The Archive Project

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Bill Buford Mar 23, 2016

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, Bill Buford discusses his history working at Granta, including iconic magazine covers and experimentations with the magazine’s content. He goes on to talk about being an editor for Granta Books, stating that it is “the aim of every editor, at some point in his or her life, to get arrested.” Later, he discusses his research for Among the Thugs, a nonfiction piece on British soccer and crowd violence, including his experience at the World Cup in Italy in 1990.

There is an ambition in any literary editor, I think, to start a world war because of the cover of his magazine.”

“This was a very self-conscious literary project, this was literature with a capital ‘L,’ and it made me distinctly uncomfortable. And I have to admit I am still uncomfortable with this idea of literature. I don’t really know what it is. I have my own definition of what I regard as a literary work, which is nothing more than ‘a complex piece of writing that allows me to respond to it in a complex way.’ But, actually, literature and the idea of doing a literary magazine—it’s the kind of thing that people who wear socks with their sandals do.”

Bill Buford is a staff writer and European correspondent for The New Yorker, where he has written about sweatshops, the singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, and chef Mario Batali, among other topics. Prior to this, he also served as the magazine’s fiction editor, an editor for Granta magazine, and publisher for Granta Books. Buford is the author of Among the Thugs, a personal nonfiction account of crowd violence and British soccer hooliganism, and has edited three anthologies: The Best of Granta Travel, The Best of Granta Reportage, and The Granta Book of the Family. He lives in New York City with his wife and two sons.

Sharon Olds Mar 21, 2016

Show notes

On this episode of The Archive Project, Sharon Olds begins her lecture by reading a poem by Langston Hughes called “Luck,” which she tells the audience she memorized on the subway in New York City. From there, she reads several of her poems on the theme of family and personal life, including a description of her experience learning to read and her memory of running through the airport on the way to visit her dying father. Between her own works, she shares a selection of poems by other people, including one written by her sister.

“It’s great to have someone in a field that you love—someone to love and admire and study and feel close to.”

“One of the great things about traveling is the new point of view you can get on things you thought you knew.”

“I just love to read poems by other people. It’s the only time up here when I’m really happy.”

Raised a Calvinist in Berkeley, California, Sharon Olds published her first book of poems, Satan Says, at age thirty-seven. This was the start of a career that would include 12 collections of poetry to date, including Strike Sparks, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Stag’s Leap, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the T.S. Eliot prize. When describing her writing process in an interview with Salon, Olds stated she is “not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets,” and instead tries to be “an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.” Olds’ awards and honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. She served as the New York State Poet Laureate from 1998 to 2000 and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at New York University.

Jonathan Lethem Mar 17, 2016

Show notes

This episode of The Archive Project, features a lecture from prolific author Jonathan Lethem from 2007. As a writer, Lethem melds genres, often mixing crime and sci-fi with more traditional fiction. He is also known for his unpretentious incorporation of American pop-culture into his works. In this lecture, Lethem’s dry humor, sincerity, literary allusions, and post-modern sensibility are on full display as he discusses what has shaped him as a writer, including growing up in New York during the 70s, and the tragic loss of his mother when he was just fourteen years old. He also speaks to the debate on the generative function of art, calling out writers in particular. This is a great introduction to Lethem and also entertaining chance for existing fans to get to know him even better.

“Ruined things, after all, can be transformed. Shattered things can reconstitute and be repurposed. Artists do this all the time. And loss itself can be repurposed, which is exactly what I did. I’ve made my career, in a sense, on that black hole of loss. That missing mom, my argument with her departure, with the unreplying ghost she left behind, became my whole enterprise of selfhood.”

“Should we resent the distraction or be relieved? We live, I think, in a world of punch lines taken seriously. To watch television is to be immersed in practically nothing else.”

“Who are these people? Who invited them to the convention, let alone gave them the floor? Are they starting the important conversation, the one we so desperately need to hear, or are they ending it—dissolving it in schemes and nonsense?”

Jonathan Lethem is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven novels including The Fortress of Solitude, Dissident Gardens, Chronic City, The Feral Detective, and Motherless Brooklyn, winner of National Book Critics Circle Award. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Lethem has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, among others. He currently teaches creative writing at Pomona College in California.

Cristina Henriquez, performed by The Milagro Theatre Mar 03, 2016

Show notes

In this episode of The Archive Project, actors from The Milagro Theatre read excerpts from Cristina Henriquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans, Multnomah County Library’s 2016 Everybody Reads selection.

