To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

“… And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs — we entrepreneurs — have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.”

From the self-satirizing narrator of The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize novel of 2008.

Koshy’s Cafe on St. Mark’s Road in the heart of Old Bangalore is the spot where India’s sense of itself gets born again every morning in once-and-future war stories — where dreams of a “second wave” of the entrepreneurial boom underlie every other conversation. As jumping-off point and non-stop salon, it’s Rick’s Cafe in Old Casablanca, from about the same starting point in 1940. Prem Koshy — today’s Rick — is the grandson of the founder and the chief of the “Ladies and Knights of the Square Table.” In his youth, Prem Koshy moved to Kansas to go to baking school, and then to New Orleans to tend bar and run a couple of night clubs. “Now I’m back home,” he explained, “ready to see India move out of its diaper stage and into our adulthood.” He invited us to sit in over eggs and record the daily gab one day late in July:

Ashok K: … What you had in Information Technology was a whole bunch of young people who created an industry from the ground up, without a rule book… That’s given them the ability to pick up something new and run with it, to go after any opportunity they see. Which area? You can get lists from renewable energy to pharmaceuticals to whatever. But the important thing is you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people who have the ability and the confidence to run with any idea that seizes them…

CL: What a visitor like me sees is that the new wealth of India is not eliminating the old poverty.

Satish S: As the pace picks up, the slums will disappear. I’ll give you an example. Many of us when we came from the rural area didn’t use a toothbrush; we used a stick. The marketing people have said: if they introduce people to toothpaste, no company will be able to meet the demand. India is a huge market. It’s a very simple thing.

CL: Are you going to buy one?

Satish S: Oh, I definitely use a toothbrush…

Prem Koshy: Now, about this trickling-down effect. It’s the 80-20 law that’s at work. Nature’s law of 80-20 — you know that, right? If you take all the wealth and equally distribute it, 20 percent will control the wealth again, and 80 percent will support them. In nature as well, 20 percent is the strongest part of nature’s crop, and 80 percent is usually the fringe that die. We need to move the 80 percent into the 20 percent that’s going to keep us going…

Hameed N: India needs people who can see things and say that the emperor has no clothes. For example, urbanization and this current model of development which I think is the most horrible thing. And yet we seem to be helpless. But no one is helpless. We wish to be helpless. And we follow the same models with the same consequences. We are rending our social fabric. We are destroying our environment. And yet we maintain this is the only way. I doubt it is the only way. Of course it is not. But either you are for this kind of thing or you are a Cassandra, or a leftist — all kinds of names unfortunately… I would say, if people are serious about change, start with children. And you educate them not merely in technology — also not in that bogus spirituality which India talks about all the time. You educate them about the real stuff: what’s good, living well, being kind, being generous, sharing, learning to cooperate, learning to collaborate.

CL: Oh, man. You’re my guru. You’re the man I came to meet.

Hameed N: Well, thank you. But a guru is a most dreadful person — India has lots of them — because then we suspend our thinking and start listening to what somebody else tells us. That’s India’s problem…

Mena R: I know you are American, but I feel the Americans have gotten into India very insidiously. They have changed culture in India — multinationals selling toothpaste and French fries and chips. They’ve changed Indian habits and customs for whatever reason, to sell, to make money… We have been filled with a lot of information and consumerism from Western countries which we could do without.

CL: What’s the worst of it?

Mena R: Indian children — upper-class and middle-class children — now their aspirations are to be American. The way they dress, the way they eat, their attitudes, are all American. Hollywood cinema, American TV, have influenced India — a lot!

CL: Do you see anybody you like on American TV?

