WFHB

Or Big History, or, Epic Science, or Religion 2.0...Today’s show is kin to last week's, Honey From a Weed...but instead of seeing the human as capable of flourishing in concert with the natural, in this story, humanity sings itself beyond limitation.

"[T]he new cosmologists attempt to recast the universe as a distinctly human drama, a story in which we comfortably feel 'at home.' But this move is a wrong one, for it collapses an unfathomably vast and alien cosmos into something far less wondrous. It encourages a mood of self-aggrandizement, a kind of cosmic smugness that is contrary to wonder and, I think, demonstrably unscientific....Put differently, the new cosmology is, quintessentially, paradigmatically, an Anthropocene narrative, and a problematically upbeat one at that." (Sideris, Consecrating Science, 9)

Much of this is of course not new. Throughout we'll hear clips from a talk given by Wernher von Braun at Taylor University in 1972. Von Braun was the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Germany and the father of rocket technology and space science in the United States. He was also a Nazi. Along with several hundred other German scientists he came to the United States to build the dream of space travel as a kind of spoil of war.

Incidentally, Taylor University, where von Braun spoke, is a private, evangelical Christian college in Upland, Indiana, which was founded in 1846.

GUEST

Lisa Sideris is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, where her research focuses on religion, science, and environmentalism. She is the author of Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection (Columbia University Press, 2003). Her new book is Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge and the Natural World (University of California Press, 2017).

RELATED

Surviving the Anthropocene: Big Brains and Big Money at the Smithsonian by Lisa Sideris

Surviving the Anthropocene Part 2: Of Omega Points and Oil by Lisa Sideris

Religion 2.0: "The New Theism: Shedding Beliefs, Celebrating Knowledge" by Michael Dowd

Climate Change And The Astrobiology Of The Anthropocene by Adam Frank

“Sipping the Kool-Aid” of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (Jenny Lewis)

"Poor Birds, Poor Bees, Poor Men: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring" (Interchange, featuring Lisa Sideris and Christoph Irmscher)

MUSIC

"The Voyager" by Jenny Lewis

"Heretics" by Andrew Bird

"John Saw That Number" by Neko Case

"Back to the Sea" by The Thermals

"Oceania" by Björk

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Board Engineer: Bryce Martin

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

As we’re in the midst of a holiday season that can so often feel like merely a smattering of one-off charitable acts and token expressions of fellow-feeling paired with culturally enforced gluttony, it seemed appropriate to turn to a different kind of life, one which defines fasting and feasting in much different terms. As the sweet gives to salt it’s conceptual savor, a feast finds joy in breaking the fast.

Honey from a Weed is the title of Patience Gray’s most well-known book. It came out in 1986 at the height of Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in the US and can be considered counterstatement to their ethos of acquisitive commercialism. But it knows this to be a kind of errand in the wilderness. The book opens with an epigram from Octavio Paz, “Man is nostalgia and a search for communion.” Patience Gray knows that she is already too late.

A weed might be said to represent valuelessness, and worse perhaps, a thing which actively devalues what many consider to be the proper and true way of living. And even the idea of honey from a weed asks that we make the best of a bad situation. Yet, the weed is honey to Patience Gray. As value is a social construct we might readily damn a culture that even uses weed as a category of denigration and harm; and Patience Gray shows that the opposite is more of a truth. The Garden requires expulsion, after all.

But as for usefulness: In a 1987 London Review of Books essay Angela Carter wrote of the book that it is

like very few others, although it has some of the style of the 17th-century commonplace book, replete with recondite erudition and assembled on the principle of free association, as when Mrs Gray lists uses for goose fat. In a cassoulet. In soups. On bread. On toast. ‘On your chest, rubbed in in winter. On leather boots, if they squeak. On your hands if they are chapped.’

Our music throughout is by Matteo Salvatore. Salvatore, born in 1917 in the Apulia Region of Italy (the heel of the boot), was a composer and singer of popular music, as well as interpreter of traditional songs. His childhood was marked by Italy’s post-WWI poverty and much of his music reflects this experience. His music is often enriched by funny anecdotes told with irreverence. He has been called the great poet of the poor.

GUEST

Adam Federman is a reporting fellow with the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute. His writing has appeared in the Nation magazine, The Guardian, and Gastronomica among many others, and he’s the author of the biography Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray, published by Chelsea Green.

