WFHB

Here are the opening paragraphs of an article in the Guardian from March 30 of this year:

Thousands of graduate student workers around the US at private and public universities have gone on strike over the past few years, from Ivy League institutions like Harvard University and Columbia University to public state universities in California.

Graduate workers at even more colleges have organized unions in spite of staunch opposition from their administrations. Among the most pressing unifying themes among graduate student workers organizing unions and holding protest actions and strikes is the low pay, an issue plaguing graduate student workers around the US.

In the US, graduate workers take on jobs such as helping teach courses, assisting with research projects and performing often vital clerical tasks that help run academic institutions.

Included in this group are the members of the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition who voted to Strike on April 13 and have recently re-authorized the strike with 95.7% of those voting approving the action.

In our first segment we’ll offer more context on this as it has been building for several years, and in our other two segments we’ll be taking a close look at the graduate dissertations of IU’s new president, Pamela Whitten, and Vice Provost for Faculty and Academic Affairs, Eliza Pavalko - this will provide us with perhaps some ironic framing of these University leaders' positions on workers’ rights.

GUESTS

Three PhD candidates at Indiana University:

Marina Mecham is in the History Department, Anne Kavalerchik is in the Sociology and Informatics Departments, and Nathan Douglas is in Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

RELATED

Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition (thorough information and donation links)

US graduate students protest against low pay while universities profit from their work

Indiana University Graduate Workers Are on Strike and Demanding Union Recognition - interview with Cole Nelson

State Timing of Policy Adoption: Workmen's Compensation in the United States, 1909-1929

by Eliza K. Pavalko (American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 95, No. 3) - paywall

RELATED Interchange Episodes

Stacked Crooked: Renting Rooms In the Humanities Ghetto

The Public University in Crisis: An Interview with Michael Burawoy

The Mask of the Public Good: What the University Costs

Authority and U: On the Anti-Democratic Campus

Today we present Part 2 of the Producer’s Choice Awards - The Poetry Show. Poetry - Many might turn away at even the mention of the word, but to do so would miss out on work that reveals humans grappling with the great questions of their moments.

Today we feature four poets who help us see our own predicaments - one who shows us we contain multitudes; one whose life and writing was always antifascist; one who challenges expectations of female submissiveness; and one who interrupts the falsifications of narrative structures.

Those poets are Fernando Pessoa, Muriel Rukeyser, Sylvia Plath, and Thalia Field - and we’ll hear from them in that order.

I. We did two shows on Pessoa’s life and work with our guest, translator and biographer Richard Zenith. This segment centers on Pessoa’s notion of cultural imperialism, but begins with a discussion of his most famous poem, "Autopsychography."

II. This segment comes from "How to be an Anti-Fascist” which centers on Muriel Rukeyser’s 1949 book The Life of Poetry. Our guest is Eric Keenaghan - and we’ll hear two clips of Rukeyser as well.

III. This segment comes from "Fixing the Stars" and our guest was Heather Clark, author of the new biography of Plath called Red Comet, published by Knopf. In the following selection we’ll also hear Plath read from her work ("Lady Lazarus" and "Mushrooms").

IV. This segment comes from our show "Captivating Fictions" with our guest Thalia Field - an experimental novelist, essayist, and poet - modes of writing that are often combined in any of Field’s texts. Field reads "Crossroads" from Bird Lovers, Backyard, and "HI ADAM!" from Personhood.

Links to programs excerpted:

Presenting Pessoa: 1915

The Presence of Pessoa – Part Two with Richard Zenith

How to Be Anti-Fascist: Muriel Rukeyser and The Life of Poetry

Fixing the Stars: Sylvia Plath at the Edge of Sight

Captivating Fictions with Thalia Field (Extended)

MUSIC - All of today’s music is by jazz drummer and composer Max Roach.

"Man from South Africa" (Percussion Bitter Sweet)

"Conversation" (Deeds, Not Words)

"Tender Warriors" (Percussion Bitter Sweet)

"Deeds, Not Words" (Deeds, Not Words)

"Mendacity" (Percussion Bitter Sweet)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Today we’ll hear four clips from four shows that weave together ideas of slavery, imperialism, and ideological and environmental pollution. Each clip is about ten minutes long.

Those shows are:

Slavery’s Imperial Skein: Knitting Together the Capitalist Empire with guest Zach Sell

Spreading Global Freedom, or the Divine Right to Traffic Drugs, Guns, and People, with guest Mark Driscoll

Revolutionary Parallels: Zhang Taiyan and Anti-Imperialism with guest Viren Murthy

And The Poison Makers: On Liberal Modernity with Robert Stolz

I.