Mena R: Yeah. I like Drew Carey! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha…

Mena R: About six months ago the newspapers were trying to bridge a friendship between India and Pakistan. And they sent musicians and artists back and forth. I was told the Americans were funding this. But there really is no way that India and Pakistan can ever talk. It’s foolish to accept that we are going to talk. We’ve been traditionally enemies since they broke away, since 1947. If you ask any Indian, “who’s your enemy?” they will not say England, or Burma, or Sri Lanka. Not even China. We always think of Pakistan as our national enemy, and we will never make friends. The Americans understand this, yet they come and tell us one thing and then hand over huge amounts of money to Pakistanis to buy arms. Where are the arms used mainly? Back on India. So-called they are trying to contain Taliban and Al Qaeda, but finally it comes back into India…

Ashok K: The second wave [of the Indian boom] is at the high-chaos stage. It’s a churn, a maelstrom. All the pieces are there: the old, the new, the confused present… You don’t have to spin the wheel anymore. It’s spinning on its own. It’s no longer a question of: will it succeed? Of course it will succeed. But how quickly can it happen? And how can you minimize the misery that’s going to happen? There’s a lot of misery in the making, and these are new kinds of misery. Crime is going to go through the roof… It’s very much America in the 70s, when you had a runaway crime problem and didn’t know what to do with it. You have a complete churning — everything you’ve heard around this table from the connection with the older generation, parental supervision, crime, the politics and the school of resentment that Harold Bloom would talk about. Everyone in Indian politics is carrying an axe. It hasn’t helped that Indian politics has been divisive — not to bring people together but to break people into groups which are convenient at election time. You don’t have an end in sight, but hope is very strong. One would like to see the worthies who take our tax money putting a plan behind this.

Hameed N: In the life of a nation, five or ten years is nothing… What more can India give? It has given Yoga. It has given the Indian philosophy. It has given Kama Sutra.

CL: And Gandhi, too. And Prem Koshy.

Prem Koshy: In the famous words of my grandfather: Listen, buddy: before you try to save the whole world, please try not to be the monkey who pulls the fish out of the water to save it from drowning.

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

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

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

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

Our Proust Questionnaire

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

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

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

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

Q: What is your idea of a perfect poem?

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

Q: Who do you write for?

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

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

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

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

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

Q: How would you like to die?

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

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

A: Empathy.

Q: What is your motto?

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

Henri Cole with Chris Lydon in Boston, 11.20.09.

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

We’re in the “living labyrinth” of Harold Bloom’s astonishing memory here.

The great sage of New Haven is walking us through the dark, dense maze of his first and favorite poet, Hart Crane (1899 – 1932).

Take this as a sort of companion piece to go with Helen Vendler’s reflections on her own “closest poet,” Wallace Stevens.

There’s a preview, too, of Harold Bloom’s next big book, coming in Spring, 2010, just before his 80th birthday. Living Labyrinth: Literature and Influence will reconsider his famous grand argument in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) about poets and their precursors.

But the joy of this conversation for me is the generous, melting demonstration of Bloom’s theory and his method — tracing (with never a glance at text or note) the spidery links from Crane’s words and images back to Melville, Yeats, Milton, Spenser, Walter Pater, and The Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible; with real-life anecdotes thrown in touching Hart Crane’s friend the photographer Walker Evans, and his devotee the playwright Tennessee Williams. By the end of Harold Bloom’s living-room performance, one of Hart Crane’s most famous pieces, “The Broken Tower” makes a kind of music — madly, deeply in tune with Bud Powell’s “Un Poco Loco.” Listen for Professor Bloom’s laughing indulgence when I tell him that, of course, Harold, the living labyrinth is you! “A nice trope, my boy.”

Here, for before and after readings, is what Bloom calls Crane’s “death poem”:

The Broken Tower

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day – to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun’s ray?

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas campaniles with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

My world I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thighs embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledges once to hope – cleft to despair?

