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This is the first of two shows on Fernando Pessoa, perhaps the greatest modern Portuguese poet, who proclaimed himself greater than Luís Vaz de Camões, author of The Lusiads, an epic fantasy of the adventuring, marauding, slaving, nation published in 1572.

And in a like manner, Pessoa strives to better, or at least equal, another so-called national epic, in this case that of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, imagining himself the fulfillment of Whitman’s “poets to come…a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known…”

Can any poet actually back up this kind of megalomaniacal claim? At the very least Pessoa did, demonstrably, contain multitudes - and principally a trio of what he called heteronyms, of which there are hundreds - essentially other written "selves" - named Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. If Fernando Pessoa is the greatest Portuguese poet of the 20th century, then he is, rather, the four greatest Portuguese poets of the 20th century.

To guide us on our own voyage of discovery into the mind and life of this circle with no center we’re joined by Richard Zenith, acclaimed English translator of Pessoa’s poetry and prose, and now author of a monumental biography titled simply, Pessoa: A Biography, published earlier this year by Liveright.

Our music throughout is from Chopin’s Preludes, Opus 28, performed by Maria João Pires. Like Pessoa, Pires was born in Lisbon, not quite a decade after the poet’s death. She has been called “a pianist without a trace of narcissism—among the most eloquent master-musicians of our time."

In the "Introduction" to Fernando Pessoa & Co., a book of English translations of Pessoa’s poetry, Richard Zenith compares Pessoa’s work to these Preludes, which have been said to be something more like remnants than beginnings, like works that had…"been realized to the point of divine perfection, after which they had fallen to the ground and broken into pieces, most of which were lost irretrievably."

We center today on 1915 and Pessoa’s public coming out as Whitman’s poet to come. In the pages of the modernist journal Orpheu, which published only two issues, Pessoa presented his “static drama” The Mariner, signed by Fernando Pessoa, which can be said to reveal the entire project of his life’s work, and also several poems by his most vital heteronym, Álvaro de Campos. We’ll pay special attention to “Maritime Ode” which appeared in Orpheu 2. At over nine hundred lines, it was Pessoa’s longest completed poem.

Throughout we'll hear selections from the pieces under discussion - they will be edited, compressed, for time.

We begin with the problem of biography - what’s in a life that’s worth writing about when the life is about writing?

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

The Presence of Pessoa – Part Two with Richard Zenith (Interchange)

The Year of the Birth of Alberto Caeiro (from Pessoa: A Biography)

A Literature on the Brink of Dawn by Richard Zenith

The Heteronymous Identitie...

Our rising awareness that we have destroyed our planet has simultaneously provided us not with remorse or resolve but with a new fantasy: that the Anthropocene delivers an opportunity to remake our terrestrial environment thanks to the power of technology. Today's guest says "No!" in thunder.

In The Unconstructable Earth (Fordham) Frédéric Neyrat proposes an “ecology of separation” that acknowledges the wild, subtractive capacity of nature. Against the capitalist, technocratic delusion of earth as a constructible object, but equally against an organicism marked by unacknowledged traces of racism and sexism, Neyrat shows what it means to appreciate Earth as an unsubstitutable becoming. Underway for billions of years, withdrawing into the most distant past and the most inaccessible future, Earth escapes the hubris of all who would remake and master it.

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.

That’s from Melville’s Moby Dick, naturally.

All of our music for this episode comes from the Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, released in 1979.

We'll also share selections from Michael Palmer’s poem “Odd-Even” from 1985 - but excised out of published order.

Dear Lexicon, I died in you

as a dragonfly might

or a dragon in a bottle might

Dear Lexia, There is no mind

Dear Book, You were never a book

Panther, You are nothing but a page

torn from a book

Stupid Lake, You were the ruin of a book

GUEST:

Frédéric Neyrat is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is editor of Alienocene, an online journal that charts the environmental humanities and contemporary theory. His first book in English (following thirteen in French) is Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism.

