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Saul Bellow Dec 10, 2014

Show notes

Saul Bellow declares the title of his talk to be “The Decline of Something or Other” and begins by reading a text he has been working on about boyhood, nostalgia, and growing up as a voracious reader with similar-minded friends. In Chicago, he explains, the adults frowned upon this “intoxication with literature” and treated most culture and the arts with indifference. He proceeds to explain the important role that the arts play in society—especially the novel, which he calls “a very special sort of privileged communication in which every reader gets the inside story.” He defends the arts, especially their relationship with science, and says novelists are engaged in the study of human consciousness and self-awareness, but “we, mankind, are a slippery subject.”

“Let me make a pitch now for the novel. More fully than any other kind of book, the novel allows us to contemplate the possibilities of life, of human passion and human emotion, the tragedy of human character, the sweetness of human spirits—or their baseness. The novel is a very special sort of privileged communication in which every reader gets the inside story.”

“Here is my argument as concise as I can make it: the greatest mental achievement of modern times is the achievement of science…But the generally unspoken premise of the novelist is that there is much about human existence that is not explained by victorious science. It simply does not describe human creatures as we are. Too much is left out.”

Saul Bellow was born on June 10, 1915 in Lachine, Quebec, Canada and moved with his family to Chicago in 1924. He studied at Northwestern University and became a merchant marine during WWII, at which time he completed his first novel, Dangling Man (1944). He had a long career in academia, punctuated by numerous award-winning novels, including The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift. Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. He died in 2005.

Abraham Verghese Dec 10, 2014

Show notes

Verghese opens his lecture with the quote “Geography is destiny,” and goes on to discuss growing up in Ethiopia and his journey to becoming a physician and a writer. He says that his “real call to medicine” came through a book—he had a profound epiphany while reading Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham—and has since then realized the power of books to change the course of a person’s life. He discusses his journey into medicine, which also informed his development as a writer—specifically during the early days of caring for AIDS patients who were returning to their hometowns at the end of their lives. He wrote a paper in response to this experience, stating “I felt that the cold language of science didn’t begin to capture the tragic nature of this voyage, didn’t begin to capture the heartache of the families, didn’t begin to capture my own grief at witnessing this again and again.” He compares the bedside medical exam to a ritual, calling it an important practice “worthy of our best efforts” that shouldn’t be eclipsed by technology.

“I was also discovering the beautiful thing about books; that is, those quiet, inner moments of awakening are far, far more profound than outward declarations of intent.”

There are few who combine a career as physician, teacher, and author as well as Abraham Verghese, whose name is a frequent byline in newspapers, magazines, and other media forums across the world, including National Public Radio, the New England Journal of Medicine, the New York Times, The Guardian, and The Times of India.

His work as a physician informs his writing, and the reflection that comes through his writing helps him empathize with his patients—to see them individually, as human beings who are suffering, fearful and in need not just of treatment, but of comfort and reassurance. Imagining his patients’ experience has driven his work throughout his medical career. His emphasis on empathy and healing is the focus of his talks, nationally and internationally, and he stresses the importance of the patient-physician relationship in an era when advances in medical technology often tend to de-personalize patient care.

“When you write fiction, you can make up, you can go into the grave and come back, you can do anything you want, you can have a dead person tell the story. But, you have to work twenty times harder on page one to suck the reader in and make them forget that this is a made-up story, make them forget everything about their life, make them enter your world and live through three generations and finally get done and realize it’s still Tuesday. That’s how hard you have to work.”

Margaret Atwood Nov 20, 2014

Show notes

Margaret Atwood’s signature wit is in full force in this landmark lecture on, as she phrases it, “problems of female bad behavior in the creation of literature.” Novels, she argues, are not moral tracts for teaching readers how to behave. One can almost hear her smile when she says that “art is what you can get away with.” Atwood dissects the cultural expectations of female characters—often a polarity of virtuous or monstrous—noting the struggles that feminist writers face when confronting these conventions. Citing examples such as Euripides’ Medea, Toni Morrison’s The Beloved, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Atwood confronts traditional female literary tropes and the evolution of female characters throughout history. Her insights on the task of negotiating between what the reader, the writer, and even the character may think of as “good” and “bad,” as well as the necessity of creating multi-dimensional female characters, make this a must-listen for readers and writers alike.

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in Ontario, Quebec, and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master’s degree from Radcliffe College. Atwood is the author of more than 40 volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and nonfiction, but is best known for her novels, including The Edible Woman (1969), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the Booker Prize in 2000. Her latest work is a book of short stories called Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (2014). Her newest novel, MaddAddam (2013), is the final volume in a three-book series that began with the Man-Booker prize-nominated Oryx and Crake (2003) and continued with The Year of the Flood (2009). Her nonfiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, was adapted for the screen in 2012. Atwood’s work has been published in more than 40 languages. She currently lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson. (Biography courtesy of margaretatwood.ca/biography)

There is a widespread tendency to judge such characters [in books] as if they were job applicants, or public servants, or perspective roommates, or somebody you would consider marrying. Let me underline the fact that the characters in novels are none of the above—and if they were, we would all be in deep trouble.”

“Novels are made of language, and language, being human, is messy. In short, the novel is ambiguous and multifaceted, not because it is perverse, although it may be that as well, but because it attempts to grapple with what was once referred to as ‘the human condition,’ and it does so using a medium that is as slippery as a greased lawyer, as stretchy as an old-time panty girdle, and as hard to pin down as a bowl of Jell-O—namely, the language itself.”

“The creation of a bad female character doesn’t mean that women should lose the vote.”

Natasha Trethewey Nov 06, 2014

Show notes

In a talk that switches conversationally between explaining her influences and reading from a few of her poems, Natasha Trethewey discusses writing her third collection of poetry, Native Guard, her upcoming collection at the time, Thrall, and the ways that personal and national histories intertwine. For her, writing is a pilgrimage and a way of coming to terms with what has happened. She is obsessed with learning about the South and its oppressive history because it is a part of her own history, and much of her work touches on slavery and black history in the South, specifically the history of the native guard and other black regiments. While she thinks figuratively about the inability to return to her past, she also discusses how it is literally impossible, with Hurricane Katrina’s damage on her hometown in Gulfport, Mississippi drastically changing her idea of home. Memory also remains an obsession for Trethewey, and she seeks to memorialize her mother in the same way she memorializes the South.

“When I wrote Theories of Time and Space, I was thinking very figuratively about the impossibility of returning home, of going back to those places we’ve left behind. Not because the places are gone or forever changed, but because we are.”

“Whoever has the power to tell the story has all the power.”

“When I’m writing, one of the things that I love is how I discover things that I hadn’t known before. And so for me, research is always a part of what I’m doing. Whenever I get stuck in a poem, it’s probably because I don’t know enough.”

Natasha Trethewey is a former US poet laureate and the author of five collections of poetry, as well as a book of creative nonfiction. She is currently the Board of Trustees Professor of English at Northwestern University. In 2007 she won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Native Guard.

Chimamanda Adichie Nov 06, 2014

Show notes

Chimamanda Adichie opens her lecture by discussing her childhood as a voracious reader in Nigeria, specifically her experience of reading about and wanting an American “ba-gelle” and her eventual disappointment in discovering these were “really just a dense doughnut.” Her life as a reader and writer brings her “extravagant joy,” and she talks about her rituals, progress, and occasional struggles with balancing creativity and socializing. She also touches on living in Chinua Achebe’s house, and how the Nigeria-Biafra War affected her family and influenced her book, Half of a Yellow Sun. She examines her readers’ reactions to her topics, her tendency to be drawn to “a kind of beautiful sadness” in her storytelling, and her delight and surprise when she discovered that her book was a favorite of a woman she did not know and who was not Nigerian, but who found Adichie’s book an immense comfort during a hard time in her life. “Reading that, I felt so moved, and I remember thinking, ‘Fiction does matter.’”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into 30 languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. She is the author of the novel Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; the novel Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize, was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, a New York Times Notable Book, and a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year; and the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. Her latest novel, Americanah, was published in 2013 and has received numerous accolades, including winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction and being named one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of the Year. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Chimamanda divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

To write realistic fiction as I do is, I think, to try and make sense of the world by storytelling, by streamlining the chaotic nature of life into some sort of narrative with emotive points, and hopefully by doing that, we remind ourselves what it means to be human.”

“I write because I have to…I write because I love the possibility of touching another human being with my work, because I spend a large amount of time in the spaces between the imaginary and the complete.”

Wallace Stegner Nov 06, 2014

Show notes

Wallace Stegner, “the dean of Western writers,” grapples with his process of reconciling the need for conflict and ambiguity in plot with his distaste for mechanical, method-oriented writing. “The writers I admired and still admire were not carpenters, but more like sculptors,” he says. “Their art was and is a real probing of real and troubling human confusions.” He discusses writers as shape-shifters and ventriloquists, seeking to tell the truth through fiction, and declares that writing is an attempt to impose order on the chaos of our lives. This lecture is printed in The World Split Open: Great Authors on How and Why We Write, published by Tin House Books.

“The writers I admired and still admire were not carpenters, but more like sculptors. Their art was and is a real probing of real and troubling human confusions.”

“Autobiography and fiction are variant means to the same end, and neither one should be wrapped in any straightjacket of method.”

“Literature is a function of temperament, and thank god there are many temperaments.”

Wallace Stegner wrote 30 books, both fiction and nonfiction, and several short stories over a 60-year career. His legacy includes The Wilderness Letter (1960), used as the introduction to the National Wilderness Preservation System Bill in 1964. He also founded the Creative Writing program at Stanford University, worked with the Kennedy administration to expand U.S. national parks, and won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, three O. Henry Awards, the PEN Center USA West Award, and was a Guggenheim Fellow twice.

Marjane Satrapi Nov 06, 2014

Show notes

In this episode, Marjane Satrapi discusses her writing and art, specifically the film production of Persepolis (2000). She first establishes that she makes “comics” not “graphic novels,” dismissing the term “graphic novel” as a marketing ploy among publishing companies. She also establishes that the comic form is not a genre, but an artistic medium—one that allows for narrative structures that are quite different from books and paintings. She goes on to explain that she wanted to stay true to this medium throughout the film production of Persepolis and touches on her initial difficulties with the extremely social moviemaking process in contrast to the solitude of creating comics. Her humor is evident when she talks of the luxury of civilization, the need for gaining distance—in terms of both time and geography—from a personal story to tell it well, and the challenges of traveling as an Iranian with a French passport.

Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian-born French graphic novelist, illustrator, film director, and children’s book author. She was born in Iran in 1969 and grew up in Tehran in a middle-class Iranian family, attending the Lycee Francais until she left for Vienna and, later, Strasbourg to study Decorative Arts. She eventually moved to France, where she now lives with her husband, Mattias Ripa. Satrapi has worked on many graphic novels and animated films, but she attracted worldwide attention for her autobiographical comic series Persepolis. The work chronicles her childhood in Iran and her adolescence in Europe. In 2007, Persepolis was adapted into a critically acclaimed animated film of the same name that received over 25 major international award nominations and over 15 major international awards.

This use of humor was very, very important for me. And the comic gave me this possibility. And, as I said before, it also gave me [the] possibility to use this humor without falling into cynicism. Because if there is one thing that I really hate over all, it’s cynicism.”

“I wouldn’t call my work an autobiography, because an autobiography is normally a book that you make because you have problems with your family and friends and you don’t dare to say it to them, so you make a book and, you know, you solve your problem with people. Believe me, I am not like that.”

“Any intellectual and any artistic work, by definition, is an anti-fanatic work. Fanaticism presses on the button of emotion…When you make an intellectual and artistic work— when you don’t pretend that you have the answers, but you only have questions to ask—when you make this work, for the person who listens to or reads you, not only do you ask them to be smart, but to work—to try to find the answers themselves.”

Ron Chernow Nov 06, 2014

Show notes

Ron Chernow opens his talk with a discussion on being a biographer—from the perils of picking a subject to debates about how much one should reveal about that subject. Specifically, he discusses his research on the life of John D. Rockefeller for his book Titan (1998) and how it is not unusual when writing a biography to encounter “somebody I had not met in any of the earlier biographies. Here was a man with a beautiful, dry Midwestern wit; somebody with an inexhaustible fund of droll stories; somebody who had a very, very canny sense of people and situations, and certainly had a talent for business analysis that dwarfed anything I met with the Morgans or the Warbergs.”

Ron Chernow is an American writer best known for his prize-winning biographies of historical figures in business, finance, and American politics. His first book, The House of Morgan, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1990. He has also won the 1993 George S. Eccles Prize for Excellence in Economic Writing, the 2011 American History Book Prize, and the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He is also a freelance journalist with over 60 articles appearing in various national publications. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Biographers, I think, are all too easily seduced by those people who are expressive, who are demonstrative, and who can be conjured up with that kind of theatrical vividness. I think that we as a breed have a secret bias against the subtle, the elusive, and the reticent, and this is perhaps why I didn’t initially see the potential in doing Rockefeller.”

“In the age of political correctness, you’re able to tell an absolutely filthy joke, and as long as it comes from Mark Twain you’re covered.”

Calvin Trillin Oct 09, 2014

Show notes

In one of the earliest recordings of Portland Arts & Lectures, we hear Calvin Trillin humorously describe his upbringing in Kansas City and the culture shock that he experienced when he entered the WASP society of Yale University. He then focuses on the differences between Kansas City and his current home in New York. Toward the end of his talk, Trillin turns his focus to politics, poking fun at the current issues of the time. Along the way, he gives humorous insight into food culture.

Calvin Trillin’s chronicles of American life have earned him titles such as “The Finest Reporter in America” and “Classic American Humorist.” A longtime contributor to The New Yorker, Trillin has published more than 20 books spanning the genres of journalism, poetry, fiction, and memoir. Trillin was born December 5, 1935 in Kansas City, Missouri and attended Yale University. After college, he served in the U.S. Army before securing a job at Time magazine’s Atlanta bureau, covering the early days of the civil rights movement. His first article for The New Yorker, “An Education in Georgia,” grew out of this experience and was later published as a book of the same name. In 1963, he began his tenure at The New Yorker, where he wrote the popular “U.S. Journal” series from 1967 to 1982. His travels across the country while writing about the foods he encountered led Craig Claiborne of The New York Times to call Trillin “the Walt Whitman of American eats.” He publishes stories in The New Yorker and The Nation regularly and has done so for more than 40 years. In 2012, he was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor for Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff, published by Random House. In 2013, he was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

“I don’t hold with the theory that we’re all using only a tiny bit of brain matter. I think we’re all going flat out.”

“So in a lot of ways a family in New York is like a family in Kansas City. Well, there was a time, around the time that the Carter administration was floating a lot of mottos, when I got it in my head that families would have mottos someday. And I knew our neighbors would be thinking of a lot of flashy, sophisticated New York mottos. The Greenbergs down the street would put on their mailbox, ‘The Greenbergs: Best Mixed Marriage Yet.’ The Bartletts around the corner would have on their stationary, ‘The Bartletts: Triumph in Group Therapy.’ We tried to think of a motto, and we eventually went back to the same motto my family had had in Kansas City: ‘Zip Up Your Jacket.’”

Francine Prose Oct 06, 2014

Show notes

Francine Prose begins by discussing the differences and similarities between writing fiction and nonfiction, which are not always what one might assume. She finds that both require obsessive attention to detail and clarity. Reading from her novel in progress, A Changed Man, she remarks that she has “about three hundred more drafts before it’s done.” Using excerpts from several different books, Prose illustrates how language shapes character and how information is transmitted while maintaining storytelling in both genres. She teaches close reading to aspiring writers, comparing it to surgeons looking at an appendectomy, and tries to illustrate how to transmit information through showing instead of telling. With humor and great insight, Prose touches on revisions, the sources of ideas, and teaching writing.

“I knew that [my student Elissa Schappell] was going to be a real writer; she gave me a story and she called me up that evening and said, ‘I need it back.’ And I said, ‘Well, I started reading it and it seems perfectly fine.’ And she said, ‘There are five typos in it and I can’t stand to think you’re reading a story with typos in it.’ And I knew she was the real thing.”

Prose is the recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright. A Director’s Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in New York City.

“I can remember being in college and being taught Moby Dick for the first time and having a professor say, essentially, y’know, ‘Melville was looking for a way to talk about the struggle between good and evil, and he was looking for a symbol of evil, and he thought, “Oh, I know, the White Whale.”’ Well, once I started writing myself, I began to notice that it doesn’t actually work that way, that it seemed much more likely to me that Melville started out wanting to tell a story about a whale, and 50, 75 years later, somebody else came along and said, ‘Hmm, symbol of evil. That’s what it’s about.’”

“I’ve had writing classes where every student had a different personality disorder, and they were all kind of complimentary—they played off each other.”

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