books | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

By the Way • November 24, 2014

In Memoriam: Richard Eder, The Exemplary Reader

The beloved Richard Eder had the gift he admired in John Updike and that that sparkled in his own prize-winning book reviews: he “snored” metaphors and similes the way J. S. Bach could “snore” fugues. As, for example, in an appreciation of the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi: “His darkness is full of illuminations and his light is shadowed. Like the chickadee, he sings in winter, but not, in the way of ideological optimists, by ignoring winter. His throat has ice in it.”

On the New York Times staff he met Emerson’s standard: “the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” His family was a crowd of expressive originals after his example – with his wife, the painter Esther Garcia Eder and their seven children, mostly artists.

Richard was let go as the Times’ Broadway reviewer because his taste was not sufficiently commercial; so he went off to the Los Angeles Times and won a Pulitzer for his book reviews before returning in glory to the mothership. In recent years he taught Brown students how to be a critic. The job was not to bury or praise but to share the experience of wrestling with a book — with being there. At the Times today, the irresistible Dwight Garner is Richard’s real successor.

He startled me on the radio once noting that the “hot-shit books” were the ones that were still storming in your head a week later. (You can listen to that conversation above.) In the bicentennial year, 2000, the books still burning were Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf; John Updike’s version of Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius; Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost; and Akhil Sharma’s novel, An Obedient Father.

“I think you should approach a book the way you approach a strange dog, thinking it will probably bite you,” Richard told us on the radio here. He was wary of liking a book so much that readers would take his word and be let down. Better for literature, he said, “to pan all the great authors, and let people find them, in spite of us.”

Podcast • October 30, 2014

Jill Lepore: The Feminist and the Superhero

The Harvard historian Jill Lepore – prolific, impish, a super-mom, politically engaged and still professorial – is giving us the kinky inside story of Wonder Woman that you never suspected reading the old comic book.

The Harvard historian Jill Lepore is giving us the kinky inside story of Wonder Woman that you never suspected reading the old comic book. Lepore stumbled on it while she was researching a New Yorker piece on Planned Parenthood and its founder Margaret Sanger. It turns out that the man who invented Wonder Woman in 1941 – as a match for Superman – was related by common-law marriage not just to Sanger but to the birth control and feminist movements in their World War I heyday.

William Moulton Marston was a Ph.D. psychologist (and inventor of the lie detector), a bigamist by conviction and a female-supremacist in doctrine. He lived a radical bohemian life under one roof with two women and had children with both of them. Wonder Woman was Marston’s model of the new woman he thought should rule the world.

But when Marston died after World War II, Wonder Woman was domesticated and diminished. In other writers’ hands, Wonder Woman became a babysitter, a fashion model and a movie star in the 1950s. In Jill Lepore’s telling, Wonder Woman is a morphing mirror of the women’s movement itself.

WWII-era “Wonder Woman” panel, done by cartoonist H. G. Peter.

Right now, she says, that story is missing its happy ending — but where there are Wonder Women, there’s a way.

Podcast • May 24, 2013

Iyer Dyer & Doty is not a Law Firm

This one won’t be on the final exam, but in the spring clearance from the Key West Literary Seminars I didn’t want to let it go. Seriously funny Englishman-at-large Geoff Dyer, American Poet Mark Doty ...

This one won’t be on the final exam, but in the spring clearance from the Key West Literary Seminars I didn’t want to let it go.

Seriously funny Englishman-at-large Geoff Dyer, American Poet Mark Doty and globalist Pico Iyer and are testifying about the writers who inhabit writers — in their cases, respectively, D. H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman and Graham Greene. We’re dropping names and having fun here with a genial crowd… but what’s more memorably instructive in the end than artists talking about the inner voices of their ancestors? As in conversations past with Harold Bloom on R. W. Emerson and the great Schmuel, Dr. Johnson. Or Dave McKenna speaking about his ideal, Nat Cole, the only pianist who could “bend” a note and play the tones in-between. Or Sonny Rollins, in humble astonishment that he had actually made music with the geniuses Bud Powell and Sonny Stitt. Or Roy Haynes talking with Ben Ratliff about Jo Jones.

