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Michael Pollan Dec 10, 2015

Show notes

Michael Pollan begins his lecture by praising Portland for being one of the incubators of true healthy eating before moving on to discuss the new American food culture. He describes how many Americans have developed an unhealthy obsession with being healthy, which has actually backfired, as evidenced by the obesity epidemic. He labels the prevailing American ideology as “nutritionalism,” which places primacy on the mysterious “nutrient” and requires expert insight to navigate. Next, Pollan questions the assumption that the sole reason to consume food is to be healthy and encourages people to eat for pleasure, community, and spirituality as well. He goes on to describe the ways in which the food industry has benefitted from Americans’ obsession with scientific research and “miracle” ingredients. He addresses ways in which Americans can improve their current eating habits and provides suggestions for where to eat, when to eat, and how to consume natural ingredients. Pollan concludes his lecture by emphasizing the intimate relationship between all levels of the food chain.

Michael Pollan is an American journalist, activist, and professor. He is the author of four New York Times bestselling books on food and healthy eating, including The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Botany of Desire, which was later adapted into a PBS documentary. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan writes, “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” going on to argue, “The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world.” In 2009, Pollan was named one of Newsweek’s top 10 “New Thought Leaders,” and in 2010 he was listed as one of the world’s 100 most influential people by TIME magazine. He went on to be awarded the Distinguished Service Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers in 2012 and the Premio Nonino prize in 2013. He teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and serves as the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism.

Because nutrients are invisible—I mean, who’s ever seen a nutrient? Who’s ever tasted a nutrient?—they’re therefore slightly mysterious, and like many unseen things, you need experts to help you mediate your relationship to them. It’s a little bit like a religion.”

“Your personal health is not bordered by your body. You’re not a machine taking in either good or bad fuel. Your health is linked—your health depends on—the health of the whole food chain, of which you are a part.”

“Make no mistake, we are now teaching children how to become fast food consumers. We’re teaching them how to eat chicken nuggets and tater tots in ten minutes.”

Ursula K. Le Guin & Margaret Atwood Dec 04, 2015

Show notes

Ursula Le Guin begins her discussion with Margaret Atwood in 2010 by saying, “I emailed Margaret about six weeks or so ago and said, ‘What are we going to talk about?’ and she replied, ‘I expect we will talk about 1) What is fiction?; 2) What is science fiction?; 3) The ones who walk away from Omelas—where do they go?; 4) Is the human race doomed?; 5) Anything else that strikes our fancy.’” The two women examine these questions and talk through their answers. They delve into their writing processes and motives, creating many humorous analogies for the act of writing, whether they connect it to naked chickens, salted slugs, or dark boudoirs.

“If we knew everything ahead of time, we wouldn’t write the book. It would be paint by numbers and there wouldn’t be any discoveries.” – Margaret Atwood

“Rereading a book is much better than reading it. A good book reread is better than a good book read.” – Ursula Le Guin

“All doors are doors to the future, if you go into them.” – Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; The MaddAddam Trilogy; The Heart Goes Last; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. In 2019, The Testaments won the Booker Prize and was longlisted for The Giller Prize. She lives in Toronto.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, and passed away on January 22, 2018 in Portland, Oregon. She published 21 novels, 11 volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, 12 books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many honors and awards including the Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, and PEN-Malamud. Her most recent publications are Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2010 and The Unreal and the Real: Selected Short Stories, which received the 2012 Oregon Book Award for Fiction.

We are incredibly saddened by the news of her passing, are so grateful and honored to have known her, and thank her for her transformative contributions to international literature. Our thoughts are with her family, friends, loved ones, readers, and writers everywhere.

Maxine Hong Kingston Nov 20, 2015

Show notes

Maxine Hong Kingston appears as part of the Portland Arts and Lectures series not long after many of her belongings and writings were lost in the Oakland firestorm of 1991. Her lecture, entitled “Another Person of Peace,” is about her rediscovering herself as a person and a writer following the fire. Kingston discusses the inspiration behind her book that was lost to the flames, which was to mirror the Books of Peace that appeared in China hundreds of years ago. Coincidentally, these books were also burned, though deliberately so because of how threatening they were to the reigning powers. Kingston discusses the irony of her own book of peace burning and talks through possible methods of creating The Fifth Book of Peace. She spends some time reading from the eighteen pages she wrote after the fire, documenting her reaction to losing her home, her possessions, and her writing, and discussing how she learned to rebuild.

Turning the bend, I looked up and saw that my house was gone. It was not that I recognized the place that it had stood or any familiar piece of it or its neighbors, but that the landscape was everywhere utterly changed. I had come to the ash moon of a planet that passes through the sun.”

“If a woman is going to write a book of peace, it is given her to know devastation.”

“Ideas have an invisible existence that protects them, pervious to fire and bombs. If the fire had killed me, do my ideas live without me thinking and breathing?

Terry McMillan & John Edgar Wideman Nov 18, 2015

Show notes

Wideman and McMillan begin their lecture with a discussion of the projects they are working on and how they decide what material to write next. McMillan then reads an excerpt of her writing, speaking through the voice of one of her female characters. Wideman follows by reading a segment called “Picking Up My Father From the Springfield Station.” Each writer talks about his or her inspiration: in Wideman’s case, it’s his father’s life; in McMillan’s case, it’s her mother’s life. They discuss their portrayal of race, family, and identity in their work. The theme of empathy holds a strong undercurrent throughout the lecture, specifically the ability of writers to get under people’s skins in order to understand them and the social significance of this act.

“There’s nothing more political than a radical act of the imagination.” – John Edgar Wideman

“If you can’t step out of your own world, there’s no way you can have any compassion or empathy for anyone else.” – Terry McMillan

Terry McMillan is the best selling author of Waiting to Exhale, which gained national attention following its publication in 1992 and was later adapted into a film directed by Forest Whitaker and starring Whitney Houston. Her 1998 novel, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, experienced even greater commercial success and was adapted into a film starring Angela Bassett. McMillan is credited with pioneering the black urban romance novel and bringing popular awareness to the existence of an audience eager for novels and movies that feature black middle-class identity, specifically the interior world of black female professionals.

Like, McMillan, John Edgar Wideman’s novels often focus on black urban life. He spent the first ten years of his childhood in Homewood, a predominantly black community of Pittsburgh. Homewood became the setting for many of his novels, including Sent for You Yesterday and Philadelphia Fire, which each won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His memoir, Brothers and Keepers, which examines his relationship with his incarcerated brother, was nominated for a National Book Award. Wideman was the second black American to receive a Rhodes scholarship to the University of Oxford. He went on to found the African American Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania and currently serves as a professor at Brown University.

“The worst thing that’s happening in our country is our failure of imagination, our collective inability to get inside one another’s skins. And that follows from our history, from the history of slavery, the history of inequality. We don’t want to think about that too much. We’d rather float all sorts of myths that explain away our inconsistency and our inhumanity. And so memory and imagination are rather dangerous, because they say, ‘Look at yourself. Think about yourself.’” – John Edgar Wideman

Robert Hass & Czeslaw Milosz Nov 18, 2015

Show notes

Portland poet and essayist Doug Marx moderates this lecture between former Poet Laureate Robert Hass and Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. Hass and Milosz read and discuss a variety of their poems. Marx periodically asks questions about each poet’s inspiration and their composition process, and Hass and Milosz’s answers often lead to the reading of additional excerpts.

