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

Juan Enriquez: the only bet is on brains

Juan Enriquez’s vision makes you want pray for a rain-out, bet on the flood. Especially if you live in one of the research and teaching centers of the world — best of all in MIT’s zipcode: 02139. Recovery, jobs and money are all fuctions, in the Enriquez brief, of zipcode concentrations of brain cells and emerging new “life science” industries.

Juan Enriquez is an investor, teacher, writer and sometime politician who’s famous now on YouTube and the conference circuit for riffs like this one. We’re picking up on, first, a TED talk he gave this Spring in California, and then a grand Boston boast that the Red Sox playing field is the epicenter of the next economy. At TED, he pictured a race underway between the crashing of car companies and newspapers and other branded industries and the simultaneous blooming of super-tech invention: the Big Dog carry-all robots, implantable organs and shoe leather man-made without cows. I asked Juan Enriquez in his Boston office tower for a sort of scorecard as of late spring in year one of the Age of Obama. The bad news is that we’re in real danger of sinking ourselves (not our kids — us!) with debt we cannot pay. We’ve been through some tentative confession of our sins, but atonement is still to come. Here’s the good news:

I’ve never seen a better time to invest: things are cheap, there’s a lot of smart people around, there’s a lot of technology we’ve been investing in for 15, 20 years in life sciences that is incredibly exciting right now. And Boston is the center of the universe for that stuff. Per capita, there isn’t a smarter place than Boston right now…

Half facetiously, I claim that the center of the universe is the pitcher’s mound at Fenway. And the reason for that is because you’ve got Boston University sitting on one axis, Harvard on another, MIT on another, then Boston College and Harvard Medical School… Within a three to five mile radius of that pitcher’s mound you have an awful lot of what the new economy looks like.

Of the known universe, at this point, the corner of Vassar St. and Main St. may be the single most interesting corner anywhere and the reason why is because you’re sitting in the middle of a zipcode, 02139, that has generated one the largest economies on the planet in terms of the companies that the faculty and students that graduated MIT have done. The second reason is that you have a huge concentration of life-science powerbases that around the Whitehead and the Broad Institutes and the Human Genome Project. You have a new neuro-cognitive center, the Picower Institute where they’re bringing together in one building everybody who’s thinking about the brain. So if you’re a psychologist or a psychiatrist, if you’re a neurosurgeon or a brain imager, if you’re a computer scientist, anybody who’s thinking about brain circuitry or how this thing works, you’re all talking to one another in a building, which is highly unusual for academia.

And then right across the street from that you’ve got a Frank Gehry building that has possibly the next generation of computing, the next generation of artificial intelligence, and the next generation of robotics. And you bring those three things together — and you think of single professors’ labs — a lab the size of your house — generating market caps of five or 10 billion or 20 billion dollars in the students that are graduating and the companies they found…

When I want to show somebody why the US is still a really important power despite the debt, despite a certain sabbatical from governance, I drive them through the area… As you go past the Stop & Shop, you’ll see the old NECCO candy factory, which has now become the global research headquarters for Novartis. In three other huge buildings next to it they’ve taken the three big Swiss Pharma companies – Ciba, Geigy, Sandoz – merged them and offshored almost all of the R and D to Cambridge, MA, which is a big deal! That’s offshoring probably five percent of the future of the Swiss GDP. That’s what the bet is… And then you hit the Charles River, which is lovely, right?

Juan Enriquez in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, June, 2009.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Alfred Gusenbauer. (38 minutes, 17 mb mp3)

Alfred Gusenbauer: desperate? serious?

Alfred Gusenbauer seems to think so. Austria’s hearty 49-year-old former chancellor, who may be typical of the left-of-center professionals in European politics, likes everything he sees on his American sojourn, starting with the Obama stimulus package, the borrowed budget, and the push for big public investments in health, education and green technology: “What the US government is doing now compared with all the others in Europe is the best one could do,” he says in conversation.

Europeans may be cushioned by a stronger social safety net, but Gusenbauer is struck by a sort of “optimism net” in America. We are blessed, at last, with “a government in which the people trust.” Habitually, perhaps, self-reliant Americans tend to look confidently to their families and their own initiatives, he remarks. Americans take six months or a year to believe that their sinking economy is in serious trouble. Europeans will take six months or a year to believe the good news, if a recovery ever comes.

Gusenberg, visiting at the Watson Insitute, leads our conversation with a quip — German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s joke about the difference between Communism and Capitalism. “In Communism, first they are going to nationalize everything, and then destroy it. In Capitalism, it’s the other way round.”

Germans and Austrians, proverbially, take different views of a crisis like this world economic shutdown: in Berlin the situation is supposed to look “serious but not desperate;” in Vienna, rather, “desperate but not serious.” The Gusenbauer view, in our non-technical ramble, is that what’s deeply serious in the crisis is the economics of it — the stark imbalances (East and West and within every society) of production and consumption, savings and debt, health and hunger. What could be desperate is the social rancor and far-out politics fermenting even in Europe among people feeling abandoned — among workers who’ll never work again, among young people who don’t believe Europe’s “paradigm of progress,” and among politicians who will put the European project at risk to save their national bacon.

We are just at the beginning of real consequences for real people. I see two vulnerable groups: Those that are older than 50. Most of the old jobs and the old qualifications are gone. The huge danger is that people over 50 losing their jobs right now won’t be able to enter the market again… The second group is the youngsters, because with this enormous increase of unemployment that we are facing right now, all those that are leaving nowadays universities, grammar schools, technical education schemes, they will enter the labor market and find closed doors. And we cannot predict what this might mean for their social and political behavior… In Greece last year, among university students… this went quite far in terms of public violence and in terms of challenging the state authority. So nobody can predict right now which social and political effects a longer duration of the crisis might have upon different groups. This will be the real challenge for European democracy and for the European welfare state, to hold the social fabric together in times when it is fundamentally challenged…

An Austrian Socialist makes a model of development and redistribution and social justice in the near neighborhood of South-Eastern Europe — the West Balkan states of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, Bulgaria and Rumania — whose GDP altogether is smaller than Austria’s today:

Within Europe, I think it’s very clear; our hope is in the East, because from there the demand will come, from there the energy will come, from there the dynamics for the future economic development will come. And we are free to decide, are we going to support such a development, with a clear redistribution of resources that we have in Europe going to the East? … Our problem is that we are losing our markets. If we are not selling cars you are going to lose your job, so we have to sell our cars. We need people that are ready to buy our cars. Where are the best, most regulated, based on rule-of-law markets in our vicinity? It’s the new member states of the European Union. And therefore I tell you, it’s much better to spend one Euro in Romania than to spend a Euro in Austria, because a Euro spent in Austria will directly go into the saving rate, not in an increase in the sales of cars.

Alfred Gusenbauer in conversation with Chris Lydon, Providence, June 11, 2009.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Joseph O’Neill. (40 minutes, 18 mb mp3)

Joseph O’Neill: “Think fantastic!”

Everybody knows by now that Netherland has been Mr. Obama’s bedtime reading this spring. This is said to mean that our president is not all-wonk, that he still has a writer’s appetite for imaginative prose. To me it’s downright strange that nobody goes on to ask: but why this book? and what might it mean to him? These are the questions I’m chasing down here with the author.

The affinities between O’Neill and O’Bama are delicious. O’Neill, like the president a fine amateur athlete, had been playing cricket on Staten Island less than 48 hours before we met in Boston. Like the president, O’Neill is a hybrid of two cultures: his father comes of a family of IRA tough guys from West Cork; his mother is the daughter of a Syrian-Christian-Turkish hotel keeper on the Eastern Mediterranean port town, Mersin, in Turkey. O’Neill grew up mainly in The Hague in Holland. He went to mainly English schools and has a law degree from Cambridge. O’Neill’s great work of non-fiction, Blood-Dark Track, a “family history,” could have been subtitled Dreams, and Nightmares, from my Grandfathers. At a White House ceremony recently, O’Neill told me that not the least of what he shared with the president was a raging urge to step outside for a cigarette.

In the near background of our conversation is the immortal Trinidadian cricket aficionado C. L. R. James (1901 - 1989) and his autobiographical masterpiece, Beyond a Boundary. People keep commenting on Joseph O’Neill’s debt to F. Scott Fitgerald and The Great Gatsby for this novel about a climber and halfway gangster, Netherland’s Trinidadian-American Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreams a new American dream and ends up, like Gatsby, literally dead in the water. But O’Neill is in much deeper debt to C. L. R. James for his cricket vision.

James was an inspiring writer in the pan-African liberationist movements of the 1930s and after. He was a fierce anti-imperialist and, contrarily, an ardent champion of pre-imperial English culture (he had virtually memorized Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in his teens) and most especially of cricket, the country sport that the Empire took to the colonies. “Cricket is much more than a game for Mr. James,” as Neville Cardus of the Guardian put it; “it is a way of life.”

# 1 on sports, the West Indes, colonialism

“Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle,” James wrote in Beyond a Boundary. “It belongs with the theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.” Embedded in it, moreover, is a universal code of fair struggle and honor. Common phrases like “a straight bat” and “it isn’t cricket” became “watchwords of manners and virtue and the guardians of freedom and power.” James, who called himself “a British intellectual long before I was ten,” came to think that games were more expressive of a culture than poetry, drama and music, and that W. G. Grace, the Babe Ruth of 19th Century cricket, was a higher monument of English life than Queen Victoria. The game itself, he decided, was “the only contribution of the English educational system of the nineteenth century to the general educational ideas of Western civilization.” For black and brown West Indians, specifically, James found that schoolboy cricket had everything to do with self-mastery and liberation among a subject people. Club cricket and the international game turned out to be wide open to transformation by West Indian virtuosity. The starting point for C. L. R. James, as Joseph O’Neill recounts in our conversation, was that

Learie Constantine bats for the West Indes

…if you were one of the members of a colonized race in Trinidad — there are two in Trinidad: an African population and a South Asian population, almost 50-50 — you were allowed very few forms of self expression. And one of those was cricket. It was one of the arenas where certain hierarchies were abolished. A lot of sports have that in common. And he thought that was a great thing, where people could have access to their souls on the cricket field… Also the trajectory of Trinidad in particular towards independence went hand in hand with the West Indies cricket team, gradually becoming a team which reflected the West Indian population and not of the colonists. Quite separately from those local things, he took it as a given that cricket, as he said, is like art. It’s a wonderful thing, and why should we diminish ourselves – we being the colonized people in this case – by persisting to see it as being owned by the colonizer? Why can’t we own this sport? So what if they made it up? Are we not just as entitled to the particular bliss and gratifications that this sport offers? And that is quite a big important statement to make. It’s a way of throwing off colonial categories of the world and it’s a way of laying claim to what the world has to offer. We see now in the way cricket is organized around the world that India is the main power in cricket, and will undoubtedly remain in that position for many years. And the old seat of power in London is not what it was…

Frank Worrell against England, 1950

This is the thinking that Joseph O’Neill has learned from C. L. R. James, puts regularly into practice on the cricket grounds of New York, and has embodied in Chuck Ramkissoon, the most beguiling character in Netherland. It’s the thinking that feels like such a good fit with the First Reader in the White House.

If a novel confronts the American reader with the other, namely cricket, that is something that would obviously appeal to this President, who it seems to me is extremely interested in the tension between oneself and the other, and sees it as a very fruitful tension. I’ll put it another way: if there’s any American who could understand cricket, it is Barack Obama. And in many ways his platform is a Ramkisoonian platform, namely that the current boundaries (again the reference to James is intentional) of American vision have proved to be defective. They just have. And the Bush years represented a kind of catastrophic shrinkage of what it means to be American, and the idea of what the role of America in the wider world might be. Barack Obama, for autobiographical and intellectual reasons, is in a position to make another argument. I think so far he’s made it rather persuasively.

Joseph O’Neill in conversation with Chris Lydon, Boston, June 15, 2009.

Is it too late to celebrate Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) with an honest, unblushing American face? Have we laid too much pavement, built too many Cheesecake Factories in too many malls, imprisoned and executed too many harmless rejects and overextended our military rule too far ever to put Thoreau on our postage again?

That’s the major reservation in this otherwise festive gab about the making of one of the universally cherished American writing minds, Henry David Thoreau – to this day an exemplar of simplicity, conscience, naturalism, non-conformity, the power of solitude and great prose.

John Pipkin’s argument in the form of a novel, Woodsburner, is that what fired young Thoreau to bust out of his father’s pencil factory, to hole up in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts and eventually to write the secular scripture known as Walden, was strangely enough, a real raging wildfire that Thoreau himself carelessly started – a fire that burned 300 acres and could have destroyed his town.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with John Pipkin about young Henry David Thoreau. (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3)

John Pipkin: never too late

John Pipkin’s take is that the fire in fact rescued the 26-year-old Thoreau from what was beginning to look like a life of failure. With his doomed brother John, Henry had paddled through their famous week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, but he hadn’t yet composed any of its signature wisdom. As for instance: ” …steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one’s style, both of speaking and writing.”

