Christopherlydon Videos

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.

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.

The Wire was the genius series on HBO that revealed Baltimore today ( Bodymore, Murderland ) the way Dickens Bleak House and Oliver Twist revealed 19th Century London. It was reality television, finally, about no-go America: not just terror-stricken drugged-out public housing but the complexity of human responses inside it. It was the new-media breakthrough that made producer David Simon an authority on how and why old media failed. It was the series that retired in glory after five years, but in DVD release is still challenging all our mythologies of drugs, race, schools, work, want of work, and police work. Click to listen to Chris s conversation with Sonja Sohn and Donnie Andrews. (29 minutes, 13 mb mp3) First Middlebury, then Duke, now Harvard are teaching courses around The Wire, because as the esteemed Harvard Sociologist William J. Wilson put it, the show goes deeper than social science has into the challenges and inequality of urban life. This is television that changed also the people who made it. Our conversation is with two of the key contributors who are part of teaching the Wire are also still dealing with what it stirred up in their own lives. First, the real Donnie Andrews, a ghetto famous free-lance killer of drug dealers in Baltimore who fired up the idea of The Wire and inspired Omar, a main character in it. Ed Burns, later a co-producer of The Wire, was Donnie s arresting officer. David Simon covered the story for The Baltimore Sun: It was during a time when I think I was at my lowest point, because I had just lost a very dear friend of mine, who died in my arms As he was dying, he asked me who he was, who was I? And I told him: Donnie. He said “Donnie, I can’t see you.” At that point I realized, I couldn’t see myself either. That was the turning point for me. It was like we had a war going on, a drug war, in Lexington Terrace. We were always assigned to take somebody out. And the guy I took out, I already put like 4 bullets in him, and I stood over top of him, and he looked up and asked me: why? I stood there for what seemed like an eternity trying to figure out that question, why am I doing this? He’s black just like me, got a mother, brother, sister, family, just like me, and I just took everything from him. And I don’t even know why. And at that point it began to turn my life around. So I went home and I read the Bible. Paul. I read Paul. I didn’t come out of the house for like 2 days, and I just kept reading Paul over and over. Finally I realized that if Paul, who did basically same thing that I did, God forgave him. And converted him, so maybe he can do the same for me. So I got on my knees and I prayed. Donnie Andrews with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009. And the actress Sonja Sohn, who played the often anguished narcotics cop, Kima Greggs: My first year on The Wire was absolute torture. For some reason, and I didn’t know at the time, I would get on the set, and many times I couldn’t remember my lines, I would go into a little bit of a panic, and it just – it was something I just couldn’t figure out. And I thought, gosh, am I really this bad of an actor? I later started learning about complex PTSD, and realized that a part of my brain was just shutting down, the entire year I was shooting The Wire. I’ll give you an example: my mother was battered by my father on a somewhat regular basis. And in the neighborhood, you don’t ever call the police, ever. You don’t snitch and you don’t call the police. But there were a number of times when I thought my mother was going to be killed by my father, and I would go upstairs and call the police, hoping that my mother was going to be alive when they came. And the police would come – and I thought “wow, thank god, they’re going to take him away.” And they would talk a little bit, and they would leave my father there. I would go, “why aren’t they taking him away?” and then after a course of time, third, fourth time, they would come and just sort of smirk and snicker, just kind of pooh-pooh this thing away. And I started to hate the cops, because I thought “you guys are supposed to help me, you’re supposed to save my mother, and it’s not happening, and as a matter of fact, you’re now laughing at my family.” So I realized, one reason I couldn’t step into the character of a cop is because I had such deep resentment for the cops, and a lot of pain, that eventually I had to unravel. Sonya Sohn with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009.

