Here are two clips of the artist Vija Celmins talking about two pieces of artwork, one a painting and the other a small sculpture work. These clips were produced by the Museum of Modern Art in New York for their audio guides for visitors.
I saw "To Fix the Image in Memory" at the museum, which looked like a pile of small brown stones in a glass box, and I would have completely passed it by and not realized what she'd done if I hadn't listened to her talk about it in the audio guide.
Even though these clips are very short you get a good sense of her approach to making art.
Gun with Hand #1 The picture Vija Celmin's is available here, on the MoMA website.
I really admire how Terry Gross can turn a minor starting point, like the release of a new movie, into a thoughtful, far-reaching conversation. A lot of credit goes to the interesting people she interviews, but it seems like she goes in to every interview with the assumption that the interviewee, no matter how minor, has something fascinating to talk about.
I recently remembered this excellent Fresh Air interview from 2007, with Mexican movie director Guillermo Del Toro. The conversation begins with his movie, Pan's Labyrinth, but goes on to talk about fairy tales, horror and the psychological function of dark stories. He explains how his approach to stories and art came out of childhood experiences of fear and trauma. Del Toro is articulate and heartfelt and the interview is one-of-a-kind.
"It was not love, and it was certainly not a momentary weakness. It was an attempt to ward off chaos."
The New Yorker's monthly fiction podcast gives me a fluttery feeling whenever I see a new episode materialize in my itunes. When the shows are good, they're very good- the voices, the story, the language and the analysis. When they don't work, it's usually because the reading is halting or stilted, and I often don't finish those episodes.
I'm posting this one because the story, a quasi-personal history by Sergei Dovlatov, amazed me with its deceptively straightforward writing. Dovlatov finds a way to write about mixed emotions, odd circumstances, and contradictory characters in a way that feels realistic, sometimes humorous, and quietly reverent.
It's read by David Bezmozgis with an accent carrying Russian and Canadian inflections (I think?). His pacing harmonizes perfectly with the story.
I tracked down this brief NPR story from 2005 because I remember how it crossed topics, covering both a biological field science subject and a human interest subject. You get a chance to listen closely to dialects of birds and the dialects of people. It's worth listening just to hear the accents in the second half.
I almost ignored a recent New Yorker Out Loud interview when I saw it was about the Dreyfus Affair, a familiar dot on time-lines of high school history curricula. Snore.
Then I paused, feeling dim. I was losing mental Jeopardy. Other than recalling a fuzzy picture of Alfred Dreyfus, I was a vacuum of information. French, yes, but was he a politician? Was this before or after World War I? Did he get shot or was that another Affair?
I was taught that history education is twofold - You must learn the factual details of the event and you must consider the broad, sweeping thematic meanings. With the Dreyfus Affair, I failed to be imprinted with either, despite being exposed to the story numerous times.
So with that, I pressed "play". The interview with Adam Gopnik about the Dreyfus Affair accompanies his article for the magazine. In the interview, he mines the event for insights about the different forms and definitions of national pride; talking about allegiances that are based on values and laws and allegiances which are based on spirit and national identity, all of which help to explain why the event is so historically important, why it shows up so much in history textbooks. Brief and memorable, the interview is a great way to get up to speed.
Sometimes I think the Moth is just around to encourage cathartic, inappropriate public weeping during our commutes. The three Moth stories I'm linking to here all touch on illness or injury and tragedy. The flip side of all the sadness is the courage and perspective the storytellers bring across. If you want to keep it together I suggest you store your heart in a remote, inaccessible place, safely out of reach.
If you can make it through the icky descriptions during the first part of Radiolab's latest episode, it's worth it. There's a lot of great stories about life-sucking creatures large and small, from bloodflukes to cats, and the way they keep coming back to hookworms is very satisfying.
The show also touches on why parasites are considered such low forms of life, and raises questions about why we consider certain methods of flourishing and reproducing to be cheating, and other methods, honest.
"My fear was totally groundless, and totally real."
If you've ever been pulled underwater by a current or found yourself cowering at the sound of thunder, you know the power of oceans, forests, weather and storms to overwhelm us completely and stir up elemental anxiety about the intentions of natural forces.
I first listened to the short story, "The Seventh Man," by Haruki Murakami last summer, read aloud by John Shea on the PRI program Selected Shorts. The story reminded me of one of my favorite childhood books, "Time of Wonder" by Robert McCloskey. In that story, children visiting Maine help prepare for a summer storm, wait it out indoors, then after it passes over they marvel at the the power of the storm to uproot trees and scatter debris. The story has hardly any plot at all, it's so peaceful and quiet it puts children to sleep.
"The Seventh Man" has a storm at its center too, hearing it roar through a remote place and hearing the quiet of its eye, but this story is dark and strange. In this relatively simple story, Murakami incorporates themes about nature, its misunderstood power and the way we imagine its will. He also touches on friendship, regret and guilt.
The story perfectly expresses the remembering and recounting of traumatic event, the way the details are scrutinized, the emphatic insistence on the realness of what occured, the way the teller colors the set-up to the event with their knowledge of what's to come, and the reverberations of the memory over time.
The reading is at times a little overwrought, but it's that energy that gives the story a careening feeling, like you're not sure where it's going, and you're not sure if you can believe the narrator.
