The Archive Project

In this episode of The Archive Project, Andrei Codrescu shares an epic poem he wrote in honor of Portland’s Lovejoy Columns, which once supported the now demolished Lovejoy Ramp at the Pearl District entrance to the Broadway Bridge. The columns themselves were sparred from demolition by the efforts of the architectural group Rigga, who are introduced at the beginning of Codrescu’s lecture. Following his reading, Codrescu answers questions from the audience about his thoughts on the past and future of Portland, art, and poets—among other topics—weaving his trademark dry humor and frankness throughout his discussion.

I don’t like things, you know? I am sort of intrigued by them…That’s the most you can do with the world is find it interesting—if you like it, you’re doomed.”

“The danger of it…is that it doesn’t leave room for the unpredictable. You can plan too far ahead and you take all of the shadows out and then it becomes very, very boring—you know, like all Utopias. Nobody really wants to live in paradise.”

“That’s why I think every city bureaucratic should be doubled by a poet. Or they should live with a poet, or you know, keep a poet as a pet. Poet is just pet with an o.”

“We need to be saved from our own arrogance in a certain way and the fact that we feel so good. Because feeling good is not great. Feeling good leads to fascism, you know? When people feel really good they want to march somewhere and beat people up—that’s fascism. It’s good to be a little sick. It makes you sensitive and it gives you empathy. So, I mean, an excess of health is what we really need to be saved from.”

“I have always found if you slide a little French word in your title, things sound better.”

Born in Romania, Andrei Codrescu emigrated to the United States in 1966. His first book of poetry, License to Carry a Gun, won the 1970 Big Table Poetry award. In 1983, he founded Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books & Ideas and became a regular commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered. In 1989, he returned to Romania to cover the fall of the Ceausescu regime for NPR and ABC News. From this experience, he wrote The Hole in the Flag: an Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution. Codrescu is the author of over forty books, including The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, Jealous Witness, and Whatever Gets You Through the Night. He is also a screenwriter and received the Peabody award for his film Road Scholar, which he also starred in. He has taught literature and poetry at Johns Hopkins University, University of Baltimore, and Louisiana State University, where he was MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English.

In this episode of The Archive Project, New Yorker columnist Brendan Gill examines city life in context of the writings of Lewis Mumford, an American historian, sociologist, philosopher, and critic best known for his studies of urban architecture. Gill reads from Mumford’s works, inserting his own concerns and humorous anecdotes along the way. He goes on to discuss urban influx, the integrity of cultural inheritance, and the importance of the survival of small cities.

Over the past couple of years, I have visited a number of American cities and have observed, nearly always with dismay, a contempt for those attributes of human life—coherence, orderliness, nobility of form—that Mumford spent a lifetime elegantly championing not merely as hallmarks of urban architecture, but of civilization itself.”

“The fear is that in their new colossal scale, these cities are becoming not merely unrecognizable, but uninhabitable.”

“As one might expect, boom towns tend to lack this integrity of cultural inheritance—either because they are too young to have achieved it or because they have ruthlessly disposed of it, along with other space-consuming heirlooms of little or no monetary value.”

“In this period of feverish urban bloat, can cities as small as I would like them to be prove themselves capable of surviving and prospering?”

 Brendan Gill was an American critic best known for his writing in The New Yorker, where he critiqued film, drama, and architecture. Gill landed a job at The New Yorker straight out of college and served as the film critic from 1960 to 1967, the theatre critic from 1968 to 1987, and columnist of “Sky Line,” an architectural forum, from 1987 to 1997. His essays also appeared anonymously in the magazine’s “Talk of the Town” column. In total, he is credited with writing more than 1,200 pieces for The New Yorker and was known for being an outspoken advocate of the importance of architecture to New York City’s historical preservation, architectural excellence, and quality of life.

A New York Life, Gill’s 1990 nonfiction publication, contains sketches of many of his friends and acquaintances over the years, including Dorothy Parker, Eleanor Roosevelt, Alec Waugh, and Man Ray. His other nonfiction works include A Fair Land to Build In: The Architecture of the Empire State and The Dream Come True: Great Houses of Los Angeles. Gill also wrote biographies of Cole Porter, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Charles Lindbergh, as well as poems, novels, and plays. A year before his death, Gill published Late Bloomers, which comprised features of people who had achieved success during or after middle age, including Harry Truman, Charles Darwin, and Edith Wharton. Gill died in 1997, at the age of 83.

