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Mary Cappello
184 Plays5 years ago
Mary Cappello is the author of six books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour (a Los Angeles Times bestseller); Swallow, based on the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection in Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum; and, most recently, Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon.com, The Huffington Post, on NPR, in guest author blogs for Powells Books, and on six separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. A Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, a recipient of The Bechtel Prize for Educating the Imagination, and the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, Cappello is a former Fulbright Lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute (Moscow), and currently Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. Lecture appeared in Fall 2020 as the inaugural title in Transit Books Undelivered Lecture Series.
https://marycappello.com/bio-full/
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
You
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
are listening to something rather than nothing, creator and host Dan Vellante, editor and producer Peter Bauer.
Juxtaposing Authors and Creativity
00:00:17
Speaker
You started by saying that you didn't know where that class would go. I love that because that's really the principle behind the work that I do also as a writer and thinker and artist and certainly as a teacher. And I love, Ken, that you brought us back to the fact of the matter that it was really, it was the novelty of the juxtaposition that fueled that class.
00:00:48
Speaker
Yeah. What would it mean to place Charles Chestnut alongside Henry James? There they were contemporaries, but did their lives of work intermingle? What would it mean for us to be able to put them into conversation? I still think that Chestnut is a, to this day, under appreciated writer. I'm really surprised that no major films, for example, have been
00:01:16
Speaker
as far as I know, yet to be produced based on his work.
Impact of Education on Creativity
00:01:21
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But thank you for remembering that class with me and for bringing us together again to have this conversation.
00:01:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I just want to place it. Sometimes I don't think we take the time to kind of take the time, at least I find, as far as placing that. And yeah, indeed that Charles Chestnut, Henry James class, for me, formatively, it's really connected to this podcast as well. So you might as well know that too. At the same time, I was studying philosophy of art with Dr. Cheryl Foster.
00:01:53
Speaker
At the same time, it was my first, right around that time, studying aesthetics, encountering works of art, making judgments, or making statements that are philosophical statements about aesthetics and worth.
00:02:09
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And that conversation, you know, was something that I really wanted to pick up with this podcast in saying I'm outside of the Academy. Right. So I love being at the university and I spent time at the university.
Academia, Activism, and Philosophy
00:02:26
Speaker
taught at the University of Rhode Island as an adjunct for a semester. And so I've had that life, but also have been this labor guy. After many years putting together this program, it was kind of just a continuation of some of those fundamental questions I was asking about why is there something rather than nothing? What is art? What are we doing? Why do you create?
00:02:50
Speaker
and just doing it now. So here we are. And I love that you're giving us the example of the best way in which I hope our education can manifest is by taking what we've learned in that space, which really is a world apart, I think of what happens in higher education at its best is the opportunity to inhabit
00:03:16
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what I call an island of difference for a time. And then to be able to take that, and I love hearing that you took philosophy with, of course, my most magnificent colleague, Cheryl Foster, into the realm of where we live, the realm of labor, the realm of human rights, the realm of public
00:03:38
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discourse and really the stuff of our humanity. I was really very moved when you invited me to the conversation.
Introduction of Mary Capello
00:03:51
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I visited your blog, Ken, and to see that you are propelled there in that blog by not settling on answers to questions, but letting questions yield
00:04:08
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other questions. And so, yeah, this is just this is this is fabulous. All right, so now the listeners I know we're excited to talk to each other. So it's so Mary, Mary Capello, a great, great English professor, University of Rhode Island.
00:04:33
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writer, Nightbloom, Swallow, called back in recently lecture. But before we get into lecture, which I told you we wanted to chat about, what were you like, Mary, when you were younger around creativity, around thinking, around books, any of that stuff?
00:04:50
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Wow. Creativity thinking books. It's a wonderful question. I dedicated my fifth book, which is called Life Breaks In, a Mood Almanac to my kindergarten teacher and the tables of arts and crafts that she invited us to.
Childhood Creativity and Identity
00:05:11
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And so when you asked me this question, I returned to, for me, the necessity
00:05:19
Speaker
of imagining that we all are hopefully afforded as children. And I think that, I think of everything I do as a return to the space of play and the fact that no matter how we were nurtured in our play, I think most of us, I think the story of childhood for everyone is pretty much a story of interruption. And so at some point along the line, usually sadly earlier rather than later,
00:05:48
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we are interrupted from the space of play. And I think those of us who continue to make art somehow have the urge or willingness or desire to return to that place. But I guess when you asked me what I was like as a young person or how creativity writing was nurtured in those days,
00:06:14
Speaker
I guess I go back to the question itself, in part, because I start to wonder actually what it is to be young, you know, what what do we mean by young. Yeah, we could have we could even have a conversation together about the whole matter of
00:06:31
Speaker
how it is we move in our lives from point A to point B. Do you get to be young? Do you notice when you're no longer young and you're something else? There you go. What is it that is happening in us and through us and for us that we consider to be something like age?
00:06:52
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You know, I was a tomboy and I think it's important to mention that because I was already as a child working against the grain of my, you know, gender ascription, if you will. And I think back to how my mom was always, she's always upset that she'd look out the window and I'd be pulling
00:07:12
Speaker
all of the other bigger kids around in this wagon that I had. I was a bit of a leader as a kid. I would be the person to take friends on quests in the nearby woods and alongside the creek and such. I think we all have identity themes or images that we can return back to.
00:07:31
Speaker
really, for us, tell us who we are. And for me, it's an image of an Avon cosmetics bag that my godmother gave to me. She was an Avon lady. I don't know if you remember what those words were. Sure, absolutely. So a lot of the gifts that she gave me were Avon products. And one year, wow, she gave me this
00:07:51
Speaker
blue bag that was a cosmetics bag. And I promptly turned it into a 007 briefcase and filled it also with a rock collection that I was gathering at the time. But around then, ages 10 to 12, I was also coming into my own as I was thinking of myself as an athlete, actually, as a young athlete. And it was made for a TV lifetime movie story here where
00:08:20
Speaker
I was at this Catholic school, that's another story, and they didn't really have much sports going on. It was in a working-class neighborhood outside of Philadelphia. Not a whole lot of resources to draw upon.
Mary's Reading Journey and Influences
00:08:34
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And one day, one of the parents got all the kids together in the schoolyard and had us running back and forth. I said, let's all run. See how fast you can run. And I'll never forget this feeling.
00:08:46
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I was running and I kept outrunning all the other kids and but I didn't know that I had that in me and so it's one of the first times that I had this experience of how interesting I guess I can do something with a kind of power and energy that I wasn't aware of and so I actually started to think of myself as a future athlete around the same time and I want to mention it because the coincidence of
00:09:08
Speaker
reading with running as seems yeah to me you know at the same time yeah around the same time that i started to read uh for myself so which is to say i just remember around age 12 taking into my hands for the first time on my own it was Anna Karenina and um but i was like reading things like what else was i reading the lives of the saints and um chi paishi um a book of of
00:09:36
Speaker
calligraphy and drawings at my mother and paintings by a Chinese artist that my mother was always poring over. But if you can imagine, Ken, I don't know if you could picture me as someone who also was reading Mad Magazine on the sly and watching tag team wrestling. So, I don't want you to give me a false impression. You know, I imagine you're somewhat diminutive, but the size of the streak in you must have been pretty strong from
00:10:04
Speaker
Mad magazine, whatever. Sure. That's not a shocker. And you know, it was my grandfather who was an immigrant shoemaker. I was called the Muir Mandolin and Guitar Society, an orchestra in Philadelphia, one of the founders.
