Open Source with Christopher Lydon

We’re back in the pub a year later with Mark Blyth, the outspoken political economist at Brown University—which means he works and talks and thinks at the intersection of big money and big power.

In this pub, the forbidden word is “bankruptcy.” When Mark Blyth moved to the United States, the national debt was about a quarter of the gross national product for one year. It is now 125% of GNP. The government does not cover its costs. It chooses not to raise taxes, and it cannot stop borrowing.

This week: a show from our archive from The Connection days.

“It ain’t over till it’s over.” That’s Yogi Berra’s ageless line, in the title now of a summer hit movie just to prove Yogi was right about pretty much everything.

He was a most valuable player in his New York Yankees uniform and a most beloved, most creative, most quotable source of American language and American wisdom. We got it first-hand in a radio studio with that dear man almost 25 years ago.

The line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary-artistic history: Eileen Myles grew up in Boston/Cambridge and moved to New York in 1974 to become a poet.

Chris with Eileen Myles.

And they did. 20 volumes later—their latest book of poetry is A “Working Life”— they’re very nearly the New York poet, with a branch office in Marfa, Texas, and still a strong Boston accent that is part of the poems. Recently, back in Boston, Eileen Myles sat down to talk about a life in poetry and in conversation with the world.

We’re humbled—we’re also scared—by the power of chatbots like GPT-4 to do pretty much everything that word people have ever done, but faster and maybe more to the point. The twist in this conversation is that our guests are professional humanists, guardians, and teachers of the hard-earned old wisdom of books, not machines. And the double twist that they want to argue is that the enemy here is not evil AI: it’s us, who have enfeebled the old culture to a vanishing point in the practice of our politics, our media, our most expensive elite universities.

Robert Pogue Harrison and Ana Ilievska.

Robert Pogue Harrison is our Dante scholar at Stanford, our professional humanist, and a West Coast friend in smart podcasting. We asked ChatGPT about his voice, and we got the instant answer that his voice “has a certain mellowness and introspection” that go with his “keen ear for language and a precise, articulate way of expressing his ideas.” He’s joined by Ana Ilievska, initials A.I. She is Robert’s colleague from Europe in humanistic studies at Stanford. Recently, in the podcast Entitled Opinions, they both defended AI as a wake-up call, maybe in the nick of time, to rescue humanity, human stewardship, human culture from its corrupted condition. They both said they expect their students to use AI and to learn from it.

Here’s a last burst of wind in our sails, a last gentle guffaw, from a listener we came to adore: the cartoonist Ed Koren. You knew Ed Koren, too, for those furry, quizzical characters he drew and captioned—portraits of our general bemusement—through a 60-year run in The New Yorker magazine. His studio, it turned out, was in rural Vermont, where he’d gotten hooked on our public radio shows. Finally, just a few years ago, we met the sheer joy of that man, face to face.

Chris Lydon with Ed Koren in Vermont, November 2021.

Ed Koren knew that “the laws of entropy,” as he put it in conversation, were not in his favor. But he did not believe in dying, and in his case, I don’t either. Most of a year ago, in the late stages of treatment for inoperable lung cancer, he told me he’d withdrawn from hospice care because hospice framed its mission around death, and his passion, as he said, was life and living. What I heard was not the sound of denial, or evasion of anything. I felt him embracing a truth that I’d felt from the start of a precious friendship: Ed Koren stood for the elusive strands of humanity that do not die. The wonder of our connection has been discovering, oddly enough, that we could talk about such things. And so we did, producer Mary McGrath and I, visiting Ed and his wife Curtis, late in March, up in Mary’s ski country. As we entered his studio this time he was absorbed in reading a New Yorker profile of the godfather of modern graphic design, Milton Glaser.

Ed Koren’s hairy creatures.

Scenes from Ed Koren’s studio last month. In the center: Ed with Mary McGrath.

William James, thinker and writer, was known widely in the nineteenth century as the adorable genius who invented American pragmatism. He was a brain scientist, student of war and religion, a philosopher who can feel like a very lively presence in the shadows of our condition, whatever we call it.

John Kaag.

In the 2020s, the philosopher John Kaag is our guest to enlist William James in a sort of quest for insight and healing in a divided nation. His books on William James include Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.

There’s nobody quite like Sonny Rollins in the All-American sound and story of jazz. He was a teenager in Harlem in the 1940s when major players caught on to a rising star. Steadily over the decades, he built one of the genius careers on the tenor saxophone, alongside his rival and friend John Coltrane. More than that, Sonny Rollins was making his music a way of life, a mission of self-study and self-improvement, a moral and philosophical course of inquiry and reinvention—of gentleness and peace—all at the same time.

Biographer Aidan Levy. Credit: Jahsie Ault.

In his 93rd year of life, Sonny Rollins now has the affirmation of a 700-page biography, meticulous and monumental—modeled on Robin Kelley’s life of Sonny’s friend Thelonious Monk. It lets all of us see Sonny Rollins up with Walt Whitman and a few others on the Olympus of American art and storytelling.

Out of the blue a decade ago, Paul Harding won a huge popular following, first, and then the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his modern Maine sort of folk tale called Tinkers. His new one is deeper, darker, more ambitious philosophically, more poetic, more beautiful in long stretches—more ironical, too, starting with the title.

Paul Harding.

This Other Eden takes off from sketchy reality—a real colony of free poor people—Europeans, Africans, indigenous Penobscots, fishermen, farmers, all of them on a tiny island off the coast of Maine about a century ago, until they got swept up by the state and banished to confinement, some of them in the Maine School for the Feeble Minded. In the novel, it’s Paul Harding’s invented characters and imagination that compose a tale of family love encompassing the damages of incest and murder and official state cruelty.

“Don’t forget” is a mantra in our shop: “don’t forget” specially the characters, the moments that made us. Norman Mailer is the spirit-seeker and sometimes reckless truth-teller we are un-forgetting in this podcast. We are summoning Norman Mailer in his hundredth-birthday season, what could be his revival time, to tell us what happened to his country and ours. Mailer lived and wrote it all: 40 books of eagle-eyed fact and fiction. First as a soldier in the Philippines, in the 1940s; then: epic poet of the Sixties in America; eventually as a celebrity and popular artist of Duke Ellington or Frank Sinatra proportions.

J. Michael Lennon, Chris Lydon, and John Buffalo Mailer.

Sinatra taught us love songs, Mailer read the maelstrom of our American dream life to us. The premise in our conversation is that Norman Mailer, 15 years after his death, is still speaking to his country. Certainly to John Buffalo Mailer, youngest of seven sons and daughters, co-editor with J. Michael Lennon of a Mailer distillation for 2023, titled A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy.

Lydia Moland is reminding us that when present company in American public life comes up short, the ancestors of American democracy and spirit are lurking out there, in abundance and power to reset our judgment of who we are and what is possible, for a society, for each of us.

Lydia Moland.

Lydia Moland, our sometime radio colleague, is now a philosophy professor at Colby College in Maine. For her the shock of recognition came at the chance sight of a nineteenth-century letter from a battling idealist, Lydia Maria Child, whom she’d never heard of. (It reminds me of the Pulitzer Prize biographer Stacy Schiff feeling much the same rapture at the same moment in 2016, rediscovering the sturdy giant of the American Revolution, Samuel Adams.) Lydia Moland’s big book became a story not just of a central figure in the abolition of slavery, but of her own passion as a contemporary scholar finding a model of moral courage for our own times. We spoke together at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge on the publication of Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life.