On April 5, 2016, former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove was honored as Oregon State University’s Stone Award winner. The Stone Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement honors a major American author who has created a body of critically acclaimed work and been a dedicated mentor to succeeding generations of young writers. In her acceptance interview with OSU Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing Karen Holmberg, Dove addresses her writing process, adapting her work to the stage, and facing fear through poetry, among other subjects.

“I think by facing it—not trying to conquer it, but by facing it and entering it—I feel a little less afraid of it. I feel like I’m getting to know the fear. I mean, half of fear—well, half of anything—is the fear of the unknown.”

Rita Dove was encouraged to read widely by her mother and father, the latter whom was one of the first black chemists in the tire industry. She excelled in school, including being recognized as one of the top one hundred high school graduates in the country and attending Miami University in Ohio as a National Merit Scholar. She went on to study at the University of Tübingen in West Germany on a Fulbright scholarship and earned and MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Dove’s debut book of poetry, The Yellow House on the Corner, was praised for its sense of history and attention to detail. She went on to write the verse-novels Thomas and Beulah, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and On the Bus with Rosa Parks, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, among others. In praise of Dove, poet Brenda Shaughnessy has said, “[She] is a master at transforming a public or historic element—re-envisioning a spectacle and unearthing the heartfelt, wildly original private thoughts such historic moments always contain.”

In addition to her publications, Dove is known for her advocacy of the arts. She was named US Poet Laureate in 1993, making her the youngest poet and the first African American to hold this title. She took the post seriously, traveling around the country to give readings and generate interest in the literary arts. In 2011, she served as the editor for the Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry and stirred controversy and dialogue through the inclusivity of her choices for the collection.

“I don’t think there’s any shame is subterfuge. I don’t think that tacking it straight on is everybody’s thing—and in fact, what is really frustrating is if you have a fear, or you have an emotion you really want to get out, and you try to pour it out and it isn’t a good poem…One of the things I think a young poet can do is to go at it sideways, to tell it slant.”

In this episode of The Archive Project, Literary Arts presents a rare public appearance by one of Oregon’s greatest entrepreneurs, Phil Knight, for the release of his 2016 memoir, Shoe Dog. In this candid and riveting memoir, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company’s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world’s most iconic and profitable brands.

In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his lime green Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed $8,000 his first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion, and the Nike swoosh has become one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable symbols in the world today. But the man behind the swoosh has long remained a mystery. Now, for the first time ever, Knight tells his story, interviewed on stage by New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik. Hear first hand from Knight as he shares his journey toward building one of the world’s most iconic brands.

 I think one of the things that is unique about Nike is that when we go to work on Monday morning and one of our athletes has performed at a high level, everybody in the company—from clerks to the CEO—is lifted by that.”

“A lot of people say, ‘Well, you created a culture’—but it wasn’t me. Basically, it kind of bubbles up from the people. You can’t dictate a culture…it comes from within. I’ve got fingerprints on the culture, but it is by no means dictated by me.”

“We wanted to win their hearts as well as their feet.”

One of the world’s most influential business executives, Phil Knight is the founder of Nike, Inc. and led the company from a small partnership founded on a handshake to the world’s largest footwear, apparel, and equipment company. He served as CEO of the company from 1964 to 2004 and continues to this day as Board Chairman. In addition to his work at Nike, Knight has been a certified public accountant with Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand and was an Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Portland State University. He lives in Oregon with his wife Penny.

Special thank you to Nike Inc., Oregon Health & Science University, Weiden + Kennedy, and The University of Oregon for supporting this event.

In this episode of The Archive Project, Cristina Henríquez discusses the real-life inspirations behind the characters in her novel, The Book of Unknown Americans, namely her parents and the various communities she engaged with when moving to several different cities throughout her childhood. She goes on to discuss the power of imagination, fiction, and reading to help people build stronger connections to one another, stating, “That’s the power of stories. They deepen our empathy. They expand it. This is one of the things in particular that fiction does. And it does it through a feat of imagination. Because of words on a page arranged in a particular order, it allows you, the reader, to imagine someone else’s life.”

The 2016 Everybody Reads pick, The Book of Unknown Americans explores the lives of two families who have come to the United States from Mexico and Panama, as well as the experiences of men and women who have immigrated from all over Latin America, as they pursue different versions of the American Dream. Everybody Reads is a community reading project of Multnomah County Library, made possible in part by gifts to The Library Foundation. The Everybody Reads program celebrates the power of books in creating a stronger community through a shared reading experience.