RELATED

Viruses and Separation: Frédéric Neyrat on political virality and competing separatisms

On The Political Unconscious Of The Anthropocene: Frédéric Neyrat, interviewed by Elizabeth Johnson

Five Propositions | Critiques for the Anthropocene (2016)

The New Cosmology or Upbeat in the Anthropocene (Interchange)

MUSIC

Fear of Music Talking Heads (1979)

“Mind” (alternative take)

“Heaven”

“Air”

“Animals”

“Memories Can’t Wait”

ID underbed

“Dancing for Money” (Unfinished Outtake)

CREDITS

Impresario: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Today we repeat our May 25th episode with poet, dramatist, essayist, and novelist, Thalia Field.

This Extended Version of “Captivating Animals” with Thalia Field includes a discussion of Émile Zola and his attempt to recreate in fiction the scientific methodology of the Positivists and Claude Bernard; a reading of a medical journal article on the “insanity” of antivivisectionists; the tragedy of Charles Darwin’s “support” for vivisection.

Radio Version of Captivating Fictions

RELATED

Personhood (New Directions website)

“TURNS BEFORE THE BEFORE CURTAIN” by Thalia Field

A Conversation with Thalia Field, Author of Experimental Animals (January 15, 2017)

Thalia Field: The TNB Self-Interview (November 24, 2016)

Subjects of Captivity: Personhood Rights and Nonhuman Animals (Interchange with Jeff Sebo)

Ghosts, Dogs, and the Law: On Constructing Criminality and Negating Persons (Interchange with Colin Dayan)

GUEST

Thalia has been teaching fiction and multimedia and interdisciplinary creative/critical practice in the Literary Arts department at Brown University since 2000 where she is the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing.

MUSIC

All of our music comes from Tim Berne, saxophonist, composer, and record label owner. We range across multiple albums and band lineups. The pieces come from Visitation Rites, Clause & Reflect, Diminutive Mysteries, Sacred Vowels, Sanctified Dreams, and Pre-Emptive Denial.

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

In this episode of Interchange we welcome back Holly Buck whose new book is Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough, published by Verso.

And as we did in our previous show with Buck, which was called "Capturing the Carbon Imaginary," we’ll feature music from Polish jazz pianist and composer Krzysztof Komeda. Komeda was born in 1931, the same year that E.O. Hulburt, a physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory published a paper in the journal Physical Review titled "The Temperature of the Lower Atmosphere of the Earth” where he stated that “the carbon dioxide theory of the ice ages... is a possible theory,” supporting the theory of the greenhouse effect and global warming first proposed by Swedish chemist and physicist Svante Arrhenius in 1896.

Our opening song is “Svantetic” - a composition from Komeda’s classic album Astigmatic, recorded in 1965. "Svantetic" is not dedicated to Svante Arrhenius but rather to Svante Foerster, a Swedish poet who was a friend of Komeda.

1965 is the same year that Lyndon Johnson’s President’s Science Advisory Committee stated that “pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air”, with effects that “could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings."

Fifty-six years later, this year, on October 28th, the House Oversight Committee convened a hearing entitled, “Fueling the Climate Crisis: Exposing Big Oil’s Disinformation Campaign to Prevent Climate Action'' which included several Oil & Gas company executives. They were asked under oath by Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney if they would pledge to no longer spend money to oppose efforts to reduce emissions and address climate change. None of them would, perhaps unsurprisingly.

Since 1965 no country has put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the United States. The 278 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide the U.S. has emitted to the atmosphere over the past half-century represents over one-fifth of global emissions during that time. It seems revealing that this coincides with the rise of the U.S. prison population.

Holly Buck’s first book, After Geoengineering, addressed questions about the technological solutionism of climate intervention, while her new book, Ending Fossil Fuels, makes plain that to stop the extraction and burning of fossil fuels means putting an end to an industry with massive wealth and political power, and with existential entanglements in so many of the ways we even imagine what life is supposed to look like.

Buck exposes what she calls the “cruel optimism of Net Zero” - an idea fully supported by Big Oil and Gas. But she also offers a “A Phaseout Toolbox for the 2020s” which lays out five demands to pursue, including the nationalization of fossil fuel companies.

GUEST

Holly Jean Buck is a geographer and environmental social scientist studying rural futures, the politics of platforms, and how emerging technologies can address environmental challenges. She works as an Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York, and has a Ph.D. in Development Sociology from Cornell University. She is the author of After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration and Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough.