In our June 15 show, “Slavery’s Imperial Skein” with Zach Sell, we asked if the brutal practices of US white settler colonial agriculture, which is to say the slave plantation, could be transplanted across Britain’s colonial empire in the wake of the US Civil War and Black emancipation without actual enslavement? The answer “troubled” the rapacious Imperial imaginary.

 

II.

In "Spreading Global Freedom, or the Divine Right to Traffic Drugs, Guns, and People" we begin by unpacking what Mark Driscoll calls an ugly phrase for an ugly phenomenon, "Climate Caucasionism," and then we’ll hear about a minstrel show put on by the historically decorated US national hero Commodore Matthew Perry aboard the ship named the Powhatan - not quite the Pequod of Melville’s Moby Dick, but in the same spirit one assumes.

 

III.

In "Revolutionary Parallels: Zhang Taiyan and Anti-Imperialism" Viren Murthy discusses what might be described as a positive form of nationalism - anti-imperial nationalism - specifically mobilized to fight off the ideological invasion of so-called Western powers.

 

IV.

In "The Poison Makers: On Liberal Modernity” - about the life and work of Japanese philosopher, politician, and social activist, Tanaka Shozo, we talk about the problem of industrial scale pollution and the modernizing state, and how Tanaka Shozo discovers that the liberal state cannot (and does not care to) protect individuals “freed” from feudalism when capitalist industrialism poisons every aspect of natural life.

MUSIC

"Jaipur" - Amancio D'Silva

"London Bridge Is Falling Down" - Count Basie

"Truth" - Art Bears

"Cuyahoga" - R.E.M.

"The Song of Investment Capital Overseas" - Art Bears

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Last week, the Indiana Grad Workers Coalition announced preparations for a strike vote in early April.  This step was provoked by IU administrators, who have stonewalled recognition of a grad workers union, despite the supermajority of IU grad workers who have signed union cards.  This sequence, including recent grad workers’ protests at the IU Board of Trustees meeting, reminded us of the last time IU went on strike in 2013.  Today, we are sharing an Interchange episode covering the lead-up to that strike, originally aired on March 5, 2013.

Two undergraduate organizers, Sam Harrell and Tucker Lang, describe the political context and strategy of that strike movement, which was borne out of anti-student debt protests and the Occupy Wall Street movement.  In 2012, undergraduates took over the IU Board of Trustees meeting and turned their back on the trustees, using Occupy-based methods of non-hierarchical communication to conduct an assembly exposing the tragic cost of high student debt loads.

Later that year, mass assemblies called for a strike in the spring of 2013, eventually catalyzing undergrad and grad picket-lines, a sick-out strike by staff, and the occupation of Woodburn Hall by hundreds of students and faculty members.  As the two interviewees describe, the strike was a method to bring together wide-ranging discontent at IU, from anger about tuition hikes, to the staff wage freeze, to the historic underrepresentation of Black students.  Some of the demands have shifted since 2013, yet we are glad that Interchange was able to preserve some of the reflections from that struggle in order to put them into dialogue with the contemporary grad workers movement.  Here is WFHB’s news director emeritus Joe Crawford, interviewing Sam and Tucker.

https://wfhb.org/news/interchange-samantha-harrell-and-tucker-lang-strike-at-indiana-university/

When Rasul Mowatt first shared his work on this book with me I immediately thought of it as “The Book of Interchange.” Its investigative breadth seemed to run on a parallel track to this program, and in fact, many of the books and authors cited by Rasul have appeared on the program. Of course, this is no surprise as we are after the same quarry - that entity or ideology that has us bound to structures and systems that bleed the life right out of us for the sake of a very small number of people. I have called it property or capitalism, patriarchy or misogyny, monarchy or democracy, white supremacy or religion, militarism or industrialism, individualism or liberalism, and so on…and we’ve done show after show on these topics.

But here we are, finally, and perhaps conclusively: it turns out all these particular “control systems” devised by humans can be subsumed under “the state” and to paraphrase a 12th century philosopher, “The State” is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere. In these 4 episodes of "The State Made Visible" the center is in the city.

Mowatt tells us that “the modern city’s schema combines the empty city freed of indigeneity; the closed city of restricted access; the colonial city with planned congregations of the racial “Other”; the imperial city renovated with racial and gendered city splitting; the Stateless-beyond-city of the rural and through ‘hood abandonment; the dead city that is prison; the revanchist city of gentrification; and the possibilities of the old, walled fortress city and the new, selective private city. All of these combine to yield the eventual production of the apartheid city of confinement and restrictive order.”