It was the shock and embarrassment of the fire he started — the “woodsburner!” whispers in Concord — that got Thoreau in gear as a writer, Pipkin supposes. The Pipkin premise makes Thoreau (who admitted being thrilled by the blaze) more socially sensitive than the “hermit and stoic” that Emerson recalled in his brilliant memorial essay. “It cost him nothing to say No,” Emerson wrote. “Indeed, he found it much easier than to say Yes… Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure and guileless. ‘I love Henry,’ said one of his friends, ‘but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.’”

Whatever effect the fire had on Thoreau, it may have been part of what prompted Emerson to buy the land at Walden Pond where he then invited his friend to build his writing camp. Even then they were both vexed by the intrusion of the railroad through Concord and the pace of “development” in their woods. So the fire makes a plausible moment to reimagine the hatching of American doctrine.

John Pipkin (born in Baltimore, now a Texan) was a student at the University of North Carolina of Philip Gura, keeper of the Transcendentalist flame. Professor Gura’s lament on Open Source not so long ago was that we have traduced Thoreau and Emerson not just by ignoring their earnest advice but spinning them into literary abstractions. Pipkin’s rejoinder is that the environmental emergency arrived with the first European settlers in America and that the model activist, even at this late date, is still Thoreau. “He was the attorney of the indigenous plants,” as Emerson said, “and owned to a preference of the weeds to the imported plants, as of the Indian to the civilized man.”

Sir Ken Robinson does most of the talking, over breakfast here, on the sketchy matter of “creativity” and the teaching of it. John Maeda, in the gossamer blazer and scarf, is the work in progress.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with John Maeda and Sir Ken Robinson. (24 minutes, 11 mb mp3)

Both men are titans of the TED conference style of presenting “ideas worth spreading” to the Web. John Maeda emerged at TED two winters ago talking about The Laws of Simplicity, while inside he was reeling toward his own future, head still spinning from Ken Robinson’s TED talk a year earlier on education as a standardized way of crushing invention. Maeda, a star at MIT’s Media Lab, still in his thirties, heard a call from the heavens to “change my life.” And so he did, moving from MIT and the engineering of technology to the presidency of the Rhode Island School of Design and the teaching of art and innovation. After a RISD year that he’s been blogging at every turn, Maeda’s invitation to Robinson to give the commencement address felt like a personal thank-you and maybe an appeal for confirmation. Early on RISD’s graduation day, we had a three-way gab at the Hope Club in Providence about expressiveness and originality, in art and life, across the board.

Well, I think it’s helpful to start with a definition. And John’s right, there are all kinds of misconceptions about the creative process, people think it’s just sitting around waiting for inspiration to hit you, it’s about special gifts, it’s about luck, some people have it, some people don’t. It’s unfairly distributed. And I think all this is nonsense.

Firstly: everybody has tremendous natural creative capacities, everybody. It’s an endowment of being a human being that you’re born with. The truth is that some people discover their real creative possibilities and others don’t, and that’s partly because of how we educate people.

The second big misconception is that it’s about special things, that there are only certain activities which are inherently creative. And that is equally mythical. You can be creative with anything, absolutely anything that involves your intelligence. I put together a large scale strategy for the British government about ten years ago and I know that the government thought, when they asked me to do this, that I was going to get a commission together exclusively of artists. Well, you know the arts can be tremendously creative, but so can science and so can mathematics, and so can business and so can broadcasting and so can anything. So one of my campaigning issues for a long time was being able to get creativity out of the ghetto and to get the arts integrated with a bigger argument.

And the third misconception is there’s not much you can do about it, creatively enough, and that’s the end of it and good luck with it. And what RISD testifies to, and all great institutions like this, is that you can create conditions onto which capabilities will grow and flourish. That you can teach some of the essential processes of creative achievement that it takes application and work and control of the mathematics and discipline. So my definition - I remember some politicians in Britain saying the problem is “you can’t define creativity” and, I said “No, I think the problem is you can’t define it. So let me define it for you.”

So my definition is: it’s the process of having original ideas that have value and, all three bits of that to me are important. Firstly, it’s a process, it’s not an event, I mean it occasionally happens that some idea hits you fully-formed and that’s the end of it. But much more often an idea may stare itself in your mind and it’s the beginning of something, not the end of it, you then have to work on it, and evolve it. And often doing that is a very material business – you’re working with physical materials, it could be steel or clay or it could be words or numbers. It could be a conceptual process. It always is to some degree a conceptual process, but it’s a process.

It’s very rarely the case, I think, that what comes out of the far end is what you began with. I remember someone saying that art is a surprise, not a prediction. And, it’s part because of the way this process evolves. But it’s as true of science as it would be of the visual arts or music or theater.

The second thing is it’s about originality, it’s thinking new thoughts and trying to make something fresh and original. And that’s a real job of work for all the reasons we’re saying: because our minds quickly become kind-of enthralled in assumptions that we don’t question anymore.

And the third thing is it’s about critical judgment, it’s about value. And I think this is a really important part of the conversation, because not any original idea is any good. Some original ideas are actually not even worth pursuing, they’re original but they’re kind of worthless. But then often mature works are produced and the culture as a whole thinks this is a waste of time. And that’s because there’s a difference of value being applied to it. And my point is just to say that every creative process isn’t just about thinking fresh things, it’s acting critically on the ideas, it’s a kind-of reciprocal process of hypothesizing and critique.

Sir Ken Robinson in conversation with John Maeda and Chris Lydon, in Providence, R.I., May 29, 2009.

“When a black man becomes President of the USA, pigs will fly. And then what happened? Swine flu.”

In Philip Womack’s dispatch from Calabash in the London Telegraph, June 2, 2009.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Melvin Van Peebles, Xu Xi, Robert Pinsky and Kwame Dawes. (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3)

This last roundup of memorable voices at the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica is about us — the second of the big reasons I come. The first is to hear Caribbean writers at home – even the ones who’ve become famous in America like Junot Diaz and Edwidge Danticat, sounding off in the islands of Bob Marley and Derek Walcott.

Xu Xi and Melvin Van Peebles at Calabash

The second mission, for me, is to see the States from a penetrating gaze just offshore — something like the old Irish wisdom on the world of the British empire. So as the Calabash gab winds down, I’m gathering up conversations with Jamaicans and visitors from all over about the US and the world early in the age of Obama. The impressions here are from the breakthrough filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, the Hong Kong novelist Xu Xi, the repeat poet laureate of the United States Robert Pinsky, and the world citizen and poet Kwame Dawes.

Melvin Van Peebles came to Calabash to show his new movie Confessions of an Ex-Doofus Itchy-Footed Mutha, nearly 40 years after he inaugurated the “blaxploitation” movie tradition with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasss Song. With me Melvin Van Peebles is just short of exultant about the direction of things at home:

I think the States is on the right track, oddly enough. Things are coming to fruition. On election night, I went to a swank party on Central Park West. The cab driver who took me home wouldn’t take any money. He says: “we won, man, we won. He was from Sri Lanka. When a New York cab driver won’t take money from you, maybe things are changing. It was a seminal moment in my life… It can never go back. The guy is not messing up. He sure doesn’t give fodder to the stereotype of how a person of African descent can’t find his way out of the cotton patch. That’s changed. Over. Out. Can’t be discussed anymore. That’s an immense change. You can’t go back there.

Melvin Van Peebles in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009.

Xu Xi is a literary light of a changing Hong Kong view. She’s both novelist and essayist – minding the gap between Hong Kong, the British colony for a century, and now China’s booming gateway for all kinds of commerce and cultural traffic East and West. This is a woman who grew up, as she writes, between Confucius and Catcher in the Rye.

The thing that is interesting since Obama’s taken office is the shift I’ve seen, especially in Hong Kong among friends who were always dissing America — you know, British friends, Australian friends, Chinese friends, who are suddenly so much more sympathetic towards America. It’s like: Oh, the U. S. of A. is not all that bad… I’m thinking of a British friend of mine in Hong Kong, a very smart man who’s never been to the States and never had much desire to go until Obama got elected. He’s the sort of person who should be coming to take a look, you know?

Xu Xi in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009.

Robert Pinsky: poems of place that travel

Robert Pinsky writes poems of place, starting in New Jersey, melodic poems with palpable images that travel easily. He read his signature piece, Shirt, beginning “The back, the yoke, the yardage…” and the Calabash crowd would have listened all afternoon. Pinsky was the poet laureate who got many thousands of Americans reading their favorite poems aloud; at Calabash he heard scores of Jamaicans reading their own strong verses in Open Mike sessions.

I am seeing in the island rather a promising vision of the next steps for American culture, and what we think of as the American project of becoming a people…

One of the most moving passages in Dreams from My Father deals with the part in that boy’s life when he has assimilated himself to Indonesian society–he is flying kites, he knows the language. His mother is seeing her husband diminished, frustrated and ossified. He is a good man but something is very wrong for him because he is living in a totalitarian country. So she gets the boy up at four thirty in the morning because she has realized that she needs him to get an American education. He must be an American in effect. And the kid complains because he is sleepy, and she tells him that this is no picnic for her either…

There is a great model here for American art and for American life. She wants him to be like Odysseus, the most interesting of the heroes. In the first lines of the Odyssey, it says that Odysseus, though he failed to get his men home, he traveled to many places and learned the manners of many people. She made sure that the compass, or the core, or the guiding vision, had to do with this project of being an American people.

Robert Pinsky in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009.

Kwame Dawes “an anthem for possibility”

Finally, Kwame Dawes, a prime mover at Calabash, had a big question on his mind. If the Age of Obama really is what it feels like, a new time, a watershed for black, brown and white people in the world, what is the opportunity, the invitation, for artists and writers, like himself. Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana, schooled in Jamaica and Canada. He now teaches at the University of South Carolina, and writes an astonishing variety of poems, essays and oral histories.

I became an American citizen last year, after Obama won the election… so as a Ghanaian-American, I am starting a journey along with this Obama guy, who for all of his African-Americanness is a kind of immigrant in America… and I think he understands the immigrant experience and that narrative.

For Americans choosing to be led by an African American, it means that America, particularly White America, has to be engaged imaginatively with the idea of who this man is…

I become a beneficiary of that because they have to engage with me and who I am. We have to find a point of connection and possibility. It is a moment. And it is a moment that we do not completely understand but it is significant because the equations have began to change.

Kwame Dawes in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Marlon James. (50 minutes, 23 mb mp3)

Poets and writers come to the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica from every corner of the world, and still the overpowering voice in the fiction readings belongs to a native son from down the road in Kingston. Marlon James, in his second novel, The Book of Night Women, has conjured a teen-age female narrator, also a green-eyed black-skinned heroine named Lilith, and a blood-curdling conspiracy of female slaves in Jamaica in the year 1800. Their mission is to burn, kill and destroy a merciless slave plantation with the same rapacious cruelty that the British masters (and a very Irish overlord) use to run it. The Book of Night Women is not so much a historical novel as a very modern elaboration of violence that strips the souls of people. You feel you’re not just reading it; you’re becoming a witness to sexual, verbal and physical ferocity that scars and reduces everybody; and then you’re a witness also to love — unnamed, but exquisitely articulated — where you least expected it. “I didn’t want to let anybody off the hook in this book, including the victims,” Marlon James remarks in our conversation. There’s a writer here with a book and a “dynamism of spoken language” that are very much for us and our world.

Marlon James: out with myths and nostalgia

One of the concerns from critics was why in such a forward-looking time I was writing a backward-looking novel? You know: “Black is the new president,” “we’re post-racial” and all of that. There are a lot of answers to that, and not just the very typical one, that you need to know your history and so on. But I wasn’t writing a historical novel. There are many ways, I hope, in which this novel is in dialogue with the President. The first is the ownership of language. The story is old, but the idea of telling a story in the voices of the people who went through it is still a pretty new thing. The idea of a slave’s story or the story of urban poverty being in the voice of the people who experienced it is new, and it’s pretty radical when you look at the British West Indies. The first publisher to see The Book of Night Women was a British publisher who turned it down. And her request to me was to reconsider writing it in the third-person in standard English. And what struck me there was that even in 2007, people still refuse to have stories told by the people who experienced it, in a language that breaks standard English, that accepts lyricism, that breaks words here, that joins words here. It is a slavery novel but it is also a novel that acknowledges the dynamism of spoken dialect English. And owning it…

I didn’t want to let anybody off the hook in this novel, including the victims. And I think that it is something that had to be said. It’s too easy. I always say it and I say this sometimes when I lecture: if blacks accuse whites of denial, then blacks could accuse themselves of myth-making — that that there were all oppressive whites and all oppressed blacks. So that is why the idea of slaves owning slaves is so painful for some people to read. It’s a fact; it happened. Slaves themselves became the masters after the rebellions. I knew I could have written a very black and white story and probably still have been praised for it, largely–it must be said–out of guilt. I know I could have written about horrendous white masters beating poor slaves and have gotten away with it. To me that is intellectually dishonest. I think the more humane thing, but also a dialogue that has more to do with what is going on now, is one that recognizes all the ambiguities: that even such a dark world is still pretty gray…

It is not just a matter of knowing history so that you don’t repeat it. It is that you are headless without history. And I don’t think it is being taught enough. If I thought it was being taught enough I wouldn’t have written the book… Toni Morrison has said she writes the books that she wanted to read but could never find. And I agree with that totally. There is certainly a rich tradition of slave narratives and so on, but it is still not enough. Even the most enduring and the most lauded works about slavery tend to be about American Slavery– like Beloved. And Caribbean slavery was such a radically different thing: it was so violent. You can’t help but be hyper-violent when you are talking about West Indian slavery. And it is not even the violence itself, but the uncertainty that makes it even more violent…the slaves were not beaten into submission, they were very proud warriors from kingdoms who were just defeated in war. They were prisoners of a war of sorts, not necessarily victims who were waiting to be captured. And when you put that in a mix with people who come from Britain, mostly men, who are being thrust into this world where anything goes, it is bound to be explosive. And I think that story hasn’t been told enough.