RELATED

Big oil CEOs just lied before Congress. It’s time they’re held accountable

COP26: a radical climate reading list (Verso)

Our topic today is a modernizing, industrializing, Japan, and the life and thought of Tanaka Shozo, the the late 19th and early 20th century Japanese peasant, politician, land speculator, liberal parliamentarian, transgressor against the Emperor, and environmental rights activist. But, we are, in the end, talking about liberal modernity and industrial capitalism across the globe. From labor coercion, and industrial accidents, to widespread pollution and so-called engineering fixes that frequently only compound disasters, this is not a story unique to Japan. We are all Japanese, and no one is Japanese. You’ll have to listen to the show for that to be explained.

In Bad Water, published by Duke University Press, Robert Stolz demonstrates how a series of large-scale industrial disasters in the 1890s revealed the need to incorporate nature into politics.

The Ashio Copper Mine unleashed massive amounts of copper, arsenic, mercury, and other pollutants into surrounding watersheds and in the process exposed the myth of the autonomous liberal subject.

When the air, water and land are contaminated by private corporations in support of an adventurous modernizing state, how can one be responsible for one’s own health and well-being. How can one pursue liberty and happiness in this corrupted environment? And if the new system of government fails to protect you on every level, who, or what can you appeal to?

Finally, Stolz discusses Tanaka’s concept of Nagare (or positive flow) and Doku (literally, poison), and his warning that creating too much “poison” can overwhelm Nagare so that no equilibrium can be found. There will be only Poison. This is clearly a message that “enlightened” and modern humanity has failed to learn.

GUEST

Robert Stolz is associate professor in the department of history at the University of Virginia, and author of Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870–1950.

RELATED

Remake Politics, Not Nature: Tanaka Shozo's Philosophies of 'Poison' and 'Flow' and Japan's Environment by Robert Stolz

On Being Domesticated By the State: A Conversation With James Scott

Revolutionary Parallels: Zhang Taiyan and Anti-Imperialism (Interchange with Viren Murthy)

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

MUSIC

"Turn You Inside-Out," Green

"Cuyahoga," Life’s Rich Pageant

"These Days," Life’s Rich Pageant

"Undertow," New Adventures in Hi-Fi

"I Remember California," Green

ID inserts

"Endgame" (Out of Time) and "Underneath the Bunker" (Life’s Rich Pageant)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Today's show is a repeat from June 25, 2019.

In her book, Carceral Capitalism, poet and scholar Jackie Wang confronts mass incarceration in the US by delving into the processes that feed into and maintain the prison system: anti-black racism, predatory lending, algorithmic policing, privatized prisons, credit scams, data analytics and histories of exclusion. The so-called ‘race-neutral’ technologies like credit scoring, data mining, and algorithmic policing provide a justifying veneer of scientific legitimacy so that criminality and poverty become self-fulfilling prophecies of capitalist rationality.

Guest

Jackie Wang is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (2018), a book on the racial, economic, political, legal, and technological dimensions of the U.S. carceral state. Her forthcoming book manuscript, tentatively titled Vectors of Control, examines how, during the postwar period, calls to reform the U.S. criminal legal system catalyzed experimentation in the realm of criminal procedure and led to the development of new technologies of control. Rather than focusing exclusively on the role of the state in pursuing the policy path now known as ‘mass incarceration,’ her recent research looks at the role of reformers, nonprofits, the Cold War university, and financiers in shaping the development of the carceral state.

RELATED

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

Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the politics of Safety by Jackie Wang

Against Racial Capitalism, from Occupy to the Present by Dan Nemser (book review)

The ‘Superpredator’ Scare (NYT video documentary)

The Cybernetic Cop: The Future of Policing (Music, text, voice & RoboCop collage by Jackie Wang, produced with assistance from Alexander.)

PALANTIR has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology (The Verge, Feb 27, 2018)

MUSIC

From Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues

“Attica Blues”

“Steam (Part 1)”

“Blues for Brother George Jackson”

“Ballad for a Child”

“Quiet Dawn”

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

In an English romantic novel from 1796, the title character and hero, Marchmont, exclaims “is it possible that for a small sum, such as it is likely such people as these can owe, their creditor has a right to shut them up from the common air, and use of their limbs, by which alone there can be any chance of their payment? Can laws that suffer and enforce this senseless cruelty, be the very best that the wisdom and experience of mankind can devise for the government of civil society?”