As usual I am pining naively in the writers’ chat for my own William James or some magisterial successor who might explain Americans to themselves in a universal frame today. But the writers are reminding me of the contradictions in all these affinities. What we don’t have these days, and maybe don’t want, is a “synthesizing voice.” It’s one of England’s great achievements, Geoff Dyer slipped in, not to have a Bernard Henri Levy on the premises. If we had Whitman and his democratic vistas in our midst today, Doty says we might ignore him as his own generation did, or celebrate his worst poems, not his best. If by a miracle Graham Greene had been announced in the lobby of our theater, Pico Iyer insisted he’d have sprinted away because to meet his inspiration “would simplify, not deepen, my understanding of the man.” Odd, then, that everybody wanted to sit down with the subject that made Geoff Dyer famous — the inexhaustibly contentious, inconsistent and sometimes monstrous D. H. Lawrence, remembered as “a man who burned like an acetylene torch from one end to the other of his life” and elsewhere as “the man who could write brilliantly and awfully, in the same sentence.” Geoff Dyer gets the last line on the perplexity of writers’ affinities: “… but one would have thought it a huge privilege to be on the receiving end of a lashing from Lawrence.”

Podcast • February 12, 2013

Geoff Dyer, “on whom nothing is lost…”

Geoff Dyer would tell you he found his way into writing as a way of not having a career. With ever-ready tennis racquet in his book bag, he seems pretty much the man we all ...

Geoff Dyer would tell you he found his way into writing as a way of not having a career. With ever-ready tennis racquet in his book bag, he seems pretty much the man we all want to be when we grow up. He’s a pissed-off Englishman but light-hearted about it. He’s learned, he’s liberated. He’s prolific, he’s celebrated. And he’s very, very funny, in person as on the page. We’re making conversation here at the Key West Literary Seminar this winter.

Geoff Dyer hooked me 15 years ago with But Beautiful, an inspired set of improvisations on the sacrificial lives of jazz geniuses (Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Chet Baker, Bud Powell) whom Dyer (astonishingly to me) had never seen or heard in life. He is famous since then for Out of Sheer Rage about his constitutional inability to write a scholar’s account D. H. Lawrence. He has served a long apprenticeship with the hero he speaks about here: the anti-critic and anti-theorist John Berger. Meantime when Dyer writes from the road about importunate Cambodian kids trying to sell him a Coke — he lifts the travel essay toward a very personal moral majesty.

What’s so individual about Geoff Dyer is the mix of amateur and expert voices — of the angry working-stiff with an Oxford degree who’s judgmental but always original on photography and poetry, history, fiction and that “foreign music” known as jazz, just for starters. He’s in the great line of stylish pubic thinkers from Hazlitt to George Scialabba, writing ever “outside his field,” because in truth he has no field. He invites and challenges all of us to pay attention to everything, to look at what we’re seeing, to get us into the act, to be touched by it.

Podcast • April 21, 2011

Arnold Weinstein: The Dimensionality of Reading

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Arnold Weinstein (53 minutes, 26 mb mp3) [Scott Kingsley for the Brown Alumni Magazine] Brown University literature professor Arnold Weinstein is recalling a half-century of reading and teaching ...

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Arnold Weinstein (53 minutes, 26 mb mp3)

[Scott Kingsley for the Brown Alumni Magazine]

Brown University literature professor Arnold Weinstein is recalling a half-century of reading and teaching books. He’s tracing the “Morning, Noon, and Night” — in the title of his new book — of his literary life. He begins, in this conversation, with two books that he read as a senior at Princeton: Melville’s Benito Cereno and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

Benito Cereno is the story of a Spanish captain and his cargo of enslaved Africans who rebel and depose him. In Weinstein’s telling, it is a narrative of misunderstood power that resonates with America’s modern misadventures abroad. It is also, he says, the most cinematic writing of the 19th century. His long-held dream is to make it into a film.

It was in reading The Sound and the Fury that Weinstein began to understand the tussle between the “there and then” that dominates our inner lives and the “here and now” that constitutes our movement through public life.

I think each one of us lives exactly that ballet. We are always juggling what’s roiling inside of us versus the moves or steps in our public lives. Faulkner taught me that. … Once you see past the picturesqueness of Faulkner’s world, or the evils of both racism and sexism, … then you are confronting an extraordinarily rich picture of human maneuvering room: how you live with your inner ghosts, how you try to reach to the other. Books in that sense are profoundly ethical.

I think books are mirrors for readers. But they’re not mirrors in the lazy narcissist sense, that it’s kind of facile self-reflection. There’s labor in it. Call it a distorting mirror. It’s a picture of who you are, but it’s perhaps an elemental version of you that either you’ve never noticed, or never wanted to notice.

Arnold Weinstein with Chris Lydon in Providence, April 2011.

Professor Weinstein is sharing a profound faith in the essential nutrients of books, paired with a healthy dislike for the literary theory that has dominated the academy over the last four decades. We should read for emotion and experience, he reminds us, and remember that literature is not, as the theorists exhort, more “complex” than we realize, but rather richer and more resonant.

He’s learned, in years of leading celebrated courses on the tough masterpieces — his favorite is “Proust, Joyce and Faulkner” — that teaching literature is carrying out an injunction “that says we’re part of an ongoing life. They’re young, I’m three-score-and-ten, and these book are in many cases centuries old. There’s a kind of parallel between the blood-line in students, the blood-line in faculty and the blood-line in books. We’re there to keep these alive.”

Podcast • January 11, 2011

Knowing Jesse: Among the Books of 2010, a Life Lesson

I am always, I am sometimes tough I am sometimes heroic I am sometimes tough I am always, I am always brave I am always tough I am sometimes invisible I am always brave, heroic ...

I am always, I am sometimes tough
I am sometimes heroic
I am sometimes tough
I am always, I am always brave
I am always tough
I am sometimes invisible
I am always brave, heroic
I am always, I am sometimes brave
I am sometimes, I am always tough.

Jesse Cooper

Marianne Leone Cooper wrote the book that stuck to my ribs at the end of 2010: Knowing Jesse.

Way off our usual path of wonkery and literary modernism, this is a book (and a writer) that ambush the heart, that confront our numbness with numbers and the new. It’s a book that feeds our neglected hunger for a humanistic revival, for a transformation of consciousness. It is Marianne Leone Cooper’s fiery, often very funny account of her son’s brief, brilliant life. Jesse Cooper, as she writes, was “an honor-roll student who loved to windsurf and write poetry. He also had severe cerebral palsy and was quadriplegic, unable to speak, and wracked by seizures. He died suddenly at age seventeen.”

Marianne Leone played Joanne Moltisanti on The Sopranos for four seasons on HBO. Chris Cooper, her husband, is a supporting-part superstar in Hollywood. Knowing Jesse is a celebrity-proof story of love-struck strivers from acting school bringing up their baby in Hoboken in the 80s, about their readiness, as it turned out, to be led by their hearty, heroic, sometimes brave, sometimes invisible boy Jesse. By the 6th grade, after storming their way into mainstream public-school classes in Kingston, Massachusetts, Jesse was writing compelling poems, as above — each with its own rhythm, design and heart:

I love that poem. What I remember when Jesse was writing that poem is how insistent he was on the way it looked on the page, which I thought was really interesting. “I am sometimes invisible” grabs you by the throat in that poem. I actually thought of calling this book “sometimes invisible,” because people with disabilities are sometimes invisible in our society… When you’re in middle school you have these heroic self-images, but he also knew that he was sometimes invisible.

We never downplayed the disability. I used to talk to Jesse and say you know, Jesse, you’d be a master of the universe if it weren’t for this disability. You would be a little white boy with a movie-star daddy, and more money than 99 percent of the world deals with every single day. But we are a minority. And because of that he was well schooled in Martin Luther King and Ghandi and all of those movements. I wanted him to be politically aware of what it meant to be a minority… In sixth grade, when it was black history month, the teacher says: I want each of you to pick a black personage to be. Everyone in the class picks a sports figure, except for Jesse who picks one of the kids who integrated Little Rock High School. And why is that? Because we read a book about it, together. About what that meant…

I did worry that I was grooming him to be more of an insurrectionist than maybe his own temperment would have made him. But I think he agreed. “I’m sometimes invisible” tells me that he got it. And his picking not a sports figure, but the kid who integrated Little Rock High School, told me that too. I wanted to give him a vision. He could take his intellect, have a life of the mind, and thrive with that.

Marianne Leone Cooper in conversation with Chris Lydon in Kingston, MA, January 6, 2011