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Charles Ruas interviews social critic and author
Susan Willis
about her latest book, Portents of the Real: a Primer for Post 9/11 America. In this work Willis analyzes events that reveal the state of mind of American culture and the changing nature of our society: She tracks the patriotic passion for the American flag right after 9/11 tracing the flag from the world trade center to Afghanistan and the launching of flags into outer space to consecrate them. She analyses the fascinating figure of the Washington D.C. sniper and how he is a typical product but who has turned against his own society. Susan Willis looks at the ways to protect the government from attack by hiding it, and also looks clearly at the Abu Ghraib photos of prisoner torture and discusses how they reveal our culture and reflect the state of our present society.
Charles Ruas interviews Juris Jurjevics, a founding editor of the prestigious Soho Press,who has turned author to write the novel he would ideally like to read. The Trudeau Vector is a page turner combining geopolitics, environmental disaster and bioterrorism in a political thriller set in an Arctic Research Station. It is a brilliant and terrifying debut in its medical and historical accuracy about the technology that will make our future world.
Charles Ruas interviews artist Dave King on his first novel, The Ha-Ha, a critically acclaimed novel about a controversial subject very pertinent to a wartime culture. The protagonist, Howard, is a disabled Viet Nam vet whose injuries have a disastrous effect on his family and friends. The novel follows his painful progress through the years to rebuild a facsimile of a normal life. (As we write, the war in Iraq is creating tens of thousands of injured on all sides who are facing physical and social rehabilitation and are invisible to the media.) Howard's life takes a sudden turn when his former girlfriend has to go into rehab for her drug addiction and leaves him in charge of her mulatto son. His attempt to create a semblance of normalcy for the boy reveals the narrow focus of his existence. Gradually he is forced to build a life around the child and measure the distance between himself and the real world. A brave and powerful first novel on the toll of the aftermath of war.
Charles Ruas interviews young Vestal McIntyre following the release and enthusiastic response to his first book, a brilliant collection of short stories, You Are Not the One. These comic, off-balance stories range from tales of college kids in the hinterland of Idaho to young professionals caught in the heady dot.com prosperity in Manhattan The writing features a broad range of characters, vividly portrayed and dazzlingly reflective of the way we have come to live.
Charles Ruas' guest, California poet Eleni Sikelianos, reads excerpts from and discusses her latest works including "The California Poem", an epic for the millennium that traces the people and places of the Golden State through historical and geological time. Plus "The Book of Jon", a portrait of her father; perceptions, understanding and memories of an adventurous, charismatic man who loved life, and pursed his pleasure in total disregard of all conventions, ultimately descending into addiction and self destruction. Sikelianos says, "I am interested in the absolute ferocity of poetry, in our wild, eccentric human selves and animal and mineral planet, untainted by but interacting with socializing forces."
Translations always have their difficulties no matter how great the prose, but some languages carry more weight than others. French critic Pascale Casanova uses an innovative economic model to situate such writers as Beckett, Faulkner and Joyce on a world map of culture that exists independently of both economics and politics. Her new book from Harvard University Press, the already controversial The World Republic of Letters opposes naturalistic studies of literature to advocate literary capital as a viable, border-crossing currency, especially for smaller nations with rich traditions that are dying at the feet of the western world's literary giants. Host Charles Ruas draws her out in this interview, highlighting ideas that are sure to set the heads of academy spinning. Ms. Casanova, a scholar associated with the Center for Research in Arts and Language in Paris, is also the author of Beckett: the Abstractor and the winner of the Grand Prix des Gens de Lettres.
Barbara Goldsmith is well known for her biographies of such grand American figures as Gloria Vanderbilt, Victoria Woodhall and the Johnson family. Why choose a French scientist now, even a two-time Nobel Prize winner like the great Marie Curie? Here Goldsmith regales Charles Ruas with the story of her meeting with Madame Curie's daughter, Eve, (now 100), who at last opened the Curie family archives to the public, only to find them still radioactive a century after they were sealed. Mdme Curie was a Polish refugee who became the scientific genius who visualized what did not exist - radium - the substance which killed her, her husband and her Nobel Prize-winning daughter, though she denied its harmful effects to the end. Goldsmith gets her down, hot and cold, in Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie. Barbara Goldsmith is also the author of The Straw Man, Little Gloria...Happy at Last, Johnson v. Johnson, and Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. She is a trustee of both the New York Public Library and the American Academy in Rome, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of two Emmy Awards and several literary honors as well.
Charles Ruas asks all the right questions of Jean Nathan, a journalist who began
searching for a children's book she loved as a child and found not just the book, The Lonely Doll, but the author of the popular 1960s series lying comatose in a hospital, taken care of by devoted friends. In The Secret Life of The Lonely Doll: the Search for Dare Wright, Nathan discovers the complex life of a talented woman who was treated by her portraitist mother as a doll-like child and grew up to become a fashion model, an actress and an artist who photographed her own doll, Edith, as the principal character of a poignant narrative that veils and reflects her own shattered childhood. Nathan has previously written for The New Yorker, The New York Observer, The New York Times and Vogue, among other publications.
Charles Ruas's guests on this program, dedicated to the life and work of Peggy Guggenheim, are Mary Dearborn, author of Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim and Karole P.B. Vail, Guggenheim's granddaughter and currently a curator at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York.
As Dearborn (also the author of biographies of Norman Mailer, Louise Bryant and Henry Miller) and Vail describe her, Guggenheim was a complex personality who discovered her vocation in art at the same time she liberated herself from the sexual conventions of her day. With the Art of This Century gallery, her first, she made the transition from Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism during the Second World War by bringing together the European artists in exile in the U.S. with American artists living in New York. After the war, she brought American art to Venice, Italy in the form of the collection that eventually became the museum in her onetime palazzo. Dearborn has also written Mailer: a Biography, Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louise Bryant, and The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller.
Charles Ruas welcomes Ron Padgett and his indelible memoir of artist Joe Brainard, a book that includes illuminating portraits of the legendary New York School milieu that shaped their lives and careers.
Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard (Coffeehouse Press) is Ron Padgett's haunting evocation of a friendship that began in first grade in Tulsa, Oklahoma and lasted a lifetime. The book reveals an enigmatic friend and brilliant artist who fell ill at the height of his success and slowly withdrew from his work as he succumbed to AIDS. It also gives a detailed picture of the early days of the New York School poets and the downtown bohemia that nurtured them.
Leave it to the writers to make sense of this election! When producer Charles Ruas put together this powerhouse trio of writers to discuss the current political climate, he did not know how explosive their conversation would become. Listen as they make mincemeat of every reigning political notion while cracking the coded language we use to communicate hot-button ideas.
Carol Brightman is the author, most recently, of Total Insecurity: The Myth of American Omnipotence (Verso). Her previous books include Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World; Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure, and Drawings and Digressions (with Larry Rivers).
Laura Flanders is a well-known news commentator who appears nationwide on Air America every Saturday and Sunday night, as well as every weekday morning on the public-radio talk show, "Your Call," from KALW 91.7 fm in San Francisco (online at www.yourcallradio.org. She is also the author of Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species and the editor of The W Effect: Bush's War on Women (Feminist Press), a new anthology.
In this lively discussion with Charles Ruas, author Christopher Mason divulges how auction houses turn works of art into investment commodities, how shopping-mall honcho Alfred Taubman transformed Sotheby's into a powerhouse against rival Christie's, and how their financial shenanigans have affected the worlds of art, international society, and white-collar crime prosecutions - or have they? Of particular interest is their discussion of how market activity has come to determine an artist's social standing and professional reputation alike.
Christopher Mason's investigation of the
Sotheby's-Christie's price-fixing scandal is detailed in his new book, The Art of the Steal.
Patrick McGrath is a master of the modern psychological thriller, as previous books like Spider and Asylum have proved. Here he discusses his latest, Port Mungo about a modern-day, British Gaugin and artist wife who relinquish the contemporary art scene for the even more hothouse atmosphere of Honduras. Yes, it has a fabulous nude scene. Hear McGrath tell all as host Charles Ruas peers into the novelist's unrelentingly gothic psyche.
How much do you know about Paraguay? Host Charles Ruas elicits a fascinating history from novelist Lily Tuck, author of Siam, or the Woman Who Shot a Man and The Woman Who Walked on Water, who reads from her sensuous latest, The News from Paraguay.
Host Charles Ruas in conversation with visiting Brit poet Robin Robertson , whose seductive voice and stories of the ritual mortifications attending all book tours turns this elevated half-hour into a festival of joyful lyricism.
Host Charles Ruas speaks with Shanghai-born Wang Ping, about The Magic Whip, her most recent collection of poetry. The title refers to the long braid of a woman's hair that, in Chinese culture, is both an allure and a weapon. Here the Shanghai-born, American writer and scholar confesses how she discovered the power of Chinese characters - by studying Ezra Pound and translating Chinese poetry for Allen Ginsberg, who started her own writing career in English.
Artists, fairytales, hauntings and real-life drama provide only some of the highlights of this terrific interview, as host Charles Ruas speaks with A.S. Byatt, indubitably one of the world's great storytellers, about her latest work, Little Black Book of Stories. (Not to be missed!) If you read Possession, The Matisse Stories, Angels and Insects or The Whistling Woman, you still won't be prepared for this.
Charles Ruas' guest today is novelist and National Book Award winner, Jessica Hagedorn, discussing her most recent work of fiction, Dream Jungle, and the young Asian-American fiction writers she has included in Charlie Chan Is Dead, II, a new anthology bringing widespread attention to new currents in American literature.
Charles Ruas speaks with Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat, author of Krik? Krak!, about what she calls "the
dilemma of Haiti," captured in her beautifully wrought new novel, The Dew Breaker. Here Danticat tells the story of a Haitian immigrant to the U.S. whose daughter discovers his past as a torturer in the Duvalier regime.
New York School poet Ann Waldman, who is also associated with Beat poetry movement, discusses her latest collection, In the Room of Never Grieve: New and Selected Poems 1985-2003 with host Charles Ruas. Waldman was a cofounder of St Marks Poetry Project in New York as well as guiding spirit of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which she co-founded in 1974 with Allen Ginsberg at Naropa University in Boulder, Co. Discusses returning to New York after long years in Boulder and becoming engaged in political process once again.
The luminous Fanny Howe recalls her old pulp fiction in conversation with host Charles Ruas on the publication of her important new memoir, The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Work and Life.
Host Charles Ruas in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Shipler, who reads from his best-selling book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America.