An author of nine novels, a poet, and sometime resident of debtors’ prison, Charlotte Smith, coined the term prisonscape in Marchmont. That use was meant for the view inside the prison, but today we are helped to understand that the prison is everywhere - that through the prison the State has organized social and economic life for all of us.

Our guest today is Brett Story, a geographer and award-winning non-fiction filmmaker, and professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. We’ll focus on her 2016 documentary film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes and her 2019 book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America, published by the University of Minnesota Press. The book and film share the same motivation and research, but each offers a distinct and revealing treatment of the subject. They complement and deepen each other.

In the manner of last week’s show with Rasul Mowatt we’ll explore the role of the state in constructing Prison Land.

And while Story’s film offers twelve landscapes, we’ll focus on three: the so-called “Silicon Valley” of the Midwest, Detroit, as owned and “revitalized” by Quicken Loans billionaire Dan Gilbert; St. Louis, Missouri, where municipalities proliferated to support an intensely segregated racialized geography, and where taxes take the form of traffic stops and nuisance fines leading to our modern version of Charlotte Smith’s prisonscape, or debtors' prison; and we’ll begin in New York City with the private transportation that has sprung up to connect those imprisoned in the rural geographies of upstate New York with their loved ones and relatives who mainly live in the outer boroughs of Empire City. We’ll hear clips from the movie throughout that have been edited for time constraints.

Our music today will feature Yusef Lateef, a multi-instrumentalist and composer from Detroit, and Clark Terry, a trumpet player and composer from St. Louis.

GUEST

Brett Story is a geographer and award-winning non-fiction filmmaker. Her films have screened at True/False, Oberhausen, Hot Docs, the Viennale, and Dok Leipzig, among other international festivals. Her second feature-length film, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016) was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Canadian Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. She is the author of Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America from the University of Minnesota Press (2019). She was a 2016 Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow and is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.

RELATED

Brett Story: The Prison in 12 Landscapes (Sabrina Alli interviews Brett Story)

On structure, collaboration, and imagining a better possible future (interview with Brett Story)

How Does It End?

Today we begin a conversation with Rasul Mowatt about his book The Geographies of Threat and the Production of Violence which will take us on an historical tour of the use of the City as the locus of State power - where the State is given form, we might say embodied, in things like city councils, mayoral offices, and municipal policing, but also through real estate development and major events planning. The City moves us around at the State’s behest.

As we’ll hear in the conversation that follows - the City is configured as a managed enclosure - not unlike the animal pen - that contains within its borders many other configurations of enclosure - from a school system to the prison complex to whole city blocks that are occupied by hospitals and universities. It’s in the very dailiness of managed life where an abstraction like the State comes to dominate us.

Today we introduce the concept of the state - which is not the government, which is not the nation - by way of the South Shore Country Club circa 1977 - a building that has become the South Shore Cultural Center through the determination of local residents - but that, since its inception in 1906, through exclusionary policies - No Jews or African Americans, or for a time Roman Catholics, were allowed - has existed in a geography of threat where violence would be rationalized by dominant ruling class.

This is the Chicago of Mayor Richard J. Daley, who in 1968, in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, gave cover to murdering racists by instructing police to shoot to kill any arsonists or looters should riot come to Chicago.

Then we’ll turn to the Mexico City and the 1968 Olympics, where the state organized a massacre of people protesting political suppression of labor unions. Using the Olympics as cover, authorities incited violence and then blamed it on the protesters in order to attack and arrest them - hundreds were murdered and thousands arrested.

The Olympics, like other mega-events, have been used to enforce policies of oppression and dispossession throughout the world, all while touting the benefits such events bring to the local population. The State does benefit some people to be sure, while promising benefits for all and protection from things like disease and crime - often wholesale constructions sold to us by officials and bureaucrats.

Perhaps we can agree that there might be such a thing as good government, but can there ever be a good 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 a Professor in the Departments of American Studies and Geography in the College of Arts + Sciences at Indiana University, and soon will be a Department Head in the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University.

