fascination in this painting is looking for John Singer Sargent’s measure of the Boit Daughters’ inner lives and destinies. Can not the careful reader of these four “portraits” find the one who, among four lonely spinsters, would suffer grave mental illness?

I’ve felt secret swoons and longings for these girls since I was 8 years old. Erica Hirshler in conversation gives us all permission to fall in love for all time with the painting.

Terry Teachout’s fine reconsideration of the man called “Pops” solidifies Louis Armstrong’s standing as not just the greatest horn player since the angel Gabriel, but an all-transforming artist at the level of James Joyce or even Shakespeare, and a black American freedom fighter of character and conscience, too.

Louis Armstrong’s power to astonish was never in doubt. Hoagy Carmichael, the songwriter of “Stardust” and “Georgia,” dropped his cigarette and gulped his drink the first time he heard Louis, barely out of his teens, in 1921. “Why,” Hoagy moaned, “isn’t everybody in the world listening to that?” Over the next 50 years the whole world heard Louis, and marveled, but there were always questions, too: Could honky-tonk music from red-light New Orleans get standing, really, with Schubert and Bach? Was Louis in artistic decline after the Twenties? Was he an Uncle Tom in all that Satchelmouth clowning?

All the modern answers as Terry Teachout documents them are over the top now in favor of Louis Armstrong. Listen to the testimonies his fellow horn players Ruby Braff and Wynton Marsalis gave me on Louis’s legendary centennial, July 4, 1900: that if Louis wasn’t actually God, he was at least proof of God. His grandeur, complexity and consistency as man and artist seem now beyond question. Harold Bloom, keeper of the cultural canon and an astute jazz listener, too, pairs Armstrong with Walt Whitman as the greatest American contributor to the world’s art, the genius of this nation at its best. It turns out we could believe our ears after all.

CL: You refer to him at one point as a middlebrow genius, which I think is awfully good, but spell it out.

TT: I used that phrase because Armstrong is a guy whose favorite band leader was Guy Lombardo, a guy who just liked a good tune, who happened to be a culture-changing genius. And he didn’t see why you couldn’t like Guy Lombardo and Caruso and the Beatles and Barbra Streisand, and Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton — he just thought it was all music.

The picture on the cover of my book was taken by Philippe Halsman in 1965. It is an outtake from a session that was photographed for the cover of LIFE, this very famous photo that everybody’s seen of Armstrong with his eyes popping and the horn pointing outward and he’s dressed in this tux. He looks wonderful and he looks like the Armstrong we all know.

In this photograph, Armstrong’s just standing there with a very enigmatic half-smile on his face, holding his horn, dressed beautifully, looking like a man who knows something that maybe we don’t know, a man who knows his complexity, the complications of his own personality, who has seen the world as it is and in a very deep sense has accepted the world as it is.

Armstrong is a man who is at peace with himself. At the very end of his life he sent a letter to a friend that I quote at the end of my book, where he says that ‘my whole life has been happiness and I love everybody.’ And he wasn’t kidding, he really wasn’t kidding.

That kind of acceptance of the fundamental realities of life, not meaning that you don’t want life to be changed, but that you accept the world as it is, and decide that you’re going to make the best of it, that’s really at the heart of his character, and I think of his genius too. It allows him to take in all things in his music and his art, the sadness, the beauty, the joy, the comedy, and make them one.

Terry Teachout in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 8, 2009

Rick Benjamin says the threshold instruction of most good poems is: slow down, be alert, wake up. The reason to write poetry is to be of use, he says. The reason to read poetry is that it might change your life.

In our series “whose words these are,” on the practice of poetry today, Rick Benjamin stands out as an activist, a communitarian, a Buddhist, a globalist, a family man who’s always telling his kids: “Remember, talk to strangers.”

He lives by Rumi’s line from 13th Century Persia: “The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep.” It’s the idea that gets him up in the morning, and animates his classes at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design on “Poetry in Service to Schools and the Community.”

In an essay on pedagogy, Benjamin writes: “Poets are such good teachers, and their learning catches you in ways that very few other things will. . . . Making poetry is not worth doing if you aren’t trying to bring someone else along with you.”

Q: What’s your favorite poem?

A: Here’s one, but I don’t know if its my favorite poem, because I can’t even pick my favorite meal. I’m just going to say one poem that I know I like a lot. “In Black Water Woods” by Mary Oliver.

Q: What is the talent you most want that you don’t have, yet?

A: I’d like to be a much better glass blower than I am. I dabble in it, but I’m very bad at it. I think I’m too interested in the medium to be good at it – maybe that’s paradoxical. I like paying attention to it so much that when asked to do any of my own work I’m at a loss. I’m kind of a glass-blowing voyeur.

Q: What’s the keynote of your personality as a poet?

A: It would have to be something about circulating love, unabashedly and without embarrassment. The love that we are lucky enough to find in structures like families, in our communities, between countries — to honor it, fully.

Q: Who are your fellow travelers in other mediums?

A: Visual artists like Andy Goldsworthy, who are willing to work with ordinary and organic materials and make something beautiful and impermanent out of them. That’s all I aspire to as a writer, to hope fully with fidelity, make a snapshot of something and know that it will have changed and be gone tomorrow.