The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) -or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure…

And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) – but slip
Of pebbles, – visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

It’s a measure of the change in the discourse that David Bromwich, Yale’s Sterling Professor of English who used to write op-ed in the New York Times, now keeps a sort of Times Watch in the Huffington Post, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. “I don’t have a particular grievance, or have it in for the Times,” Professor Bromwich says to me in conversation, “but they are an important mainstream paper, and the way they bent towards the war in Iraq, I think, was all-important in legitimating that war. So they bear watching, and when no one else is minding that watch, I do it.” He was the only writer I saw who broke through the “de mortuis” sentimentalism around the Times’ late language meister William Safire to nail the propagandist and congenital war-monger: “the true Safire touch — clever, punchy, alliterative, demagogic.” In a more consequential “close reading” of the Times through five days of late October, Bromwich wrote: “the conclusion draws itself. The New York Times wants a large escalation in Afghanistan.”

David Bromwich seems to me better yet at Obama-watching than at press criticism. He can write with penetration of Barack Obama as an American almost-literary invention, and he can make you feel you’re reading Nabokov on Don Quixote or Harold Bloom on Hamlet. In our gab, Bromwich’s essentially sympathetic but distressed view is that Obama “is a capitive of the inertia of the use of American power that he inherits.” To my taste, Bromwich does what the magisterial columnists of old like James Reston and Walter Lippman (the people I wanted to be when I grew up) used to do: pull the threads of news and impression and gossip and deep reading into a “mood of Washington” and some sense of where we’re going. Sitting in New Haven, Bromwich comes at it with the training primarily of the literary man, a biographer of the critic William Hazlitt and prolific interpreter of Rousseau, Burke, Lincoln and Mill. He adopted the old liberal prejudices when they were uncontested — in favor of peace, against torture; for civil liberties without cavil; for the republican virtues and constitutional standards. Bromwich’s finished work has an often chilling clarity and eloquence I find nowhere else these days:

Afghanistan is the largest and the most difficult crisis Obama confronts away from home. And here the trap was fashioned largely by himself. He said, all through the presidential campaign, that Iraq was the wrong war but Afghanistan was the right one. It was ‘a war of necessity’, he said this summer. And he has implied that he would accept his generals’ definition of the proper scale of such a war. Now it appears that Afghanistan is being lost, indeed that it cannot be controlled with fewer than half a million troops on the ground for a decade or more. The generals are for adding troops, as in Vietnam, in increments of tens of thousands. Their current request was leaked to Bob Woodward, who published it in the Washington Post on 21 September, after Obama asked that it be kept from the public for a longer interval while he deliberated. The leak was an act of military politics if not insubordination; its aim was to show the president the cost of resisting the generals.

The political establishment has lined up on their side: the addition of troops is said to be the most telling way Obama can show resoluteness abroad. This verdict of the Wall Street Journal, the Post and (with more circumspection) the New York Times was taken up by John McCain and Condoleezza Rice. If Obama declined at last to oppose Netanyahu on the settlement freeze, he will be far more wary of opposing General Petraeus, the commander of Centcom. Obama is sufficiently humane and sufficiently undeceived to take no pleasure in sending soldiers to their deaths for a futile cause. He will have to convince himself that, in some way still to be defined, the mission is urgent after all. Afghanistan will become a necessary war even if we do not know what marks the necessity. Robert Dole, an elder of the Republican Party, has said he would like to see Petraeus as the Republican candidate in 2012. Better to keep him in the field (this must be at least one of Obama’s thoughts) than to have him to run against.

For Obama to do the courageous thing and withdraw would mean having deployed against him the unlimited wrath of the mainstream media, the oil interest, the Israel lobby, the weapons and security industries, all those who have reasons both avowed and unavowed for the perpetuation of American force projection in the Middle East. If he fails to satisfy the request from General McChrystal – the specialist in ‘black ops’ who now controls American forces in Afghanistan – the war brokers will fall on Obama with as finely co-ordinated a barrage as if they had met and concerted their response. Beside that prospect, the calls of betrayal from the antiwar base that gave Obama his first victories in 2008 must seem a small price to pay. The best imaginable result just now, given the tightness of the trap, may be ostensible co-operation with the generals, accompanied by a set of questions that lays the groundwork for refusal of the next escalation. But in wars there is always a deep beneath the lowest deep, and the ambushes and accidents tend towards savagery much more than conciliation.

David Bromwich, “Obama’s Delusion,” in the London Review of Books, 22 October 2009. Read it all here.

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going?

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

Stephen Burt makes you think of Samuel Johnson and also “The Simpsons.” If Harold Bloom were a precocious thirty-something again, if he loved science fiction and underground rock ‘n’ roll, if he wrote for American newspapers as well as the great London reviews, if he kept blogs on contemporary poetry and separately on his family life, mightn’t he sound something like this? Tenured and popular at Harvard, boyish Steve Burt seems to have read and formed a strong opinion on everything in print, in the same way Alex Ross of the New Yorker and The Rest is Noise seems to have heard and pronounced on every measure of music. Burt also writes a lot of poetry — a lot of it playful, like Kermit the Frog’s “Self Portrait as Felt Amphibian,” but aiming also at a civic note, even a political vision as poets like Yeats and Lowell once did. In conversation at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square, Steve Burt called his own sensibility more “modern” than “post-modern.” It’s the modernist attitude, he says, that “if we read well enough, if we make our art good enough” we might yet resolve some of the fear and disquiet of our times.

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

A: Can I give you a list of finalists? Clarissa Dalloway. The older women in James Tiptree’s Brightness Falls from the Air. The computer programmer in Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2. Barry in Lorrie Moore’s Frog Hospital. Dorothea Casaubon née Brooke is quite hard to forget when you’ve read Middlemarch. Theophrastus Such, the wiser-than-you voice of George Eliot in her essays.

Q: Which three poems would you take to a desert island?

A: “Sphere” by A.R. Ammons. “Paradise Lost” and I hope it would come with “Paradise Regained.” John Ashbery’s “Three Poems.”

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

A: I would like to be a competent rock drummer. Peter Prescott from the Volcano Suns, maybe.

Q: Who is doing Steve Burt’s work in another medium, perhaps in another century entirely?

A: If I am doing what I want to do when I write about poetry for relatively large, rather than scholarly audiences, then I am doing something remotely like what Douglas Wolk has been doing for graphic novels and comic books, and what Alex Ross has been doing for composed music.

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

A: I am the last person who would know… I’d want people to see a man writing poems that are clearly unlike one another and yet are all thoughtful and all sound like him.

Q: When you walk down the street who do people think you are?

A: Someone who is picking up his little guy. Someone who has either a three and a half year old next to me or a backpack full of books.

Q: What quality do you love in a poem?

A: Abandon, wild nuttiness, something that’s not already been done. Helen Vendler reminds you that poems want to be unklike one another.

Q: What is your motto?

A: “I’m not sure.” That’s the motto.

Stephen’s new book of poems is Parallel Play; he has published two other volumes, Close Calls with Nonsense and The Forms of Youth.

In the Obama rapture after South Carolina, what we wanted wasn’t experts (because there are none) or wiseguys (because Chris Matthews has them all). We wanted oracles.

Then came an email from a listener in New York: “Give me Amber, or give me death…,” thirsting for that fabulous firehose of crystalline commentary from talk shows past.

And then Braunze himself called from Alabama — another heroic one-off thinker and talker whose call-in handle, like Amber’s, has the hue of an alloyed heart and mind. Braunze, too, wanted to grope out-loud through scenes from a dream unfolding since the South Carolina went to the polls on Saturday. Could it really be happening — this regeneration of a demoralized world-nation? This gathering momentum and spirit around an African-American candidacy in a campaign that refuses so far to be racialized?

And so we recorded these conversations which, if nothing else, memorialize the dim, dawning awareness of a great shift in all our perspectives on possibility.