00:10:22
Speaker
of that organization and a deeply humble human being. He always allowed me to play first mandolin. And as I got older and he could see that the music he was teaching me, you know, wasn't really quite cool or hip for where I was headed. Yeah. He would score pieces for me like by the Beatles or, you know, yesterday for the mandolin. He died when I was 14 years old.
00:10:50
Speaker
It was a terrible loss for me. I kind of put the mandolin away after my grandfather died because the mandolin was really about my relationship to him. And I was also real lucky to have been nurtured by a wonderful couple in the neighborhood. Maybe you've
Impact of Environment on Creativity
00:11:11
Speaker
heard of Jerry Spinelli. Most people have, he said. Yeah, I've heard that name. A major young adult novelist won the Newberry Medal.
00:11:19
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among other awards. And oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, recently made into a Disney program. But Eileen at the time, Eileen Spinelli, who's now a children's book writer, she lived in the neighborhood where I grew up. And my mom found her by way of a poem that appeared in the what was it called? Oh, gosh.
00:11:42
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I'm blanking on the name of the, it was a major, major magazine and it had a poem by Eileen appeared in it. My mom was an intellectual, autodidact, anti-racist activist, feminist. She's worth a show unto itself. Yeah, yeah. And so she read this poem. My mom was a poet and she saw this poem and she saw that the woman who wrote it lived in Darby.
00:12:09
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She found her house and she went to knocked on the door and introduced herself and Eileen was a wonderful is a wonderful wonderful person and she held these sessions for kids in the neighborhood to write poetry, and she had
00:12:24
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her own children, many children, from more than one marriage. They don't be running around the house. And we've been at the table with Eileen. And so I had wonderful, wonderful influences growing up. But I also grew up in a violent neighborhood. A lot of who I came to be really has been about working against the examples that were given me as much as working with them.
Dormancy and Creativity During the Pandemic
00:12:55
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But that's a long answer to your question. No, no, that's what I wanted to. And I think, you know, I've been, I don't know, maybe this is like getting older and just like looking at, I find that there's such great conversation around like, even
00:13:14
Speaker
what we dropped, what we picked up, what we decided not to continue, what we picked up when we were 40 and being like, shit, I'm going to read the Mad Magazine collection. Because damn, I want to have fun in my life. Like right now, I want to do something. And I think it's interesting to kind of rediscover or figure out why you did things or didn't do things.
00:13:43
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Yeah, go ahead. Well, this is a question that really interests me a great deal. The next book project that has been brewing for a while, I want to write about dormant states and what we sleep to and what we wake to. And so it's very much related to what you're talking about. And I like that during the pandemic, I really
00:14:12
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was made to think about this more and more because I have a 10-year-old nephew whose life has come much closer to mine since the pandemic began and had to do with his being required to learn via Zoom. And so I kind of swooped down into his life when this happened.
00:14:38
Speaker
You know, he didn't have any of the tools that he needed to do this from from Wi-Fi to a tablet to to a Chromebook to all of the things it's presumed children will have, you know, and that that was that was one thing. And then I tried to start working with him on my own and teaching him my way of drawing because he loves to draw. And as we were working together, I discovered that he's probably dyslexic. He was literally having difficulty seeing words.
00:15:07
Speaker
and with great, great frustration reading. But I didn't know this was going on with my nephew. And so this huge, huge window opened. And consequently, we've spent much, much more time
00:15:22
Speaker
together. We live in different states, so we're not real close to one another, you know, physically. And my partner and I took risks in the course of this pandemic because of the sense that he needed us. And his mother is a single working mom. And
00:15:39
Speaker
You know, there are no provisions in this country for people, nothing whatsoever. And he was made to, you know, he had to be home alone and no childcare and the depression that he was experiencing as a result. So we spent some weeks together with him in Maine. I have a little cabin there. And my point is to say, Ken, that watching how my nephew opened when the world was offered him as his classroom.
00:16:04
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And what started to emerge in me, and I started to think about all that lay in potentia, I call it, you know, in potentia.
00:16:14
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that will be in us and that simply needs to be something has to happen to activate it. I know it's that Proustian notion, do I need to? I need to be rubbed in a particular way. I need for a sound to come into my sphere of influence. I'm going to be eating petite madeleine again for that which is already there to come into being. And so I just want to say that, yes, I've been having the grace of this experience thanks to my nephew Hayden.
00:16:45
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When he was here, this opened a whole new world to me,
The Dormant State in Art and Philosophy
00:16:50
Speaker
hanging out at skate parks and having the beautiful experience of the rhythm, the rhythms of the skaters, the movements of
00:17:02
Speaker
of people at all ages and what happens in skate parks and feeling being given this alternative tempo to the tempo of our times. And this to me is an answer to your question of how is it that that which is always there, what has to happen for it to
00:17:25
Speaker
to come to light and manifest that which manifests. Well, I want to I want to like, you know, just capture that thought, you know, right there. And I tell you, it is
00:17:39
Speaker
You know, it's a deep kernel and I'm very interested in your, you know, as you get into that of dormancy, you know, like there's this state of being and becoming, right? So like it is, like there's enough of it there for it to be what it is, but it's not there yet. So when it manifests itself, it's kind of this whole age of art
00:18:04
Speaker
you know the question right so it's like the Michelangelo right so David is trapped within the granite prior to you know him being sculpted like David is there what is what is what preconditions are there and it's like one theory of art that the art is there you just kind of made the dust it off versus you know kind of the wellspring that we create
00:18:27
Speaker
something out of nothing. I want to not miss this one point, Mary. Our conversation is going to be like this a little bit. I want to tell you, you mentioned Anna Karenina and I want to giggle to myself and I want to tell you why.
00:18:42
Speaker
Because with with you being like, you know, it's it's a great relationship We have like you're a prominent teacher and you know I've expressed that to you But there was one time when I was mentioned I was all you know, I get excited excitable you're excitable and I'm like, hey
00:18:58
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm doing my Russian literature class. And I love, you know, I love, I read Anna Karenina and I loved it. And I realized right off the bat, I'm like, okay, I'm talking to Mary with some very strong views. I'm talking about the most depressing, patriarchal, let's build the structure to kill the woman at the end. I'm like, this is not the book. This is not the book I'm ready to gush over.
00:19:26
Speaker
And I totally meant in my enthusiasm, even at that time, to be like, okay.
00:19:34
Speaker
Anna Karenina, like we can do a whole episode of like, you know, dealing with toll story, right? There's this magnificent art art art artifice in construction that goes around the story, but the story is fucking bleak. Yeah. Well, this is a great point. This is a great point. And I, you know, I have to say that, well, when I was reading Anna Karenina as a as a preteen, for me, it was more like it was
00:20:04
Speaker
replacement for the Bible because it was so big. And my mom was a real Tall Story fan. And Tall Story would be fine with that, right? Oh yeah, absolutely. So for me, it was about an induction into tome
Literature's Influence and the Art of Lecturing
00:20:23
Speaker
reading so you know I could what I remember most of all was the size of it and the size of my lap and the fact that it was bigger than me and so you know all of the things that one comes to understand about the book when one is you in college you know uh that's a whole different kettle of fish right but um so yeah I love that I love that
00:20:47
Speaker
I, uh, yeah, I just, I just remember that moment. I just remember that moment because, you know, obviously Tolstoy is defensible, right? I mean, but what I'm saying is it's like a nuanced analysis. It's not like, uh, saying, well, I don't know nowadays it's tough to say, I mean, but there's these hallowed works, traditional work. And I'd be like, this thing is, is nothing but problems like that massive tome.