Musicians: like poetry, I have a range of music that I really love: some of it is Jazz, people like John Coltrane, and some of it is something more contemporary, like the hiphop music my kids listen to, K’naan.

Q: What is the quality you most prize in a poem?

A: Wisdom. All I ask of a poem is that it has some wisdom, and then my job, I think, is to become a vehicle and vessel and to circulate that wisdom if I have the opportunity and the possibility to do so.

Q: Who is your favorite fiction character of all time?

A: The unnamed narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Q: What is your motto?

A: “I want to love as if my life depends on it, and when the time comes to let it go, I want to let it go and be on to the next thing.”

Robin Kelley’s superb biography brings the Thelonious Monk story back from the ragged edge to the creative center of American music. And it brings my reading year to a blessedly loving, gorgeously swinging, dissonant, modernist, and utterly one-off climactic note. There may be another jazz biography as thickly detailed, as audibly lyrical, as passionate, as thrilling as this one, but I can’t bring it to mind.

There’s a vastly detailed, fresh take here on an immortal jazz pianist and composer whose life is often remembered as freakish, at best impossibly mysterious. Not that jazz players hadn’t known from the early 1940s that young Monk was a giant, and ever afterward that those odd, distinctive Monk tunes (nearly 100 of them) are the exotic orchid-like treasures of the American song book.

But this was a man who mumbled at the keyboard, got up and danced around it onstage, showed up late and sometimes disappeared; who did time for small drug offenses and famously lost his “cabaret card” required to play in New York jazz joints. This was a man who suffered bipolar disease and finally died in 1982 in the care of the same rich European lady who’d been Charlie Parker’s last refuge almost 30 years earlier. It is an impossibly eccentric story until Robin Kelley fills in the life of an unshakeably original musician, and with endless family detail paints a fresh picture of a consistently generous friend, a revered and attentive son, father and husband, in triumph and trouble.

In this telling Monk emerges as (not least) a heroic African-American Emersonian at the keyboard. Monk’s insistence that “the piano ain’t got no wrong notes!” resonates with Emerson’s war on conformity and consistency. Monk’s stubborn, self-sacrificing attachment to his own aesthetic summons up Emerson’s “trust thyself” wisdom, and his advice that “a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within.” “To believe your own sound,” (paraphrasing “Self-Reliance”) “… that is genius.” Monk knew.

One of Robin Kelley’s many arguments with the received wisdom on Monk is that, though he was the house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem after 1941, and a cornerstone of the regeneration of jazz at mid-century, he belongs to no genre, no “period.”

I kind of break with tradition: I don’t see him as part of the bebop movement. I see his harmonic ideas as being fundamental to so-called bebop, but he wasn’t really out of that. He spent more time in the early forties hanging out in these old piano parlors, at James P. Johnson’s house, with the great stride pianists up in Harlem at that time, Clarence Profit, Willie “The Lion” Smith… He learned piano from an African-American woman who lived in his neighborhood named Alberta Simmons. Nobody’d ever heard of her until my book. She was a fabulous stride pianist. She was part of the Clef Club. She knew Eubie Blake and Willie “The Lion” and all these cats. And so, he grew up playing that and maintaining the old stride piano style because of three things.

One, they believed in virtuosity, but virtuosity that is expressed through your individual expression, not just through speed. How could you take a tune that everybody plays, like “Tea for Two,” and really make it sound like you, like your inner soul.

Two, Monk learned from these guys all the tricks that became fundamental to his playing: the bent note, for example. We say “Monk was so amazing because he could bend notes.” Well, wait a second. Listen to James P. Johnson play Mule Walk. He’s bending notes. It’s all about that. Monk learned all that from those guys, the clashing, the minor seconds, they’re playing that stuff back in the twenties.

And then, you mention Monk’s mumbling. Well, Willie “The Lion” Smith said in his own memoir, “if a piano player’s not mumbling or growling, you ain’t doing anything.” That’s old school.

What Monk did was take the oldest, rooted tradition of the piano, in Harlem, New York, all over the country. And then he combined it with a future we have yet to achieve. It’s collapsing space and time. And his whole approach to the piano is one that brings past and present and future together in one. And he had never ever left his roots as a stride pianist — all the way to the very last tune he ever played.

Robin D. G. Kelley in conversation with Chris Lydon, December 18, 2009

Gordon Wood, the wonderfully plain-spoken Pulitzer and Bancroft prize historian at Brown, thinks that Thomas Jefferson would find Barack Obama obnoxiously, over-reachingly Hamiltonian… and that Alexander Hamilton would likewise dismiss Obama as a Jeffersonian dreamer.

Empire of Liberty is the title of Gordon Wood’s magisterial new history of the early American republic, 1789 to 1815: boom and transformation on our shores, the rise and fall of Napoleon in the wider world. “Empire of Liberty,” Jefferson’s phrase, is also a neat capsule of the contradiction between a republic of free and equal mostly rural yeomen and a hegemonic global idea wrapped into the American flag. But Jefferson, the libertarian and slave-holder, was nothing if not paradoxical: he was a small-government man and a devotee of peace, but he would have been happy to see the French Revolution invade England, end monarchy and free the world.

CL: Gordon Wood, if there’s a connection to be made across more than two centuries to the “realism” and “idealism” of President Obama’s peace-prize speech, you’re the man to make it.