Marlon James in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009.

Calabash, the Caribbean literary festival, is an outdoor church of the written word, rocking and resonating on the south coast of Jamaica with the voices of poets and writers from Hong Kong, New York, Barbados, Nigeria, London, San Diego and Boston, among other home addresses.

In this first of our conversations from Treasure Beach, Pico Iyer is preaching. All his life, the Dalai Lama has been friend and inspiration. Zadie Smith is queen of his literary realm. And now Barack Obama is his “global soul in the White House.” Pico is our model of “global attitude,” in short. Born in England of Indian parents, he went to school and university in the United States and has lived 21 years now in rural Japan, on a tourist visa.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Pico Iyer. (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3)

Pico Iyer: a more fruitful creolizing culture

We’re at the center of the word, and the center of the world, now.

When I was born, everyone would have said the center was London or New York. The world has grown so much more interestingly complex, so quickly, that a literary event in Jamaica finds a much larger audience than a literary event in London or New York would.

A 21st-century novel is much more likely to be set in Bombay, than London or New York. I think of London as the capital of the 19th-century novel, New York as the capital of the 20th-century novel, and Bombay — by which I also mean Kingston, and Port of Spain, Lahore and Lagos and other places — those are the capitals of the 21st-century novel in the English language.

Before coming to Jamaica, I might have thought of it as a marginal place. Now that I’ve been here, I can’t say that. It’s not at the margins. You’re right that it’s on the edge of the great America as Ireland was on the edge of Britain, but it’s as central as New York. It has the same number of influences coming here - you an Irish-American person, and here’s me, an Indian-Japanese person. We’re converging by the sea in Jamaica, surrounded by other mongrels, like ourselves. And the conversation is at least as rich here, as in New York, but perhaps richer. We can’t talk anymore about a center of empire and a victim of empire. The empire is global and Jamaica is having its say, to London and New York, and London and New York have to attend to it.

It’s interesting that the writer that you and I have most celebrated during this conversation, Zadie Smith, is half Jamaican, half English - she lives in New York. But in her life, because she’s such an accomplished novelist and essayist at her young age, she is a way of saying, “I’m going to bring my Jamaican heritage as well as my English and American heritage into the center of Western thinking, and the center of Western writing,” in exactly the same way that Barack Obama willy nilly is bringing Kenya into the White House, and into the center of traditional power. So that Kenya now can say, “We have our guy in the White House. The most powerful man in the world is from our little tribe.” They can legitimately say it as much as somebody from Kansas can say it. And I think Jamaica now is empowered in that same way. They can say that one of most exciting novelists in the English language, Zadie Smith, is coming from Jamaica, and is channeling Jamaica into, and bringing it together with her English part, and now her American life.

And I think that that’s the excitement: that Jamaica is now a center of the world, and there isn’t the center of the world, there isn’t one center of the world. The center of the world is everywhere.

Pico Iyer in conversation with Chris Lydon, at the Calabash International Literary Festival, Treasure Beach, Jamaica, May 24, 2009.

Aleksandar Hemon: funny people, sad tales

What the Bosnian-American fictionist Aleksandar Hemon loves about being compared to Vladimir Nabokov is not the part about mastering English as a new language — praise Hemon doesn’t feel he’s earned quite yet. What pleases Hemon is a deeper Slavic kinship that readers have noted — the same kinship that Nabokov felt with Chekhov and “the subtle humor” of “this Chekhovian dove-gray world,” as Nabokov put it. Hemon writes “sad books for humorous people,” he says, and perhaps “humorous books for sad people” as well.

Our conversation is with the novelist of The Lazarus Project, the story-teller of Love and Obstacles. Hemon is a favorite of The New Yorker magazine for his very typically bi-focal new-century identity. He is about equally rooted in Sarajevo and Chicago by now – about equally drawn, for example, to gaudy gangster histories in either place. The Lazarus Project made a surreal link between a historic murder in Chicago in 1908 and the carnage in Sarajevo at the end of the 20th Century. He writes a very stylish immigrant English for one part of his audience, but the interesting thing in the Internet age is that Aleksandar Hemon also writes a political column online in Bosnian, not just for Sarajevo but for Bosnians in the US who wouldn’t – maybe couldn’t – read him in English. Like the Bosnian man now living in St. Louis who watches pictures of the snow falling in Sarajevo, on the Web. He’s not writing about exile, Hemon says, because he can and does go back to Bosnia. Rather he’s writing the stories and moral discoveries that come with displacement. I asked him to surface his theory about the continuities of violence in the world.

AH: I don’t believe in human atavism, that we’re savages waiting to be activated. I think what turns people into killers on a vast scale is a kind of misguided historical project. These things are well organized. The Nazis, obviously, were not savages. Genocide is a technology, it is a very complicated operation, and they needed a vast, well trained force to do that. Similarly, in the Balkans. A lot of people have represented the conflict in the Balkans as, you know, tribes at each other’s throats, which was a lie in so many ways. But it also misses the point of genocide, the technology of genocide. To kill seven thousand men in Srebenica, you need a large number of buses to transport people from Point A to Point B, so they can be shot. Someone has to organize those busses. There is an army hierarchy and so on. So, for the worst in us to be brought out, there has to be a historical project. In that vein, not quite a genocidal project obviously, the Bush administration, for example, brought out the worst in Americans. They had a misguided horrible project which somehow we’re still at. We’re still doing it, in many ways. And this brought out the worst things in America, and I hated that experience. Which is also to say that opposing such projects becomes a necessary ethical position for each citizen, including writers.

CL: There is a moment in The Lazarus Project that many have noted, where Brik is in a fight with his wife. She is American and she’s kind of defending the innocence of the kids at Abu Ghraib. And the Brik character, who has a lot in common with you, tells her: “I hate the normal people, in the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave… I told her that to be American you have to know nothing, and understand even less. And that I didn’t want to be American…” What has happened to that anger in you, what has happened to that in us?

AH: Well, I have had my anger. It never quite reached that point. Brik is very, very angry with the whole notion of being American. So I could write him, because during the Bush years I had a hard time being American. I was more of an American in ’99, when I wasn’t even a citizen, than I was during the Bush years. Because it seemed to me that if you were an American, you had to sign up for these projects, and I didn’t want to sign up.

CL In The Lazarus Project, Chicago in 1908 is the site of a kind of nativist hysteria. 100 years later, precisely, it became the seat of the new almost transnational American politics. What has happened to us, what has happened to Chicago?

AH: Well, Chicago, like America, was never one thing. It is not a monolithic thing, absolute and primitive… You know, as long as there has been a history of racism in this country there has been a history of opposition to racism. As long as there was an injustice, there were people fighting that injustice. The question is who has a higher hand. That is what I love about America: that vitality. And it can never be reduced to one thing, and the Bush regime tried to reduce it to one thing, we can stand united and question nothing. But it is too big, it is too complicated, it is too democratic. And what happened in Chicago and the United States is this: people like myself, who were playing defense, moved over and started attacking the opponents goal to score. And we scored.

Aleksandar Hemon in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, May 15, 2009.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with novelist Colm Toibin. (44 minutes, 22 mb mp3)

After The Master, his breakthrough meditation on Henry James, there’s no detaching the Irish novelist Colm Toibin from James’ own “dramatizations of secrecy.” Toibin’s new novel Brooklyn will remind you oddly of The Portrait of a Lady, as his modest Irish heroine, Eilis Lacey, arriving in the States from County Wexford in the early 1950s, can be read as a re-casting (in a different direction) of Isabel Archer.

I suppose I was aware that I was dealing with a young woman, as Henry James said about Isabel Archer, “confronting her destiny” but doing so almost ironically in the sense that she doesn’t really confront anything and she doesn’t really have a destiny; and that I was dealing with something that is one of those great, almost hidden subjects, oddly enough, which is the subject of Irish immigration. Though we know so much about it, we end up knowing so little about it. There are very few novels about it, for example…

The James thing was interesting to me, too, in that James deals with dramatizations of secrecy and of people having things they keep to themselves and that, if known, will be explosive. So too, in this book there are two sisters and they keep things deep in themselves. And I was interested in that dramatic power of withholding, which is something I think I learned a lot about from James — in his own life and perhaps moreso in his work.

Colm Toibin in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, May 2009.

Our fresh conversation on Brooklyn is topping up a sort of seance Colm Toibin and I enjoyed five years ago at the James family burial plot — on the fringe lawn, oddly enough, of the lesser Mount Auburn immortals. For me, nothing summons the ghost of the great Jameses, all of them, more studiously and more persuasively, than the melodious Irish voice of Colm Toibin. On Henry, for example:

You begin by admiring the work. But then I found that the life is so ambiguous and so interesting. His relationship to his family is constantly in a state of flux. He himself — in London, say — longs to go out. He longs for society; he gets an enormous number of stories from duchesses and archbishops. But he also longs to be alone. He never longs for the same thing twice. The next day he wants something else. He is a very fluid and mysterious character.

He sexuality remains mysterious. What sort of erotic life he must have had, what sort of dream life, remains entirely mysterious. It’s a pre-Freudian existence as Freud is coming into vogue. It’s a pre-Wildean existence as Wilde is coming into vogue.

He exile is also strange: the way in which he never really wrote about the English very well. His English characters don’t work for me. And yet he couldn’t write about a settled Boston. The Boston of the Metaphysical Club — that is lost on him, too.

So he realized in his last years that he could actually go and describe those Americans in Europe again — the disruptive presence of Americans whose wealth or whose ambitions would fit against an older and much more duplicitous society. He knew about duplicity, just as he knew about secrecy… His life as lived — the level of industry, the level of care taken with work, the secret suffering and also the secret glamor, the going to Italy, the living in palaces — all that is what he had.

Colm Toibin in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, 2004.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with George Scialabba (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3)

George Scialabba: ideas as life, not a living

In the din, that is, of over-caffeinated wonks and touts who pass for thinkers, I rejoice in a modern guy from the old neighborhood who reads around the clock in Matthew Arnold’s realm of “the best that has been said and thought in the world” and keeps writing what he thinks.

What Are Intellectuals Good For? is his new collection. The first answer to the question is his subtitle: “Essays and Reviews by George Scialabba.”

With a vocation but not a speciality, George Scialabba meets the Irving Howe standard of the public intellectual: “By impulse, if not definition,” Howe wrote of the New York circle in the 1950s, “the intellectual is a man who writes about subjects outside his field. He has no field.”

No tenure, either. No tank to think in, no social circle, no genius grant (yet), no seat in the opinion industry or on cable TV — “no province, no clique, no church,” as Whitman said of Emerson — not even a blog. Though yes, a website. George Scialabba’s “credentials” are only the steady heart and critical pen he brings to the ecstatic discipline of ideas.

Ideas seduced George as a Catholic kid in the Italian-American working class precincts of East Boston, the harbor neighborhood often mistaken for an airport. Affirmative action brought him to Harvard (Class of 1969). A half-conscious zeal to be a “divine secret agent” brought him into the narrow way of the lay order, Opus Dei. “Intellectual concupiscence, I guess” brought him out of the church onto the wide path of modernism.

The gods and demi-gods in George’s cast include Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Orwell; in America, Randolph Bourne and Dwight Macdonald, Susan Sontag, Walter Karp and Ralph Nader. The tilt is often but not always to the left. George’s deeper enthusiasm is for self-conscious humanists in the public square. “By that,” he writes, “I mean that their primary training and frame of reference were the humanities, usually literature or philosophy, and that they habitually employed values and ideals derived from the humanities to criticize contemporary politics… Their ’specialty’ lay not in unearthing generally unavailable facts but in penetrating especially deeply into the common culture, in grasping and articulating its contemporary moral/political relevance with special originality and force.”

Scott McLemee says it well in Inside Higher Ed: “If you can imagine a blend of Richard Rorty’s skeptical pragmatism and Noam Chomsky’s geopolitical worldview — and it’s a bit of a stretch to reconcile them, though somehow he does this — then you have a reasonable sense of Scialabba’s own politics. In short, it is the belief that life would be better, both in the United States and elsewhere, with more economic equality, a stronger sense of the common good, and the end of that narcissistic entitlement fostered by the American military-industrial complex.”