Cristina Henriquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans explores the lives of two families who have come to the United States from Mexico and Panama, as well as the experiences of men and women who have immigrated from all over Latin America, as they pursue different versions of the American Dream. It was recognized as a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, one of The Washington Post’s top 50 fiction books, and an NPR Great Read, among other accolades.

Everybody Reads is a community reading project of Multnomah County Library made possible in part by gifts to The Library Foundation. The Everybody Reads program celebrates the power of books in creating a stronger community through a shared reading experience. In partnership with Multnomah County Library and The Library Foundation, Literary Arts is proud to present Cristina Henríquez at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall as the culminating event of the 14th annual Everybody Reads program on Tuesday, March 8, 2016 at 7:30 p.m.

Back then, all we wanted was the simplest things: to eat good food, to sleep at night, to smile, to laugh, to be well. We felt it was our right, as much as anyone’s, to have those things. Of course, when I think about it now, I see that I was naïve. I was blinded by the swell of hope and the promise of possibility. I assumed that everything that would go wrong in our lives already had.”

“I like it here. I started off as a manager, but now I own this building. Bought it out almost ten years ago after working jobs on the side, saving up. I got a good deal. The area is changing, though. A clash of cultures. I try to make this building like an island for all of us washed-ashore refugees. A safe harbor. I don’t let anyone mess with me. If people want to tell me to go home, I just turn to them and smile politely and say, “I’m already here.”

“Maybe it’s the instinct of every immigrant, born of necessity or of longing. Someplace else will be better than here. And the condition: if only I can get to that place…People do what they have to in this life. We try to get from one end of it to the other with dignity and honor. We do the best we can.”

The mission of the Miracle Theatre Group, aka Milagro, is to provide extraordinary Latino theatre, culture, and arts education experiences for the enrichment of all communities. Since its founding in 1985, Milagro has filled a unique program niche while building a solid reputation. The organization works in three distinct areas: fully mounted productions at El Centro Milagro, with each season presenting a combination of English, Spanish-language, and bilingual performances; Teatro Milagro, the bilingual touring & arts education program; and multilingual community arts programming at home and in the field. Milagro is committed to presenting works that exemplify the Latino experience through a culturally informed lens.

Performers:

Dañel Malán co-founded the Milagro Theatre with her husband, Jose Eduardo Gonzalez, and in 1989 she created the bilingual touring program, Teatro Milagro, which tours nationally to schools, colleges and universities.

Ajai Terrazas Tripathi is a graduate of Oregon State University with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre. He is an actor, teaching artist, grant writer, director, playwright, and Tour Manager of Teatro Milagro.

Monica Domena, Adriana & teaching artist, is a graduate of Central Washington University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Of Puerto Rican decent, this is Monica’s second season of touring with Teatro Milagro.

Giovanni Alva, Estefano & teaching artist, is a graduate from Humboldt State with a Bachelor in Theatre Arts. He is also an improv actor, originally from San Diego, California.

Shenekah Telles, Josefina & teaching artist, is an actor from Las Cruces, New Mexico with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Portland. In addition to acting, she brings to Milagro skills in costume and make-up design.

Tom Brokaw Feb 26, 2016

Show notes

Tom Brokaw begins his lecture with a humorous discussion of his transition into retirement as one of the leading American television journalists of the late 20th century. He turns his attention to more serious subjects following this, focusing the remainder of his talk on the major social developments of the 20^th century, how these have shaped the attitudes and actions of Americans today, and what he hopes is to come for the nation as it heads farther into the 21^st century.

As a journalist and as a citizen—as a husband, as a father, and as a grandfather—I have been trying to think about how we can help create a new national dialogue about America going into the twenty-first century.”

“I thought about these winds of change that had swept about America and around the world during the 1950s and then picked up pace and velocity and effect as we moved into the 21^st century. And I came home not just as a journalist, but as a grandfather now, and I looked at my four darling, whip-smart granddaughters, and I thought, 40 years from now, if they have this same kind of reflective moment, what will they say about what we left them? How did we prepare their future? What is our legacy? Will we be able to extend what the greatest generation gave to us? And I must say, I was not entirely confident about that.”

“We have been witness, wherever we are in this country, in the last ten years to an increasingly polarized political culture—a determination not to find common ground, a retreat, if you will, across the political spectrum to the far corners of the room in which the operating ethos of the day is to shout but not to listen.”