In this final episode we’ll focus our attention on the disposability of populations - of course this is a constant throughout this tour of the city in history. Our centerpiece is the partial meltdown of Detroit Edison’s Fermi-1 nuclear plant on October 5, 1966. Fermi-1 was permanently shut down in 1972, but its successor, the 1,100-megawatt Fermi-2, went online in 1988 and is still operating. Does the location of this nuclear plant reveal Detroit as a disposable city, full of disposable people?

We begin with the construction of acceptable violence - by both police and vigilantes - protecting property and the family while making the home the most dangerous place to be.

GUEST

Rasul A. Mowatt, Ph.D., is just a son of Chicago and a subject of empire, while dwelling within notions of statelessness, settler colonial mentality, and anti-capitalism. He also functions in the State as head of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management at North Carolina State’s College of Natural Resources.

RELATED

The State Made Visible – Part One

Here There Be Dragons: Part Two of The State Made Visible

Architecture or Revolution: Part 3 of The State Made Visible

MUSIC

"Up Against the Wall" (instrumental) - Group Home

"Bucktown" by Smif-N-Wessun

"We Almost Lost Detroit" by Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson

"A Toast to the People" by Gil Scott-Heron

"Wrap Your Troubles in a Dream" by Louis Armstrong

ID - "Amerika" by Moodymann

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

In his 1923 book, Towards a New Architecture, French architect Le Corbusier wrote,

The machinery of Society, profoundly out of gear, oscillates between an amelioration, of historical importance, and a catastrophe. The primordial instinct of every human being is to assure himself of a shelter. The various classes of workers in society to-day no longer have dwellings adapted to their needs ; neither the artisan nor the intellectual. It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of to-day; architecture or revolution.

A fascist antiSemite, Le Corbusier also wrote, “the technocratic elite, the industrialists, financiers, engineers, and artists would be located in the city center, while the workers would be removed to the fringes of the city."

A quick recap of our previous two episodes might be in order. In episode one we zeroed in on Chicago, Illinois and the reign of Mayor Richard Daley, the elder, in order to see how buildings and neighborhoods were mapped out and residents penned into ethnic and racial zones, effectively conforming to the template originating with the Spanish Empire as a method of controlling and exploiting their colonial territories.

In episode two we took a closer look at that template as codified in the early 16th century in the Laws of the Indies which detailed the design of resource extraction zones, or cities, down to the direction the winds should blow down the streets. It’s here that body type characteristics are also codified and spatialized into racial categories. Without the space, there is no race. We still live inside the design and infrastructures first laid out in places like Mexico City to serve the desires of the state.

And today in Architecture or Revolution we’ll center the program on city planners active in the mid-20th century, like Harland Bartholomew and Robert Moses. Bartholomew is best known for the destruction of the St. Louis Riverfront and displacing thousands of Black families from Mill Creek but his reach is national and his influence immense. Robert Moses was the colossus astride New York City who understood that politics and legal codes might change, but it’s mighty hard to tear down the bridges that restrict the movement of Black and Brown New Yorkers keeping them penned in and impoverished in neighborhoods organized by state abandonment.

But we’ll begin in the early 19th century with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 - which literally separated the so-called “old” world from the “new” and barred any European nations from attempting to influence or control any of the sovereign states in the region. It almost sounds like a good thing. Right.

GUEST

Rasul A. Mowatt, Ph.D., is just a son of Chicago and a subject of empire, while dwelling within notions of statelessness, settler colonial mentality, and anti-capitalism. He also functions in the State as head of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management at North Carolina State’s College of Natural Resources.

RELATED

The State Made Visible - Part One

Here There Be Dragons: Part Two of The State Made Visible

St. Louis: Patterns of Segregation and Alibis for Abandonment (Interchange with Walter Johnson)

Forms of Concentration: Constructing Racialized Bodies (Interchange with Daniel Nemser)

Marie Louise Berneri’s Journey Through Utopia, written in 1950, opens with a dissection of the reactionary authoritarianism of Plato’s Republic in which the State must create a mythology of divinity and purity in its Guardian class to mystify the masses. Berneri writes:

"Throughout history one sees that the existence of a State implies the division of society into classes, but that the ruling class does not necessarily owe its power to its economic wealth but to an ideology which clothes it with a superior power, maintained by the use of armed forces."