GW: If we can talk about these historical characters having present-day relevance, which Americans like to do, which is strange in itself. People ask me, what would George Washington think of the invasion of Iraq! … Hamilton would think it was too Jeffersonian. In the sense that he’s already intending to pull out, he’s really making that promise to cover his base, his democratic base, and that his intentions in Afghanistan are essentially to get out in the best way possible, without creating too many political problems for himself. I think Hamilton would take that rather cynical view of what Obama is doing. Jefferson I think would believe that we should avoid war at all costs and I think he would be in favor of getting out.

CL: Your book underlines for me what seems to me the main, if largely unspoken tension in our policy and politics today, which is the difference between the republic that the founders put together in Philadelphia (“if you can keep it,” Ben Franklin said) and a notion of an ambitious world empire.

GW: Well I think obviously Hamilton would be most pleased with the modern America: huge burocracy. He would love the Pentagon, the CIA, all of the million plus men and women under arms. This was what he dreamed of : that we would be a great power. Jefferson would be appalled by the extent of Presidential power for example, and just general Federal governmental power would appall him. But I think he would also believe that we have tried to maintain our sense of ourselves as being the spokesmen for democracy in the world, and that’s been an important part of our history. The critics of Bush were appalled not so much by the use of troops, but it was the torture, it was the brutality, the un-American aspects of the War on Terror that bothered a lot of people. Jefferson would have been on that side.

Idealism comes out of the Jeffersonian tradition. We’re full of paradoxes. Jefferson himself is the greatest paradox in American history: that our supreme spokesman for democracy should be a shaveholding aristocrat has to be ironic. And he is a spokesman for democracy. He did believe at heart that every person is the same. Not just that people are created equal — everyone can belive that, and everyone did in the 18th century — but Jefferson believed that despite the inequalities you could see everywhere in our society, beneath the surface, at bottom, we were all the same. And he included slaves in this. That makes him a spokesman for democracy.

I think Obama had a little bit of Hamilton and a little bit of Jefferson in that speech. He’s a peacenik, but he’s also a realist in that speech. That is, he says: “there’s evil in the world and war comes out of that evil.” Jefferson would not have believed that. Jefferson was devoted to the idea that we could eliminate war, we could eliminate the use of military force. Hamilton, on the other hand, is the realist. He says “no, war is not caused by monarchies. War is caused by human nature. There are evil people.” So there was a little bit of each — a little Hamilton, a little Jefferson, a little realism, a little idealism — in that Nobel Prize speech.

Gordon Wood in conversation with Chris Lydon in Providence, December 17, 2009

Sir Andrew Motion succeeded Dryden, Wordsworth, Tennyson and, immediately, Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. He can sound like the elegist of rural old imperial England, but he can sting in the present tense too, on matters from Princess Di to the “scream of rocket-burn” in the war on Iraq. “Harrowing clarity” is his stated goal. He laughs with us about trying to write poetry that looks like water and bites like gin.

We are doing a little comparison shopping across the old pond in our poetry series. Andrew Motion speaks for the far shore of the “two peoples separated by a common language,” in G. B. Shaw’s famous line. His volume of new and selected poems, The Mower, traces a personal and national past without shrinking from a quickly shifting British future. In our conversation, he sounds comfortable living and writing at the meeting of forward and backward gazes.

Introducing The Mower, Langdon Hammer of Yale notes the feeling that Motion describes in his memoir of childhood, In the Blood, as an “evening-mixture of sad and safe.” Hammer explains:

The feeling involves a turning away from modernity and modernization, but it implies for the same reason a specifically modern attitude. That attitude is central to the way in which modern English culture has tended to define Englishness. In this tradition … moral realism and verbal precision, especially in description, balance the potential for vague idealism and naive patriotism. skepticism guards against self-pity …. Feeling is expressed through a carefully calibrated reticence.

Andrew Motion acknowledges with us the ambition to capture in his formal and outwardly quotidian verse his own and his parents’ experience of six pivotal British decades:

A lot of the subjects of my poems are on the face of it very personal — they’re poems about my partner, they’re poems about my childhood, they’re poems about my mother in particular, they’re poems about my father, they’re poems about what happens to me in a rolling way — but I’ve always thought that the very large amount of my time that I spend engaged with the political things around my writing is evident here … a sense of England mutating from being one kind of society into another one. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m sort of lingeringly, damp-eyedly peering back at a golden age and wishing that it would come back again. That’s very much not my political position. I feel very much engaged with the here and now. As I say that, I also feel very struck of course by living at the moment where the old imperial idea of the UK gave way to something else.

Andrew Motion in New York City with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, 12.16.09.

Orhan Pamuk in his six Norton Lectures at Harvard this fall filled the air with ideas about fiction. “The novel is not about the characters but about their world,” for example, part of the reason that Pamuk has never titled a book with a character’s name. (No disrespect to David Copperfield, Jane Eyre or the Karamazov brothers, either; but Pamuk is more in tune with Thackeray, who called his masterpiece not “Becky Sharp” but Vanity Fair.)

Two recurrent images in those talks will stick forever: first, the scene, endlessly revisited, of Anna Karenina on the train to Petersburg from Moscow after she first danced with Vronsky — “with a novel in her hand and a window that reflected her mood;” this is for Pamuk the most perfectly saturated picture in the greatest of all novels. And then there was the portrait Orhan Pamuk painted of himself, an insatiable teenaged reader, in his family’s grand apartment in Istanbul in the late Sixties into the Seventies, expanding his character, forming his soul, confronting his great teachers: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Thomas Mann, Dickens and Melville, among others. So the conversation begins:

I argue that for the last 150 years novels have been the global literary form… It is a very democratic form. You can talk about the biggest issues of history, life, ethics, things that until recently only philosophers or religion addressed… In my youth, that’s why I think I took novels seriously and read lots of classics. Not only as entertainment but also as guides to understand the world, examples for my spirit, variations on the colors and shades of human spirit. You read Dostoyevsky, you understand something about human spirit. You read Stendhal, you understand something not only about mid-19th century French culture, but the adventuring human spirit and freedom versus community.

Novels taught me not only to understand life, but also how to see and understand myself. I am not a Freudian in the sense that I do not believe that human spirit is formed only in childhood. I argue that although some part of us may have been formed in our childhood, we continue to re-form, to progress, to make ourselves adapt to new conditions, and in fact radically change even in our twenties and thirties.

Orhan Pamuk’s museum in progress…

And I think naively that I did this through reading novels… Perhaps because I felt that I was at the edge of Europe, for me, novels represented the best of European culture. I wanted to acquire that. I read novels in my teenage years and early twenties just as someone gets essential liquid for life.

Orhan Pamuk with Chris Lydon at Columbia University in New York, 12.12.09.

By now Orhan Pamuk is in the front rank of global novelists for My Name is Red and Snow, books about not so much the clash as the interlacing of cultures, in the terms of his Nobel Prize citation. His new one, The Museum of Innocence, is stuffed with the collectible evidence – the earrings, the cigarette stubs, the views out the bedroom window – of a blissful love affair going bad. In his Norton Lectures, that’s what Pamuk said most novels are: they’re word museums stuffed with the human details of a period and a place. “No ideas but in things,” as William Carlos Williams put it. In our conversation Orhan Pamuk is inviting me and all his readers to see the real museum he’s building now, in Istanbul, to show off the substance, the real stuff of this book. Think of the novel, he says, as an annotated catalog of that Museum of Istanbul in the last quarter of the 20th Century.

Keith Waldrop, who just won the National Book Award in poetry for his Transcendental Studies, is a quilter in phrases. He eschews any intention or meaning that you could point to in his work. He makes statements here and there, but his poetry, he’s said, is about “having nothing to say and saying it.”

“The sound is what I go by,” he says. “I write for the sound and tone of things.” At the same time he communicates, as the poet Michael Palmer has written, “a particular humanity and an appreciation for the absurd, even the grotesque, in daily life.”

We’re laughing out loud a lot in this conversation. And I feel I’m cracking “one of the vital and requisite, semi-secret presences in American letters,” quoting Michael Palmer again. Waldrop is remembering his boyhood in Emporia, Kansas, where grew up in the Bob Dole era, nourished by comic books and the Bible. No one in his family had much interest in reading, much less writing. “Nobody told me I could be a poet,” he says. Poetry was “something I was sneaking into.”

Keith Waldrop’s poems could remind you of Samuel Beckett’s stark minimalism in language and feeling, or of Thelonious Monk’s beautifully bent phrasing and harmony in music. He’s even closer, as he says, to the gorgeous torn-paper collages of the painter Robert Motherwell.

He came to his “collage poems” decades ago, in admiration of Motherwell and in some frustration that his teaching load at Brown University was crowding out “my own work.” So every night at midnight sharp, he began experimenting with a new process:

I brought up a batch of books, all prose books, and no verse, no poetry. I stacked them on the dining room table. To write a poem I would take three of the books, of three different kinds: I would have one novel, usually a book of psychology or science or something, and then some third depending on what was around. I would start opening them and getting phrases out, sort of at random… My eyes might go down and light on a phrase, and I would put it in. I didn’t spend a great deal of time doing it. I would put these phrases down, going from one book to another, and would make one stanza, let’s say of four lines or so. Then I would do it again, and get another stanza of four lines, and when I had enough that I thought I’m tired of doing this… (it might be a page, it might be a couple of pages, not more than two or three) I would take it upstairs to type, and I would retype these stanzas in alphabetical order… and eventually, in a month or so, I had a book of poems. I arranged them alphabetically by title. You’ll understand also, in retyping them and then reading over them — If I didn’t like a line or a word I could throw it out, I could change it, I could add something…It wasn’t that I was trying to figure out something about collage. I was trying to find poems.

And eventually I had this book.

Keith Waldrop with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, 12.10.09.

Suketu Mehta, the master storyteller of modern Bombay, learned by listening — to the runaway poet from Bihar, for example, who wanted him to write a book titled “Untold Stories” or “Untellable Stories,” like his own.