“When I said ‘pleasure,’ what I really meant was ‘work,’ which really is the deepest pleasure.” – Robert Hass

“It seems to me that reality is a great cure against despair. In general, you can see in the poetry of our time a very strong movement toward subjectivity, but there is another kind of poetry which honors reality.” – Czeslaw Milosz

In an interview for the Chicago Review, Robert Hass said, “Poetry is a way of living… a human activity like baking bread or playing basketball.” Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and is recognized as one of contemporary American poetry’s most celebrated voices. He is also a leading translator of the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and Japanese haiku masters Basho, Buson, and Issa. He has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship, among others. He currently teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Czeslaw Milosz spent World War II in Warsaw, Poland, under the rule of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. During this time, he worked with the underground Resistance movement, writing and editing several books that were published in secret during the occupation. When the war was over, Milosz aligned himself with the new communist government and was stationed in Paris, France as a cultural attaché. Sensing the new communist leadership as more of the same, Milosz refused to return to Poland when summoned, staying in Paris as a translator and freelance writer before moving to the United States in 1960 to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. Milosz has published dozens of books in his lifetime, including collections of poetry, novels, and works of nonfiction, many of which became modern classics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. He died in 2004.

“Well, the problem is, of course, of the evil in this world—which is so immeasurable, so enormous—that to maintain faith in a good God is almost impossible. And that’s the curse of historical experience. The only theological solution is that God suffers because of the world.” – Czeslaw Milosz

Lawrence Wright Nov 10, 2015

Show notes

Wright begins his lecture by elaborating on his recent journalistic investigation into the history of Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard. Wright seeks to answer two overarching questions: 1) Where do new religious ideas come from? and 2) why would anybody believe them? Although he focuses on Scientology, Wright also emphasizes the fundamental needs that drive people to all organized religions: hope, play, purpose, community, and structure. He credits the unique appeal of Scientology to a potent mixture of therapy, celebrity, and science.

“Perhaps these are all revelations from God, in which case I do wish he’d get his story straight. Or else they are hallucinations, frauds, or products of a diseased imagination. I think in the case of L. Ron Hubbard, we see all three of these factors at work.”

“But new religions will come along, whether Scientology exists or not; they always do, especially in America where you can believe anything you want. And if you don’t find a belief you like from the smorgasbord of beliefs that are laid out before you, you can create your own.”

Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, and playwright. After graduating from Tulane University in New Orleans, Wright completed his M.A. in Applied Linguistics in Cairo. He then pursued a career in journalism, writing for publications such as Rolling Stone and The New Yorker, for whom he has been a staff writer for two decades. He is the author of one novel and eight nonfiction books, including The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, which was nominated for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Wright is the co-writer of The Siege (1998), starring Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, and Annette Bening. His one-man play, “My Trip to Al-Qaeda,” was adapted into an HBO documentary film directed by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney. In addition to his writing career, Wright is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the keyboard player for the Austin-based blues band WhoDo. He is currently writing a series for HBO called God Save Texas.

Donald Barthelme Nov 10, 2015

Show notes

Barthelme begins his lecture with a series of readings, including a story about his family’s quest for a dog, his reflections on being a father, the study of angels, and a conversation with Goethe in which he compares music, art, and nationalities to common day objects. Barthelme also previews a selection of excerpts from his forthcoming novel The King, a retelling of Le Morte D’Arthur through the lens of World War II, which he had not yet decided on a title for and which was posthumously published in 1990. He returns to the short story form following this, tackling the subject of life in New York and revisiting the subject of parenthood. His Q&A sheds light on some aspects of his personal life, including his life in New York and his own work alongside that of his family.

“It is a curiosity of writing about angels that very often one turns out to be writing about men. The themes are twinned.”

“You must not confuse the monster in the story with the monster you see before you; they are two different monsters.”

“It seems to me that in the contemporary world we suffer from something called information sickness; that is, the point is to push away experience, much of it unwanted vicarious experience and much of it synthetic and contrived by other people to manipulate us. If I thought there was any authentic experience to experience, I would probably recommend that—but I’ve seen very little of it.”