RELATED

"Wolfing It" by Angela Carter (review of Honey from a Weed)

"Between Plenty and Poverty" by Adam Federman (Gastronomica, Spring 2011)

"Paradise Lost" by Adam Federman (Petits Propos Culinaires, May 2008)

MUSIC

All songs by Matteo Salvatore

"Zingarella"

"Mo ve'la bella mia da la muntagna"

"Cunta l’ore"

"Le chicchiere du lu paese"

"Le nozze di Giannina"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Studio Engineer: Bryce Martin

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Interchange took a break this week. As a substitute, here's a conversation with Christoph Irmscher about Louis Agassiz for your edification and your listening pleasure. This first aired on June 8, 2013 as part of the summer series The Custom House.

Louis Agassiz, born in 1807 in Fribourg, Switzerland, came to the US in 1846 and very quickly became one of the most influential men in the development of the practice of science in America.

A co-discoverer of the Ice Age, he is often portrayed as a racist proponent of miscegenation (which he was) and a failure as a theorist of human development–as the scientist who refused to see species in the light of Darwinian evolution on religious grounds. But as our guest the biographer Christoph Irmscher shows, Louis Agassiz was one of the most influential men in the development of Amercian Science.

Erza Pound used Agassiz's method in his ABC of Reading: "The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one 'slide' or specimen with another. No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the sunfish."

A post-graduate student equipped with honors and diplomas went to Agassiz to receive the final and finishing touches. The great man offered him a small fish and told him to describe it.

Post-Graduate Student: "That's only a sunfish."

Agassiz: "I know that. Write a description of it."

After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks of the subject.

Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.

The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.⁠

GUEST

Christoph Irmscher teaches English at Indiana University, where he also directs the Wells Scholars Program. He is the author of Max Eastman: A Life, and several other books, including Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science and Longfellow Redux.

CREDIS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Engineer: Jonathan Richardson

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

"Censorship and Sensibility" features local author and film scholar Joan Hawkins in conversation with writer Laurie Stone. Stone was in town to read from her latest book as part of the Player’s Pub Spoken Word series organized by the Writers Guild at Bloomington.

A longtime writer for the Village Voice, theater critic for The Nation and critic-at-large on Fresh Air, Stone’s new book of stories, My Life As an Animal, is composed from around the edges of multiple forms, memoir, fiction, journalism, essays and criticism. At the center of each is a woman, figured to be similar to Stone but with essential dissimilarities, writing from deep within the sexual politics born of 70s feminism who feels and deploys the erotic pull of words as they both seduce and slice us open.

In a review of My Life as an Animal Joan Hawkins writes:

Stone’s narrator is smart, funny, well spoken, and complex. Prickly, too. She finds her way in life, and in these stories, by challenging ideas and arguing with those close to her. If you’re looking for a sweet cozy of a tale about a 60-year-old woman falling in love and moving to Arizona, you need a different book…. Animal is the perfect book for that corner café table that Patti Smith writes about in M Train, where you read and reread books until you get the hang of their logic.

We begin with a controversy. Laurie Stone was set to read from her book on Studio A, a Sunday night talk show broadcast by WKCR, Columbia University’s student-run radio station, until she got an email from the show’s producer asking her not to read one of her stories. The producer wrote: “Some particular lines in your selections do not reflect our station's values and more importantly our university's values, and would be an issue to air.”

We should note that WFHB will “bleep” a certain word that is not allowed (ehem, censored) by the FCC, but we will be hearing the lines that created the controversy.

Our music today comes from Philip Glass’s 1989 album Solo Piano--specifically the 5 variations of the composition Metamorphosis--all performed by Branka Parlić. The songs were inspired by the short story of the same name by Franz Kafka, published in 1915. One day Gregor Samsa awoke to find himself a monstrous vermin...estranged from his family, his work, himself.

EXTENDED: This is a special extended version of Joan Hawkins' conversation with Laurie Stone, author of My Life As an Animal, on feminism, theater criticism, and the influence of Kate Millet and Sexual Politics. (77m)

GUEST

Laurie Stone is author of My Life as an Animal, Stories (TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press), the novel Starting with Serge (Doubleday), and the essay collection Laughing in the Dark (Ecco). She is editor of and contributor to the memoir anthology Close to the Bone (Grove).

RELATED

Words from a Stone (Melville House blog)

Censorship of Laurie Stone (PEN)

urban fauna: a review of my life as an animal by Joan H...

EXTENDED VERSION: "Censorship and Sensibility" features local author and film scholar Joan Hawkins in conversation with writer Laurie Stone. Stone was in town to read from her latest book as part of the Player’s Pub Spoken Word series organized by the Writers Guild at Bloomington. A longtime writer for the Village Voice, theater critic for The Nation and critic-at-large on Fresh Air, Stone’s new book of stories, My Life As an Animal, is composed from around the edges of multiple forms, memoir, fiction, journalism, essays and criticism.