My conversation with George Scialabba is about whatever happened to the Williams James lineage of public intellectuals — to Emerson’s ideal of “Man Thinking” in his “American Scholar” essay. I ask him toward the end for his own specifications of the post-modern intellectual, a description of the ideal he’s seeking today:

GS: I think post-modernity is premature. I think we ought to postpone post-modernity for a few centuries, at least. I don’t think that modernity has exhausted its potential and the very sad fact is that nine tenths of the world, or eight tenths, or seven tenths, hasn’t yet entered modernity. This is a great, terrible indictment of us who have. We need to stop improving our lifestyles and just start inviting, at least pulling up, people who are trying to climb into the modern political and literary and intellectual and scientific culture. When nobody is getting less than two thousand calories of food or culture a day, then we can take off into the post-modern future—together. But now it just looks like we are really heading for a species division: some people are on such a fast-track to the future that, when other people are sunk in pre-modern misery, and its just not a healthy prognosis for the species.

CL: So who, then, are we looking for in the way of an example?

GS: Well, culturally I would say Wendell Berry and Sven Birkerts. People who have the sense of the vast, unexplored riches in the printed word, in the case of Birkerts, and in the natural world, in the case of Berry. People like Ralph Nader, who have a sense of the vast riches of the civic realm. They seem to be the exemplary modern men, and I don’t think that we should try to extend or go beyond their example so much as we should try to emulate it.

George Scialabba in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Boston, May 6, 2009.

It’s easy to see George Scialabba as the exception that proves the rule that “public intellectualism” is dead — stifled by the “power elite” in corporate universities and government, by television and the tyranny of advertising — “the modern substitute for argument,” as Santayana said; “its function is to make the worse appear the better.”

But I don’t buy the line. I don’t even buy George’s discouragement. The open architecture of the Web has diversified and, at many sites, enriched and intensified the play of accessible ideas, beyond our imagining, say, ten years ago. Among the exemplary great ones: edge.org, which keeps freshening the argument that biologists and brain scientists are now the critical source of public ideas; 3 Quarks, the best of global magazine racks; George’s favorite, Crooked Timber; my favorite, perhaps: Juan Cole’s Informed Comment, where a Middle East historian at Michigan became the Thucydides of the Iraq War. Yet clearly something is missing — some point of connection, some contemporary version of Chatauqua. Our moment of crisis and broad popular disillusionment might be a dream time for independent thinkers, but it isn’t yet. Is the fault in our stars or in ourselves, that we don’t have a bolder, more robust public culture?

Reif Larsen: stories, pictures and margins!

Maybe there are two Reif Larsens. One is, at 29, the precocious savior of the collapsing book business — the game-changer, anyway, who in a desperately down market got $900,000 for his first novel, with foreign rights on top of that. His assignment, apparently, is to do with his story-telling, illustrations and marginal commentary in The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet roughly what Yo-Yo Ma, with his tangos and Appalachian tunes and the Silk Road Project on top of his Bach cello suites, did for classical recording. This is Reif Larsen, the hope of an industry.

The other Reif Larsen is the young man in our conversation, in his mother’s art studio in a three-flat house on the Cambridge-Somerville line near Boston. We are sitting in front of one of his mother’s images: black-and-white female figures with slides projected onto their skin. “You can see,” he says, deadpan, “how I became fascinated with scientific diagramming.”

This Larsen is the child, as he says, of “an extraordinary collision of naturing and nurturing,” whose devoted parents and teachers have been getting out of his way all his life to let him be who he really is. This is the boy who drew ant anatomies for the sociobiologist and preeminent ant scientist E. O. Wilson. He’s the boy who never forgets the 7th grade teacher, Lois Hetland, who instructed him to draw his own detailed map of the globe; the same boy who hasn’t forgotten the coastlines of all the continents. The wonder of this Reif Larsen, you sense, isn’t really that he emerged so young. It’s rather that he took his time and poured all 29 years of his life so far into producing the Spivet yarn, about a 12-year-old mapmaker on a ranch in Montana who wins a grown-up prize from the Smithsonian Institution and wends his way to Washington to claim his victory. Spivet is a multi-media journey through a young man’s multiple intelligences. Here is Reif Larsen, the experimental story-teller, who would have found his own way, no matter what.

Reif Larsen speaks about literary influences, early and late, from Tedd Arnold’s No More Jumping on the Bed to Salinger’s stories, to Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, to Conrad and Garcia Marquez, to Tolstoy and Gogol, and now the Bosnian-American Aleksandar Hemon. He speaks also of the modern writer’s inescapable entangements with technology, and in particular of his resistance to the “hypertext” fiction that Robert “The End of Books” Coover was advocating when Larsen was a student at Brown a decade ago.

Of course the great irony is that [Spivet] is really an exploded hypertext book. I’ve come back. Thank you, Coover, is the moral of this. So, yes, I wanted the tenets ot narrative and character to be in place, but within that format I found… Originally all of the subtexts were in the footnotes. I had almost no images in the first draft. I have a love-hate relationship with footnotes… With some writers like Junot Diaz and Nicholson Baker and some of David Foster Wallace’s stuff, it really works. But often it’s an authorial intrusion where the author is saying “I know so much more about this.” There’s almost a pompousness in the writer saying: “you’ve got to do this, reader.” And as someone who’s interested in narrative and how we read, how we form stories in our head, the footnote didn’t feel right. Also T.S. wouldn’t have liked it. T.S. is a spatial thinker. He would have seen the page as a sort of map. So at some point in the process I made this really key breakthrough: They’re not footnotes! They’re going to be marginalia! From a reading point of view, the real breakthrough was the arrows, because suddenly you’re following a kind of diagram, you’re following a map, but you’re also doing a lot of lateral movement which mimics (at least in Western culture) the eye reading, how the eye reads. So I quickly found there was a key relationship between the main text and the subtext, or the sidebars. In that T. S. is almost most comfortable in these exploding diagrams, or in these annotations; and he’s willing to make observations, or risk a sort of emotional literacy that he wouldn’t in the main text if it’s tucked away. He dips his toe into the pond of adultness, often in the last line of a sidebar. So seeing how these two things react to each other was really interesting from a writer’s point of view. And pretty early on I wanted the reader to know: I can’t skip the margins!

Reif Larsen in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 8, 2009.

His next book, Reif Larsen says, will be “about an underground troupe of puppeteers, traveling around to places under siege, performing strange shows about particle physics, for the masses!”

What is the rock drummer thinking? Well, if he’s the dazzling first-novelist Paul Harding of Tinkers, the guy at the drums in the band known as “Cold Water Flat” was channeling Elvin Jones, reinventing time with his own hands and feet on drumsticks and pedals. He was listening to hear how sound works, how the world works, how he works. He may have been composing a contrapuntal bit of narrative that turns up on paper in this exchange between an itinerant mule-and-cart peddlar named Howard Aaron Crosby and his customers in the backwoods of Maine, circa 1900.

Where’s the soap?
This is the soap.
The box is different.
Yes, they changed it.
What was wrong with the old box?
Nothing.
Why’d they change it?
Because the soap is better.
The soap is different?
Better.
Nothing wrong with the old soap.
Of course not, but this is better.
Nothing wrong with the old soap. How can it be better?
Well, it cleans better.
Cleaned fine before.
This cleans better — and faster.
Well, I’ll just take a box of the normal soap.
This is the normal soap now.
I can’t get my normal soap?
This is the normal soap; I guarantee it.
Well I don’t like to try a new soap.
It’s not new.
Just as you say, Mr. Crosby. Just as you say.
Well, ma’am, I need another penny.
Another penny? For what?
The soap is a penny more, now that it’s better.
I have to pay a penny more for different soap in a blue box? I’ll just take a box of my normal soap.

From Tinkers by Paul Harding, pages 13 - 14. Bellevue Literary Press, New York, 2009.

Paul Harding [Gary Ottley photo]

Paul Harding’s prose in that moment can remind you of Marshall Dodge’s old “Bert and I” Maine stories. It can also sound like music: “Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation. There was the ring of pots and buckets…” We hear light percussive sounds of a human voice, repetitions finding a rhythm. We hear a musician becoming a writer — not a wild a leap, he observes in conversation.

The differences between being a rock drummer and writing are superficial. The obvious ones: you’re playing with a couple of other people on stage, and you’re doing it at an ungodly volume. I’m clinically half deaf and I have tinnitus and a ringing in my ear all the time. But writing scratches the same itch… Having been a drummer I write by ear. I write by rhythm, you know. I just think of the rhythm of the sentence, and there’s a certain number of beats in a sentence, in a phrase, in longer passages. So there’s a kind of arranging. And then certainly in all these multigenerational things going on in Tinkers, I’m just fascinated by the experience of time, of being in time, and all these characters thinking about time and all that. As a drummer… you can futz around with all sorts of time signatures and all sorts of beats. You can play a time signature within another time signature. You can do all that sort of stuff. It’s all narrative, and narrative is all about time. So that’s what you’re doing with the writing, too.

I saw Elvin Jones of the famous Coltrane quartet several dozen times and had the opportunity to sit right in front of him and watch what he did with time. He could tap into the depths of the universe… Drumming is multi-tasking, it’s orchestration. You think of it as a string quartet — in the way you can play counterpoint with yourself, with your own different limbs, that kind of thing. I think of that as the way of making narrative, too. Any given scene has different strata. You can have things moving very nimbly, very quickly in one level of the writing, with larger, deeper cycles going on beneath. And you can work all that contrast and counterpoint. It’s the way you actually pull depth and dimensionality out of things.

Paul Harding in conversation with Chris Lydon, in Essex, Massachusetts, May 5, 2009.

Paul Harding is also a self-taught modern New England transcendentalist, out of the Thoreau and Emerson school, who read his way into an original inner life. Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa Writers Workshop eased his transition from the drums to the keyboard. He’s read everything — been touched by Henry James and Proust and Carlos Fuentes and Michael Ondatje, among others — and he’s taught writing at Harvard.

Tinkers — as in country peddlars between the 19th and early 20th centuries — is an almost plotless novel, constructed as carefully as a clock, about fathers dying, thinking about their sons, and their fathers. It is a marvel on every page.

We’re taking two fresh measures here of the United States as military colossus — in two new books from the Watson Institute this spring. Two common points here: you won’t forget these perspectives once you’ve taken in the view; and you won’t see them anytime soon on page one of the New York Times. One is about our military real estate: 900-plus US military bases around the world — many of them toxic, more and more of them under local protest. The other is about the cultural process of war: the technology, media, narrative story line, TV and digital graphics of military power into the 21st Century. The anthropologist Catherine Lutz edited The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts. Political theorist James Der Derian wrote Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial Media-Entertainment Network.

I asked James Der Derian to take apart the pun in his title about virtue, virtuality, virtuosity…

JDD: I was hoping that “virtuous war” would be a felicitous oxymoron — the tension between the idea of war, which is bloody and dirty, and the whole idea in the virtuous that you can do good through something so blunt as warfare. Part of it comes out of the humanitarian intervention systems that evolved out of earlier administrations; we shouldn’t put this all on the doorstep of the Bush administration. You see it coming together, the virtual and the virtuous, both in doctrine and technology. The idea that what we can do should determine what we should do is part of the notion of “virtuous.” At one time the words “virtual” and “virtuous” were synonymous. They went down separate tracks in the Middle Ages. They always contained this idea of producing an effect at a distance, which technology can do; but it was about producing a good effect. Christ was in some ways a “virtual” tool of God. The notion also in Greek thinking as well of how the gods operated carried the idea of “virtuosity.” So in the United States it becomes almost a “deus ex machina” — to use war — in particular, a high-tech, low-casualty (at least for our side) form of warfare — to solve some of these intractable problems.

CL: What is the connection between the “war on terror” and your “virtuous war”?

James Der Derian: virtual virtuosity

JDD: It speaks to the virtualization of the enemy During the Cold War we had a fairly obvious enemy other. General Powell at one point said we’re being deprived of enemies: all we had left at one point was the North Koreans. In one way when you talk about the War on Terror, it’s to recognize that the old models, the old paradigms of war (particularly the idea of organized violence among and between states) no longer holds. And yet the master narrative continues. So you’re looking for some “other” to plug into this notion of “the enemy.” One reason why the President and others use the term “war on terror,” as absurd as it sounds, is that we didn’t want to recognize the face that you could have 19 terrorists spend about $500-thousand and incur close to $25-billion in immediate destruction, not including the Iraq war that followed, which is going to top out probably around $1-trillion before we get out of there.

CL: Is it possible that Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda mastered virtuous or virtual warfare before we did?