He was a boy of seventeen who had run away from the poorest state of India, Bihar, to come to the big city, not to work in the movies, not to make a fortune but to write poetry. His father wanted him to be a scientist. So this kid slept on the sidewalks and he took me all around the city and showed me how he ate, what he had to pay to go to the bathroom, the small and great scams of the city. And he went all around the city writing poetry. And then I asked him if he had contacted his parents — he had run away from home — and he said he hadn’t, and so I said he might want to notify them. They must be worried. He wrote a postcard to his father, and his father took the next train over from Bihar. I got a phone call one morning from the kid saying his father had arrived in Bombay and was taking him back to Bihar, would I meet them for breakfast? And I did. The father was a lovely man, a science teacher from a small village, and he said he had come to collect his son. The parents had been worried sick about him. I said, “Well, now that you’re here, how long will you stay?” He said, “Oh, we are taking this afternoon’s train back.” Now, Bihar is at the other end of india. It’s a three day train journey. He’d just traveled for three days; he had come that morning and he was going back that afternoon. I said: “Why don’t you stay? This is a fabulous city, a great city. You can see the Gateway of India, you can see where the Bollywood stars walk around.” He said, “No, I have no interest in all of this. I want to get out of this city as fast as possible, because all these big buildings, they have been built by stealing somebody else’s money.” Essentially, he was paraphrasing Balzac without knowing it: “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.” And his son kept saying to his father, “But this is my karma-bhoomi” — the proving-ground of my destiny.” And the father said, “No, this is paap-ki-bhoomi” — the land of sin…

Suketu Mehta with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, 12.3.09.

Suketu Mehta went home to India to track the migration — soul by soul, the reader feels — of a “nation of villages” into megacities on the scale of Bombay, now Mumbai, where people name the trickle of the open slum sewer after a river back home. His masterwork Maximum City, did for Bombay what the immortals Dickens and Balzac did for London and Paris; except that the sprouting of mushroom slums and high-rise spikes in India may be running 20 times faster and bigger. Suketu Mehta is the great expositor by now of a reckless, universal love affair with mostly miserable megacities. “Right about now, for the first time in history,” he remarks, “more people live in cities than in villages. We have become an urban species.” He is the expositor, moreover, of a method of listening for the unofficial narratives of the time: myths told in temples, migrants calling home, letter-writers composing messages from prostitutes to their parents, assuring the family that their daughter has a good office job and that money is on the way.

Suketu Mehta is telling me also that from the old India of starving cows and sadhus to the new one of Bollywood and billionaires, there’s a very old ping-pong game of ideas going back and and forth between India and the United States: from the Bhagavad Gita to Henry David Thoreau (“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial…”); from Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience to Gandhi’s satyagraha in South Africa and India; from Gandhi to Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr., and from Dr. King to Barack Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The game, he’ll persuade you, isn’t over.

Rana Dasgupta’s India is a land of grueling poverty still, in a culture transfixed by glittering wealth. The dominant mood is “frenzied accumulation” in a society “consumed both by euphoria and dread.” Mahatma Gandhi’s India of fond memory — triumphant non-violence and democratic socialism in a nation of villages — is almost gone, and mostly forgotten, too. Rural India has dropped out of the conversation. The “great man” in India’s dream of success, Dasgupta chuckles, is probably Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore. The new half-hidden India in Rana Dasgupta’s telling is a dynamic contradiction — emphasis on the dynamic. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the White House, seen but not heard on our TV screens last month, is another version of the contradiction. On the outside, Singh looks like a cartoon of the last maharajah; unglimpsed, like the snowy mane under his Sikh turban, is the mind of the former finance minister who in 1991 opened India to a transforming flood of foreign investment.

Rana Dasgupta is dubbed by Salman Rushdie, no less, “the most unexpected and original Indian writer of his generation.” The blurb, too, half-hides the story. Dasgupta, Oxford educated, now 38, was born in London of an English mother. He returned to his father’s country at the start of the new century to write both fiction and fact. Tokyo Cancelled was a nested novel and a sort of homage to folk tales in an age of disconnection: 13 stories spun out spontaneously by travelers stranded overnight in an international airport. Solo, not yet available in the US, is a fantasy of music and memory, set in Bulgaria. All the while Dasgupta has been fixing a steady anthropological eye on the veiled violence of money rampant in Nouveau Delhi. “Capital Gains,” a long piece in Granta last summer, began with a true tale that’s also symbolic: the public scandal of Sanjeev Nanda, a reckless boy prince of the new money, drunk, in his $150-thousand BMW a few years ago, slicing through seven people, killing six of them, but rich and unrepentant enough to buy freedom from punishment – for a while.

This story erupts into the public domain with the delicious nausea of something widely felt, but rarely observed: the recklessness of this economic system, its out-of-control heartlessness. Sanjeev’s speeding BMW is a symbol of gleaming, maleficent capital, unchecked by conscience or by the roadblocks of the state. The scene of the impact, a one-hundred-metre stretch of road strewn with organs, severed limbs and pools of blood, is like a morality painting of the cataclysmic effects of this marauding elite in the world of ordinary people… as if his fatal velocity was that of foreign forces whose impact, here in India, could only be catastrophic.

Rana Dasgupta in Granta, July 2009.