“When I read a book, or when I go to a movie, part of what I’m seeking is that emotional connection to the characters of the story. I hear people say sometimes that they read a book because they want to escape. But for me it’s just the opposite. I don’t want to escape life. I want to see it. I want to see it in new ways, from new angles and new perspectives; I want to dive deep. That’s why I turn to books. And I want to give readers that experience too, even if it’s painful, especially if it’s painful. I want to break your heart.”

Cristina Henríquez grew up in Delaware, where her novel The Book of Unknown Americans is set. She discovered her love of writing in high school, when a boy she had a crush on gave her journal to write her feelings down in. “For the first few weeks, I was writing to him, spilling my feelings upon the page with relish,” She recalls. “But it didn’t take long before I found I was writing for myself and for the sheer enjoyment of the act of writing. I was hooked. I sat down at the end of each day and scribbled page after page, experimenting with new ways of saying things and reveling in a feeling of absolute freedom.” Though the boy never returned her romantic feelings, Henríquez had found her passion. She went on to earn her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The Book of Unknown Americans was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book, one of The Washington Post’s top 50 fiction books, and an NPR Great Read, among other accolades. Other works by Cristina Henríquez include Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and the novel The World In Half. Her work has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, and she is a recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award, a grant started by Sandra Cisneros.

“Too often, it seems to me, sameness is what people are after. And the reason, of course, is that sameness is easier. Sameness coddles us; it makes us feel comfortable and safe. I know this space, it makes us think. I know what to do here and how to behave. I know what’s expected. I can just be, without having to try very hard. Difference, on the other hand, is disruptive. It challenges us. It requires us to learn something new, or to adapt, or even just to listen. But it asks something. It puts the burden on us.”

“Imagination is like most things: it’s a skill you practice. And the more you practice it, the easier it is to summon. It changes the way your mind works. It changes the way you see other people. Where once your mind harbored fear, which grows too often from a lack of understanding, now you have the impulse for compassion. Where once you had distance, now you have a feeling closer to communion. Where once you had the instinct to hold your community tightly around you, pulling it closed like a cape, now you have the thought to open the wings and let others in.”

In this episode of The Archive Project, Yann Martel reads selections from his novel Life of Pi, which received the Man Booker Prize in 2002 and was later adapted into a feature film. Between readings, Martel shares information about his writing process and his overarching philosophy behind the book. At the conclusion of the reading, he answers a series of questions from the audience, including the number one inquiry on everyone’s mind: Just how will reading this novel make a person believe in God?

“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”

“I must say a word about fear: It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life.”

“The proof of God is not in the story. The proof of God is that there are stories.”

Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963, the son of Canadian parents studying graduate courses abroad. Both of his parents went on to join the Canadian Foreign Service, and Martel divided his childhood between Costa Rica, France, Spain, Mexico, and Canada. This wanderlust continued into his adulthood, when he traveled to Iran, Turkey, and India before taking up residence in Montreal.

Martel worked a variety of odd jobs in his early 20s—including tree planter, dishwasher, and security guard—before devoting himself to writing at age 27. He gained international attention in 2002 for his second novel and third publication, Life of Pi, a fantasy adventure about a boy stranded in a lifeboat with a host of zoo animals, most notably a tiger. Life of Pi won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and was made into a feature film in 2012, winning 4 academy awards.

Martel’s other works include We Ate the Children Last, a collection of short stories, and the novel Beatrice and Virgil, which was a New York Times best seller and winner of the Financial Times Fiction of the Year Award. In 2012, he published 101 Letters to a Prime Minister, a collection of correspondences to the prime minister of Canada. His latest novel, The High Mountains of Portugal, was published in 2016. He currently lives in Saskatchewan.

Click here to view the slideshow Lewis references during her lecture.

In this episode of The Archive Project, poet, scholar, and National Book Award winner Robin Coste Lewis presents on “The Race Within Erasure.” Lewis first became widely known in 2015, when her debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus won the National Book Award in poetry –– it was the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974.

Lewis’s career as an academic and poet brings language and visual art, and their histories, to bear on questions of race and gender, both now and in the past. In this talk, Lewis focuses on a writing practice called “erasure” which is essentially the act of creating a new work out of an existing one by deleting text. She gradually widens this lens to talk not only about erasure in literature, but about how history is recorded, remembered or erased; how the humanities are taught; which stories are published and read, and how this shapes our understanding of our society and our worldview.