00:21:09
Speaker
is nothing but problems to deal with, and it's fantastic in its own way. Mary, one of the things I mentioned to you that I wanted you to speak to specifically, and I'm going to give you a little bit of a quick background.
00:21:27
Speaker
Um, you know, it's about the lecture and it's about the art of the lecture. And the reason why I want to focus on this too is because a good friend of mine, a refugee from Southeast Asia, a good friend of mine, writer, poet, he teaches at Union College, which I think is up in New York.
00:21:51
Speaker
And he would say, you know, when you have that professor of yours on the program, just send me a reminder if you could. I want to hear what she has to say about the lecture. And I want to tell you
00:22:04
Speaker
I, you know, I've learned, you know, so I taught philosophy, I learned lecture, I, I'm a verbal processor. I understand things as they're explained and continue to talk about them and to keep talking about them and to interrogate them. Right. But that's not everybody's learning style. Right. So within the idea of the adult learning, we need these activities.
00:22:28
Speaker
You gotta be doing things, it needs to be interactive. And it's not an either or dichotomy either. But I love the lecture. And I know in you dealing with the topic of the lecture, you know, we're talking about something that is antiquated, you know, it's just the Elbow Patches Professor 1950 NIT.
00:22:53
Speaker
So Mary, tell us about the lecture and tell us why it's important. Sure. Well, Ken, I'm very interested in the forms that we use to convey, embody, experience what we call knowledge. And so I am interested in creating genealogies of these forms and
00:23:23
Speaker
not taking them for granted. And that goes for the lecture, that goes for the syllabus. In academic settings, the panel, the conference, we could even take this thing we might be calling the interview or the podcast and ask similar questions of it. What are the tacit assumptions that go into these forms? What undergirds them? Why do we obey their rules? What is not happening?
00:23:51
Speaker
in their name? What do they allow? What do they do not allow? Can we create new forms that might make a different kind of relationship to knowledge possible? So these are the questions that propel my interest in something like the lecture. As a person who is an essayist and a nonfictionist, I'm also interested in adjacent forms to nonfiction and the essay. And so the lecture
00:24:20
Speaker
shares this beautiful history with the essay. Some of the greatest essays and the great essays began as lectures. And I'm very interested in what it means to take that which is on the written page and perform it. So what happens to
00:24:39
Speaker
to print culture when we embody it literally. And what becomes possible when we bring our work into a public space. So many, many, many prongs to my interest in the lecture. And that's just a handful of them. There are more than that as well. We can talk later maybe about how once I wrote the book, I realized that a sort of relationship between pedagogy and violence was at the heart of my wanting to
00:25:09
Speaker
redefine the terms by which this form that I think is a quite beautiful one could be reimagined. What's the violence in it? The violence in it has to do with the way in fact of course it has been associated with a kind of
Critique of Contemporary Society and Thought
00:25:28
Speaker
patriarchal top-down relationship to knowledge. And by the time I got to the end of transforming what was originally a lecture into a small book, I actually discovered that the etymology of rostrum has militarist underpinnings. But I don't want to give all of that away because there's this beautiful anticipatory thing that happens in the book. But what I realized is that I wanted to pursue the lecture as an alternative to the speech.
00:25:57
Speaker
And the bully pulpit of the bully, what I call the bully pulpit of the mind, and in particular, you know, the past four years of authoritarian standing at a, the standing behind the podium, preaching nonsense, on the one hand, and barking out slogans and things to which people are meant to salute, you know, I wanted to rest the podium away from that bully.
00:26:28
Speaker
And also, you know, reinvent the relationship to the bully that I've been internalized as we all have in this contemporary moment. So that's where the violence is. And I say that what I was trying to create is something like a new body of maybe a new
00:26:46
Speaker
political party neither republican nor democrat but i would call my group the friends of thought the friends of thought and um and we went to the political action committee if you got a political action committee i got new checks uh for you okay would you form that political action committee or you got a committee meeting i'm i'm i'm happy yeah we wouldn't give like we wouldn't give speeches we give lectures but what do i mean by the lecture well on one hand um
00:27:15
Speaker
I mean, yes, definitely a return in some ways to a form that I have experienced in the past as a type of art, a type of a relationship to language that doesn't know where it's going, that relies on a connecting of points at the same time that it wanders. So to return to that,
00:27:39
Speaker
with the idea that through it we can come to be a different type of listener. So listening really is at the heart of the book. How do we create in our auditors a different type of listener?
00:27:56
Speaker
than the one that they think of them as. Now, at the same time that, you know, there's nothing nostalgic about this, though there is a desire to return to a form that I think has hardly been exhausted. At the same time that I'm trying to anticipate a type of lecture that doesn't yet exist. My book is a type of clarion call of sorts to say, okay, what form can or must the 21st century essay taken? And with that,
00:28:24
Speaker
What are the needs and pressing concerns of our moment? How can we, in articulating those, come to invent a new version of the lecture? Now, the lecture, as I imagine it, is a form that allows you to dream, by the way, and that, at its best, might make possible sleep. Now, a sleep that is not to be confused with docility
00:28:53
Speaker
You know, I think that the three things that plague our contemporary moment are docility as a nation state, as a people, you know, docility. It's amazing to me that nothing gets people in this country to take to the street.
Creativity and Political Recovery
00:29:09
Speaker
You can do so many things, so many things as we do on a daily basis to one another, you know.
00:29:14
Speaker
and we still don't get out onto the street. When I lived in Italy years ago, every other day there was a manifestozione. But anyway, so docility in individualism and delusional thinking, and that the three of those, it seems to me, sort of dictated a rather troubling recipe.
00:29:39
Speaker
for a contemporary moment. So I'm not interested in docility, but I am interested in a form that might allow you and me to sleep in public. And by sleeping, I mean to allow for one type of vigilant attention to relax so that another type of attention might emerge.
00:30:06
Speaker
And I mean, that is what happens when we dream. I'm very inspired by a book by Jonathan Crary called 24-7, which is about the contemporary bludgeoning of sleep. And we're in a state of absolute sleeplessness most of the time. So these are some of the things that are at stake for me in
00:30:37
Speaker
revitalizing this thing that used to go by the name of lecture. And so if you were, you know, present to the sort of lecture I have in mind, I wouldn't be so interested in your getting it right, getting what I'm saying down on the paper, making sure you get a report, it's going to be on the test. What I say in the book is something like, I'm interested in a set of questions like, what does any lecture remind you of?
00:31:04
Speaker
What does it make you want to know? And you and I, we could generate a lot of questions together about what sort of things, what sort of questions do we want a lecture to enable us to be able to ask? And so the knowledge you produce, in other words, in response to my lecture, I hope would be one that's not at all like what's on the page.
00:31:34
Speaker
that I'm performing from. And in the book, there's a long meditation, hopefully not so long as to weary anyone, but a lengthy meditation on the note and the notebook and what's going on in the margins of your thinking. And does a great lecture really allow you to get to that place? And I talk about how, for me,
00:32:04
Speaker
One of the things that happens in the presence of a great lecturer is that it's not that I cling to every word. It's that the voice makes possible something and opens a space to me. Maybe I will pause on a particular sentence from that lecture.
00:32:25
Speaker
I just need to stay with that one sentence in my notebook. Now they'll keep talking, but I need them to keep talking in order to stay with the one sentence that they've delivered to me. So I hope this helps to give you a sense. Well, it really does.
00:32:41
Speaker
And I, you know, I could see us talking more about it in the future, because I mean, sometimes there's these topics where or ideas that you just see in of themselves and say like, yeah, I've thought about that. I want to know what that is. I want to defend. I want to defend. And the moment right now is that, you know, we're talking about
00:33:04
Speaker
You know, the worst epic I've seen politically, I'm 48, the worst epic, nothing's even closed, the worst political epic as far as the negativity and the harm, the violence, the death, the killing, the ignorance, the disavowal of truth.
00:33:23
Speaker
is, is, you know, like, so we're all, we're all still dealing with that. And I think what I get excited about is like yourself and others, or even for myself, when I'm trying to create is say, look, it's 2020 time, but there's still new things. Like we are creating many new things or have the ability to create new things. And, you know, on the political matter,
00:33:46
Speaker
We just had four years of the, an absolute frontal attack day to day on the concept of truth. And so if there's a thinker and intellectual or philosopher, like we're all being like, okay, let's get back to verification. Let's get back to supported empirical evidence or statements and let's just, let's get there. And I think,
00:34:14
Speaker
creative acts like you're talking about or vehicles can help us get to that place. But we are still in recovery, right? Most definitely in recovery. Where do we begin with?
00:34:31
Speaker
what you've just said. I don't know if the antidote to Trump's undermining of truth, and I'm sorry I had to use his name because I don't like using his name. I think using his name insists his presence again and again and again and again. And that's what we dealt with in the past four years. I think this endlessly rapid fire in your face, perpetual
00:35:02
Speaker
Presence of his name of his person of his tweets of his it's it's it's been horrifying the extent to which to you know, we've also allowed ourselves to be to take the bait again and again and again and but I don't know if the antidote is empiricism and I I think you know Notice how
Art's Disruptive Role in Society
00:35:31
Speaker
the imagination is degraded in under totalitarianism or in authoritarian states. So there's the truth of the imagination is our ability
00:35:48
Speaker
is built upon our willingness and our ability to allow ourselves to stray, to allow ourselves right to what we started with in our conversation today, the relationship between the quest and questioning. And so I don't know that what we need is verifiability. I do think that what we need is, you know, what is the opening to thought of any sort?
00:36:17
Speaker
It's the openness to thought. What is thought? The shutting down of thought is accompanied by the shutting down of language. We know that one of the things that
00:36:33
Speaker
he did was to impoverish the language you know he proves to our students that you really don't need to know anything about the words that you that you that you know so everything we taught is like why would i need to know this professor don't be careful with your words because you can wield power and maybe the
00:36:55
Speaker
easiest way to wield power is to be careless with your language, I suppose. But again, it's the sloganeering. It's the lack of nuance. It's the reducing language to soundbites that serve this deeply consolatory function for people.
00:37:14
Speaker
The easy answer make American great yeah that sounds good, you know, get rid of immigrants sounds good, you know, this sort of. So, yeah, I'm not sure that that the degradation of truth that he carried out is necessarily.
00:37:32
Speaker
But the answer to that is science, for example. The greatest scientists, as we know, are those who ask the question no one else is asking. And facts never function on their own. We're always interpreting them.
00:37:47
Speaker
And so I just want to, yeah, I guess complicate that. And I think you're absolutely right. I think that even in the term, as far as empirical, there is a closing there. There's a by definition of closing.
00:38:03
Speaker
You know with art and creativity we're you know, what we are talking about is is is an opening Mary I want to know What art is so this if you you don't have to blame me for this question This goes back to your colleague Cheryl Foster. You're both in good stead No, uh the fundamental question What is art? well
00:38:30
Speaker
You know me, I'm still stuck on the earlier question, but that's okay because what is the problem of our moment? It's a crisis in belief as much as anything you're saying, you know, we don't know what's true. I heard a really brilliant discussion on public radio a few days ago. It might've been actually a week ago with Dartmouth professor, and I'm sorry I don't have his name in front of me, but he was talking about Gnosticism.
00:38:55
Speaker
And we might want to turn to that conversation that he had in the work he's done to explain how a particular relationship to belief is what's fueled, what's fanned the flames of interest in Trump. And I like to think about the way in which he doesn't have constituency as followers. And so there is something to do with faith that's at work here.
00:39:25
Speaker
And yeah, perhaps that is what flies in the face of not just truth, but being able to, to question what is true.
00:39:34
Speaker
Okay, so what is art? And maybe is art, is there a relationship between art and these very questions? Well, the general conceptual question you have, and I would think as far as the way you answer questions and look at it too, I would even say, what is art? And then thinking about it in terms as its role within reinforcing or disrupting whatever our day to day is.
00:40:02
Speaker
Well, I do think that art at its best disrupts, but let's get back to the question, what is art?
00:40:18
Speaker
If you were, you and I were to play together, that's what I consider this conversation. You know, we're, it's really great to be talking to you again and again. Can I always say, thinking back to seeing you as a young student in my class and here we are these years later. But, you know, you and I, what we can do with this question is actually to ask a question of each of its constituent parts and what
The Essence and Challenge of Art
00:40:45
Speaker
Is there a whatness? Is art a what? And does that verb to be even do justice to art? I think about Gertrude Stein, one of my favorite quotations from her comes from patriarchal poetry. What is it?
00:41:11
Speaker
This is a line in patriarchal poetry. What is it? What is it? It's like the poet is asking the question of its own poem. And then she answers this with aim less, aim less. And you're asking the wrong question, she seems to be saying, of this work of art by asking what it is. And I wonder if there's another question we can ask other than what is art? It's starting to think about
00:41:38
Speaker
It's like the experience, the experience of it. Let me give you an example. What is art not? Is there such a thing as non-art? When you told me we were going to talk together for this podcast, I don't know how it was. What was I looking for? I happened upon, oh, I know, my partner Jean and I, one night we were listening to some really fabulous experimental jazz on the radio.
00:42:06
Speaker
I don't know why this question came into my mind at that moment, but I found myself wondering if Trump likes music and what kind of music does he like. So I Googled this question and I found this great essay in the Chicago Tribune by Steve Kelman. He's a professor of comparative literature and the piece is called Does President Trump Like Music?
00:42:31
Speaker
It turns out that he doesn't. So this might be a way to answer the question of what art is. And I'm quoting from Steve Kelman's article. He says, it appears that only the United States Marine Corps band performs at the White House under the current president. And he talks about how there's this program that happens every year called In Performance at the White House. And in Trump land, the only music is that of the United States Marine Corps band.
00:43:02
Speaker
That says it all, doesn't it? Doesn't this say it all? The man that has no music in himself is fit for treason and strategy. Well, America, here's the conclusion. America, don't elect people who don't like music and don't like dogs. Is this that?
00:43:19
Speaker
Like, we can do political analysis. There's two billion hours of analysis of the election saying, hey, tell you what, let's let's lift the weary eye to he who does not like dogs in music. Okay, right? Do I have a crowd? Mary, we have a crowd with just that statement. I'm gonna have you too. Yeah, I'm so with you.
00:43:47
Speaker
You know, yeah, what is art? Art is the, I can tell you it's the place where I, it's a place, it's a place that I want to live in most of the time. And I wish I could live in the place where art resides most of the time. I think of art as an intensifier of life and art is that which
00:44:18
Speaker
reaches into and taps that which is most vital and puts it before us and and asks us to um exist in turn and in kind in its midst and um yeah and you know i think one of your questions right at the heart of your podcast is how to make something from nothing or yeah go ahead yeah go ahead yeah
00:44:47
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that the artist is the person who really insists on making something from nothing. Is art always and ever a defense against the void? I hope not. I think that the great artist is she who allows the void into her consciousness and in concert with it.
00:45:18
Speaker
makes something from it creates something, not exactly in its stead, but as what is the alternative? You know, I'm not the sort of writer who or artist who
Creativity in Academia
00:45:37
Speaker
makes void like art to answer the void. You know, you think of somebody like Beckett who does that. And sure. Yeah, so I mean, there are artists, of course, but I think of the I was thinking, though, that, you know, if we think about the question of art vis-a-vis the void or the nothing, there is a way in which there is no negation in art. Art doesn't know negation. And
00:46:07
Speaker
Uh, in that, um, it is at its best eternal at the same way, same, same sense though, that, um, I think some of the greatest art is profoundly ephemeral. Um, and so, yeah, you know, I was thinking about Freud when he asked me this question and how Freud proposes that the ego
00:46:38
Speaker
can't understand the fact of its own negation. Freud could never really make sense of suicide, for example. It's that reflexive piece that he didn't understand within the model, I think. Yeah, he couldn't accommodate it within his notion of the psyche. How does one imagine one's own demolition, one's own ultimate absence?
00:47:08
Speaker
You know, the thing which we can't seem as conscious beings to really, truly be able to, yeah. And yet I do think that artists are people who, you know, are willing to stare into the abyss. And at the same time, though, that what I'm trying to say is that, you know, maybe what the abyss and art have in common is that neither of them ultimately can be negated
00:47:41
Speaker
With one of the things that as far as your creativity and to develop what you just said, I do have a question about, you know, like, why do you create? And I want to give a little bit more of addressing around that, right? So Mary, you're, you know, you're a professor, you know, public intellectual, you know, artist,
00:48:05
Speaker
And within the realm, you know, I know enough about the realm of, you know, American academics is you could, you know, great lecture, you know, students come to you and you have your sections and you have tenure and you could put out some, you know, important, important essays, which you've done and you've done these type of things. But there's also an element of where.
00:48:25
Speaker
you're creating things that maybe aren't necessarily the output of the academic, that there's a creative intensity, that there's a philosophical thinking, that there's a lot going on there. So with that dressing around it as to why do you create, how do you find yourself
00:48:44
Speaker
kind of like doing it, you know, your own way, like, you know, you could, I guess, you know, you could say, hey, I'm a professor at URI, great university, and that's cool. Yeah, thanks, Ken, for that question, because I was trained as a poet, and also a scholar. And so there was a moment in my own career where I wanted to bring the poetic
00:49:07
Speaker
into the same space as a scholarly. And I talk about really what drives my work as that desire to wed a scholarly ethos with a poetic sensibility. And by scholarly ethos, one of the things I learned as a scholar was the necessity to take responsibility for my utterances and to realize that what I create doesn't emerge in a vacuum.
00:49:28
Speaker
to acknowledge that there have been a history of people the world over who have come before me and that I'm responsible to read as much as I can of the work of those others and to take responsibility for myself in history as a citizen of the planet. And so that's the scholarly ethos piece. And then the poetic sensibility. Well, this is what I was trained as a poet. And so I am very much interested in language as such.
00:49:57
Speaker
and the texture and shape and weight and power of just the word. I'm also interested in apposition, what it means to place things side by side that don't want to be placed side by side. So this is an answer to your question. I was very, very lucky actually.
00:50:18
Speaker
I did not know that when I took the position at the University of Rhode Island, my first job was at the University of Rochester, and I left that position, which was actually a more replete and, you know, I mean, I had a lower course load there, I had a raft of assistants, I had a huge research fund.
00:50:39
Speaker
private prestigious university and I moved to the public university in order to be near to my partner Jean Walton who eventually was also hired at the University of Rhode Island so we've been very lucky in that regard but when I made that move you know and I was at that cusp of wanting to bring poetic sensibility into conversation with my scholarly training I really wanted to invent a new form you see I was already thinking I did not want to write strict scholarship
00:51:08
Speaker
The University of Rhode Island was a place that said I could do that and still get tenure. Okay. Whereas at another university, if I had stayed at The University of Rochester, I would have, they would, they were very happy for me to write my poetry, but really would have had to publish my book in 19th century American literature and culture, which I was working on at the time. So I was 200 pages into actually two different scholarly books that I never brought to completion. When I turned in the direction of writing my first work of literary, what would now be called literary nonfiction, it was,
00:51:37
Speaker
Yeah, memoir at the time, night bloom. And so that's the answer to your question of how I do what I do inside of academia. I mean, I never could have told that the University of Rhode Island would have offered me really the condition of possibility to do the work that I have come to do, which frankly, I left strictly scholarly writing behind around 1991, and I never
00:52:03
Speaker
turned back. So what I do now is strictly of a kind of art making, but it's definitely research infused. And yes, I do think of myself as a public intellectual. When you say, why do I create when I create, I think I'm doing what a lot of people hope to do as artists, just trying to make strange creations in, if I'm lucky, in a beautiful look, I have to try to create a nest, you know, where I can
00:52:29
Speaker
make what I make and what I produce is something strange, I hope. I'm very interested in strangeness, in disruptive beauty. I think that I'm compelled to create because I'm compelled to care for things other than, you know, the nurturance that would be required of me as a woman, you know, to tend and to care for
00:52:59
Speaker
ideas and to see if I can bring some of these things to light in the short time that I'm given on the planet.
Memoir as Memory and Storytelling
00:53:10
Speaker
You got me thinking about
00:53:14
Speaker
I love autocorrect. I hate the way in which the internet relies on these anticipatory algorithms and tells me what I want to ask before I've asked it. I really, really hate that. But I like autocorrect because, of course, it always makes for found poetry. The other day I was texting a friend. I forget what the context was, but I used the phrase, the sloth of despond in my text. I don't know if many people in a text would use that phrase.
00:53:41
Speaker
the sloth of despond, and it accidentally came out as the sloth of despond, or the sloth, you know, that cute little animal. Yes, I love this, like I want to create stickers or something or t-shirts with the sloth of despond, but this is an answer to your question. I think I create to avoid the sloth of despond, but maybe
00:54:04
Speaker
Maybe I should try to try to have a relationship with the sloth of Despond because, you know, if he's a cute little animal, he might be more attractive. So, yes, this is my answer to your question of why I create. I and I find those the I find like the some of the forms of communication, like even within text and auto correct and all that stuff. There's a lot of like strange comedy within that. And I have this I speak
00:54:32
Speaker
people were close to me like I talk about how there's an aspect of like my persona that is, you know, like tied into into the work and like maybe kind of like, you know, like, professional, like professional capacity. And then I look at how I text. And it is it is like, it is seriously, I enjoy it. I'm not critical of myself. But I mean, these are seven year old texts. I mean, these are
00:54:59
Speaker
I mean, it's so like, it's so random and basic. And I think sometimes our communication right now, there ends up be this kind of funny accident component to it. I want to get I want to I want to ask you a question. Um,
00:55:17
Speaker
And mind you, I am part of this might be I don't get to ask, I don't do as much literature or conversations of that nature. But I wanted to ask you a related question on memoir. And I have listened or read all of Karlova Knauskar's autobiographical writings, my struggle. Oh, yeah.
00:55:45
Speaker
Just, you know, I don't know. I think the total amount of listening time on the series is something like 140 hours, something like that. It's longer than the Bible, significantly longer than the Bible. For me, I think I'm just simply fascinated by somebody who engages in writing about themselves, a memoir,
00:56:15
Speaker
in writing this in the exposure that is part of it. Here are my thoughts. Here I am. Here's what I'm doing. Here's this ridiculously absurd thing that I spent half a day on or half a decade on. Can you tell, just maybe as an intimate sense of like, when you are writing about yourself and when you're doing the, you know, creative nonfiction or the memoir, how do you
00:56:45
Speaker
How do you even do that? How do you even show yourself? How do you do that? How do you take that leap? Yeah. Well, what a great question. I would love to hear some time about your experience of listening to Nalscarve because obviously, I mean, you draw attention to the fact that these are very long books, but you were able to listen and stay. And what was it about the writing that enabled you to do that? It comes back to the writing for me.
00:57:14
Speaker
And I think that's the power of Nalsgaard. It's not so much what he's documented, but how he brought those pieces of his life onto the page. And so I think this question of memoir and what it means to be engaged in life writing, if we want to call it that, or a particular branch of nonfiction
00:57:40
Speaker
that is autobiographical. I think it brings us back to the question of why I create again. So I realized in answering the question that I didn't say to you that one of the other reasons I create, which is to tell other people's stories actually, one of the reasons I create is that I've been listening for a long time too, and I've been watching the lives of
00:58:08
Speaker
the people close to me, my family in particular, but others also people I don't know, strangers, I'm very interested in the kinds of intimacy that becomes possible between strangers. And I have had the privilege in some of my writing and some of my books to tell the stories that are not wrong, you know, in Swallow, for example, I mean, I dedicated myself to the life and work of Chevalier Jackson, but I also got to know some of his patients, including an 88 year old woman who had been
00:58:37
Speaker
treated by him or one of his colleagues as a child. And we became fast friends. And this is like one of the most beautiful things that can happen, I think, in the life of a writer. I got to know the children of some of the people who he saved. And I told their father's story. I found their father's story in an archive, in a medical archive. I found photographs of him. And he presented with the most difficult case that Jackson had
00:59:07
Speaker
had treated he he was a baby and he had all of these foreign objects stuck in his throat. He was fed them by a sadistic babysitter. It's a horrible, horrible story. And Jackson saved his life as an infant. Well, here, I actually they found me. I got to meet his children, you know, I couldn't find out who he was. Exactly. I didn't, you know, because he was deceased by the time I wrote the book and
00:59:35
Speaker
You know, I had his name, but I couldn't really find out much about him. And they happened upon my book and saw the photograph of their father and got in touch with me. But so all of this is to say that, believe it or not, you can be a memoirist and be as interested in the stories of other people as you are in, in quotation marks, in yourself. Now, what does this mean? The self I'm interested in as a memoirist is a stranger to me.
01:00:06
Speaker
You know, I'm not interested in telling my story when I write a memoir. I'm interested in testing the limits of language to bring a self into being in the first place. And to my mind, you know, the best and most interesting memoir is what memoir was supposed to do when it was inaugurated in the 80s and 90s in the United States at its best. It was a genre that was trying to theorize memory, memoir, memory.
01:00:36
Speaker
The great memoir is to my mind is someone who really tests the waters of the relationship between the past and the present and offers us a novel version of that relationship. That's why I want to read the memoir, not because I want to, you know, re-experience your experience of trauma. And so, so this is complicated, Ken, because what happened to memoir in the popular imagination is quite distinct from
01:01:03
Speaker
what it was trying to be when it was emerging as a genre in the late 20th century. And so I'm afraid that, you know, it's a complicated thing that happened. It became, well, one of the great things about memoir, of course, was that memoir was intended to honor the ordinary. So I always like to compare memoir as a genre to
01:01:32
Speaker
what we used to refer to as memoirs in the plural. So who writes memoirs? I'm writing my memoirs. And the only person who writes his memoirs, it's always a he, is the memoirs were things written by a person of note
01:01:51
Speaker
who is resting on their laurels and has nothing left to do. So they write their memoirs. Well, here's what I did. Exactly. And so a memoir is meant to honor the life of you and me. Like anyone can write a memoir. And not only that, but a memoir needn't be confused with a linear all purpose autobiography. So memoir might tap into just a moment in time or
01:02:21
Speaker
even a thematic thread of a life. And so, for example, I've written two books that could ostensibly be called memoirs, though, again, I don't call them that. I call my first book, Anemic Collage, and my third book, Called Back. I would want to call it a ritual in transfigured time, but they both are marketed as memoirs. And so my third book was written from the experience of breast cancer. And notice I didn't say it's about breast cancer because
01:02:51
Speaker
experience. It's it's it's it was it was written from that experience meaning I wrote called back in response to cancer treatment and the regime that most women are put through it's a pretty classic one and it hasn't changed in 13 years since I was treated for breast cancer slash burn and poison basically you know right so surgery radiation chemotherapy tamoxifen
01:03:20
Speaker
aromatase inhibitors for five years. That trajectory really hasn't changed much. And so this was a ritualized routine into which I had to insert myself. And I have to be thankful for some aspect of it because I have to suppose that at least one piece of it, we don't know which one, probably saved my life. But I was trying to re-inhabit the ritual in an untoward way. And I was trying to document the kind of thinking
01:03:49
Speaker
that being a woman in late 20th century America undergoing breast cancer treatment required of me. So do you see all that's really different from saying, you know, I was telling the story of my breast cancer experience. That is not what memoir does. And I don't know that I would call Nal Skard's book memoir. Now I say that at the same time that I want to push against it because unfortunately one of the things that happened in memoir
01:04:17
Speaker
once it became popularized and got confused with a voyeuristic trauma telling, air your dirty laundry books, when all sorts of lambasting of memoir appeared in the press. And what else happened at this time? Well, guess what we discover? Who writes memoirs? Mostly women. And so if you're following me, memoir to my mind took a very bizarre and circuitous route
01:04:47
Speaker
having begun as, and by the way, I have a whole theory, we don't have time to talk about it now, but, you know, that memoir actually was meeting a need at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Well, tell me about that. Tell me about that. Well, you know, I think that it meant a need at the time to kind of reach into what we would consider private space and make it public.
01:05:18
Speaker
And so again, if we, and also to make public grieving possible, and you think about the AIDS quilt and how that was an attempt to publicly grieve, to publicly mourn when we were being made to turn away from the reality of what was happening and in particular in the queer community. And I think about the memoir at its outset also having played a part in a collective remembering, when I wrote
01:05:47
Speaker
called back, I was also trying to contribute to a kind of collective remembering. I had a friend who also had endured breast cancer treatment and she said to me when I was in treatment, she said,
01:05:59
Speaker
that she remembered that they gave her something that she felt helped her to forget what she'd gone through. And she said, I hope they're giving you the same drug. And I said, oh, God, that's the worst thing you could possibly give me. Well, you know the technical name for that, Mary, with Italian background, that's the forget about it pill, right? That's the technical. That's the Latin script. Forget about it.
01:06:27
Speaker
That's good. Can you forget about it? Yeah, so you know, so the necessity remember, but but what happened is that, that a memoir came to be construed as all memoir, you know, came to be reduced to these kind of trauma written tell all
01:06:47
Speaker
redemption narratives. And this plays a part in a wound-based culture. We've been famous for this in the United States of creating populations of voyeurs and the genre since the 19th century of the type of genre that asks us to sit curbside at the expense of somebody else's suffering. But what happened was something really strangely misogynistic in the process.
01:07:17
Speaker
were then, you know, the lambasting of memoir, either vertically or inadvertently also, you know, morphed into a
01:07:28
Speaker
and land-based thing of women writers because it's mostly women who are... I saw that happening and I'm glad you mentioned that because I am seeing the development of the genre because or the work that you were doing whatever the nature of the work that you were doing that was the first major exposure for me as a reader and saying well okay I know memoir I know these
01:07:52
Speaker
but seeing you engage in that. But I also saw when you first started to engage with that, I would see it in the popular press or maybe I read tons of London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. One of the main things that I read are kind of book reviews. And I started to notice what you were talking about, that
01:08:13
Speaker
There, you know, it's like, it's like a genre, it's like a genre critique or a style critique, and then it's tied up in massive issues of women, you know, women in who's writing or which gender is writing it. And I saw that develop of what you're talking about. And
01:08:34
Speaker
And, uh, it's insidious because it's a way of, um, re-domesticating women writers all over again, you know, where on the one hand, I'm trying to suggest that memoir at the outset was really intended to undo a relationship to, um, to an afforial autobiographical impulse and to
01:09:00
Speaker
even alter our relationship to time, to memory, to question how we interpret the past. You know, have all these magnificent things going to, to honor the ordinary. You know, it's a, it's a very, it's an, it's extraordinary genre, really, at its best, but then it's, it's what happened to it. That doesn't mean that, you know, there still aren't people writing
01:09:29
Speaker
great things in its name, but I had the experience with an essay that I wrote of the editor changing the title of my essay. The subtitle of my essay was an essay on blank, right? And when it appeared in print, he retitled the subtitle an essay slash memoir on blank.
01:09:52
Speaker
Oh, God. I thought, what are you? You have got to be kidding me, especially because because I am someone who has done a lot of thinking about the genre and also theorizing about them and also the politics of the genre. And if I didn't call it a memoir, I did not want to be thought of as a memoir. But it really felt to me like that was a that was a kind of misogynistic slap unconsciously. So, of course, I would hope.
01:10:20
Speaker
Because none of the essays by men in the journal were given these subtitles, you know, given a subtitle that they didn't ask for. Yeah. And I know when you were talking about particularly within literature and thinking back, you know, there's there's whole styles of literature that I think
01:10:41
Speaker
or that have been degraded or not, or I would say that their true worth in the work, the emotional work they were doing, the historical work they were doing, the organizing work, you know, I think like sentimental novels, you know, seen very feminine women and like emotional and like imploring, you think of abolitionist literature. And there was this kind of constant critique that it wasn't, you know, that it wasn't rational.
01:11:08
Speaker
that it wasn't a proper appeal, right? That an appeal to the heart was very feminine and very, and so it was placed in a very different realm for literature, even though the stories are fantastic. And you know, so you get into these, what you're talking about within memoir and, uh, or within that realm and
01:11:31
Speaker
women's role within that. What happens when a style or a genre becomes a woman's genre, right? Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Needless to say, male essays, for example, are writing as, if you will, memoristically as women writers are. But believe it or not, there's a conception and understanding that it's only women
01:12:01
Speaker
who write memoristically. Yeah. And like I said, within literature, I think we find a lot of things of that nature. And I want to point out, Mary, and they say specifically too, as far as literature, there's this nexus of literature and the way that you've taught and written as far as disruption of
01:12:28
Speaker
in injurious categories, right? Or things that are set up based on gender or race. And one of the biggest points that I took as an intellectual point from, you know, well, probably from your lecture on race
01:12:46
Speaker
And gender was this. And I remember it to this day was that there was this invisibility in the storytelling, right? There was this invisibility. There was deep assumptions that in a Henry James novel, a woman's going to look like this. She's going to be wearing this.
01:13:04
Speaker
She's going to be white, you know, like there was all these there was all this Stuff that's going on in the background and all that's there and it seems intuitive you point out and saying well Wait a second. How come we haven't talked about?
01:13:19
Speaker
the race of this character in this. And in Chestnut, you know, and I always thought it was such a profound point of what's invisible, not even what's shown, but what's invisible within those texts. And I think there was a radical critique. The radical critique he had was started there. I always thought it was starting there.
01:13:39
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, and it is a profound point because that disruption is like going back to the void. That disruption made you see and be like, wait a second. Is this person white? Is this woman? Is she wearing what type of dresses she wearing at this point? And all those assumptions were there's so much behind that text. All of it is tacitly assumed. And I think at the time, of course, with that class, we were
01:14:07
Speaker
trying to understand the relationship between ideology and art, you know, and the invisible workings of language, the work that language does that we can't see, and that, of course, no writer is in control of. And, you know, no writer can control language's political unconscious.
01:14:28
Speaker
Yeah, and certainly as you know, as educated readers, we want to be trying to make visible the things that are passing us by in these
Ideology, Art, and Modern Communication
01:14:37
Speaker
texts, right? It's the beauty of investigating them in those ways, I think. Yeah, when I want to convey like, and when I'm talking about that, I want to convey some of the raw, the raw element of the thought and my reactions at that time. Because, you know, I'm talking, we're talking now and I'm 48 at that time, I'm, I don't know, maybe
01:14:57
Speaker
1920 years old, somewhere around there. But in a literature studio, in a literature guy and a philosophy guy, but having those disruptions were very important for my development as a radical, as an intellectual, as a radical, to say what is in there, what is or isn't there, to have that type of disruption, but also to take a look at
01:15:26
Speaker
Um charles chestnut and i'll talk about another disruption radical disruption. So we have this text of charles chestnut a very light-skinned Identifying as an african-american man and we start studying could be the marrow tradition the conjure woman Other books that he had done and you look at the back cover and I say, oh wait a second. Mary cappello. Dr. Cappello This guy's white. I think I get the wrong copy, right? I mean because
01:15:55
Speaker
But that's where it starts. That's where it starts. No, no, no, no, no. This is an African-American man and he's an African-American writer.
01:16:05
Speaker
a novel. And I think to this very day when you and I wax quizzical a bit about why more chestnut and I just see movies of the house behind the cedars of this story there, the marrow traditions, a screenplay that's already written. You and I have this reaction where it's like, this guy is super like, important. Yeah. And in, you know, as the intellectual can always tell you about super important writer.
01:16:35
Speaker
super important thinkers that have been maligned and forgotten yes yeah there's no question he was radical um and of course yes that chestnut uh could pass and chose not to um but but that very question of how we read race you know um that you're you're drawing attention to and uh really love hearing you re-narrate to
01:17:00
Speaker
your own encounter with that which was not making sense for you and how that helped something in you. And so I love Ken that you've used the word disruption more than once in the course of our conversation today. And I think I had mentioned that, you know,
01:17:19
Speaker
Yeah, I like to say that disruptive beauty is something I'm interested in achieving in my own work with disruption. Disruption. We're so we're so trained against it. Right. I mean, my second book Awkward is really about an inability as a nation state to to to dwell in uncertainty post 9 11. The tendency to be reactive as a culture. Yeah, seek vengeance to
01:17:49
Speaker
I mean, now, of course, all of these, the ability just to, to dwell in awkwardness is harder and harder by the day because, you know, I think about how the moment something happens, it's translated, it's mediated instantly and almost turned into a brand before we even know what it was that occurred. You know, so it's, it's hard to
01:18:15
Speaker
even allow for disruption in other words, because I think the way in which things get translated back to us are always already sealed over and packaged. Even when the pandemic was packaged in terms of that logo, I felt myself really pushing against that image that we kept seeing of the virus. And it really allowed me to think real hard with my students at the time of what does it mean as nonfictionists to represent
01:18:43
Speaker
the virus or represent the pandemic. And what's going on? How are we exerting some relationship to the real and thereby offering a way to read it and understand it? When we create pretty much overnight, it seemed to me, this logo, I felt like it was turning into a logo and then you have a brand. And when you have a brand, if you get a brand thing that's meant to be consumed, it's like making it part of consumer culture.
01:19:12
Speaker
almost immediately. I was just looking back to Robert F. Kennedy's speech that he gave on the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated. I was looking back at it because I'm teaching Anadur Smith's Notes from the Field right now. And she cites it in one of her essays as something that she asked her drama students to listen to. So I was going to return my class to it. And one of the things that is very clear about that evening
01:19:43
Speaker
on which the circumstances of his delivering the lecture, the lecture rather, the speech, was that the people in the audience didn't know yet that King had been murdered. And that's just incomprehensible to us. I don't even know how to my students, you know, how is it that the word hadn't gotten yet out? We can't imagine that, you know, because everything's instantaneous.
01:20:13
Speaker
And so that group, that crowd, who had gathered to hear Kennedy speak that night, heard for the first time from him the news of King's assassination. Anyway, yeah, chestnut, disruption,
01:20:34
Speaker
Oh, and then, you know, I think at the end of the day, you know, I think at the end of the day, what you talked about as far as, you know, this immediacy and this kind of like, this constant sea of reaction, like reactive type of quality that we've kind of taken on a role to react is,
01:20:57
Speaker
You know, we're on call all the time nowadays, right? We're on call. And even if we're good at work, we could say, well, I'm not sorry, I'm putting my work stuff over this side.
01:21:11
Speaker
you know, my boys 11 years old, my daughter's at the U of O and she's 19. And yeah, 19, my daughter and my middle son, 17, my little guy turns 12 tomorrow, my youngest. Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah. And, you know, so what I'm saying is like, when it comes to the, you know, the immediacy of the phone and text and communications, it's like, we're on call. We're on call all the time. And, you know, I think we got to kind of,
01:21:41
Speaker
you know, figure out, you know, not being on call or allowing ourselves not to have to always give the performance that we're up and going at it with doing it the right way. Yeah.
01:21:57
Speaker
But hey, Mary, before we go here for now, I wanted to ask you if you could let the listeners know where to find your stuff, where to find you, your writing, your books.
Closing Remarks and Contact Information
01:22:16
Speaker
I want to mention one tiny thing is
01:22:21
Speaker
connection to the show. I'd like to kind of point these out, but I mentioned earlier in the program, Bunkang Twan, a friend of mine from University of Massachusetts, and a poet.
01:22:33
Speaker
We used to hang around at the University of Massachusetts after, I was doing my labor studies program there, but I also took a Buddhism and American literature course. But there was this great bookstore, I should probably remember the name of it, I remember the name of the great pizza place. A bookstore, I went there and I was, your book had just come out, it was right around that time, and I said, hey, you got Mary Capello, you have to have her.
01:23:02
Speaker
They, you know, they got her they got her book in and that was I think it was your first one. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Nightbloom. And, you know, just some of this overlap with the University of Massachusetts and the poets that I've had on the program.
01:23:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's been really nice. But in finishing up here, let folks know how to encounter you in a way that you wish to be encountered. Sure. I have a website. It's www.maricapello.com. And my name is spelled with two P's and two L's. A lot of people get that wrong. My name literally means hat in Italian. And if you spell it with one P, it means a single hair.
01:23:48
Speaker
So you want to get that right. But yeah, I think that my website is the best way to reach me and to find lots of resources for my work. And there's a contact page there with my email address. That's really the best way. When I was writing my book on mood, I had fantasies of creating multidisciplinary mood rooms with people or
01:24:12
Speaker
Uh, uh, atmospheres that people can enter and exit as they please built around a particular theme. I, uh, uh, this book life breaks in, you know, it's about mood. And I was trying to think of. Well, at that time, you know, what did we maybe need? Um, what I needed, what I wanted. Other than a reading, you know, go hear somebody give a reading from their book creates this thing I called mood rooms.
01:24:38
Speaker
And I did have the opportunity to work with an experimental musician, Kristin Bolas, and create something along the War River mood room. But, you know, anybody has some ideas about wanting to create atmospheres together, something we'd call collectively a mood room and that would bring to bear the expertise of people from different fields, film, philosophy, art, literature.
01:25:06
Speaker
That's a dream of mine. But of course, we're in the pandemic now. And that doesn't mean, though, that such things can't be conjured and created. Well, and I think that's the thing. It's the structures of, you know, I've interviewed guests who would say, you know, my little kiddo, like I lived in a tiny apartment and my little kiddo needed to sleep. And so my art form was writing. It was the quietest art form. Like I'm an artist.
01:25:35
Speaker
But I wasn't going to do anything else that kind of created noise. She was also a musician. That's what it was. She was a musician. And she said, you had a kid. And so then kind of creating, you know, within that. And yeah, the pandemic. Yeah, I mean, it forces these difficulties. But I love, you know, I've obviously it's great to connect with you, Mary. And also to, you know, as you know, I really like to latch on to
01:26:04
Speaker
your style, your ideas, the fact that you interrogate and make sure that people understand what it is that they're thinking, what's going on in your head and what assumptions are there. So I want to thank you for continuing to do the work that you do to be my kind of like literary philosopher person right in the middle.
01:26:34
Speaker
my secret my secret use but um no it's it's um with great great excitement to to be able to chat with with you again and you know even on the last point too at the mood rooms i see this podcast for me is
01:26:50
Speaker
you know, a creative endeavor in the pandemic, right? I'm creating things. I know that there are ideas out there and that there are positive energies to get through difficulties, you know, to have life worth living, right? And so I definitely see your suggestions as part of that. Mary Capello, you know, I could say a million great things about you. You're on something rather than nothing. I want to thank you for your time.
01:27:20
Speaker
Thank you, Ken. The feeling is mutual. It's really very special to have this chance. Yeah, and then I'll bug you again a few months down the road, all right? Okay, okay. To be continued. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. You are listening to something rather than nothing.