RELATED

“Shoot to Kill. . . Shoot to Maim”

A Palace for the People (on the South Shore Cultural Center)

Writing Red: Joshua Clover on Strikes and Riots (Interchange)

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

In this repeat from March 13, 2018, we’re joined by noted film scholar, Jim Naremore, author of Charles Burnett: A Cinema of Symbolic Knowledge; Michael Martin, editor-in-chief of Black Camera: an International Film Journal, and professor in the Media School at Indiana University, who values Burnett as an artist who shows the banality of oppression; Jacqueline Stewart, author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity and professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago; and Jonathan Rosenbaum, long-time film critic for the Chicago Reader, now retired, whose latest books are both collections — a two-volume work called Cinematic Encounters that appeared in November 2018 and June 2019. Volume one consists of interviews and dialogues, and volume two is subtitled Portraits and Polemics (University of Illinois Press); and, finally, we speak with the artist himself, Charles Burnett.

The Glass Shield

Films discussed:

“The Horse”

“Killer of Sheep”

“Glass Shield”

“When It Rains”

 

MUSIC

Our music is from John Handy’s Recorded Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival, released in 1966. Its three tracks run underneath the whole program with the exception of a bit of conversation with Burnett regarding Paul Robeson, for which we used Robeson’s "The House I Live In."

RELATED

The Troublesome Films of Charles Burnett – Interview with James Naremore

Burnett’s Governors Award acceptance speech

Ava DuVernay honors Charles Burnett at the 2017 Governors Awards

Milestone: Killer of Sheep

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Kade Young

Today we discuss the work of the late Noel Ignatiev using the memoir that has just been published by Charles H. Kerr. It’s called Acceptable Men: Life in the Largest Steel Mill in the World. That steel mill is the Gary Works of US Steel which was indeed the largest steel mill in the world in 1972, the year that Ignatiev began working there. The title of the memoir comes from Ecclesiastes chapter 2, verse 7: “For gold is tried in the fire, and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.” That same chapter advises us not to make haste in a time of trouble. And I recommend that when you read Acceptable Men, that you spend some time with it. It’s brief and straightforward yet its deeper intentions are subtly revealed when you return to it and read it a second or third time. In other words, read it not in haste in our times of trouble.

Noel Ignatiev, who died in November of 2019, worked for over twenty years in steel mills, farm equipment plants, and machine tool and electrical parts factories. He was a prominent member of the Sojourner Truth Organization, co-founder and co-editor of Race Traitor: Journal of the New Abolitionism and the managing editor of Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life. He was perhaps best known as the author of How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 1995) - a book that has been called “path-breaking” and “essential.”

The show features two guests.

John Garvey is a Brooklyn native and lifelong New York City resident who was a leading activist in the Taxi Rank & File Coalition in the 1970s. He then worked as an educator in New York City jails and headed the Teacher Academy and Collaborative Programs at the City University of New York. He is an editor of Insurgent Notes. He worked with Ignatiev as an editor of both Race Traitor and Hard Crackers.

Michael Staudenmaier is an assistant professor of history at Manchester University in North Manchester, Indiana. He teaches and writes about Chicago’s Puerto Rican community, and the role of race, racism, and antiracism in United States history. He’s the author of Truth and Revolution: A History of the Sojourner Truth Organization, 1969–1986, published by AK Press.

RELATED

A Life Defined by Political Engagement: Noel Ignatiev, 1940–2019, by John Garvey

Introduction to the United States: An Autonomist Political History by Noel Ignatin (Ignatiev)

Sojourner Truth Organization

A Revolutionary Left

Hard Crackers

Race Traitor

Unmade in America: The Wages of Factory Work (Interchange with Dave Ranney)

There Are No Accidents: The Business of Blaming the Worker (Interchange with Jonathan Karmel)

MUSIC - Uncle Tupelo

“Graveyard Shift” (No Depression)

“Factory Belt” (No Depression)

“Grindstone” (March 16–20, 1992)

“Discarded” (Still Feel Gone)

“True to Life” (Still Feel Gone)

ID “Sandusky” (March 16–20, 1992)

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm