words

Podcast • October 3, 2017

Karl Ove Knausgaard on Art and Loneliness

Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote a 6-volume selfie that a lot of us can’t stop reading. My Struggle he called it, looking inward and talking to himself for thousands of pages. Autumn, his new book, is ...

Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote a 6-volume selfie that a lot of us can’t stop reading. My Struggle he called it, looking inward and talking to himself for thousands of pages. Autumn, his new book, is a relief for him and us: It looks outward, in short pieces, letters to a new daughter before she was born, about Stubble Fields, Telephones, Wellington boots, chimneys, the painter Vincent Van Gogh. You name it, he’ll write it, a theme a day as in the college course we wish we’d taken.

In conversation it’s not one guy introspecting, it’s two guys groping for a connection, sitting in the back of my house in Boston for most of an hour in the storm season of 2017. What’s the difference, I’m asking, between his narcissism and President Trump’s?

We’re jumping from Russian novels to gene editing to the experience of loneliness, and I’m finding him wide open to engagement. He’s generous, transparent, in effect: innocent. Here’s an excerpt of the interview below:

Karl Ove Knausgaard: The books I’d been writing before were so introspective and so analytic and so self-analyzing. That’s very much about relations, very much about psychology, and it’s basically all about the interior life. And this book is the opposite. I’m looking at something outside of myself, and it is the things themselves that should be in the center, basically yes removed from myself. But from thing to me was to see what happens if you write, you know in your own style personally, about something objective that happens with an encyclopedia thought of the world, you know. Everything becomes, in the end, very personal anyway somehow. It’s impossible to remove yourself. You never think of quality of writing in an encyclopedic text, you know, in a dictionary. It’s just like it’s a matter of fact: this is the world. But what you discover when you write about it that’s just not true. The objective world just doesn’t exist. It’s all a relationship between me and the world and you and the world. There is nothing else.

Christopher Lydon: So why get out of yourself after so long inside? Was it for relief?

KOK: Yeah, very much a relief. It was joyful to write this book, and it wasn’t joyful to write My Struggle, as my previous book was called. But a joyful part is, you know, because I am writing about joyful things. I’m writing about being alive in this world, which is joyful. We do forget it all the time, but it is. And this book is mainly set in a garden and a house, and that’s it. That’s where the world is. I mean, even when there are hurricanes and, you know, climate change and all the wars and hunger and all of this, this is still true. It does exist.

Video: On Van Gogh and the Life of an Artist


Video by Zach Goldhammer. Illustrations by Susan Coyne.

Podcast • May 28, 2015

James Wood: The Book(s) of Life

The book critic James Wood doesn’t worry about the fate of the novel — after years of reading them, writing them, reviewing them in The New Yorker and teaching them at Harvard. In his new book, The Nearest ...

The book critic James Wood doesn’t worry about the fate of the novel — after years of reading them, writing them, reviewing them in The New Yorker and teaching them at Harvard.

In his new book, The Nearest Thing To Life, Wood never once writes about the novel as the kind of tired contrivance that’s driving ‘reality hunger’, that’s being outpaced by new journalism, film, social media, or video games. Novels, he argues, scratch an itch most things can’t reach. And he’s persuasive. He reminds you that this unwieldy form — the long-written lie that tells the truth — has passed the test of its readership continually now for centuries.

In the time of Robinson Crusoe, the very idea seemed dubious enough that William Taylor, that book’s publisher, felt the need to promise in a preface that he

believe[d] the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it: And however thinks, because all such things are disputed, that the Improvement of it, as well as the Diversion, as to the Instruction of the Reader, will be the same.

A kind of beginning: it might be real life, or might as well be real life, for all that you take away from it in reading.

Today, fiction functions as the nearest thing to scripture for a secular age. Wood, who has written about his frustrated relationship with the Christianity of his parents, feels that the novel’s power and popularity comes from its comedy, its secularism, from leaving behind Christ the King and picking up where Jesus the forgiver left off in the Book of John:

That sense of forgiveness is, I think, one of the things that most moved me, and moves me, about fiction. In part for personal reasons: that I was growing up in a somewhat unforgiving world, that there was a lot of official talk about Jesus as a forgiver, but it seemed that too often was just rhetoric, which was sad. What was grinding against that was a more evangelical emphasis on sin and correction and therefore punishment — certainly judgment. Forgiveness was hard to come by. The novel — storytelling, when it was done right — seemed to me to offer comprehension and forgiveness for all, for every type of person.

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So, Wood concludes, beyond powers of instruction and revelation, love and empathy, horror and humanity, greatness in a novel means never finally pronouncing on the goodness or badness of character or action. The great novelist proceeds according to her own distinct rules, three simple ones: “There’s nothing new under the sun,” “nothing human is alien to me,” and “every thought is permissible.”

James and Chris discussed ten books in this podcast.

– Max Larkin.

Photograph by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard.

July 10, 2014

One Nation Under Surveillance

It’s the artists — from Orwell of Nineteen Eighty-Four, to Philip Dick and Margaret Atwood, to Trevor Paglen and Banksy — who raise the big questions: about voyeurism, about safety and risk, and the essence of our public and private selves. Is there a book or a movie that tells us what kind of world are we living in, or where the surveillance state begins and ends? What impact does mass surveillance have on our selves, on our national psyche, on the way we interact with each other, on the art we make and the way we live?
The Five NSA Programs You Should Know About

Guest List

What do we envision when we envision the surveillance state?

The latest item in the Snowden surveillance files comes from  Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, who tells us that the messages of law-abiding Americans outnumber ‘legitimate’ targets of NSA surveillance nine to one. We’re talking about love stories now, trysts, hook-ups, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial nightmares. They have no ‘intelligence value’, but the NSA is saving them all the same.

Still, there doesn’t seen to be any real outrage. We the People under surveillance seem to be confused about how much our liberty and our privacy are worth in exchange for convenience  and connectedness. We beg to be followed on Twitter and stalked on Facebook, even as we’re wonder, in an abstract way, how bad it would be to pop up on a government watch list.

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It’s the artists — from Orwell of Nineteen Eighty-Four, to Philip Dick and Margaret Atwood, to Trevor Paglen and Banksy — who raise the big questions: about voyeurism, about safety and risk, and the essence of our public and private selves. Is there a book or a movie that tells us what kind of world are we living in, or where the surveillance state begins and ends? What impact does mass surveillance have on our selves, on our national psyche, on the way we interact with each other, on the art we make and the way we live?

Here’s a short excerpt with the surveillance artist Trevor Paglen:

For a lot of moviegoers the thought of the surveillance state conjures the entirely sinister images of East Germany under totalitarian Communist control after World War II – all of it made vivid in the film “The Lives of Others” from 2006 about an eavesdropper for the security police known as the Stasi. Fritz Pleitgen was a celebrated correspondent for German TV during the Cold War, and warns us about giving up our privacy.

Read More

  • Our friends at the Boston Review convened a forum on privacy and surveillance, with the former FCC chairman Reed Hundt at the center, and comments from Rebecca MacKinnon, Evgeny Morozov, and Richard Stallman.
  • Glenn Greenwald has argued that we’re closer to Nineteen Eighty-Four than we’re willing to admit, while our other guest Benjamen Walker sees it differently on his Theory of Everything podcast;
  • Judith Donath traces the line between public and private space in this lecture;
  • The photographer Trevor Paglen told a conference this winter that secrecy doesn’t describe all the things we’re not allowed to know, but rather a behavior of powerful people — a whole world, with a look and a feel, if you care to seek it out.
  • Facebook has been manipulating your mood, and you can read about it at The Atlantic.
  • Michael P. Lynch on privacy and the threat to the self on the New York Times philosophy blog.

Podcast • January 23, 2014

Sven Birkerts: Present at the Creation of “Infinite Jest”

Sven Birkerts is a literary critic and essayist as well as a professor at Boston University and the editor of the literary quarterly AGNI. He was very nearly present at the creation of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite ...

Sven Birkerts is a literary critic and essayist as well as a professor at Boston University and the editor of the literary quarterly AGNI. He was very nearly present at the creation of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” more than 20 years ago, but in this conversation, I wanted him to begin with today: how Wallace’s masterpiece became a touchstone for a generation. I asked him if he was ready to call it a great book.

Podcast • January 8, 2014

Mary Gordon on Pope Francis: Hope for Grown-Ups

Mary Gordon – a steady light among American writers labeled ‘Catholic’ – has strong, mixed emotions about the Pope who loves the same steamy Anna Magnani movies that the Catholic church used to ban. She ...

Mary Gordon – a steady light among American writers labeled ‘Catholic’ – has strong, mixed emotions about the Pope who loves the same steamy Anna Magnani movies that the Catholic church used to ban. She “burst into tears,” Gordon remembers, when she first read Pope Francis’ open-hearted interview in the Jesuit magazine America — his identification of himself as, first, “a sinner;” his picture of his church as “a field hospital after battle,” his sharp turn from “obsessive” fixations on sex. She got “hysterically giddy,” she’s telling me, then “scared.” Her tears signaled “how sad I’d been, for so long” about her church. Hope seems possible again, and disappointment, too. She makes writerly distinctions here – that “tone” matters and the Pope’s is a radical turn; but that his “diction” is different when he speaks of women in the priesthood. “His phrase was ‘the door is closed.’ What’s the one thing he won’t talk about? Giving full power to women.”

Mary Gordon is prized as independent-minded, feminist, faithful, and nuanced in novels and searching reflections from Final Payments (1978) to Reading Jesus (2009).

Mary Gordon gave us a roster of female theologians we all might get to know better: Elizabeth Johnson of Fordham,  Sandra Schneiders of Santa Clara, Lisa Cahill of Boston College, Margaret Farley at Yale and Mary Boys of the Union Theological Seminary in New York.