But that is only the start of Dasgupta’s story of India, in Granta and in our conversation. Unpeeling what President Obama calls “one of the defining partnerships” in the world, Dasgupta seems to be betting on an Indian Century before it’s over:

The fact is that India and America have very very profound similarities, and a very obvious kind of relationship. Both countries are based around a grand political idea, they’re not based around any kind of racial homogeneity or anything like that, they are based around a constitution, and a moment of independence from the British. In both countries a desire to be left alone to run your business is a very powerful feeling. There is suspicion in both countries of governments and the interferences they make into private – read: commercial – life. And it’s precisely for this reason that so many Indians have been so successful in America – they don’t even have to stop at the airport to understand where they’ve come – they already know it. They’ve understood America deeply before they’ve arrived. This has been enhanced in the last two decades by the fact that the elite of India now automatically sends its kids to study in the US. There is a very very vast number of Indian teenagers who come here to study, to the extent I think that the Indian elite now regards the US as its other territory…

There are also ways in which America or India differ profoundly. America is a society of systems, there should be nothing that eludes the state – with systems of policing, control, regulation… That is clearly not the case in India… Indians accept that things cannot be systematized, that there is inherent chaos, that you don’t have to understand your neighbor, that he may live an incredibly different life from yours, but that’s not a problem. The incredible ramshackle bric-a-brac nature of Indian cities, where slums are next to high rises, is not felt to be a great shock. The face that people hack into electricity systems to run their slums is treated with wry humor by middle class Indians…

I suspect these things will play out to Indian’s advantage, because Indians will be much more comfortable in the US than Americans will be in India. And at a time when the new major economic growth prospects are in countries that look more like India than they do like America, Indians will be an incredibly mobile and flexible work population… Even being very wealthy they are quite comfortable living in a house that runs out of water quite often, and runs out of electricity. They’re able to go into weird places in central Asia and Africa and feel quite okay, knowing how things operate, knowing that even people who are turning over millions of dollars a year, can do so without contracts, just on the basis of various forms of informal business ethics.

So I think that as time goes on, America will retain its monopoly of certain things – India will never build a scientific academic research infrastructure that remotely rivals America’s. It will continue to use America’s and supply America’s with talented people, and Indians who are interested in working in those kind of environments will come to the States. But India itself as a major economic opportunity will continue to mushroom, and Indians will spread out into Africa and China and central Asia with enormous ease and flexibility.

Rana Dasgupta with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, 12.3.09.

The poet Henri Cole got his French first name from his Armenian mother. From his father, a military man, he got his Southern speech and, in what sounds like sadness and irony, “a knack for solitude.” Poetry was the place where as a young gay man he worked through yearning and anger to astringency and order. French, Armenian and English were the languages of his home growing up in Virginia in the sixties and seventies. “And hearing this braid of languages regularly spoken,” he has written, “heightened my sense of words as a kind of loge in which desires were illuminated, memory was recovered and poems would be assembled.” On publication of The Visible Man in 2005, Harold Bloom pronounced Henri Cole “a central poet of his generation. The tradition of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane is beautifully extended … Keats and Hart Crane are presences here, and Henri Cole invokes them with true aesthetic dignity, which is the mark of nearly every poem in The Visible Man.”

I was an undergraduate student at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and I was reading the novels that we all read — Woolf, James, Conrad. These are novelists who, you might say they’re novelists of the interior – and that kind of transcript of the interior life in the novel somehow got me interested in how some version of that is achieved in a concentrated way in poetry. I grew up in a military and c
Catholic household, so I was used to rigid structure and passion you might say, the passion of the mass and the structure of conforming military uniforms. My brothers were jocks and I didn’t really have a way to be myself, I guess I was probably looking for a way to be a man or masculine in some different way, and somehow poetry entered my life and it gave me a way to have a conversation. It made me sociable, I wasn’t very sociable — I was a pretty shy undergraduate so it made me sociable…

In Boston, now his home base, Henri Cole is reading to us mostly from his latest collection, Blackbird and Wolf (2007). Listen to his “Dune” and consider Colm Toibin’s observation that “The self in his work is explored as a diver might explore the ocean bed, it is ready to be surprised, frightened, puzzled, while the world above the water is noted with something close to calm and half-remembered acceptance. Cole’s poems at times display an amazing eloquence and command of form, but they are usually also impelled by sorrow, by dark knowledge, by pleasure, by the body and its discontents, and by history and what it has left us. It is not surprising that he has invoked the language of prayer as being an early influence.”

Our Proust Questionnaire

Q: Who is your favorite all-time fictional character?

A: I remember reading a French novel called The Wanderer when I was a young man, by Alain Fournier. I don’t remember the character’s name, but let’s just call him the Wanderer.

Q: What’s the quality above all that you look for in a poem?

A: Two qualities: there has to be a commitment to emotional truth, and there has to be a little concerto of consonants and vowels.

Q: What is your idea of a perfect poem?

A: Almost every poem of Elizabeth Bishop’s. James Merrill has a poem called “The Broken Home” that I love. In the Merrill poems, the thing I like so much is the combination of a high register of speech with total colloquial moments – I like that the poem has a range that can go from very high to very demotic in a few short lines.

Q: Who do you write for?

A: I don’t think too much about it. I am more committed to the truth and sound thing. If you think about too many people in your head, that’s like having a bunch of guns pointed at you, and that will censor you I think. When I write a poem, I hope to be in conversation with Merrill, who hopes to be in conversation with Cavafy or Whitman, and it goes back and back to Horace. But I guess I am also aware of the need to push all of that out of my head and just write the poem that I want to write.

Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other media? Who is doing the work of Henri Cole’s spirit in a different way?

A: I am probably most nurtured by visual art. I love Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Vija Celmins, Alice Neel. I’ve collaborated with two great visual artists, Jenny Holzer and Kiki Smith. Visual artists tend to be freer than writers are. Writers seem to have more boundaries – maybe it’s because making art is more physical, but they just seem freer. Also in relation to public events, speaking to the moment in history.