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

Amber, if this voice is new to you, is a Barbadian orphan who has lived in proud poverty in Boston for more than a decade. She has no “papers,” as they say, but the spirit of a cranky super-patriot. In talk radio, we thrilled to hear “Amber is on the line.” And people still ask me: “How’s Amber?” about the ferociously articulate caller who tangled on the air with the best (including Gore Vidal, Camille Paglia, William Safire, William F. Buckley and Harold Bloom) and bested them all. “What is Amber thinking?” people want to know. “What is she thinking? Are you in touch?” Well, we are ever in touch, and she is ever her indomitable, industrious, provocative self. Here’s a touch of Amber this morning at the South Station stop on the Red Line subway through Boston:

Every day I’d go down to the edge of the water and stare way out at that horizon, and I was convinced at age 5 that America was just over that edge: terrifying, electrifying, important, deep, epic, beautiful, monstrous. That’s what America was to me, still is… So much of this campaign, this man, is wrapped up in that once again. I’m almost, almost — don’t get excited — almost a born-again American today. It’s not that I’m in love or in awe with Barack Obama. It’s what his moment on the American stage means… It’s a second chance for this place… This country is my religion. For someone who’s missed it… ached for it, I cannot begin to tell you how deliciously happy I am that this moment is here.

“Amber,” in conversation with Chris Lydon in the morning transit rush-hour, Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Braunze identifies himself as “an entrepreneur with insight.” He’s lived his life between Birmingham and Boston, a business consultant with tentacles deep in the information technologies, and also a singer, jazz lyricist and Miles Davis devotee.

I think that the dark cloud of just sadness and desperation — because you just can’t get there being a good guy — has been disproved by Barack Obama. He is a good guy and he is making it. His is kind of the Todd Clifton of America now — Todd Clifton from [Ralph Ellison's] Invisible Man. Todd Clifton was a Harlem activist… eventually the symbol of hope in Ellison’s mythology. Barack is that person in real life come to be. It is almost as if Barack Obama was prophesied in Ellison’s famous line, “who knows but that on the lower frequencies I speak for you.” I think Obama is speaking for those on the lower frequencies, those who’ve not had the opportunity to demonstrate what they can do. I think that’s impacting white America, saying: hey, you know, we need to be a little bit more pro-active, those of us who believe, because if this guy can do it, we’re really, really underutilizing a lot of talent.

“Braunze,” on the phone with Chris Lydon from Birmingham, Monday, January 28, 2008

Not the least of Harold Bloom’s many charms for me is that he bridges poetry and jazz, to which our conversation turns. Bloom combines ardent fan-hood and that incomparable gift for assimilating and synthesizing all he’s heard as well as all he’s read, and making meaning of it.

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

[Sue Mingus]

Bloom’s theoretical work on The Anxiety of Influence was written about poets, of course, but applies in still more obvious ways to the rough evolutions in African-American music in the past century. As Bloom remarked to me:

That is because the whole jazz tradition from at least Amstrong on features what was called ‘cutting.’ And cutting is the pure instance — from the Greeks on, and it was revived by Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzche — of the agonistic spirit; the agon or the contest. The last cutting contest I heard was the rather unequal match between the extremely brave Branford Marsalis and Sonny Rollins — very brave of Branford. Of all living masters in jazz now, Rollins is surely the greatest extant… Among poets it’s always a competition. Mr. Stevens and Mr. Eliot existed at the same time. Mr. Eliot thought well of Wallace Stevens and published him in England by Faber & Faber. Stevens refused to say a word about Eliot in prose, though it entered into the letters occasionally and it was family tradition; that’s how they told me he didn’t like Eliot or his poetry. Didn’t like the fact that Harmonium had been crowded out by The Waste Land in 1922…

Harold Bloom with Chris Lydon, at home in New Haven, Connecticut. Autumn 2007.

Besides, Harold Bloom actually knew that elusive, suffering genius Bud Powell (1924 – 1966), the pianist who lives as large in legend as the great innovator Charlie Parker. Sonny Rollins, who played with both of them, told us last spring it was part of the unspoken lore of jazz in the 1950s that “Bird was jealous of Bud.”

