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Mary Karr, the poet and ever the scrappy little beast, gives me three more reasons to marvel, and cherish her, in her third memoir. Lit, after The Liars Club and Cherry, is the story of drinking her way to Catholicism, sobriety and more writing. Her title refers, she says, to the things that lit her early mid-life: spiritual practice, Jack Daniels and Literature. Click to listen to Chris s conversation with Mary Karr (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3). I love, first, the company she keeps. Her writing group, her list of literary familiars, encompasses the best: Augustine, Cavafy, Faulkner, Brooks Haxton, Homer, Thomas Lux, Milosz, Milton, Nabokov, Shelley, David Foster Wallace, Tobias Wolff, Franz Wright. And she talks convincingly, with rapture, about the community of the word that has sustained her. It s the cathedral. I was totally without any kind of faith I didn t have a mystical bone in my body growing up. I thought God was like the Easter Bunny, I was probably in the fourth grade before I realized that people were really serious that they believed all this stuff. But I believed in the church of poetry. I believed that it was Eucharistic. You take someone s words into your body it is like you take their passion, their suffering into yourself and you re changed by it. You know, Shelley would say that the feeling humanizes you more, but you become in Cavafy s phrase a citizen of the city of ideas. I was a very lonely, strange little girl in a kind of backwater town. You know, I had a crush on J. Alfred Prufrock, I mean I was a pitiful little thing. Of all the people. The other girls were ogling the lifeguard at the pool and I was saying indeed to try to sound British. So I was a little misfit, and getting to read these writers, these poets mostly, it was majestic. It was magnificent You can have the entire artistic experience in one sitting, in one mouthful, in one moment. I love, second, her catnip connection with kids younger than my kids, adventurous girls especially. Girls will be foolish about boys. They ll write a guy s name on their notebooks over and over. And they ll also go on great adventures and slaughter monsters from island to island and, like Odysseus, they ll come home by leaving home. They will come into themselves. They will come to.  I love, third, her hard-won wisdom about memoirs, that first the writer has to get over one s self and make room for something else: I think if you re working on a memoir and your main antagonist is not some aspect of yourself then you re probably in the wrong business. You probably ought to be writing fiction or something else.  If you re writing because someone did something to you, you are fighting the wrong dragon. A really great memoir has some aspect of self as the antagonist. In Tobais Wolff s This Boy s Life, his step-father did beat the crap out of him but it is an interesting book because Toby is trying on different costumes throughout the book he puts on one male costume after another. It is about trying to be a man. 

Thomas Balmes is a global filmmaker from France who commits anthropology with his camera. He is coaching us here in how to make expressive use of the new video democracy on YouTube how to adapt our own anthropological eyes to see and perhaps reveal what s lurking in plain sight all around us. Click to listen to Chris s conversation with Thomas Balmes (23 minutes, 11 mb mp3). I go by an amateur s notion of anthropology, as the social science of spotting, as they say, what s familiar in the strange and what s strange in the familiar. Thomas Balmes has improvised his way to mastery of the art all over the planet. Damages is his rare American film, by turns grotesque, hilarious and perversely winsome, about lawyers in a litigate-or-die law firm in Bridgeport, Connecticut haggling over personal-injury and wrongful death claims. You ll feel a certain shock of recognition hearing Thomas Balmes say why the US is heaven for documentarians: because we Americans (unlike, say, Japanese or French folk) will talk openly on a stranger s camera (or into a cellphone, on a bus) about anything, including dollars for death. Most of the Balmes movies are made elsewhere: looking at the tribal wars in the Balkans, for example, through the eyes of tribal warriors from Kenya who went to Bosnia as peace keepers; or watching McDonalds market its burgers in India, the land of the Sacred Cow. The next big Balmes production will track four babies from birth to walking – in Namibia, Japan, Mongolia and San Francisco. Everywhere Balmes uses the fly-on-the-wall direct cinema technique. No shooting script, no voice-over commentaries: just looking, listening, and leaving viewers to make sense of whatever it is we catch – as in that Bridgeport law office: My questions to Thomas Balmes have mainly to do with the lessons for journalism or anti-mass media: how might we all learn to shoot the scene outside the window with freshness, ambiguity, tolerance, humor and entertainment value? (His answer boils down to: Just do it.) What if in place of television news we could call on Thomas Balmes and his inspired imitators to show us what and who they re looking at tonight?