Tom Brokaw is an American television journalist and author best known for anchoring the NBC Nightly News from 1982 to 2004. He worked as a news editor for a television station in Omaha, Nebraska, before leaving in 1965 to anchor the late evening news for a television station in Atlanta, where he reported on the Civil Rights Movement. He joined NBC in 1966 and served as NBC’s White House correspondent during the Watergate scandal. From 1976 to 1982, he was a host of NBC’s popular morning program, Today. As a co-anchor of the Nightly News, Brokaw covered such historic events as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Persian Gulf War, and he hosted documentaries on such current event issues as global warming and the Iraq War. His books include The Greatest Generation (1998), Boom!: Voices of the Sixties (2007), and The Time of Our Lives: A Conversation About America (2011). A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland (2002) and A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope (2015) documented his childhood and his battle with cancer, respectively. Brokaw received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.

Joan Didion Feb 25, 2016

Show notes

In this episode we feature the iconic writer of nonfiction, Joan Didion, from a special event in 2001. She briefly reads from her then new book Political Fictions, and then talks with David Sarasohn from The Oregonian.

Didion’s career began in 1956 when she began writing for Vogue. Since then, she wrote more than a dozen books of essays and nonfiction, including the 2005 national bestseller The Year of Magical Thinking, which became a Broadway production. Didion contributed work to virtually major magazine and newspaper in the country, and wrote several screenplays with her late husband John Gregory Dunne.

Her writing about American politics began in earnest in 1988 when she got an assignment from The New York Review of Books to cover the presidential election. This reporting was collected, along with other articles and essays, into the book Political Fictions, which was published in 2001 and was the reason for this event in Portland. The reading and conversation in this episode is fascinating because as she says “history is context.” Didion connects her observations in 1988 about the professional political class to the contested political election of 2000, which had occurred just a year earlier. And her insights and thoughts about the dangerous implication for how our American political life was evolving feel eerily prescient for our current situation.

Didion died on Thursday, December 23, 2021 at the age of 87.

“I have a strong sense that we better start noticing the rest of the world.”

Joan Didion was one of America’s most respected writers, her work constituting some of the greatest portraits of modern-day American culture. Over the four decades of her career, she produced widely-acclaimed journalistic essays, personal essays, novels, non-fiction, memoir and screenplays. Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award in 2005.

Lydia Davis Feb 19, 2016

Show notes

Lydia Davis begins her lecture by explaining her attempt to find a balance between poetry and prose through writing short stories. She discusses several of her favorite authors—including Samuel Beckett, Russell Edson, and Bob Pearlman—and reads short selections from their works. Davis also discusses her work translating Proust and Flaubert, among others. She then reads from a New York poet named Sparrow who writes minimalistic translations, compares his translations to the originals, and asks whether or not one can write the same thing in radically different ways or if it is indeed the same thing at all. Davis goes on to talk about letters of complaint she wrote that became “too literary to send,” and reads one addressed to a frozen peas manufacturer where she criticizes the poor aesthetics of the packaging and her concern that the business will suffer.

A good poem almost always offers you something surprising in the language and the way of thinking.”

“The way that we read a piece of writing is determined by the context in which we read it.”

“I wrote poems early on, but to be a poet somehow was not a serious option for life. So if eventually some of my work comes right up to the line—if there is one—that separates a piece of prose from a poem…the approach to that line is through the realm of short fiction.”

Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections. Her collection Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award of Merit Medal, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust. Davis is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. (Biography courtesy of Macmillan.)

Stephen Greenblatt Feb 18, 2016

Show notes

Stephen Greenblatt begins his lecture with a discussion of censorship and religious toleration in early Christian Europe. He distinguishes Christianity from earlier Pagan and Jewish ideologies by emphasizing its commitment to a “single absolute doctrinal coherence” and the ways in which the church dealt with heretics. Greenblatt then moves on to discuss the influence of various theologians—including Augustine, John Locke, and Thomas More—on Christian intolerance. Greenblatt emphasizes the Renaissance conception of religion as essential for social order and peace and the common association between atheism and anarchy. He goes on to examine the ways in which certain texts survived religious persecution despite their radical assertions, specifically “De Rerum Natura” by Lucretius, whom Greenblatt credits with influencing the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Botticelli.

“It is precisely choice—and the attendant idea that there might be multiple competing positions among which you could choose—that in the name of saving the soul, Christians determined not to allow. In its place was a single truth and with it a determination to weed out false beliefs.”

For Lucretius argued not only that there were atoms and emptiness in the world, but that there was nothing else. There were no demons, there were no angels, there were no ghosts, and there were no bodiless immaterial souls. And what followed as the poem winds its way through its magnificent six books was a succession of unacceptable propositions of the kind that gave More and Locke and all their contemporaries very, very bad stomachaches.”