JDD: No, but it you look at what Bin Laden said in a famous interview in 2004, he’s talking about how “we’re going to provoke the superpower, provoke the Crusader, and we’re basically going to beggar them.” He was very savvy about the notion of how to magnify this minuscule group of really pathological heretics within Islam into this colossus that would produce this over-reaction — would call out almost an auto-immune response where our attempt at a cure would be worse than the disease. In that case, Bin Laden was incredibly rational and savvy about how to magnify what was a pretty insignificant force into something that now can play on the same field as the superpower.

James Der Derian in conversation with Chris Lydon and Catherine Lutz at the Joukowsky Forum, Brown University April 28, 2009.

Cathy Lutz picked up immediately on the convergence of these two scholars’ perspectives.

Catherine Lutz: a fantastical system

I think that’s exactly the way to look at the American military bases — as a response that has a certain rationality but ends up being a completely overwrought response to the notion of empire — of the desire that the United States has a role, should play and can play a role in controlling events around the world. Hence this global spread and distribution of these bases with that dream behind it of global control, global surveillance, global knowledge. The assumption that there’s a lot of rationality in the system as a whole — we need to rethink that. There’s rationality in parts of it, different forms of rationality, but they form up into what we can see is a pretty fantastical system… It costs over $100-billion in the US military budget. It’s a very significant investment in a certain kind of idea of the world, and the US role in it.

Catherine Lutz in conversation with Chris Lydon and James Der Derian at the Joukowsky Forum, Brown University April 28, 2009.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Kennedy (48 minutes, 22 mb mp3)

David Kennedy: ethical jeopardy

I’ve never read an introspection quite like Kennedy’s memoir, The Rights of Spring, about his innocence abroad in Uruguay in 1984. These could be extended notes for a screenplay of a key life moment, questions we all ask ourselves: What am I doing in this picture? Who would play me in my movie? What are the camera angles and points of view here? Why did I say what I said? What did she hear me say? What’s going on below the surface between lawyer and prisoner? Between lawyer and judge? What is the hierarchy of rules in play? And why did Kennedy’s moments of intense connection with the Uruguayan prisoners reaffirm a gulf of estrangement?

On a second reading, I thought: this book would do (for soldiers and civilians) as a “counterinsurgency manual.” I feel some disproportion here. David Kennedy has exhumed more delicate questions about his case against torture than some of our public servants asked about inflicting torture. Why so much anguish about human-rights interventions, and so relatively little about the military kind? Who is pressing David Kennedy’s examination of conscience about our military campaign in Afghanistan?

The argument of this book — and of a parallel book I wrote about the law of war — is to try to awaken within the military command, also among soldiers in the field, a sense of their own moral agency. One more anecdote: there are all these stories of soldiers in Iraq who came back from the field quite troubled that they had killed civilians or children. And then they’re connected back to duty and back to mental health by their mental health professionals, by their pastors, by their military commanders, who say: what you did was proportional. In one way or another, distinctions and norms are used to quiet the very normal sense of ethical jeopardy that goes with violence.

I this book I’m talking about the ethical jeopardy that goes with political action, which I don’t think is any more or less dramatic than the ethical jeopardy that goes with military affairs. But the mechanisms in which it’s shrouded and elided and denied are quite similar.

David Kennedy in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Joukowsky Forum, Brown University April 29, 2009.

The public point of the book is to wonder what’s left of the human rights movement after many of its ideals have been encased in government and big bureaucracies — and many others have been trashed on our side at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Gaza. On elite campuses like Brown, it is almost an undergraduate rite of passage to start your own NGO to attack hunger, disease or an ancient injustice in the back of beyond. But is “human rights” still a viable cause, or career?

Amitav Ghosh & Robert Coover

Our conversation draws on the novelist Robert Coover’s exercise of conscience about freedom of expression in the world. Today. Burma was the focus this week of what’s become an annual International Writers’ Project teach-in at Brown.

Burma of the thin-skinned but immovable military regime in Rangoon. Burma of the Nobel Prize prisoner and non-violent point of resistance Aung San Suu Kyi. Burma of Kipling’s old “Road to Mandalay” (how we loved the Sinatra version) and the mahogany, jewels and oil that the British Empire stripped from the land between the 1820s and World War 2.

After our week with Burmese poets, artists and writers who’ve done hard time, some in solitary, in modern Burma, our conversation here is with Robert Coover about the artists’ predicament, and with the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, whose first big novel, The Glass Palace, retold the colonial story behind the “news” of Burma. Resonating around the conversation somewhere is the spreading scandal of official US torture of terror suspects after the 9.11 attack on New York, through the war in Iraq.

Amitav Ghosh makes a point of starting off with Burma’s colonial history. He’s driving much the same point that Mahmoom Mamdani posed against the American (typically “liberal”) reflex to moralize and racialize our stories of faraway people.

Burma experienced colonialism, perhaps, in the most extreme way, where it was almost completely ransacked. After 1885 it was, actually, strangely similar to Iraq. The British went in under the guise of freedom and so on. Shock and awe, tyranny, all those tropes were there. But then after that they were faced with this very long resistance, so the during the pacification campaign, thousands and thousands of Burmese were killed. And ever after the countryside was fairly unsettled, so there was a lot of brigandage and so on. So then after that, I think, what profoundly affected Burma was the Second World War. People don’t adequately recognize that in the Second World War, when the British were withdrawing from Burma against the Japanese attack, they adopted the “scorched earth” policy. They literally laid waste to all of the infrastructure that they themselves had built in Burma. All the bridges, all the railways, all the warehouses, all the oil pumps. Everything was just blown up. But then the Japanese did come in, and when the British were reinvading, the Japanese adopted the same policy. So Burma was flattened twice. You think of the sort of aid Europe got, the Marshall Plan and so on. After the Second World War, Burma got nothing. There it was, this really poor country, completely devastated, it had no way of really rebuilding itself. You know, what has happened in Burma is one of the great tragedies for which the whole world, in a sense, bears responsibility.

Amitav Ghosh in conversation with Robert Coover and Chris Lydon at the Brown’s International Writers Project, April 23, 2009.

Historical amnesia is Ghosh’s thread to Iraq and the furor today about the CIA’s “harsh interrogation techniques” in the Bush years.

You know, I must say, I sort of knew that the Iraq war would be a catastrophe. But since then, so much of what happened there, actually, is incomprehensible. Leaving aside the torture, do you remember, a couple of weeks after the fall of Baghdad, there was an Iraqi general who actually went to the American authorities and surrendered? He surrendered. His sons came with him. The next he was heard of he had been wrapped in a carpet and beaten so badly that he died. Now, can you imagine an American doing that to, say, a German general in the Second World War? It is inconceivable. Can you imagine the British doing that to a French general during the Napoleonic Wars? It is literally inconceivable. How is it possible that these deep, deep taboos, not just in global culture, but specifically in Western culture, come to be flouted so easily? This other thing, this torture business, you know, the Prussian state, of all, abolished torture as a method in the 18th century because Frederick the Great said that it doesn’t work. All the things that people are saying today, he said. And ever since it has been one of the rules of warfare and, you know, the rules of warfare basically decided what civilized conduct was… So it is strange to see these arguments being rehashed over two hundred years later.

Amitav Ghosh in conversation with Robert Coover and Chris Lydon at the Brown’s International Writers Project, April 23, 2009.

Amitav Ghosh in his public talk here relayed a subtle and fascinating piece of advice from Burma’s most famous resister, Aung San Suu Kyi. Resist politics, too, she has told her followers. That is: resist the post-modern tendency to locate morality in politics alone. This was the example of several Burmese artists at Brown this week, none more touching than the physician and writer Ma Thida, who said that she survived in prison by meditating 20 hours every day. The lesson for all of us seemed to be: remember also (quite apart from politics) the inner life, “laughter, love and joy,” as the last repositories of moral consciousness.

Robert Coover took the advice, first, with a grain of salt; and then as an embrace of art.

I have worked a lot on political issues and have always been disappointed at how few were alert to those issues and how many were sunning themselves on the green, enjoying their inner lives. But, I think that one of the roots here — it’s what we all pretend, anyway, is the root – is the thought that art itself has this function. The novel, the painting, and, now, digital art as well: all of our modes come into deep focus without having an external object at which that is aimed. So that you can be moved by music at the same time you are moved against American foreign policy. And I think that’s our hope as performers.

Robert Coover in conversation with Amitav Ghosh and Chris Lydon at the Brown’s International Writers Project, April 23, 2009.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Carlos Fuentes (22 minutes, 10 mb mp3)

Mexico’s statuesque novelist, the handsomest, best-tailored writer in the world, sounds euphoric in spite of The Crisis — maybe because, as Brazil’s President Lula has said, “we didn’t start it this time. It was the blond guys with blue eyes.”

On Fuentes annual sojourn at Brown, he is riffing with us on changes we believe in, and a few we don’t.

Carlos Fuentes: stroke of genius [PM photo]

CL: Carlos Fuentes, the world has changed, rather in your direction since I have seen you. Take stock.

CF: Well, I spent eight years of my wasted life with George Bush.

CL: You weren’t alone.

CF: I am glad that is over because I have a deep feeling for the United States since I went to school here as a child during the era of Franklin Roosevelt. So my ideal is the Rooseveltian ideal: the New Deal. When I see it as left behind, corrupted, violated as it was in the Bush years, I feel extremely sad about the United States. People say I am anti-American. No, I am pro-Roosevelt…

CL: Mexico’s politics have changed [since the PRI got thrown out ten years ago]. When does the economics catch up?

CF: I am afraid it is not catching up at all, because in Mexico we need to put the people to work. We have a great reserve of labor, which we are not using. We are thinking that if private enterprise takes up the slack of this crisis, we will go through it, but I don’t think that is true. I think that basically in Mexico we have to renew our infrastructures and modernize the country with the abundant workforce that we have. It is not a question of trickle-down capitalism, we have to build from the bottom up, as Roosevelt did in the United States in the ‘30s…

CL: The news, of course, is about the fear of Mexico becoming a narco-state: that both the guns and the drugs are making their way through these tunnels into the United States and Mexico. Put that into perspective.

CF: Let’s say that the narco-wars in Mexico cause around 100 deaths. 90 of those deaths are between the capos of the gun cartels—like Al Capone in Chicago—they are gangs fighting, and murdering, each other. About 8 are police and army personnel and about 2 percent are civilians, so that is the way that cookie crumbles. Besides, it is localized in the north of Mexico, in Ciudad Juarez, Baja California and Tampico. But it is not a universal problem in Mexico, it is not nationwide. But that they are infiltrating governments, that they are infiltrating politics—that is also true. The reverse of the coin is that the origin of the problem is in the United States. And as long as the United States does not know who creates demand for drugs, who are the banks that clean the money that comes from the border, who are the people who are manipulating, using the drug business in the United States, we will never know the truth.

There is the great thing from the Obama administration, which is to accept that this is a bilateral problem that requires a bilateral solution. It is not only a problem of Mexico, it is a problem of the United States demanding the drug, supplying the arms and making the money. Let’s see if this is cleared up by the present administration in Washington.

CL: Your friend and mine, ex-president Ricardo Lagos from Chile, was worried that all of the discovery of these fifty-plus tunnels has been on the Mexican side. The United States, for all of its alarm, can’t seem to find the other end of the tunnel.

CF: It has to be because the United States and the Bush administration refused to accept that this was a bilateral problem shared by Mexico and the United States. [Under Bush,] it was only a problem created by Mexico against the United States. When you accept that it is a bilateral problem, you see the other end of the tunnels.

CL:: What do you think is unfolding in the [United States] relationship with Cuba?

CF: I think that more is happening than what meets the eye. I think that there is an agreement, basically, between the United States and Cuba to go step-by-step. I mean, after fifty years of cold war, it is natural that the steps be taken cautiously. But I think there is an agreement basically for both Havana and Washington to take the steps, hesitatingly, Hillary Clinton makes one declaration, Raul Castro makes another, Fidel intervenes, Obama intervenes. We are going towards a normalization of relationships. Now, will this affect the internal politics of Cuba? At the meeting in Trinidad, everyone demanded that Cuba be readmitted into the Organization of American states, but there is a proviso there, and that is that the governments must be democratically elected, which is not the case of the Cuban regime. How do you get through that hurdle? Come on.

The present situation is an anachronism. It was built on the fact that Cuba was a satellite of the Soviet Union. There is no Soviet Union anymore. What danger does Cuba represent? None whatsoever. It has a regime that is distasteful, it is not democratic, but you can have relations with an authoritarian capitalism, which is the way that I guess that Cuba will go, following China and Vietnam…you have good relations with them under the system of authoritarian capitalism. You can live with it.

CL: You’ve been watching the United States your whole life. Send us a postcard, about us.

CF: I am extremely optimistic. You know I’ve always said that the American presidential election should be universal. We should all have a right to vote for the President of the United States because it affects us all, and I think that 80% of the world would have voted for Barack Obama. I think he represents hope. It’s a novelty, it’s a good novelty, he’s a good man, an interesting, an intelligent and generous man — for me its great news to have such a man in the White House, it’s very good news.