Short story writer and novelist Donald Barthelme is considered one the most important American writers of the 20^th century and critical to the post-modern school of writing that includes John Barth, John Hawkes, William Gass, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon. His writings are known for their technical experimentation and melancholy gaiety. He first rose to national prominence when his debut novel, Snow White, was printed in its entirety in The New Yorker, taking up virtually the entire issue. He later received the National Book Award for his 1972 children’s book, The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djinn.

Oliver Sacks Oct 19, 2015

Show notes

Oliver Sacks begins his lecture by sharing a series of anecdotes about his patients, such as one man who could not recognize faces or objects and mistook his wife for a hat—the inspiration for the title of one of his books. Additional stories include a man with a head injury who lost his sense of smell and a woman who had no left-sided sensory perception. He discusses the relationship between neurology and the soul, including the sub-cortex of the brain, the most primitive part, which affects will, action, desire, feeling, contact, engagement, and the animation of a person. He proceeds to show vintage video clips about his past medical diagnoses, talks about the patients that inspired characters in his novels, and examines the moral and humanist dilemma of bringing back to consciousness people who have been mentally absent for years. He expounds on the idea that medicine does not rely solely on physiology, but also on a patient’s place in society and the world.

“One tends to take one’s experience for granted. One tends to think that the world is given to one, full of depth and color and movement—and sometimes one needs a neurological mishap to understand that nothing is given to one, and that we live in a world of constructs, starting with rather primitive constructs, like color, and moving on to narratives and theories about which we live our lives.”

“A man who has had a head injury and who has lost his sense of smell thought this would be absolutely trivial; who needs smell? In fact, he finds that this undercuts his sense of reality and of the vividness of the world to an extreme degree. He comes to find that smell is an unconscious accompaniment, an undertone to all one’s experience.”

“Disease is a social construct.”

Oliver Sacks was a physician, a best-selling author, and a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. The New York Times has referred to him as “the poet laureate of medicine.” He is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain and An Anthropologist on Mars. Awakenings, his book about a group of patients who had survived the great encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century, inspired the 1990 Academy Award-nominated feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Dr. Sacks was a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He died on August 30, 2015.

Julie Mancini Jun 03, 2015

Show notes

Former Executive Director of Literary Arts Julie Mancini gives a speech about the early days of Literary Arts during our 30th birthday celebration on September 8, 2014. She shares memories from her fifteen-year career, including the ways in which she helped convince world-famous writers such as Joan Didion to visit Portland. Sharing feedback from visiting authors, Mancini chronicles how Portland Arts & Lectures grew to be the largest literary lecture series in the nation.

We begged writers to come here. It’s hard to imagine a time when writers and publishers didn’t care about Portland, Oregon.”

“We finally got Joan Didion and John Dunne to come because Calvin Trillin called them and said, ‘OK, go out there, I promise you. Stay at The Heathman and eat the salmon hash.’”

“Sometimes it worked best when people didn’t know who they were going to see. After a few years they started to trust us. That was the case when we presented Maya Angelou in the eighties. . .or Jane Smiley before she was a Pulitzer Prize winner.”

Mark Doty May 29, 2015

Show notes

Mark Doty reads from his new book, Deep Lane, and discusses his poetic influences, including Walt Whitman and Deborah Digges. These mentors, and the themes and ideas from their works, appear throughout Doty’s poems. Other themes include animals and observations on the natural world. Doty also shares several poems about New York and concludes his reading with a generous Q&A session with the audience.

Mark Doty’s Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. His eight poetry collections include School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria. One of his four volumes of nonfiction prose, Dog Years, was a New York Times bestseller in 2007. The Art of Description, a handbook for writers, was published in 2011. Doty’s poems have appeared in many magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. Widely anthologized, his poems have been published in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections.

Doty has been honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, the Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. (source: www.markdoty.org)

You will remember Manichaeism, which is the heresy that suggests the world is equally divine and into forces of good and evil, darkness and light, and that the outcome of the struggle is not yet known.”

“This is what young poets need to do—borrow from everything until you become yourself.”

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