This is a special extended version of Joan Hawkins' conversation with Laurie Stone. This additional segment focuses on feminism, theater criticism, and the influence of Kate Millet and Sexual Politics.

 

Radio Version: Censorship and Sensibility

Laurie Stone

Joan Hawkins

 

 

 

 

 

CREDITS

Interview by Joan Hawkins

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

From the Ukrainian Pale to Bridgeport, Connecticut. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Radicalized by deplorable labor conditions for immigrants in America, Matilda Rabinowitz became one of the only women to organize for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

Rabinowitz immigrated to the United States from Ukraine at the age of thirteen. Radicalized by her experience in sweatshops, she became an organizer for the IWW from 1912 to 1917 before choosing single motherhood in 1918.

Our guest today is her granddaughter, Robbin Légère Henderson, who has illustrated Matilda’s memoir with black-and white-scratchboard drawings. She depicts her grandmother’s life in the Pale of Settlement in Ukraine, her journey to America and political awakening, her work as an organizer for the IWW, a turbulent romance, and her struggle to support herself and her child.

Henderson’s book is Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman, and in it Rabinowitz describes the ways in which she and her contemporaries rejected the intellectual and social restrictions imposed on women as they sought political and economic equality in the first half of the twentieth century. Rabinowitz devoted her labor and commitment to the notion that women should feel entitled to independence, equal rights, equal pay, and sexual and personal autonomy.

Matilda arrested in Detroit

She may be best remembered for her organizing autoworkers in Detroit at the Studebaker plant who began calling for the eight-hour day and weekly rather than bi-monthly paychecks, and held a combined skilled and unskilled walkout on June 17, 1913. This action, considered to be the first major strike at a U.S. auto plant, may not have occurred without Rabinowitz’s work.

But it’s a troubled love for another labor organizer Ben Légère that animates this story and makes it more than just an account of socialist labor organizing in the same years that would see the Russian Revolution explode into world consciousness.

GUEST

Robbin Légère Henderson, a California native, received her BA at the University of California at Berkeley and attended Reed College and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in California, New York, Europe, Central America and New Zealand. For the past five years Henderson has devoted herself to scratchboard illustrations related to her family history. A residency in 2015 at Blue Mountain Center provided an opportunity to complete the graphic memoir of her grandmother, Immigrant Girl, Radical Woman, published in 2017 by Cornell University Press.

RELATED

The World of Our Grandmothers

The Women of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.)

Bread and Roses: Workers’ Rights A Century Ago (Books Unbound)

MUSIC

"One Day More" by Elaine Purkey

"Factory Girl" performed by Rhiannon Giddens

"Break and Roses" performed by Bobbie McGee

"Factory Girl" by the Rolling Stones

"Make America Great Again" by Pussy Riot

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Our show today is another in our series on the Russian Revolution of 1917. This time our focus is on Leon Trotsky. Our music throughout is by the 80s English, socialist, skinhead, soul, punk group, The Redskins. We open with “Lev Bronstein.”

The dream of socialism as an organizing principle has been deemed an inevitable failure — and logically undemocratic because what started in 1917 did, as a fact, devolve into one of history’s worst dictatorships under Stalin. But that history has been used to conclude that socialism inherently leads to that tyranny, holds it within its core. That narrative has been enthusiastically and uninterruptedly promoted in the west by capitalist powers ever since.

Of course socialism, the idea, was around before the Russian Revolution of 1917, and certainly before Stalin stormed the stage. And the ideals behind socialism, the economic system, trace back to philosophies, religions, and long-held, long-accepted human ideals.

So how did 1917 become the start of a very successful century of propaganda against socialism?

Lenin’s impetus for Revolution in Russia was to light a fuse for worldwide revolution: to turn Imperial First World War into Civil War in each country--Workers shouldn’t shoot at each other, they should unite and fight against the rulers who are telling them to shoot each other.

And it was the Socialism of Germany that led him to believe this was possible; but the German Social Democrats voted for War Credits, giving credence to a blend of patriotic imperialism, killing the chance for a world conflagration under socialist upheaval and starving the nascent socialism of soviets in it’s crib. Stranded, permanent revolution turned into “socialism in one country” which in turn became Stalin’s “revolution from above”: Communism by merciless, murderous diktat.