CL: Zadie Smith says that he has, on some level, the mind of a novelist. He is a great man for writing dialogue, for hearing other voices, for multiplicity of perspectives.

CF: He ends his sentences, which Bush never could… Politically, he is very good news. He is in the right direction for the present crisis. It was genius on the part of the American people to elect such a man at this time.

Carlos Fuentes in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, April 23, 2009.

David Polonsky:

“Waltz with Bashir” is the Israeli war film that broke through to everything but an Oscar. It’s the “documentary cartoon” that uses the visual language of comic books to pry open the grotesque sealed memory of war.

Even as Israeli Defense Forces were smashing Gaza last December, the movie got high marks in Israel and around the world for resurfacing IDF complicity in the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla camps in the “despised” war in Lebanon back in 1982.

“Waltz with Bashir” recapitulates one soldier’s nightmares of the long-ago war to implant fresh nightmares in the audience. It’s an experiment with animation, of all things, to break the spell of war-without-end.

With the art director of “Waltz with Bashir,” David Polonsky, visiting Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design, we’re talking about animation as a guess, a stab at simulation, of how memory works; and about story-telling as an “intervention” against the chronic continuity of official violence.

James Der Derian of the Brown faculty is the author of Virtuous War in which he extends the “military industrial” complex to include its partners in media and entertainment. He leads the conversation here in praise of animation as an artistic link between reality and the subconscious.

On the one hand, the defamiliarization of animation allows you initially to take some distance from the story. But at some point (I think it has to do with the way that the brain visually assimilates information) the filter or the rational distancing fell by the wayside. I felt like it was almost directly accessing a part of the brain, because after all, the brain, through evolution, processes visual images first in a primal way and then the images go up to the language center, which is actually a much smaller part of our brain.

Watching “Waltz With Bashir,” you almost got into some primal, visual — I am going to call it — the truth center. So I found the film much more disturbing and harder to understand in a kind of removed, intellectual way, than if it had been a straight frame that I am more familiar with, which is documentary film or Hollywood war blockbusters. I think that is why it came back into our nightmares.

We all know what Marx said about the unconsciousness of the past: that it weighs on us like a nightmare. That somehow triggered all kinds of past memories about war in my own family history. So I think it was remarkable how the film was able to achieve that kind of new channeling of a part of the brain that is not normally a part of film watching, film spectating. 

James Der Derian in Open Source conversation with David Polonsky at the Watson Institute, April 15, 2009.

David Polonsky take his artistic bows gracefully, but he is rueful about the frustration of a larger project here. I’d asked him if he and producer Ari Folman had thought of “Waltz with Bashir” as a sort of “intervention” in a pathological condition.

Yes, of course. Nobody involved in the work was thinking for a moment that this film will stop war in any place. But, yeah, it is expression. It is art. It is the need of the self to express itself. It’s not made to achieve a certain outcome but it is there to say: I’m here and I can’t stand it anymore.

CL: How did you and Ari Folman feel at the time of Gaza, December ‘08, not just the massacre but the fact that the war seemed to be hugely popular in Israel?

DP: Deeply depressed. It is very unnerving and it is very hard to remain optimistic. The sense was that we lost the last strongholds of rationality — that everybody’s, well, insane. Again if there is some kind of hope, it is in chaos. It is in the fact that this is not the result of any kind of rational thinking. And when it is not rational it can change in a moment. Because if it doesn’t change in a moment, it was rational, and the end would not come in my lifetime. And I am not prepared for that.

David Polonsky in Open Source conversation with James Derderian et al. at the Watson Institute, April 15, 2009.

Thanks and thumbs-up to the other guest movie reviewers here: Amy Kravitz of RISD for her wisdom on film animation, and Keith Brown of the Watson Institute for his anthropological eye.

“Practicing” — meaning:

James Carroll: radical, pastoral, sacramental

…that through these disciplines, rituals, and searches, we have some prospect of getting better. This, therefore, is practice like the practice of an art or sport. That we are practicing means, above all, that we are not perfect — not in faith, hope, or charity. Not in poverty, chastity or obedience. Not in the cardinal virtues, or the works of mercy, or the acts of contrition. Not in peace or justice. Not in the life of prayer, which is nothing but attention to the presence of God. In all of this we are practicing, which is the only way we know to be a Catholic.

James Carroll, Practicing Catholic, Houghton Mifflin, 2009. p. 10

“Americanist” — meaning: stamped with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s individualism and universal in-dwelling spirit. Embodied in the Boston priest of JFK’s inaugural, Richard Cardinal Cushing, who was moved by his love of his sister’s Jewish husband, Dick Pearlstein, to bury the old Roman boast that there was “no salvation outside the church.” Jim Carroll’s Americanist piety moves in a zone between, on one hand, our overtly secular national culture and, on the other, the anti-modern, anti-democratic European church tradition that Pope Benedict XVI seems to be reviving.

“Catholic” — meaning:

The practicing Catholic is at Mass. What makes a Catholic? This tradition is sacramental. The practice of Mass trumps all doctrine. We can have disagreements with the Pope and the bishops — about abortion, birth control, stem cell research, the miracles of the saints, all of that. But what we have in common is the intuition that at the table, around bread and wine, we encounter each other and God in a profound way. It’s food. It feeds a kind of hunger. Catholics go to Mass. What is a practicing Catholic? It’s somebody who goes to Mass.

James Carroll in conversation with Chris Lydon in Boston, April 10, 2009.

Jim Carroll, like me, was in the last generation of Latin-Mass altar boys, a child of the “faux-medieval” Catholic Church before the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s. He was a Paulist Priest and university chaplain for five years, and was then absolved of his vows to pursue a rival vocation: writing. For most of 30 years now Jim has modeled to me what it could mean to modernize a tradition that, even if we didn’t quite grasp it, grasped us forever.

Long ago over lunch with our friend, Bernard Avishai, the question was, “No kidding, do you believe in God?” When I hesitated a while, Jim said: “Chris, you believe in music…,” which I surely did. That was a rough start of a religious inquiry which led, not least, to my second baptism at the Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston in 1987. Along the way, Jim, Bernie, I and a grown-up variety of seekers (mostly Jews and Catholics, of many degrees of conviction and curiosity) read and chewed over the Bible, twice, from Genesis to Revelation.

Our conversation resumed this Good Friday morning over coffee and Jim Carroll’s arresting new book, Practicing Catholic. Jim is a learned radical in religion, ever at odds with the hierarchy, and still “incurably pastoral.” I think of myself as an ill-educated spiritual enthusiast, “eternally hungry.” And so it astonishes me to read anew how often our searching paths crossed over the years — around Emerson, for example, and Cardinal Cushing, who baptized me at birth; also Martin Luther King Jr., William Sloane Coffin, Thomas More and Thomas Merton.

Part of my puzzle in all these ruminations is whether Jim and I are sharing the fixations of one generation of American guys, or rather questions that reach all sorts of other people sooner or later. So your own versions of Jim’s questions and mine – church, tribe, belief, modernity and God – are entirely to the point and much more than welcome.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Ricardo Lagos and Romano Prodi (61 minutes, 28 mb mp3)

The drift of the conversation is that the global crisis is a mix of comeuppance and liberation. The crisis is surely an end of something, reminiscent of the fall of the Berlin Wall; it marks perhaps equally a rebirth of citizenship as a relief from consumership. The game here — with the retired chieftains of Chile and Italy, both professors-at-large at Brown University — is to see ourselves in the world “as others see us.”

President Lagos of Chile (2000-2006)

It is very bad. What I think is that the origin of the crisis is Americans in the United States living beyond their standard of living; and the fact that there is a tremendous deficit now that has to be financed. Someone else has been financing the deficit and that has mainly been China… Alan Greenspan has to recognize that he was wrong when he thought the financial system could be self-regulated… Because of the crisis it is necessary to think in a different way. Very similar to what happened here in this country 80 years ago with Roosevelt, there are going to be new regulations to solve the crisis, and this is what we are in the middle of.

Ricardo Lagos in a Watson Institute conversation with Chris Lydon at Brown University, April 7, 2009.

Premier Prodi of Italy (1996-98; 2006-08)

Romano Prodi put the repair — the reconception, really — of the US - Russia relationship on the top of his priority list. The point, he suggested, is to bury not just the Cold War but the polarizing, triumphalist mindset that grew up around it and lived beyond it. When I asked if he could imagine Barack Hussein Obama changing the world’s view of Islam, Prodi said: he’s already half-way there:

You know, the relationship to the Islamic world vis-à-vis the American president today has nothing to do with [the relationship that existed] a few months ago… He was, in my opinion, very brave vis-à-vis the American public opinion to open the dialogue with Iran… So, I think that if the dialogue goes on, the relations with the Islamic countries will change completely. Certainly not with the terrorists who are out of any control—you will need time, generations. But I think that with the Islamic world as a general entity he has already changed the situation. Already he has changed expectations. You listen. This is already a great change. I am confident that some results may come. For the Israeli-Palestinian conflict you need to create an atmosphere before, but even for that conflict, if you create the atmosphere, you have chances to solve the problem.

Romano Prodi in a Watson Institute conversation with Chris Lydon at Brown University, April 7, 2009.

Ricardo Lagos of Chile and Romano Prodi of Italy are the statesmen on hand: progressives, hatched as oppositionists, both famous for candor and then some. Ex-president Lagos was a spearpoint of the “No” movement in Chile, the man who pointed his finger at Augusto Pinochet in 1989 and said: you will not give us “another eight years of tortures, murders and human-rights violations” — and lived to tell about it. Romano Prodi, leading the not-Berlusconi alliance in Italy, won the prime minister’s office in 1996 and again in 2006.

In a crazy-quilt of talk that touched on the Armenian question in Turkey; cocaine-and-gun tunnels on the US-Mexico border; the expansion of the G-8 to the G-20 in what may be in truth a G-2 boardroom of the US and China; the US opening to Iran; and the chance of burying the Cold War mindset along with the Cold War — the thread through it all was the “Obama Effect” on global reality. And the consensus between the two professors-at-large before a full house at Brown was that the arrival of Barack Obama on the world stage is very like a miracle, a late vindication of resiliency and openness in American society, a new start for politics, a world-historical opportunity.

Who can imagine that a Save Darfur coalition vocally including Al Sharpton (”we know when America comes together, we can stop anything in the world”), Mia Farrow, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Elie Wiesel (”Darfur today is the world’s capital of human suffering”), Nat Hentoff, Bob Geldof, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Harold Pinter, Oprah Winfrey, the gold-medal speed skater Joey Cheek, Tony Blair and Dario Fo might be profoundly shallow in its reading of the brutal warfare in Sudan five years ago… and just as wrong-headed in its drum beat for an American intervention?

Mahmood Mamdani: pornography of “evil”

Mahmood Mamdani can. We are talking here about his book Saviors and Survivors and his argument that the Darfur rescue campaign, which became a sacred cause of our civil religion, was not so much the moral alternative to Iraq, the Bush “war on terror,” and Cheney-think as it was a variation and extension of the same toolkit. I begin with a sort of confession that I may be a sample of Mamdani’s problem — having drenched myself in Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times columns and largely absorbed the common framework that Darfur was about Arabs slaughtering Africans, and that somebody had to something about it.

If you represent my problem, then I think you also represent my solution. If you interviewed Nicholas Kristof, then you participated in shaping to some extent that audience which is the constituency of Save Darfur. I need to get to that audience because I need to turn a sermon into a debate and a discussion. I need to sow some seeds of doubt about what have been presumed to be simply goodwill gestures. I need to convince that audience that there is a politics around this — not simply good intentions and moralism and a fight against evil. I need to tell them that there is no such thing as a trans-historical evil in the world in which we live; that, in fact, all violence without exception has causes, and the causes are historical. And if you want to do something about the violence, we need to do something about the causes. The idea that violence is its own explanation is an idea which will take us nowhere except into a cycle of violence.

Mahmood Mamdani in conversation with Chris Lydon in Boston, April 2, 2009.

What held the Save Darfur campaign together? In his book, Mamdani concludes that inside the hyped numbers and moral spin was a sort of conspiracy of prejudices and neo-imperial impulses to head off the unity and independence of Africa.

The Save Darfur lobby in the United States has turned the tragedy of the people of Darfur into a knife with which to slice Africa by demonizing one group of Africans, African Arabs…

The Save Darfur lobby demands, above all else, justice, the right of the international community — really the big powers in the Security Council — to punish “failed” or “rogue” states, even if it be at the cost of more bloodshed and a diminished possibility of reconciliation. More than anything else, “the responsibility to protect” is a right to punish without being held accountable — a clarion call for the recolonization of “failed” states in Africa. In its present form, the call for justice is really a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonize Africa.

Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror., p. 300. Pantheon, 2009.

Mahmoud Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman professor of government at Columbia, is a socio-historical anthropologist of Africa and also of American media and fashions in public wisdom. He is taking apart American attitudes that took hold around Iraq and the so-called “war on terror” and that will surely affect our path to Afghanistan and the Obama team’s reconception of our American place in the world.