The Amazing Bud Powell (c. 1949)

Bloom haunted Minton’s and other uptown hatcheries of the new music on weekends home from Cornell in the late 1940s. Bud Powell dominated the scene on intermittent leaves from the state mental institution at Creedmoor. Bloom remembers Powell as sharply as people who played with him:

I had conversations with him. He was very tightly restrained. You had the feeling of someone who was balancing himself on a wire, knowing he could plunge over on either side. Cheerful enough, but grim underneath. Very tense. Very beautiful. He had that wonderfully stripped down face at that point. It got tormented and puffy after that, but it was rather an astonishing profile at that point… He was very literate, though he didn’t like to talk in terms of literacy.

Harold Bloom with Chris Lydon, at home in New Haven, Connecticut. Autumn 2007.

Hart Crane by Walker Evans (1930)

Who but Harold Bloom would have thought to put a volume of the doomed poet Hart Crane (1899 – 1932) into the hands of Bud Powell?

I actually talked to Bud Powell about Hart Crane. I gave him a copy of the old black-and-gold Liveright edition of the collected poems of Hart Crane. [Bud] was an extremely articulate and quite brilliant person. He read “The Bridge” and “The Broken Tower” at my suggestion, and “Repose of Rivers” and the “Voyager” sequence. And I told him there was a real affinity, I thought. I could not hear “Un Poco Loco” played by him, whether on the recordings — those three wonderful takes — or in person without hearing “The Broken Tower”… “The bells, I say the bells break down their tower and swing I know not where.” Because that’s what you feel is happening. Expecially when the now, alas, late Max Roach, in that extraordinary drum work in the latter part of it, particularly on the final take, the definitive take… You really feel the bells are breaking down their tower and swinging I know not where. You feel that the mind has reached its limit and is coming apart. Un Poco Loco indeed. The title is well chosen. It’s a highly autobiographical work, in a very complex way, “Un Poco Loco.” And for me it’s one of the summits of jazz. A cowbell ringing doom in the Hart Crane sense, or the Herman Melville sense.

Harold Bloom with Chris Lydon, at home in New Haven, Connecticut. Autumn 2007.

And who but Harold Bloom would swing the conversation through accounts of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Coltrane and Proust, around all the glories of American music, back to our starting point? “Well,” he said, “it’s Walt Whitman. The two great American contributions to the world’s art, in the end, are Walt Whitman and, after him, Armstrong and jazz. Armstrong, Ellington, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Mingus, what you will. If I had to choose between the two, ultimately, I wouldn’t. I would say that the genius of this nation at its best is indeed Walt Whitman and Louis Armstrong.”

Thanks to Chelsea Merz for recording this interview, and to Paul McCarthy for editing it.

By his own account, Harold Bloom has lost a step or two at age 77, after major heart surgery. His reading rate is not what it used to be, he says. In his early thirties, the basic Bloomian reading speed with a serious text was 1000 pages an hour; it might be less than half that today. Meaning that nowadays it could take an afternoon, not just the lunch hour, to consume War and Peace.

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

Harold Bloom, a Minton’s man

But Bloom’s mode of reading fast, writing fast, and memorizing almost everything still verges on the freakish, and his zest for the text is undimmed, as are his combativeness, his mockery, self-mockery, and his delight in seeing himself as both king and bad-boy of his literary profession. In our long conversation this past Fall, Professor Bloom gave us a short course in memorization, in effect: “How to Memorize… and What,” starting with Tennyson’s Ulysses He reviewed what he calls the “ghastly condition,” the “sellout” and “suicide” of the “Humanities” in American universities before “the School of Resentment.” Judge for yourself the mix of passion and put-on in Bloom’s voice. And then when I insisted he give us his constructive doctine on teaching teachers — he is, after all, the Art Blakey of literature scholars, in that so many of the great ones took his training — he gave an incisive guide, naming names and first principles.