It s the audacity of Mahatma Gandhi s non-violence, and the radical priority he gave to social justice, that Gandhi s grandson stresses in a sort of keynote conversation at the start of Brown University s Year of India. Click to listen to Chris s conversation with Rajmohan Gandhi (35 minutes, 16 mb mp3). Rajmohan Gandhi in Bapu s lap, Delhi, 1936 Short form: The skinny brown man in the traditional loin-cloth would be a thorn in the side of power today more perhaps than ever in nuclear-armed India and in a world more concertedly hostile to Islam even than India was in 1948. The father of his country would be attacking smug self-satisfaction among the new rich in India. He would be unhappy about the continued oppression of women, says Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson and biographer of the man that his family and nation called Bapu, or father. He d be attacking the worship of money with his deepest conviction, as Gandhi once wrote to a young American seeking Indian wisdom, that life is not for indulgence but essentially for self-denial. Would that the students of America could imbibe that one lesson. If Barack Obama could fulfill his spontaneous, touching wish for dinner with Gandhi, he would find the Mahatma as interested in Barack Obama as Barack Obama in Gandhi. But the American president should be prepared, says Gandhi s grandson, to hear the grand strategist of India s independence say to the Americans what he said to the British: who asked you to be the guardians of the whole wide world? And why do you think you know better than the local people what is best for them? Relax! Trust those people. Yes, they may make mistakes, but they re entitled to their freedom, to their independence. If, as I suppose, President Obama asked the great Gandhi to help me with Islam, his grandson believes: Gandhi would say: well, you, too, have your links with Islam, through your forebears. You have a tremendous chance He would tell Obama, of course, about his friend Abdul Gaffar Khan, his Pashtun friend. And he would say to Obama: there are today in the Islamic world so many thousands of women and men who are fighting for the very things you are fighting for. They are the immediate victims of terrorism. Look at the numbers of Pakistanis and Afghans killed every single day by the extremists in their midst. Now that Fort Hood has happened, we re all moved by these poignant descriptions of every single life that perished there. But the Pakistanis, the Afghans who also perish because of suicide bombings, because they re ambushed by extremists, they died unknown, unrecognized, unsung Also, and this is what I think Gandhi would say: you in the United States for the last 40 or 50 years have been drawn into the Muslim world. Ask yourself whether you really have been always fair and just to the Muslim world, and if you haven t acknowledge the places where you haven t. Because the anger in the Muslim world although it is unwise, it is foolish, it is harmful above all to the Muslim world does it have some basis in their experience with the Western world? Rajmohan Gandhi with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, 11.15.09. And if, I suppose further, Gandhi said to Obama in some fashion: you re a young idealist with a global imagination; your military chief has asked for 40,000 troops to fight in Afghanistan and your ambassador in Kabul has said: don t send them, it s a dead end how might I, Gandhi, help you, Obama, think through another way? What then? Sure, I can imagine that. And I think Gandhi would also relate that to the situation in the United States where there is unemployment, there is suffering, there is sadness. Gandhi would readily acknowledge that Obama s challenge is immense. And Gandhi would also be perfectly ready to say I don t know what you should do. But he would also say that if you truly reflect and you think of the neediest people in the world and what will help them, they you will know what you should do. Rajmohan Gandhi with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, 11.15.09. He would not be prescribing rememdies, in short, but he d been keeping a universal standard of social justice at the top of all of our agendas.

We re in the living labyrinth of Harold Bloom s astonishing memory here. Click to listen to Chris s conversation with Harold Bloom (32 minutes, 15 mb mp3). 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.

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Please do not post any offensive comments. I will delete them so don't even bother writing them. ----- Aired during One Tree Hill on November 9, 2009 Honors: #52 - Most Viewed (Today) - Germany #10 - Most Viewed (Today) - Australia #25 - Most Viewed (Today) - Canada #16 - Most Viewed (Today) - United Kingdom #34 - Most Viewed (Today) - Ireland #12 - Most Viewed (Today) - New Zealand #46 - Most Viewed (Today) - Israel #11 - Most Viewed (Today) #18 - Most Viewed (Today) - Mexico #37 - Most Viewed (Today) - France #47 - Most Viewed (Today) - Poland #21 - Most Viewed (Today) - Russia #11 - Most Viewed (Today) - Czech Republic #14 - Most Viewed (Today) - Sweden #8 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - Germany #2 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - Australia #4 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - Canada #4 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - United Kingdom #12 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - Ireland #4 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - New Zealand #4 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - Israel #2 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment #6 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - Mexico #11 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - France #18 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - Netherlands #12 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - Poland #2 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - Russia #3 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - Czech Republic #5 - Most Viewed (Today) - Entertainment - Sweden #47 - Top Favorited (Today) #13 - Top Favorited (Today) - Entertainment

Click to listen to Chris s conversation with David Bromwich (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3). 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 a 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.