I loved this conversation as a short course in how to think like an anthropologist — how to peel back events to find unwritten rules and unseen implications in a social order — Africa’s and ours.

Listen for the ideas here that reach beyond Africa, anger and accustion. The most challenging may be the argument that “survivors’ justice” (”inside” repairs, modeled on South Africa’s “truth and reconciliation” process) comes to seem much more promising than “victors’ justice” (”outside” punishment, as in the Nuremberg Trials, and de-Baathification in Iraq) as means of reforming politics and remaking broken societies.

How many setbacks does it take to induce moral clarity, or to create an opportunity? This seems to be the general question at the Harvard-MIT conference on Gaza this week.

In the short term, horror seems to freeze hearts and harden old positions. The hundred-to-one ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths in the Gaza bloodbath, the gross imbalance of forces and weaponry stir remorse and rage.

To what effect? As Meron Benvenisti observes in our conversation, the shaming of Israel (even the self-shaming in Israel) stir up defiance, too, and helped elect a new right-wing government of Israel.

My conversations on the sidelines at MIT on Monday and Harvard on Tuesday are with two stubborn peaceniks who never give up – on their almost opposite ideas.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Henry Siegman and Meron Benvenisti (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3)

First Henry Siegman, a pillar of the liberal Jewish establishment in America (Roger Cohen’s hope, on the New York Times site) is using a direct channel to President Obama to say: only you, Mr. USA, can make and enforce a fair 2-state peace when clearly Israelis and Palestinians cannot.

Meron Benvenisti: the one-state reality

Then Meron Benvenisti, once the deputy major of Jerusalem. His answer is: No! the two peoples will learn to live (respectfully, as they now live contemptuously) in a single state. Civil rights and legal equality will be the substitute for Palestinian self-determination. Ireland and South Africa are his current-day examples of power-sharing as the alternative to separate-and-unequal sovereignties. As Benvenisti feels it, the inescapable reality of geography and history in Palestine-Israel is the common fate, the intimately scrambled fortunes of two peoples. In this main argument, Benvenisti sounds a lot like the late Edward Said. And it’s among the “occupied, dominated” Palestinians, Benvenisti says, that the logic of collective and civil rights in a unitary state will keep gathering momentum.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Tricia Rose and “Braunze.” (47 minutes, 23 mb mp3)

Tricia Rose: “keep it real” & market fantasy

The civil rights movement made Obama possible… Now there’s no question that hip hop encouraged the cultural comfort that Obama represents, but he really represents the fruition of a civil rights legacy. That’s what I think people see in him predominantly. We’re reading through a hip hop lens that has four generations of black culture behind it. Almost all of his gestures, his language, his connection to the church, everything he does is both “civil rights” and occasionally “hip hop generation.” Young people see the connection to hip hop. They see the “brush your shoulder,” the fist-bump and all these moments, and there’s a great deal of excitement about those symbolic points of continuity. I see that. But if he’s hip hop, how do we account for this sense of systemic belonging that he represents? …There’s really no rhetorical continuity between Obama’s political vision as an elected official in the system, in the highest office, and the cultural politics of marginality, outsider status, and a kind of perpetual speaking-truth-to-power type of politics. There’s no parallel.

Patricia Rose in conversation with Chris Lydon, March 24, 2009 at the Watson Institute.

Braunze, the embodiment of call-in radio wisdom, on the line from Birmingham, goes a step further.

Braunze: hit the reset button

I think that hip hop is the antithesis of Obama. What it has turned into is the antithesis of all the values and progressive understandings that black culture has had since we landed here 4 or 5 hundred years ago… It’s a “faux African-American” culture. This correlation, this conflation of hip hop culture with Barack Obama is all wrong. Barack Obama is just a brotha! I think all of us hope that the Obama Effect eclipses hip hop… The corporate conception of hip hop, when adopted by African-American youth, is an opportunity death sentence. These are my relatives and friends I’m speaking about. The aesthetic, or anti-aesthetic, of hip hop is such that the opportunity they’d like to have is fated to be impossible.

Technologist and singer “Braunze” in conversation with Chris Lydon and Tricia Rose, March 24, 2009.

1. Unless the West suddenly gets a new act together, China wins the global crisis — because it has cash, a production machine, an orderly, top-down system co-designed by Milton Friedman and Stalin, and a domestic market of customers if and when export demand collapses.

2. The turmoil in finance capital has also the dimensions of a “civilizational” crisis (what do we stand for after greed and consumption… of such things as a new Paris Hilton line of apparel, for dogs?) and an advancing crisis of the human habitat, our lifeline with nature.

3. One way to see Barack Obama in this situation is as “our Gorbachev”: the designated captain whose assignment is to save the crumbling pillar on our side of the old Cold War, or surrender the regime.

By the old rule that the trick in life is to locate three main points (in anything), there’s my free translation of a fascinating Watson Institute conference last weekend. Between the lines, most of it, but clear enough.

Ugo Mattei is the “color” man in this conversation. He’s a law professor in Turin and Los Angeles, a Gramscian lefty, who contributed the Obama-Gorbachev connection and said that what the world really wants from the United States at this point is “a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy.”

Ugo Mattei: historic proportions

You can’t transform human experience into a technological game. There has been a complete distortion, I think, in the way of thinking in these last 25 or 30 years in the United States: that just because they were enjoying a technological advantage, that meant that they were intellectually superior to the others. So either there is now a humble declaration of bankruptcy of this kind of attitude, and all the rest will follow, or we’re back to the beginning. There is so much to be done in dismantling the military apparatus, and nothing is happening on this side. Talking about the “greening” of capitalism and all this kind of stuff while the world is infected by American military bases, with nuclear weapons, with consuming a lot of energy, creating a disaster wherever they are (socially, morally, intellectually) is only once again talking of all these things as if they can be understood in terms of numbers. This thing has to be understood politically. It requires a new humanism. It requires a vision of the long-term. It requires a real transformation. This is why I hope the crisis is going to go really, really bad, so that then we can restart.

Ugo Mattei in conversation with Chris Lydon, March 14, 2009 at the Watson Institute.

Alfred Gusenbauer is the credentialed heavy-hitter here. A Socialist former Chancellor of Austria, he sounds troubled by the Obama team’s emphasis on a unilateral re-stimulation of an overfed American economy.

Alfred Gusenbauer: rebalance or fall

In history, a crisis of this size normally led to revolution or war. Our task nowadays is to handle the crisis, overcome the crisis at least without war, but with a revolution of our minds. I think it is utterly necessary…

I think that there are still three options: one is the fundamental crash of the world economy. The second is what we call the Japanese experience: more or less stagnation for the next ten years. And the third is that we will be able to solve the crisis within the next two or three years. But this only will be possible if there is an international management that is trying to reconcile some of the fundamental imbalances that are inherent in the world economy. Without balancing those, there is no way out of the crisis…

The pursuit of greed will not help to solve the crisis. There will not be recovery without redistribution… If nations or social classes pursue what they have done, and what led to the crisis, there will be no way out. One has to understand that the key to the recovery is the abandonment of the concept of greed and to adopt a concept of sharing.

Alfred Gusenbauer in conversation with Chris Lydon, March 14, 2009 at the Watson Institute.

The other strong contributors here are sociologist Ho-fung Hung of Indiana University, Bloomington; journalist and documentarian Nandan Unnikrishnan of the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi; and the Indian businessman Samir Saran.

Adam Bradley is talking about the President of Flow — about how 30 years of hip-hop (”the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world”) laid down the rhyme-and-rhythm track for the Age of Obama. Add this to the open-source mix of Obama ingredients, along with the “black prophetic tradition” of church and civil-rights history:

Adam Bradley: strong rhyme, 4/4 time

Part of it is that sense of swagger… the confidence with which Barack Obama carries himself and the fluency he brings, across racial lines… You listen to Barack Obama’s speeches from 2004, and you hear consistently the drumbeat of the common good, a broader understanding of race.

So that dogged trans-racialism — I am not going to say that he is post-racial, because he is very much someone who takes us deeper into race, rather than away from it — defies some of the binary ideas of Black and White that a lot of black political figures over the last several generations have used to consolidate power. That is his “threat,” and maybe also a place we can see him picking up on hip-hop, a movement that has on it a clear association with black identity, but from its birth, was multi-racial, was about community across racial lines: Latinos, White hipsters of lower Manhattan coming together with hip-hoppers to create this new form.

There is a new American reality out there. We’re only starting to catch up with hip-hop in that regard. We are just catching up to where hip-hop has already been. Barack Obama manifests that.

Jay-Z has a line on that song, “My President is Black,” in which he says, “My president is black/ in fact he’s half white/ So even in a racist’s mind he’s half right/ So even if you got a racist mind its alright/ My president is black but his house is all white.” There is so much joy in that, and so much behind the correction that Jay-Z is giving to Young Jeezy’s line of “my president is black.” Adding that half-white element is so fundamental to understanding how Obama works.

A lot of people, Shelby Steele in particular, have thought about Obama as a kind of bargainer — a Bill Cosby, or better yet, a Heathcliff Huxtable for American politics in the twenty-first century: someone who is identifiably black and yet curries favor with whites, or at least makes them comfortable and unburdens them of some of their sense of guilt… I think that this misses some of what Obama does and what Obama can do in part because of his biraciality. There is a way that he has the capacity to bridge the divide, not in an artificial way of placation, but as a genuine embodiment of himself. Because he has already had to do that in his own life, his own personality.

Ralph Ellison has that phrase, “the completion of personality.” What we have seen, and we are able to witness it in [Obama's] memoir, Dreams From My Father, in particular, is a child of mixed racial origins and a lot of mixed connections with the Black and African sides of his origin, nonetheless finding his way, stumbling his way, toward a sense of wholeness. And maybe, just maybe, he can help this country do the same thing.

Adam Bradley in conversation with Chris Lydon, March 11, 2009

Adam Bradley makes a polished case for the rough diamonds of rap and hip hop. It’s “new-school music but old-school poetry,” he says, solidly founded not only on African oral tradition, black “signifying” and word-play artists like Muhammad Ali (”the first heavyweight champion of rap”) but also on the ancient sounds of strong-stress English poetry back to Beowulf.

Bradley was raised both classical and hip: home-schooled in Salt Lake City by a grandmother who fed him Shelley and the Romantic poets; and night-schooled by a big brother who led him through town. In his Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, you can feel Bradley’s valiant drive to justify the sound of rap to two exacting influences: the queen mother of “close reading” who taught him at Harvard, Helen Vendler; and the fussiest of all authorities on jazz, Ralph Ellison, whose posthumous novel Three Days Before the Shooting Adam Bradley had a large hand in re-editing. Bradley wants to show the rest of us how to hear hip hop as, love it or not, the poetry that speaks for and about the real universal civilization of the 21st Century…

My big question is still: what’s the chance that hip hop will return to us someday as art of genius, with the majesty of Count Basie in Sweden in 1962? Or this recent rearrangement by a string quartet in Paris of Miles Davis’s “All Blues” from 1959?

Fred Kaplan: a short history of bad ideas

Fred Kaplan, the “War Stories” columnist at Slate, reminds us in his trashing of the Bush-Cheney neo-cons, Daydream Believers, not only that his barbed book title comes from T. E. Lawrence, but that Lawrence had aimed the dagger at his own over-reaching imperial self.

“All men dream: but not equally,” Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. “Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”

In our studio / classroom with James Der Derian’s global security students at Brown’s Watson Institute, Fred Kaplan extends his argument about “a few grand ideas” that “wrecked American power.” Among the bad ideas, in Kaplan’s reading, were the oversold “revolution in military affairs” and the Rumsfeldian dogmas it spawned about the political utility of super-high-tech weaponry. Another one, he says here, was the notion that United States came out of the Cold War stronger — not perhaps unhinged by the loss of a balance wheel in world affairs. Kaplan’s conversation picks up where Parag Khanna’s left off, as to the sins of the Bush years and the depth of the Obama predicament today:

The U. S. Government’s recent actions — the willful disregard of international treaties, the documented instances of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, the often-arbitrary detentions at Guantanamo Bay, the illegal “renderings” of suspected terrorists on foreign soil, the harsh treatment of civilians under the occupation of Iraq, in the eyes of some the fact of the occupation itself — have undermined America’s authority as a moral or legal arbiter.

Quite apart from questions of war, these actions have also tarnished America’s stature as a beacon of democracy. In many parts of the world, especially in the Middle East, the word “democracy” is now discredited. Sadder still, the smattering of individuals and movements struggling for Western-style reforms shun association with the United States, knowing it would only hurt their cause…

Fred Kaplan in Daydream Believers (Wiley), p. 197

There’s a great cameo appearance here by Sergei Khrushchev, historian son of the late Soviet Premier Nikita and a longtime fellow at the Watson Institute. Quoth Sergei:

Sergei Khrushchev: the old illusion

About Afghanistan, what is happening now reminds me, one by one, of what happened with the Soviet Union. Soviet generals were against the invasion of Afghanistan. But then after, when they entered there, each two months, they said: an additional division… and maybe we will take over. At last it was finished with 150,000 [troops] that could not control Afghanistan at all. The biggest mistake, what I think is happening now, is this illusion — and your illusion also — that anybody can control Afghanistan. Nobody can control Afghanistan from outside, because we are alien and they will be united against us.