Ralph Nader has charted a utopian fictional flight out of the dystopia he sees all around him on the ground. In conversation I’m trying to figure whether Ralph has written a happy ending to his career, or a scream of despair. Click to listen to Chris s conversation with Ralph Nader. (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Citizen Nader is feeling isolated and stymied these days in the Age of Obama. It’s been 50 years now of his reform drive for home virtues and people power, and there have been many victories along the way for safer cars and cleaner air and water. Leaving aside the fact that his third-party presidential campaigns have left him a pariah in the Democratic Party (and the Obama White House), the healthcare fight and others tell him that money power rules Congress as never before. So in a sort of novel, Only the Super-Rich can Save Us, Nader has fantasized that the money is in his pocket. It s a sort of dream that Ralph s lifelong agenda has been bought out by Warren Buffett, Yoko Ono, Ted Turner, Bill Cosby, Ross Perot and a dozen other patriotic billionaires. With their money, his whole program has been enacted. Ralph speaks (a little disconcertingly, perhaps) as if it s actually happened. But if it had, would we call it good news or bad? Democracy, or Bloombergism built like so much else in our world on the charisma of money? RN: The problem is the nature of power, and the corporate entity controlling government, which Franklin Roosevelt, in 1938, called fascism The global corporate model is all powerful, has no competition in terms of a model They have nationalized the savings of the American people. They are too big to fail, so that they are bailed out, as Wall Street is bailed out. They have monetized elections, nullifying effectively people s votes. They select the politicians, put them in office, and when they retire they hire them and give them a half a million dollars or more a year as lobbyists. It is the most clever, dynamic, creative system of controlling power in the history of the world. And they give people entertainment, and they allow people to confuse personal freedom with civic freedom. So you ve got a lot of people in this country who say, what do you mean we don t live in a free country? That s right, you have personal freedom, you can eat what you want, buy whatever clothes you want, date who you want, divorce who you want, choose the friends you want, pick the music you want, get the bicycle you want, get into a five-thousand pound vehicle and go three blocks and buy chiclets if you want. That is personal freedom. It s not civic freedom. Civic freedom is what s been shredded. As Cicero said freedom is participation in power. What kind of freedom do we have by that standard? Right now we have a dystopia on the ground. It s called the liberal progressive intelligentsia and their flock. They think if they keep writing more books (the way Bill Greider and Bob Kuttner and Jim Hightower and Ralph Nader and others keep writing, exposing, proposing, diagnosing, denouncing and suggesting) that something is going to happen. We have hit a stone wall one reason I ran for President three times. Congress has shut down. Washington is corporate-occupied territory. That s the dystopia on the ground Between that real life dystopia of the progressive liberal intelligentsia and their world, and their least-worst voting for the Democrats over the Republicans and never pulling the Democrats in their direction — between that and my practical utopia I ll take my proposal as more realistic. CL: That s a very serious question you re talking about. And we all know it intuitively around health care. We all know that what Congress is doing has almost nothing to do with what people want, or even what the wonks say are the best provisions of the best policy. it s about what the healthcare industry will let us have. RN: That s been documented in books from A to Z. Here s where this book kicks in. Let s say ten elderly super-billionaries get together and they say look, enough is enough. 45,000 Americans are dying every year because they can t afford health insurance. Trillions of dollars lost, claims denied, anxiety, grieving, it s an incredible mess, a pay or die system in the richest country in the world. Suppose these guys get together at the Four Seasons. They re on their third martini. They say, you know, I met a couple of great organizers and they said if they had a billion dollars they could organize every congressional district and move the thirty-percent of congress who s already privately for single-payer health insurance to a majority. Obama will sign it because he s for single-payer, but wasn t willing to take on the drug and health-insurance companies. That ll happen in eighteen months. You wanna argue that with me? A billion dollars organizing the congressional districts the way Donald Ross and others know how to do it. Eighteen months, we d have single-payer. Eighteen months. No one will die in America because they can t afford health insurance. Just like no one dies in England, Germany, France, Sweden or Canada because they re insured from day one when they re born. That s what I mean about money. You ve got people all over the country the majority support single payer; a majority of doctors support it; even larger majority of nurses support it. And it s going nowhere because there isn t one full-time lobbyist on capital hill for single payer, and there are 2000 corporate lobbyists for the drug companies and the Aetnas and the hospital chains. When are we going to face up to the money issue? Money is not enough. You have to have smarts, strategy, determination, humanity, time, diligence — but you can have all those, and if you do not have money it goes nowhere. Ralph Nader with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009.

Click to listen to the Matters of Faith conversation with Harvey Cox, Mary Gordon, Cornel West and Chris Lydon. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) This is a book-fair exchange that caught fire around a current version of the old graffiti duel: “God is dead,” signed Nietzsche. Then, “Nietzsche is dead,” signed God. How s to read the evidence that God is back in an almighty way in the bookstores, in popular culture, in world affairs? Neo-atheists including Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have given The Big Guy best-selling burials all over again in recent years. But now come Karen Armstrong, Robert Wright, and at the Boston Book Festival last weekend: novelist Mary Gordon, a progressive Catholic who leaves plenty of room for doubt; the post-modern Baptist theologian Harvey Cox; and Cornel West, the lay preacher and “blues man in the life of the mind,” as he calls himself – each of them writing and talking up a storm about an insatiable hunger out there for a personal god, or gods, and also for “blessed communities” in His or Her name. In a jammed hall of the Boston Public Library last weekend, I asked the writers not to summarize or sell their books but to imagine we were in a train compartment between, say, Istanbul and Vienna, just talking. Harvey Cox led off for Mary Gordon and Cornel West, who brought it home, as we say in church. Lets go back to three of the great historical sociologists who gave us an analysis of what religion would look like – some were more wrong than right.  Weber said there would be secularization that would become ubiquitous.  There would be a disenchantment of the world that would lead toward an iron cage, where people would be, in fact, yearning for god-talk but giving it up, because science and technology would become so hegemonic, would become so influential, that people would no longer opt for narratives that invoke God or grace.  Now Weber was wrong about secularization, but he was right about the iron cage.  Durkheim said that there’s an eternal in religious sensibilities to a degree that human beings are gonna worship something.  They’re gonna treasure something – the question is, what will it be?  Conrad in Heart of Darkness said: what? It’s idolatry, it’s Kurtz and it’s ivory.  But they’re gonna treasure something.  The question is: will it be something outside of their ego, their tribe, their clan, their nation?  Will it be transcendental, will it be universal, will it be cosmopolitan?  And then here comes Karl Marx, who says all of this religious talk is just a sigh of the oppressed.  Of course people want to live in a world where they have some sense of wholeness.  But like George Santayana who defined religion as what?  Religion as the love of life and the conciousness of impotence.  That’s Santatyana.  He’s a naturalist.  Religious, but in no way Christian or anything else.  He agrees with Marx.  Religion is fundamentally about coming to terms with your limits.  You’re gonna die.  Your bodies will be the culinary delight of terrestial worms one day – can’t get around it.  Can’t get out of space and time alive! One of the reasons why I pride myself in being a bluesman in the life of the mind, is because a bluesman or blueswoman has the Keatsian sensibility.  That negative capability So for example you look at the Christian texts, look at the blues note of Jesus himself – my god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me, on the cross?  That’s a blues moment, that’s a Keatsian moment.  Here God, God’s self, is calling into question the benevolent power of the supposedly ultimate power of the universe.  Now I like that moment, because its humanizing What do you do in the face of that?  Well the blues say oohhh, wait a minute.  The blues ain’t nothing but an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically anyway.  Nobody loves me but my mama, and she might be jiving too.  That’s B.B. King, that’s the King of the Blues.  That’s Antigone.  Everything’s against you in the darkness, including your blessed mama.  And he does that on the B-side of The Thrill is Gone!  And it comes from a blues people who have dealt with catastrophe in America, American terrorism in the form of slavery, for 244 years.  American terrorism in the form of Jim Crow, Jane Crow, lynching In the face of that kind of terrorism, you don’t create a black Al Queda, and just counter-terrorize.  You say: no, in the face of slavery, we want freedom for everybody!  In the face of Jim Crow, we want rights and liberties for everybody.  It’s the Love Supreme that John Coltrane talked about.  In the face of that kind of catastrophe, you hold onto some sense of what appears to be impotent – namely love and justice.  Why?  Because even when you’re gangsterized, you don’t wanna get in the gutter with a ganster.  Even if you’re defeated momentarily, you’d rather be defeated with integrity than win with the thugs.  That’s the lesson of the best of Black history in America Cornel West in conversation with Mary Gordon, Harvey Cox and Chris Lydon at the Boston Book Festival, October 24, 2009.

If, as guesstimated, Osama Bin Laden spent half a million dollars to recruit, feed and train the perpetrators of 911, and if the US has spent or committed something like $2-trillion on our 8-year response, the asymmetry of costs in this global war on terror is something like 4-million to 1. And that s just the money. I m asking the journalist Mark Danner here to take a shot at a moral and political balance sheet. Click to listen to Chris s conversation with Mark Danner. (29 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Mark Danner has covered one of the dirtiest stories on earth – torture – with an insistent lack of squeamishness about the injuries to human bodies and to American identity. He wrote the landmark New York Times op-ed, We Are All Torturers Now, on the confirmation Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General in 2005. The best of Mark Danner’s work on politics, violence and war is now gathered in a book titled Stripping Bare the Body. He spoke with me in Boston about the extra-Constitutional “state of exception,” as he calls it, that isn t over yet – and what these years of suspended rules, prolonged detentions, and foreign renditions of terror suspects, and torture, have done to our country. CL: Mark Danner, I m reading David Rohde s epic accounts of his imprisonment by the Taliban in the New York Times everyday for the past week. I keep wondering: when will we learn that our presence, our mere presence, not to say blowing up weddings, is a main generator of the insurgency? MD: David Rohde, in his account of his captivity explicitly says that there are people who come and express their anger about the people who ve been imprisoned in Guantanamo indefinitely, and Bagram and Abu Ghraib. This is a major theme in his writing, and a major theme in the grievances he hears from the Taliban. This does not mean that American policy should be guided solely by what our enemies don t like. It does mean that there are very significant costs, political costs, to some of these policies that have to be weighed against how useful they are and whether they really protect the country. We seem to have a great deal of trouble weighing those costs, because, indeed, they re not quantifiable as dollars or anything else. CL: Your book keeps raising the question of what is power in a world where an IED may represent a few hundred dollars worth of effort that can blow up a multimillion dollar tank. And it happens all the time. MD: I remember distinctly finding an IED when I was with some troops in Dora in southern Baghdad. This thing, when we finally were able to get it out of the plastic bag — it was disguised as a bit of garbage — was as simple as you can imagine. It was a little mortar shell— millions of which, literally, are around Iraq, Sadaam bought millions of these things — that had been duct-taped to the base of a phone, the kind of mobile phone you have in your house and you can press button on it that will beep the handset if you lose it. An insurgent would stand up in a building, take the handset and beep it. That would blow this thing up. Simple as can be. Easy as can be to make it. Probably cost a couple hundred bucks, depending how you value the mortar shell. And these things are incredibly effective. You cannot stop all of the IEDs from being made. You cannot stop that. You have to at some point stop the people from wanting to make them. You won t succeed in stopping all of them, but you might succeed in stopping most of them. It is one thing that I think Americans have learned in the last eight years, that the road toward killing every Jihadist is not the road that the United States has to take. It has to be more political, and that s not simply a matter of money, it s a matter of effectiveness. We read everyday about these drone attacks. Another theme in the pieces by David Rohde in the New York Times was the extreme anger caused by the civilian deaths that are a side effect, a direct effect of using these missiles to attack targets on the ground in parts of Pakistan. And we think this is surgical warfare, but in fact it is people standing on the ground, suddenly being blown up. And blaming this directly on the United States. So these things do have a political cost. Mark Danner in conversation with Chris Lydon, October 22, 2009.

Ted Sizer was a master teacher when he first kicked me into shape in the 1950s. He was just out of Yale and the United States Army. I was a driven, impoverished sophomore at the Marine Corps of the Mind, as we thought of our venerable, ancient Roxbury Latin School in Boston. He d been a Yale faculty brat, son of the art historian and Old Blue legend Tubby Sizer, who d hand-designed the heraldic flags of the several Yale colleges. But then Ted had joined the army and fallen in love with the other side of the street. At Roxbury Latin, my classmates and I plotted how to break the new teacher on his first civilian job. As it turned out, Ted Sizer broke us on entering the classroom, just by eye-contact, and then by demanding results. Click to listen to Chris s conversation with the late Ted Sizer. (24 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Ted Sizer s long, brilliant career as a school reformer was based on the notions we felt instantly. He had no doctrine and no gimmicks, but the democratic premise of his life s work was that if the fundamentals at Harvard, Yale and Phillips Academy at Andover were good enough for him and his kids, they should and could be the model for public schools all over America. His peak experience as a student was being examined over and over for his Ph.D. by Harvard s reigning American colonial historian, Bernard Bailyn. And so small-school eye-contact education for every kid became Ted Sizer s standard – to be delivered by hands-on teachers until kids could speak and demonstrate all they’d learned. Ted Sizer was fighting the cancer that killed him this week when I drove out to the family house in the woods of Harvard, Massachuetts last year and we talked about what he d taught, written and learned, about American schools. TS: Well, the main ideas I came upon as an historian, primarily of American history but also of British and Commonwealth history, which were part of my PhD requirements. I was subjected to written and oral exams so it was a really rugged, typically Harvard effort, no expense spared, and my marvelous adviser, Bernard Bailyn, who now is a retired University Professor at Harvard, he would always say: well, do it again, do it again. Harvard allowed two distinguished philosophers to be part of my committee, these very thoughtful and devoted scholars who would ask the questions over and over and over, again saying do it again, do it again, do it again, until you get it right, by my standards. By the time they are your standards, you ve learned something CL: Is this the core of Sizer s lesson, which is to say you don t know it until you can perform it in a way, and you can t perform it until you ve done it over and over and over? TS: Yes, absolutely, for everybody. Even the so-called swiftest student, who may be the sloppiest, who will say something that seems so plausible you forget to challenge it. And when you challenge it, you find he can t explain where it came from. It just came with his toast in the morning. But of course that whole process slows everything down Well, what I see at the work of this coalition of essential school is quite conservative. There s language, our own and at least one other, there s social studies, our own history, those of others. There s math and science, which are easier to define, and then there s art. That s the most difficult to define. We spend, at our little school, a great deal of time explaining the importance of visual and performing arts and in public exhibitions, the kids show off their grasp and understanding of the importance of these. Ted Sizer in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 11, 2008.

Prompted by last weekend s Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? C.D. Wright speaks of her output as “a few reams of freedom.” Father was an Arkansas judge and a nearsighted bookworm, like herself. Mother was a court reporter. “Of the choices revealed to me,” she has written in her memoir of life and craft, Cooling Time, “crime and art were the only ones with any real sex appeal.” I love her take on the local and the global in her head and her poetry: The Ozarks are a fixture in my mindscape, but I did not stay local in every respect. I always think of Miles Davis, People who don t change end up like folk musicians playing in museums, local as a motherfucker. I would not describe my attachment to home as ghostly, but long-distanced. My ear has been licked by so many other tongues. Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil. Copper Canyon, 2005. p. 89 “I believe in a hardheaded art,” she has written, “an unremitting, unrepentant practice of one’s own faith in the word in one’s own obstinate terms.” Her terms run to the erotic, the choleric, the comic, in her own “luminously strange idiom,” the New Yorker said, “eerie as a tin whistle.” She read for us and talked with us at the Watson Institute here at Brown, where C. D. Wright and her husband Forrest Gander both teach writers. Click to listen to Chris s conversation with C.D. Wright. (61 minutes, 28 mb mp3) Q: What talent would you most like that you don’t have, yet? A: Well, I can’t cook. That’s a big drag, because Forrest [Gander, my husband] can’t cook very much either. It’s a real let down. We both love to eat. I don’t have another language — I would really like to have a second language. I’ve become very attracted to Spanish. And Spanish is still somewhat doable. I read a lot of Spanish literature in translation. Q: What kind? New, or old, or … ? A: This summer I read prose writers: the Argentine writer César Aira, the Spanish writer Javier Marías, I read Roberto Bola�o, a Chilean. Q: Bola�o speaks to you? A: Yes, he does. For one thing, he was a poet for twenty-five years. All his protagonists and antagonists are poets — they are completely unruly. Q: Who does your work in another medium? A: I love the jazz of the 60s and 70s— Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea — I’ve been missing that lately. In painting, I love Elizabeth Murray and I love Agnes Martin. Agnes Martin said her paintings were for people to look at before daily care strikes. I found that a wonderful phrase. Elizabeth Murray’s work I find very exciting, very alive. Agnes Martin’s makes me feel like I just had a really good cup of tea and I have a fire going and can look at the day ahead. Q: Report to the ancestors. What’s the state of the art? A: American poetry is incredibly various. America’s strength is that is so flexible, compared to other countries. America, as a nation is losing that, though. Q: What is the quality you look for in a poem? A: I love language, I like filthy language, hieratic language, I like obscure language, archaic language, technical language — so I probably have the least affinity for the real minimalist writers. I like people who are kind of besotted by language. Q: What’s the keynote of your personality as a poet? A: Honesty. But I’m not incorruptible. In general, I think that’s the characteristic that I got from my dad, who didn’t believe in any gray areas. I think it’s important to me. Q: What’s your motto? A: Be brave, be without malice, be as original as you were made to be.

Chris Hedges is Mr. Bad News in our time, the obituary writer for our economy, our culture, our democracy, our media. When I got to the New York Times (some years before Chris Hedges) in the late Sixties, Alden Whitman had the bad news moniker, writing obits of great figures for the paper of record. When Alden Whitman knocked on your door for a long interview about your life, you were supposed to know it was almost over. It s Chris Hedges s gig now, observing all of us. After most of 20 years as a war correspondent with the Times, Chris Hedges in 2003 charged his paper and others with shameful cheerleading for the war in Iraq, and left to study up again on ancient history, theology and classic literature, and to write his own classic, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. In his new jeremiad, Empire of Illusion, pro wrestling and pornography are the bookend spectacles in a parody culture all around us now the grotesque joke representations of power and eros in the end times. I find these resonant arguments, from the rare daily-news ace who s trained himself also in the long view: Click to listen to Chris s conversation with Chris Hedges. (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3) To believe somehow that we are the culmination, that time is linear, that we are progressing morally, is to ignore human history and human nature, and essentially to remain in a state of infantilism. That s what illusion is about. If we had an understanding of what the dying days, the twilight hours of great civilizations were like we would be able to see all the flashing lights, the warning signs around us. But I think that the illiteracy which has gripped the country (a third of this country is either illiterate, or is technically literate but doesn t read anymore); that shift from a print based culture into an image based culture, the belief that how we are made to feel is a form of knowledge, propaganda being a kind of ideology these are the hallmarks of a totalitarian state. Totalitarian states are image based, spectacle based states. We have set the ground for a seamless transfer from a democracy into a kind of corporate state. With the corporate state always comes the rise of the surveillance or the security state. We lack the capacity, having been unmoored from print, and relying on skillfully manipulated images, to fight back We see it in the environmental crisis; we are literally destroying the ecosystem that sustains the human species; the gap widens between the illusion of the world we think we live in, and the reality of that world.  What you ve done is render huge segments of the population into a kind of childishness which makes them emotionally, intellectually and psychologically unprepared for what it is they are about to face. They will react like all children, which is to reach out for demagogues who promise a new glory, vengeance and moral renewal. CL: What survives of American hegemony if in fact it s over? CH: Well, it is over. We can t continue to borrow, to sustain either a level of consumption or the empire that we demand. It s just a question of when, and how do we respond. I don t think learning to live without the piles of junk that have been bequeathed to us by consumer culture is going to impoverish our lifestyle. I don t think that learning a new humility as empire is dismantled is a negative. We will have to learn another language other than the language of force by which we speak to most of the rest of the world, certainly those in the Middle East. It doesn t necessarily mean the end of hope or a life of meaning or a life of richness; it just means a different kind of life. The danger is not grasping this reality. That s the danger. if we re not prepared for this reality, if we continue to live as the most delusional nation on the planet, than we we will end up like Yugoslavia. The war in Yugoslavia was caused by the economic meltdown of Yugoslavia — it vomited up figures like Slobodan Milosevic; the Weimar republic did the same; did the collapse of Czarist Russia What remains? I think that unfortunately American culture (or cultures, for we once had many cultures with their own iconography and aesthetic, and a decentralized press that gave expression to local communities) was dismantled and destroyed in the 20th century and replaced with mass corporate culture The drive of corporate culture was to implant the need for consumption as a kind of inner compulsion. Drawing on Freud, it was about manipulating people, appealing to subliminal desires and anxieties, often creating those anxieties, to fuel a kind of wild orgy of consumable products that were supposed to sort of ameliorate our alienation and atomization and loneliness and despair. And all of that is falling down around us. And yet we haven t recognized that reality. It s not unique. There s that emotional incapacity to understand how fragile the world is around us and how rapidly it can disintegrate. I think having been a war correspondent, and having lived in societies that did disintegrate, I m much more conscious. I can walk in my supermarket and imagine all the windows knocked out and the shelves bare and the neon lights hanging, because I ve seen it. There s that dual capacity to see how swiftly and quickly any society can collapse. CL: We elected a president who promised literally a kind of transformation. I don t want to to argue Obama politics, so much as just to ask: is transformation an illusion? CH: Well, we elected a brand. We elected a presidential candidate who campaigned, like his rival, primarily on a personal narrative. You had rallies where people were chanting slogans like yes we can, which they stole by the way from FedEx-Kinko s. It was campaign by experience: it was a very effective way of making us feel a certain way about a candidate. But Obama does not threaten the core of the corporate state anymore than George W. Bush threatened the core of the corporate state.  That has been more than evidenced by Obama s willingness to continue the looting of the American treasury, the largest transference of wealth upwards in American history. In the 17th century in England, speculators were hung. In our society they are given tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, and they run the government. Chris Hedges in conversation with Chris Lydon, October 8, 2009.