In our 3-part series with Rasul Mowatt about his book The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence, it’s our goal to demystify the State - which is not a tangible entity but a fiction, like Plato’s Guardians, designed to allow a ruling elite to maintain power.

The focus in this episode is on the history of the city as it evolved from the 16th century to the present, beginning with the Spanish Empire in Mexico City. It’s in the city where we can most readily perceive the mechanisms of power maintenance - from the design of streets into grids and the creation of a central plaza to the labeling of physical traits as identifiers of types of people and the spaces where they are allowed to live - thus solidifying and “naturalizing” those identifications such as Indios, Negros, and Mestizos.

The template for the very city you are living in comes directly from the Laws of the Indies, the body of law promulgated by the Spanish crown between the 16th and 18th centuries for the government of its colonies outside Europe, chiefly in the Americas. It contains 6,377 laws in nine books, subdivided into 218 chapters covering the formation and practice of church government and education; political and military administration; municipal and provincial government and lower courts; penal law; public finance; and commerce.

These decrees are the basis for the ideological underpinnings of what we consider correct ways to structure and order populations; in fact the practice of life within these structures shape the ways we think about the world and each other. And all of this in the service of the mythical State.

GUEST

Rasul A. Mowatt, Ph.D., is just a son of Chicago and a subject of empire, while dwelling within notions of statelessness, settler colonial mentality, and anti-capitalism. He also functions in the State as head of the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management at North Carolina State’s College of Natural Resources.

RELATED

Part One - The State Made Visible

Forms of Concentration: Constructing Racialized Bodies (Interchange with Daniel Nemser)

Storied Into Being: Martin Puchner On the Written World (Interchange)

Storied States: James Scott’s Against the Grain (Interchange)

Prisonscape: The View from Any Window (Interchange with Brett Story)

The Spanish Colonial Town: Planning Flexibility in Spit...

In his new book, The Writer’s Crusade: Kurt Vonnegut and the Many Lives of Slaughterhouse-Five, author Tom Roston examines the connection between Kurt Vonnegut’s life and his anti-war novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. Roston spent some time researching his subject here in Bloomington, where the Lilly Library at Indiana University houses the Kurt Vonnegut Manuscript Archives.

Did Vonnegut suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Did Billy Pilgrim? Roston probes Vonnegut’s work, his personal history, and discarded drafts of the novel, as well as original interviews with the writer’s family, friends, scholars, psychologists, and other novelists.

Slaughterhouse-Five was Vonnegut's first novel to become a bestseller, staying on the New York Times bestseller list for sixteen weeks. In 1970, it was nominated for best-novel Nebula and Hugo Awards, losing both to Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.

Its success must have been gratifying to Vonnegut who says in the book’s first chapter, “I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.”

That big subject struggling to find a form was not only the Allied fire bombing and killing of 25,000 civilians in Dresden, but also PTSD - called variously over time: “irritable heart” or Da Costa’s Syndrome, “cannonball wind” or shell shock, war trauma or post-Vientam Syndrome. And it’s this subject and its history that Roston thoroughly covers in his new book.

All of our music today comes from Everything Is Sateen: Five Songs Inspired by Vonnegut by Lusterlit. We’re opening with “Use Me” - inspired by Vonnegut’s 1959 sci-fi novel The Sirens of Titan where we first encounter the Tralfamadorians, aliens who will abduct Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, published ten years later.

Lusterlit is the literature-inspired duo of Susan Hwang and Charlie Nieland who create songs for the Bushwick Book Club in Brooklyn, New York, a club founded by Hwang that meets monthly employing the talents of local songwriters, artists and chefs who plumb the depths of a chosen literary gem to create a new song (or visual art, dance, film or snack). There are branches in Los Angeles, Seattle, Santa Barbara, New Orleans,Greenville (SC), London and Malmö, Sweden.

GUEST

Journalist Tom Roston worked at The Nation and Vanity Fair, and was a senior editor at Premiere for more than a decade. His work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, LitHub, and more. He is the author of two previous books, I Lost It at the Video Store: A Filmmaker's Oral History of a Vanished Era and The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World. He lives in Brooklyn.

RELATED

On Slaughterhouse-Five, the “Ultimate PTSD Novel” by Tom Roston

From Dresden on the 50th Anniversary of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ (2019)

The Enduring Legacy Of Slaughterhouse-Five by John Krull

MUSIC

Everything Is Sateen: Five Songs Inspired ...