Q: What is the talent that you would most love to have, that you don’t yet?

A: I would love to be able to fly. I would love to be able to sing and fly like a bird. That would be fantastic.

Q: How would you like to die?

A: Alone, in a way that is not painful for anybody that loves me.

Q: What is the keynote of your personality as a poet?

A: Empathy.

Q: What is your motto?

A: I like Henry James’s motto. “Be kind, be kind, be kind.”

Henri Cole with Chris Lydon in Boston, 11.20.09.

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 been puzzling: what’s it like to write serious verse in these times? Who does it, and why? Enter: Nick Baker, the brilliant mischief-making novelist of Vox and Fermata, the compendious historian in Human Smoke of 20th Century weapons of mass destruction, and also the Kindle commentator in The New Yorker. In a day-dreamy fictional monolog titled The Anthologist, Baker’s poetic hero Paul Chowder gives one man’s complete set of answers to questions we’ve asked in “whose words these are.” Poetry is about dense, juicy words that want to be read slowly, he says. Writing it is slow, too. The poetry game is competitive, anxious and downright scary, not because the words are blocked but because the poet is afraid he’s run out of them — or that he’s lost sight of the main goal, to make something memorably beautiful.

In our conversation Nick Baker reveals that he assembled The Anthologist by speaking his own clutter of thoughts (the silly, the sly, the grand) on poetry into a video recorder upstairs and down in his house in Maine — and some others sitting in a plastic chair next to the badminton court. This is a writer who can talk the afternoon away in the quirky, wise, erudite, fluidly funny high style that we know on the page as Nick Bakeresque.

What is a poem? A poem is something that a person somewhere decided to call a poem. That’s the first thing. And what does it ask of us? It asks us to read it slowly. I think that’s the key, is that poetry is a bunch of words that’s just making a polite request to be read slowly. And there are all sorts of other things that it can do – it can rhyme, it can thump along in a kind of wonderful galumphing way, or not – but it mainly is asking us to slow down. And I like that. I think that I’m not a very fast reader but even though I’m not a fast reader, I read too quickly. And I found that the thing that’s most helpful to me as a writer is to slow myself down artificially. And the way I do that is getting a spiral notebook and copying things out, because if you copy something out, you are forced to read at the speed of writing, which is really really slow. So that comma that you’ve come across? You’ve had to make that little comma shape. So you’re slowing yourself down and I’ve found that that’s very helpful. And one of the things I wanted to do in this book was to put my little hard-won hoard of tips and tricks into book form. Although it’s a work of fiction, here are some things that actually helped me learn how to write. And one of them was to read poetry. I as a fiction writer, learned how to write prose by reading poetry, so I have a great debt that I owe to this tradition. I carried around the New Yorker book of poems, and Howard Moss’ poems, and Stanley Kunitz’s poems with me when I was working in New York on Wall Street, read them on my lunch hour. So I have that, but also there are other tips, and one of them is to: something that you really like – slow yourself down, artificially – it may seem artificial – but slow yourself down by copying it out. If you copy it out, you’ll really read it for the first time.

Nicholson Baker with Chris Lydon in Boston, 11.20.09.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Mary Karr (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3).

I love, first, the company she keeps. Her writing group, her list of literary familiars, encompasses the best: Augustine, Cavafy, Faulkner, Brooks Haxton, Homer, Thomas Lux, Milosz, Milton, Nabokov, Shelley, David Foster Wallace, Tobias Wolff, Franz Wright. And she talks convincingly, with rapture, about the “community of the word” that has sustained her.

It’s the cathedral. I was totally without any kind of faith–I didn’t have a mystical bone in my body growing up. I thought God was like the Easter Bunny, I was probably in the fourth grade before I realized that people were really serious that they believed all this stuff. But I believed in the church of poetry. I believed that it was Eucharistic. You take someone’s words into your body–it is like you take their passion, their suffering into yourself–and you’re changed by it. You know, Shelley would say that the feeling humanizes you more, but you become in Cavafy’s phrase a “citizen of the city of ideas.” I was a very lonely, strange little girl in a kind of backwater town. You know, I had a crush on J. Alfred Prufrock, I mean I was a pitiful little thing. Of all the people. The other girls were ogling the lifeguard at the pool and I was saying “indeed” to try to sound British. So I was a little misfit, and getting to read these writers, these poets mostly, it was majestic. It was magnificent… You can have the entire artistic experience in one sitting, in one mouthful, in one moment.

I love, second, her catnip connection with kids younger than my kids, adventurous girls especially.

Girls will be foolish about boys. They’ll write a guy’s name on their notebooks over and over. And they’ll also go on great adventures and slaughter monsters from island to island and, like Odysseus, they’ll come home by leaving home. They will come into themselves. They will come to. 

I love, third, her hard-won wisdom about memoirs, that first the writer has to get over one’s self and make room for something else:

I think if you’re working on a memoir and your main antagonist is not some aspect of yourself then you’re probably in the wrong business. You probably ought to be writing fiction or something else.  If you’re writing because someone did something to you, you are fighting the wrong dragon. A really great memoir has some aspect of self as the antagonist. In Tobais Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, his step-father did beat the crap out of him but it is an interesting book because Toby is trying on different costumes…throughout the book he puts on one male costume after another. It is about trying to be a man. 