Throughout her talk, Lewis toggles between the past and present, celebrates writers both famous and obscure, challenges a cannon that is missing far too many writers of color, and surfaces ideas, stories and voices that are essential, especially right now.

“I had read every book placed before me, but in all those twelve years of my so-called education, I had never heard the name of one black woman novelist. I had never read a novel or short story by any black woman. Worse, I didn’t even know there was such a creature as a black woman who could write fiction. We knew, incorrectly, that there had been a few poets—in fact, there had been hundreds. But we learned this correction from the adamant literary commitment of our great migration working class families, not from our schools, teachers, textbooks, nor our school districts. Which is to say that at the time I went to high school—which is not so long ago, mind you—it was possible to earn a high school diploma in the United States without any knowledge whatsoever about the literary traditions of Americans of color.”

“As readers, it is our responsibility to pay attention to everything in a book—not only the way a writer wants us to read her project, but we should also attend scrupulously to the parts of the book to which the writer is wholly unaware.”

“Like a photograph, a poem or story erases what is outside of its frame—but here’s the curious part, also like a photograph, it captures the unintended, and sometimes that turns out to be the most engaging part of a text: its accidents.”

“Erasure is a collaboration of time and intent. Erasure often erases intent. Ironically, sometimes by removing text from its source, erasure can even magnify the original writer’s intent. When it is really, really, really good, erasure can reveal more about the projects of both writers.”

Robin Coste Lewis was born in Compton, California. When she was six, she told her mother that she wanted to be a writer. At the time, she thought this could only mean being a novelist. In pursuit of that goal, she studied comparative literature as an undergraduate, attended NYU’s Creative Writing Program, and earned a master’s degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature.

Everything changed for Lewis after she had an accident that caused her permanent brain damage, keeping her bed-ridden for two years. As part of her long recovery, her neurologist limited Lewis to reading and writing one sentence a day. It was physically painful for Lewis to read and write, so she decided, “OK, if it’s one line a day, it’s going to be a goddamned good line.” It was at this time that she realized she was a poet.

Her debut collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, won the 2015 National Book Award for poetry. It was the first debut book to be awarded the prize since 1974. The book is a triptych: Lyric poems exploring desire and race bookend the title piece, which is made up of titles, catalog entries, and descriptions of art depicting the black female figure from 38,000 bce to the present day. The citation from the National Book Foundation praises Voyage by stating, “In poems that consider the boundaries of beauty and terror, Lewis intimately involves us with all that has formed her. The aesthetic and psychological complexity of this work is underscored by its clarity. This voice is essential to our present moment.”

In this episode of The Archive Project, Elmore Leonard shares stories, often humorous, about his correspondences with his readers—from teenagers who ask how he has perfected the portrayal of criminals in his writing to adults who sell his letters for hundreds of dollars. He also notes how the letters portray varying reactions to his writing, demonstrating how readers and writers often view the same material in contrasting ways. Leonard goes on to discuss the gap between novel writing and screenwriting and how it is ultimately a story’s characters that do all the work and have all the power, not the writers themselves.

“They love themes in Hollywood. I never think of theme; I just think of what’s going to happen next, and I know when I reach the end. I always wait for someone else to tell me what it’s about.”

“Your [writing] style blooms from your attitude and the way you see the world.”

“What kind of writing brings in the most money? Ransom notes.”

Elmore Leonard was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1925. A storyteller from the start, Leonard wrote his first play—a war story inspired by the novel All Quiet on the Western Front—at age 10, utilizing the furniture in his fifth grade classroom as stage props. In 1949, he began his professional writing career in advertising, penning Westerns on the side and primarily selling them to pulp magazines. One of his first publications, the short story “3:10 to Yuma,” went on to be adapted to film in 1957 and again in 2007. In 1961, Leonard became a full-time writer, adding crime fiction and suspense thrillers to his list of genres and publishing more than 50 novels, short stories, and screenplays throughout his 60-year career. The most famous among these includes the novella Fire in the Hole, which served as the basis for the award-winning television series Justified, and the novel Rum Punch, which was adapted into the 1997 film Jackie Brown, directed by Quentin Tarantino. In total, 26 of Leonard’s novels and short stories have been adapted for the screen. He died in 2013 at the age of 87.