Art Young, The Masses, December 1912

Today much of the history of American radicalism, including the work of cartoonist Art Young, languishes in obscurity just when it is needed most. But be cheered, along with Michael Mark Cohen’s website, Cartooning Capitalism: Art Young and the Cartoons of American Radicalism, there are now two collections of Young’s work in print, both out from Fantagraphics, To Laugh that We May Not Weep and Art Young’s Inferno.

As we close out the year we present a program that aired near its beginning: Art Against War & Capital: On the Cartoons of Art Young

GUEST

Michael Mark Cohen is an associate teaching professor of American Studies and African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of The Conspiracy of Capital: Law, Violence and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly (UMass Press, 2019).

Michael Mark Cohen

RELATED

Michael Mark Cohen and Cartooning Capitalism (Interview)

Radical Art: Art Young and the Cartoons of American Socialism by Michael Mark Cohen

Art Young: A Cartoonist for the Ages by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman

With Gene Debs on the Fourth by John Reed

MUSIC – Irving Berlin

“Top Hat, White Tie and Tails” – Louis Armstrong – Louis Under the Stars (1958)

“Getting Nowhere” – Bing Crosby (1946) – Blue Skies

“Freedom Train” – Peggy Lee and Johnny Mercer (1947)

“Can You Use Any Money Today” – Dinah Shore (1950) – Call Me Madam

“Follow the Crowd” – Irving Berlin (1914)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

When will you come, O Hidden One

Portuguese dream of every age,

To make me more than the faint breath

Of an ardent God-created yearning?

Ah, when at last will you,

Returning, turn my hope into love?

In the aftermath of the death of his father (by tuberculosis) and in the face of losing his mother to another country and a second husband, Fernando Pessoa, age seven, wrote a shrewd, little poem to his mother.

Here I am in Portugal,

In the lands where I was born.

However much I love them,

I love you even more.

What makes this poem most unusual, according to Richard Zenith, is its “love of homeland”…its “mysterious, innate nationalism.”

It’s a poem that, as we’ll hear, might well have served as epigraph to the poet’s only published book of poems, Mensagem, or Message, where what is national is personal, political, mythical, and universal. Mensagem won a literary prize awarded December 31, 1934, by the National Office of Propaganda. Pessoa would die eleven months later, on November 30, 1935. He was forty-seven.

Mensagem presents Pessoa’s vision of a spiritual nationalism - one in which Portugal is conceived universally, as a real place and a mythical idea. It is praised and disparaged by both the political Left and the Right. Which might speak to its great worth - can a nationalistic book of poems actually offer a shared ideological message? Would any ears hear?

Today, we explore the in-between, from Durban, South Africa to Lisbon, Portugal - the beginning and the end of the greatest Portuguese poet of the last 450 years.

Throughout we’ll hear poems (or fragments of poems) from Pessoa and his three major heteronyms - the master, Alberto Caeiro, the sensualist, Alvaro de Campos, and the classicist, Ricardo Reis.

Richard Zenith’s new book is the monumental Pessoa: A Biography, published this year by Liveright. His translations of Pessoa’s poems have appeared in the volumes A Little Larger than the Universe and Fernando Pessoa & Co.

We’ll begin with Pessoa’s most well-known, and probably most widely translated poem, "Autopsychography," dated April 1, 1931.

The poet is a feigner

Who’s so good at his act

He even feigns the pain

Of pain he feels in fact.

And those who read his words

Will feel in his writing

Neither of the pains he has

But just the one they’re missing.

And so around its track

This thing called the heart winds,

A little clockwork train

To entertain our minds.

Jazz great Ornette Coleman provides our soundscape.

We open with “Turnaround" from Sound Grammar - recorded live in Germany in 2005 - where the “band plays together literally as one, no matter what's happening…As all these sounds blend together, they become, in their order to one another, grammar. And each member finds a unique place in the conversation in this ordered sonic universe.” (Thom Jurek)

GUEST

Richard Zenith is an acclaimed translator and literary critic. His translations include Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, which won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The recipient of Portugal’s Pessoa Prize, Zenith lives in Lisbon, Portugal.

RELATED

Presenting Pessoa: 1915 - Part One (Richard Zenith)

MUSIC

Ornette Coleman and Joachim Kühn

"Turnaround" - Sound Grammar

"Once Only" - Sound Grammar

"Written Word" - Complete Science Fiction Sessions

"Somewhere" - Joachim Kühn - Melodic Ornette Coleman

"Food Stamps on the Moon" - Joachim Kühn - Melodic Ornette Coleman