“Art is linked to survival. Art is linked to the possibility that you might get it down.”

Stephen Greenblatt is a Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of twelve books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern; Shakespeare’s Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Marvelous Possessions; and Renaissance Self-Fashioning. He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and of The Norton Shakespeare, has edited seven collections of criticism, and is a founding editor of the journal Representations. His honors include the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 National Book Award for The Swerve, MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize (twice), Harvard University’s Cabot Fellowship, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, Yale’s Wilbur Cross Medal, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. (Biography courtesy of stephengreenblatt.com)

Karen Armstrong Feb 12, 2016

Show notes

Scholar and commentator Karen Armstrong begins her lecture by describing her youth in a nunnery, her subsequent departure and return to religion, and her understanding of religious stagnation. She compares modern concepts of God, in which The Almighty is basically a glorified human, to ancient ones, in which God was too great and too expansive to describe. Armstrong proposes that once God is reduced to a being with a definite form, he can tolerate no other Gods and is used to justify violence. She also addresses the human need for transcendence—the desire to experience the inexplicable nature of music, art, or religion—and challenges the idea that religious commitment requires regurgitating proscribed doctrines.

It is by compassion—by putting yourself in the position of The Other—that we come to the divine, because it gets rid of that ego which holds us back from our best selves. And this is hard work.”

“Idolatry doesn’t just mean bowing down in front of a statue, it means raising a particular human notion of the divine to an absolute level. And once you’ve done that—once you’ve made something that is essentially finite, absolute—you’re going to get violence.”

“I feel that religion is at its best when it helps us to ask questions and holds us in an attitude of wonder. And it’s often worst when it seeks to answer these questions definitively.”

A former Catholic nun who left the convent to study literature, Karen Armstrong is an authority on world faiths, religious fundamentalism, and monotheism. Her poignant and captivating talks, spark worldwide debate and healthy discussion. Armstrong’s bestselling books include The Battle for God, The Spiral Staircase, The Great Transformation, and The Bible: A Biography. Publishers Weekly called her most recent book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, “Provocative and supremely readable…[Armstrong] sweeps through religious history around the globe and over 4,000 years to explain the yoking of religion and violence and to elucidate the ways in which religion has also been used to counter violence.” She was a key advisor on Bill Moyers’ landmark PBS series on religion, has addressed members of the U.S. Congress, and was one of three scholars to speak at the UN’s first ever session on religion. The Sunday Times calls her “a bridge between religions.”

(Biography courtesy of The Lavin Agency: https://www.thelavinagency.com)

Carmiel Banasky, Sloane Crosley, Katherine Taylor, Vendela Vida Feb 04, 2016

Show notes

Recorded at Wordstock: Portland’s Book Festival on November 7, 2015, the panel “Lost & Found: Fiction on the Threshold” brings authors Carmiel Banasky (The Suicide of Claire Bishop), Sloane Crosley (The Clasp), Katherine Taylor (Valley Fever), and Vendela Vida (The Driver’s Clothes Lie Empty) together to discuss their lost characters and what it means to be found. Each of these four writers read from their daring new novels that feature characters who are searching for mythical objects, lost in time or place, or going on a wild goose chase trying to escape themselves and their everyday realities. Maris Kreizman, journalist and curator of the Tumblr “Slaughterhouse 90210,” moderates this event.

The sense of loss [in the book] is about what was missing before the book started…For my own life, I think it was a way I was saying goodbye to that time period.” – Sloane Crosley

“I never know when I’m writing a book or a story or an essay until later, sometimes years later, what the theme is.” – Katherine Taylor

Carmiel Banasky is the author of the novel The Suicide of Claire Bishop. Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train, Guernica, The Rumpus, and on NPR, among others. After four years on the road at writing residencies, she now lives and teaches in Los Angeles.

Sloane Crosley is the author of the New York Times bestsellers I Was Told There’d Be Cake (a finalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor), How Did You Get This Number, and The Clasp. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The Guardian, and on NPR, among others. Prior to writing full time, Sloane spent twelve years working in book publishing.

Katherine Taylor is the author of Valley Fever and Rules for Saying Goodbye. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Elle, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a McGinnis Ritchie Award for Fiction. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

Vendela Vida is the co-founder of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit writing center in San Francisco. She is an editor for The Believer magazine, as well as the author of five novels, two of which have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She is the recipient of a Kate Chopin Award, given to a writer whose female protagonist chooses an unconventional path.

Maris Kreizman is the creator of Slaughterhouse 90210, a blog and book that celebrates the intersection of her two great loves: literature and pop culture. She is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and Vulture, among others.

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