The great Hillel says: do three things. Be deliberate in judgment. Raise up many disciples. And build a hedge around the Torah.

My version of that is to say: Be deliberate in judgment. Teach many students, but make sure that they are never going to resemble one another or resemble you yourself in the slightest. That is to say, remember what Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us in Self-Reliance: “that which I can gain from another is never tuition but only provocation.” So even with my doctoral students, every class I’ve ever taught is pure provocation. It is an attempt to make them arrive at self-tuition. This was not true of my contemporaries. This was not true of the school of Deconstruction, or of the Marxists, or the Semioticians, or of the New Historicists, the Foucault-eyites which is what they are (they all follow Foucault). This is not true of the Lacanians. They all teach a method, and people do not become themselves, but they become Paul de Man, my old friend, but not someone of whom I could approve because as I told him: “you clone endlessly.” I have never cloned, I would never try to clone… Ah, the hedge around the Torah. The Torah is for me the Western Canon, and to some extent the Eastern one as well. And the hedge doesn’t mean a fence, or a high barrier such as the Israelis now in their desperation at living in a very bad neighborhood may yet have to put up around the whole state. It means an open sort of a thing. With a hedge it can always grow. It is a natural kind of a thing. Hillel is a very good guide…

Harold Bloom with Chris Lydon, at home in New Haven, Connecticut. Autumn 2007.

Thanks to Chelsea Merz for recording this interview, and to Paul McCarthy for editing it.

There’s more to come in Part 3.

What was new at Yale this Fall was that for the first time in 53 years, the great pole star of our literary-critical firmament, Harold Bloom, did not give any of his famous courses — on Shakespeare, or on “how to read a poem.” He did, however, indulge Open Source in a long conversation that confirms a major recovery of health and the steady fire of heart and mind as Bloom writes a grand revision of his masterwork on The Anxiety of Influence.

To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.

Prof. “Bloomstaff” working on Blooms Wake

Professor Bloom asked me to ask him about what is coming to feel like an “obsession” with Walt Whitman. I asked him also to cross over into music, politics and sports. And then we agreed to keep digressing as the spirit moved us. I asked him at the outset: could Whitman actually be displacing Shakespeare in the center-ring of the Bloomian circus?

Not quite… I say specifically at the opening of this work in progress — my equivalent of Joyce’s Wake, Blooms Wake as it were — that the two figures who are threads in this labyrinth are William Shakespeare and Walt Whitman. And though I don’t quite grant them equal status, I would be prepared to say that what Shakespeare was for the Renaissance, Whitman was for the 19th Century and after: sombody who “breaks the new road,” which is what D. H. Lawrence wonderfully said of him. He breaks the new road for the New World, and for better and for worse…

The reason why English is now the lingua franca, replacing French, is because it’s American English, and it’s American commercial dominance everywhere. Even though in the age of Benito Bush, as I like to call him and insist upon calling him, that dominance may soon be called into question. He has done everything he can to ruin our economy, to ruin our international standing, to ruin our armed forces. In fact, he is the Decline and Fall of the American Empire all of himself, our Caligula, Our Nero, you name it. But he’s not as colorful as those splendid rascals…

Harold Bloom with Chris Lydon, at home in New Haven, Connecticut. Autumn 2007.

And so Bloom digresses… to the marks of Shakespeare, Shelley and the King James Bible on Whitman, and Whitman’s mark on “the American religion,” neither Judaic nor Christian, but something indigenous and very new in the world. Would that Whitman’s Democratic Vistas had left as deep a mark on American politics, which Professor Bloom segments today as follows: “one-third plutocracy, one-third oligarchy, one-third theocracy… There’s not much Whitmania left in the public sphere.”

Fair notice: if you start listening to this conversation, you won’t move till you finish it.

Thanks to Chelsea Merz for recording this interview, and to Paul McCarthy for editing it.