Sergei Khrushchev with Fred Kaplan in James Der Derian’s seminar at Brown, March 4, 2009.

Kamensky & Lepore: 2 madwomen, 1 attic

Blindspot is a lark, with lessons. First, about sex and slavery in 18th Century Boston, where you didn’t expect to find so much of either. And then, about the writing of serious history as delicious fiction.

Blindspot was undertaken as an experiment, something of an email joke, by ranking professionals who’ve been friends since grad school (Yale): Jane Kamensky, now at Brandeis, and Jill Lepore, of Harvard and The New Yorker magazine.

Told in letters and journals, Blindspot, set in 1764, is a borderline kinky love story about a Scots portrait painter (think: Gilbert Stuart) who’s fled his London debts to Boston, and a passionate, downwardly-mobile 19-year-old daughter of the Boston ruling class who presents herself as a boy so as to get a job as the painter’s assistant. Get it? Frances Easton goes to work as Francis Weston for the portraitist Stewart Jameson. She falls in love with him, of course, and he with her — or him, as he supposes through most of the narrative. Fanny writes: “I felt full prepared to open myself to him, in whatever direction he wanted, Easton or Weston.”

But Blindspot is also an argument about history and the writing thereof:

18th Century novelists called their books ‘histories.’ You know, Tom Jones is “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.” Fielding insisted that Tom Jones was a history and that what historians wrote was made up, that it was so contrived to be answerable to the surviving set of facts that could be lined up and arranged in any which way that its reliability is fundamentally questionable. It comes from Aristotle’s Poetics to make this claim — that to make something up that has universal truth because it’s about humanity was the true reform of historical writing. And it wasn’t just Fielding who made this claim. This was the argument of 18th Century novelists from Defoe on; and it was an argument they had with historians like Hume… That is a piece of intellectual work that Simon Schama took up when he called for a return to narrative history in the 1980s and 1990s…

Jill Lepore in conversation with Chris Lydon, February 27, 2009

I think our agent was hoping that Blindspot would generate the kind of controversy that Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties generated in the 1990s. I remember Gordon Wood writing an extremely angry brief in the New York Review of Books called ‘Novel History‘ — about how dare a historian do such a thing. To the extent we’ve had reaction from our colleagues — and we didn’t write it for our colleagues — it’s been very positive… I’ve been asked by a graduate student: is this something that every historian should try? And I’ve said: I don’t know, maybe every historian should take up tennis.

Jane Kamensky in conversation with Chris Lydon, February 27, 2009

The itch that Blindspot scratches for me is the appetite for history in the manner of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Hugo’s Les Miserables or, in our own day, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies — which is to say, grand, teeming, historically informed but imaginative narratives that speak to the contemporary national and global crisis.

What Dickens, Tolstoy and Hugo have in common is that, like a Breughel painting, they’re crowded with life. I can’t think of things in the 19th Century American literary tradition that do that. Maybe Harriet Beecher Stowe. But that sort of teeming, crowd-centered urban history that tackles a political event from below is not for the most part an American tradition.

Jane Kamensky in conversation with Chris Lydon, February 27, 2009

Why is that? … Where is our Dickens? It’s a really interesting question…

Jill Lepore in conversation with Chris Lydon, February 27, 2009

Blindspot can be taken as a shot at answering it.

Parag Khanna

Parag Khanna reads and sounds to me like the sane, worldly-wise, long-view alternative to the mainstream bloviators about American power in this new Age of Obama.

His breakthrough piece in the New York Times Magazine just a year ago was headlined: Who Shrank the Superpower? (Answer: GWB and “imperial overstretch.”) The evidence threaded through his book The Second World (paperbound edition just out) is that countries on the verge (think: Brazil, Morocco, Turkey, Vietnam and many others) have come to look more and more to China and the European Union for means and models of globalization. Parag Khanna was just back from Pakistan last week when I saw him in New York and asked him to take apart the anxiety in the air around Afghanistan. “The Right War,” as TIME put it in a cover headline last year? Or Obama’s Vietnam? Parag Khanna’s current piece in Foreign Policy makes the commonsense argument that Afghanistan is, first, a neighborhood problem. Enlist China, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and India ahead of the Pentagon:

We have been in geographic denial because we’ve had a constant military presence in Afghanistan since 9/11. But the truth is: we have no border with land-locked central Asia.  We do in fact require as many local regional allies as possible. 

If you look around the world at security institutions, you find that the two regions that don’t have them are the ones that are most insecure – one is south-central Asia, and the other is the Persian Gulf region.  If we are not contributing to building those longer-term institutionalized architectures, then we’re not really creating a long-term solution; we are just simply perpetuating our own role over there, which fewer and fewer countries want.

See the news, of course, the case of Kyrgyzstan closing the Manas airbase, and several years ago Uzbekistan closing the K2 airbase. Our presence in the region militarily has always been extremely vulnerable to this sort of political pressure from neighboring countries.  We have contributed very little to an integrated regional security framework for the region which involves India, Iran, Pakistan, China, Russia, Uzbekistan and others – but that is exactly what needs to happen in the long run for the region to be responsible for its own security and for us not to be stuck over there for decades to come. 

Now hopefully we’ll do that – I think that necessity can be the mother of genius.  The supply lines in Pakistan have been heavily attacked by Taliban forces.  It’s been at risk, the US is scrambling for alternatives, one of those alternatives could be Iran. If so, that opens up the opportunity to engage Iran in Afghan stabilization.  The Obama administration has said that it will talk to Iran on counter-narcotics issues; they could certainly also talk to them about logistics and supply. Other Nato countries are certainly going to do that. Now that Nato has given the green light for it, maybe the US should as well.

I wanted to hear Parag Khanna’s fresh observations of America’s limp in the world, after the Obama election and the onset of a deep economic slump:

Barack Obama most certainly understands that this is a more diffuse world, that the United States cannot unilaterally call the shots either militarily or diplomatically.  Take the financial crisis –  America doesn’t know what it’s doing anyway — so people are looking to Gordon Brown, or elsewhere, or to the Chinese central bank for solutions. Take Iran: the US is going to adopt the European view of engagement and dialogue.  Take North Korea, where the same thing is going to be happening as well.  So it is not so much that American leadership is being restored, or that America is going back to the world, or rejoining the world, but they have to evaluate to what extent there even is an international order for America to rejoin.

I believe that international order is in some form of decay, because these rising powers are doing things their own way. Russia is not consulting with the United Nations when it invades Georgia. China is not consulting any UN human rights committee when it rolls tanks into Tibet. So things are going on that speak against the notion of a strong central international community.  Clearly Obama has said that the UN is going to be a priority – he has made the ambassador to the UN a cabinet-level position— but that doesn’t mean the UN will suddenly be a more effective organization either.  The National Intelligence Council’s 2025 report says that by that point, ten to fifteen years from now, there won’t even really be such thing as the international community. It was a very striking argument for them to be making.  They’re pointing to a very sort of medieval future, rather than one in which international institutions can in fact direct and order global affairs, the way we thought they could in the aftermath of the cold war.

Parag Khanna with Chris Lydon at the Brasserie Les Halles in Manhattan, February 20, 2009

Parag Khanna is what we called in school a hard marker and there’s a tough report card here. It sounds like the right cautionary tone President Obama would easily, almost naturally, take to heart.

Jonah Lehrer

The joy of reading Jonah Lehrer is that he’s scientist enough to navigate oceans of brain-science lab reports. He knows the neural pathways where Blink meets Nudge. But he’s literature bug and humanist enough to remember that the proper study of man, as Alexander Pope had it, is you and me, the whole of Us.

Lehrer’s first triumph, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, made the case for art in an age of science. On the mystery of consciousness, he wrote: “It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.”

His new book How We Decide, which reads like a sequel, is a set of cautionary tales about the limits of the rational brain, that peculiarly human pre-frontal cortex, and by implication the limits of rational science. It is not reason — certainly not reason alone — that tells quarterback Tom Brady which receiver should get the pass, or that tells the pilot of a disabled plane how to land it. It’s not even reason that brings the best of our human gifts into balance. Lehrer quotes G. K. Chesterton: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

Jonah Lehrer identifies himself with the modern doctor who tells you not to choose the MRI for your lower back pain but to study patience, or perhaps Yoga, instead. Not only have MRIs not solved the problem of back pain. “In fact, the new technology has probably made the problem worse. The machine simply sees too much. Doctors are overwhelmed with information and struggle to distinguish the significant from the irrelevant… This is the danger of too much information: it can actually interfere with understanding.”

Most of us read too little or too much about the booming brain sciences. If you’re going to sit down and talk with just one enthusiast who’s wise beyond his years, I’d make it Jonah Lehrer:

The body that knows better than the brain

One of the great themes of modern neuroscience is that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; that the brain knows much more than we know; that we’re always taking in all this information which allows us to swing at fastballs and find the open man in three and a half seconds before we’re sacked, and choose which cereal to buy in the supermarket. All of our decisions are shaped by these emotional signals, which is why when we get cut off from these emotional signals people become pathologically indecisive. That said, one of the other great themes of decision-making sciences in the last couple of decades – going back to Kahnemann and Tversky and lots of recent work in neuro-economics – is that as wise as the emotional brain is, as profoundy intuitive as it can be, the fact that it knows more than we know, it can also be incredibly dumb, incredibly idiotic; and it’s all about the situation. You can put the same brain mechanism which can be so wise on the football field and all of a sudden you have it pick stocks, or figure out which mortgage to get, and it could make the worst decision possible. So one of the things I tried to do in this book was construct a model of decision-making that wasn’t all about: We should always blink and trust our gut – or always be rational like homo economicus. But to say: the way you make decisions should depend on the kind of decision you’re making. That you have to begin with the situation, diagnose the situation, be pragmatic about it. And then work backwards from that and try to tailor your thought process, which we’re capable of doing, to the situation at hand.

Jonah Lehrer with Chris Lydon in Boston, February 23, 2009

There are surprising connections here to the Adam Smith you never knew, to 2/28 mortgages, to the war in Afghanistan, to William and Henry James, the folly of credit cards and the novelists Ian McEwen and Richard Powers. Listen to all of it, please, and leave a comment here.

Dave McKenna chez Lydon: Jeff Dunn photo

Dave McKenna called himself a saloon pianist, but nobody else did. The genius Art Tatum heard in Dave a sort of successor. Miles Davis’s great collaborator Bill Evans found in Dave McKenna the only pianist who could teach him anything. Whitney Balliett in the New Yorker magazine called Dave the hardest swinger among all the jazz piano giants. George Shearing called Dave simply the best.

In everything Dave played, you heard a song line, then a left-hand bass line that might be singing, or dancing, or thundering on its own. And then in the criss-crossing of what sounded like 40 fingers you could think you were hearing an ensemble like the Basie or Ellington band. You also heard a complete master of the American songbook in the hands of a man – rather like Frank Sinatra – who respected the songs as written and at the same time made them his own.

In the golden age of Dave McKenna, he played six nights a week in under the grand arched and painted ceiling of the giant Oak Bar of the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. And everybody came to listen: the New York Philharmonic conductor Kurt Masur always stopped in when he was guest conducting the Boston Symphony. Dave’s friend and mine, the great WGBH deejay Ron Della Chiesa, told me today that Maestro Mazur had asked Dave to play “Rhapsody in Blue” with the New York Phil; Dave must have worried that he’d play the piano part differently each performance, and he demurred. Tip O’Neill used to catch Dave at the Copley when he was Speaker of the House in the Reagan years. There were usually a few gangsters, and cops, in the audience, too, and the actress Faye Dunaway and stray jazz stars like Zoot Sims and Ruby Braff. Dave played to the clink of drinks, but then a hush would descend as he strung tunes together — blues, or whole band arrangements, or his signature medleys of songs with the word “lucky,” or “dancing” in the title, or colors, or seasons, or girls’ names. One night I took our teenage middle daughter Amanda, a.k.a. Amy, in to hear Dave at the Copley, and even before we got to our seats Dave segued into Frank Loesser’s tune, made famous by Ray Bolger, “Once in love with Amy…”

I’m posting here, in belated tribute, a thank-you gathering-up of lost-and-found McKenna sounds: from one of many house parties he played on my Grotrian grand piano; from a radio conversation we did on the piano bench; and from an extraordinary session in the early Nineties when I asked Dave to record Leonard Bernstein’s “Lucky to be Me” as theme music for a new series of television conversations we were starting. He gave us, as it turned out, six distinctive takes on the tune. Listening to them now feels like watching Matisse or Picasso toss off six drawings of the same alluring model. Prodigious and guileless, Dave McKenna shared his life and his gift with abandon. It feels like a great privilege to fall under his spell again. Thank you, Dave McKenna.