Mary Karr with Chris Lydon in Boston, 11.05.09.

Thomas Balmes is a global filmmaker from France who commits anthropology with his camera. He is coaching us here in how to make expressive use of the new video democracy on YouTube — how to adapt our own anthropological eyes to see and perhaps reveal what’s lurking in plain sight all around us.

I go by an amateur’s notion of anthropology, as the social science of spotting, as they say, what’s familiar in the strange … and what’s strange in the familiar. Thomas Balmes has improvised his way to mastery of the art all over the planet.

Damages is his rare American film, by turns grotesque, hilarious and perversely winsome, about lawyers in a litigate-or-die law firm in Bridgeport, Connecticut haggling over personal-injury and wrongful death claims.

You’ll feel a certain shock of recognition hearing Thomas Balmes say why the US is heaven for documentarians: because we Americans (unlike, say, Japanese or French folk) will talk openly on a stranger’s camera (or into a cellphone, on a bus) about anything, including dollars for death.

Most of the Balmes movies are made elsewhere: looking at the tribal wars in the Balkans, for example, through the eyes of tribal warriors from Kenya who went to Bosnia as peace keepers; or watching McDonalds market its burgers in India, the land of the Sacred Cow. The next big Balmes production will track four babies from birth to walking – in Namibia, Japan, Mongolia and San Francisco. Everywhere Balmes uses the fly-on-the-wall “direct cinema” technique. No shooting script, no voice-over commentaries: just looking, listening, and leaving viewers to make sense of whatever it is we catch – as in that Bridgeport law office:

My questions to Thomas Balmes have mainly to do with the lessons for journalism or anti-mass media: how might we all learn to shoot the scene outside the window with freshness, ambiguity, tolerance, humor and entertainment value? (His answer boils down to: Just do it.) What if in place of television “news” we could call on Thomas Balmes and his inspired imitators to show us what and who they’re looking at tonight?

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rajmohan Gandhi (35 minutes, 16 mb mp3).

Rajmohan Gandhi in Bapu’s lap, Delhi, 1936

Short form: The skinny brown man in the traditional loin-cloth would be a thorn in the side of power today — more perhaps than ever in nuclear-armed India and in a world more concertedly hostile to Islam even than India was in 1948.

The father of his country would be attacking “smug self-satisfaction” among the new rich in India. “He would be unhappy about the continued oppression of women,” says Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson and biographer of the man that his family and nation called “Bapu,” or father. He’d be attacking “the worship of money” with his deepest conviction, as Gandhi once wrote to a young American seeking Indian wisdom, that “life is not for indulgence but essentially for self-denial. Would that the students of America could imbibe that one lesson.”

If Barack Obama could fulfill his spontaneous, touching wish for dinner with Gandhi, he would find the Mahatma “as interested in Barack Obama as Barack Obama in Gandhi.” But the American president should be prepared, says Gandhi’s grandson, to hear the grand strategist of India’s independence “say to the Americans what he said to the British: who asked you to be the guardians of the whole wide world? And why do you think you know better than the local people what is best for them? Relax! Trust those people. Yes, they may make mistakes, but they’re entitled to their freedom, to their independence.”

If, as I suppose, President Obama asked the great Gandhi to “help me with Islam,” his grandson believes:

Gandhi would say: “well, you, too, have your links with Islam, through your forebears. You have a tremendous chance…” He would tell Obama, of course, about his friend Abdul Gaffar Khan, his Pashtun friend. And he would say to Obama: “there are today in the Islamic world so many thousands of women and men who are fighting for the very things you are fighting for. They are the immediate victims of terrorism. Look at the numbers of Pakistanis and Afghans killed every single day by the extremists in their midst. Now that Fort Hood has happened, we’re all moved by these poignant descriptions of every single life that perished there. But the Pakistanis, the Afghans who also perish because of suicide bombings, because they’re ambushed by extremists, they died unknown, unrecognized, unsung…”

Also, and this is what I think Gandhi would say: “you in the United States for the last 40 or 50 years have been drawn into the Muslim world. Ask yourself whether you really have been always fair and just to the Muslim world, and if you haven’t acknowledge the places where you haven’t. Because the anger in the Muslim world — although it is unwise, it is foolish, it is harmful above all to the Muslim world — does it have some basis in their experience with the Western world?”

Rajmohan Gandhi with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, 11.15.09.

And if, I suppose further, Gandhi said to Obama in some fashion: you’re a young idealist with a global imagination; your military chief has asked for 40,000 troops to fight in Afghanistan and your ambassador in Kabul has said: don’t send them, it’s a dead end… how might I, Gandhi, help you, Obama, think through another way? What then?

Sure, I can imagine that. And I think Gandhi would also relate that to the situation in the United States where there is unemployment, there is suffering, there is sadness. Gandhi would readily acknowledge that Obama’s challenge is immense. And Gandhi would also be perfectly ready to say “I don’t know what you should do.” But he would also say that if you truly reflect and you think of the neediest people in the world and what will help them, then you will know what you should do.

Rajmohan Gandhi with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, 11.15.09.

He would not be prescribing remedies, in short, but he’d been keeping a universal standard of social justice at the top of all of our agendas.