From within this crucible the revolutionary theorist, ruthless Red Army commander and plausible dictator in waiting, leader of the left opposition against the terrorism of Stalin’s bureaucratic abstractions, Leon Trotsky was cast: The Romantic Hero in Exile , and The Apostate Enemy of Lenin’s Revolution.

GUEST

Paul Le Blanc is a Professor of History at La Roche College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and author of a short biography of Leon Trotsky from Reaktion Books, as well as Lenin and the Revolutionary Party from Haymarket Books, and his latest is on the Russian Revolution, titled October Song: Bolshevik Triumph, Communist Tragedy, 1917-1924, also from Haymarket.

PREVIOUS Episodes

Understanding Stalin with Hiroaki Kuromiya

The Past Is Uncertain with Alex Lichtenstein and Lars Lih

RELATED

Trotsky, Truth and Fiction by Paul Le Blanc

Interview with Paul Le Blanc (MR Online)

The Socialist Skinhead Soul of the Redskins

MUSIC

by The Redskins

"Lev Bronstein"

"Kick Over the Statues"

"Bring It Down"

"It Can Be Done"

"Let's Make It Work"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

In the conclusion of Hiroaki Kuromiya’s 1991 short biography of Stalin, he tells us what might be all we need to know of Stalin’s worldview: first, Stalin underlined the following passage in Trotsky’s 1920 Terrorism and Communism, “If human life in general is sacred and inviolable, we must deny ourselves not only the use of terror, not only war, but also revolution itself.” Stalin emphasized the importance of this passage with the exclamatory marginal comment, Right!; and second, as a kind of bookend, in 1952, near the end of his life, Stalin told his secret police chief, who he suspected was reluctant to use terror, “You want to keep your hands clean, do you? You can’t. Have you forgotten Lenin ordered Fanny Kaplan to be shot?...If you’re going to be squeamish, I’ll smash your face in.”

Stalin with his children, Vassily and Svetlana

Is Joseph Stalin more complicated than that? This is the man who with forced collectivization, dekulakization, famine, and the Great Terror, not to mention the millions of bodies thrown into the pit of World War II, was responsible for the deaths of untold tens of millions of the very people said to have won a new world by Revolution in 1917. Was he a "good Marxist," a Leninist, a moral monster, all of these? Hitler called him "half beast, half giant" and clearly saw a kind of reflection there. Kuromiya asserts that Stalin was a deeply singular personality with only one idea, political power at whatever cost.

GUEST

Hiroaki Kuromiya is a professor of History at Indiana University who has written several books on Stalin and his effect on Russia and the world. These include The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s; Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s-1990s; Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932; And the short biography titled, Stalin.

RELATED

The Past Is Uncertain: The Russian Revolution (Part One)

MUSIC by Dmitri Shostakovich

Excerpts from:

"Interlude III" from Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District

"The Limpid Stream Nocturne"

"Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 1"

"Symphony No. 4"

"Jazz Suite No. 2"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Studio Engineer: Bryce Martin

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

It’s October 24th 2017, nearly 100 years ago to the day in 1917*, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov became Chairman of the Council of People’s Commisars in Russia. Ulanov is better known to us as Lenin.

Michel Foucault said in 1977 that “It is the desirability of the revolution which causes a problem today.” Well, that today being 40 years ago, and Foucault’s today being 60 years on from the Russian Revolution...we might ask, is revolution still desirable in 2017...and what shall we wish to “turn over”?

Today begins a 3 part series looking at the Russian Revolution and, as is our wont in historical matters, we shorthand this by focusing on the three primary characters in this particular drama: Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin...all “pen-names”...or nom de politique.

We will note that the 1917 Revolution began as a popular workers uprising in February on Women’s Day and was in large part a spontaneous development instigated by women workers in factories. Which is to say, it had nothing specifically to do with Lenin or Trotsky (and certainly nothing to do with Stalin).

But for most of us History is necessarily a shorthand subject. Who has time to spend years unravelling the past? And anyway, depending on what thread you pull in the weave, what’s revealed always seems to change, sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically -- and always in relation to where you stand in time and space--that is to say, in your political moment.

If nothing else, the Russian Revolution reveals the uses of history for ideological purposes. For Russia’s Communism is the counterclaim to Capitalism in world historical narrative. In that way, the success or failure of a system comes pre-packaged. But as Paul Valery has been quoted: These are vulgar simplifications of things.

Today’s show is in two parts--we’ll open by looking at a particular historiography of the Russian Revolution via the American Historical Review; and then we’ll turn to Lenin, who is perhaps the founding father of Communism in Russia.

*Except, not actually...Russia used the Julian at the time, which was 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar used in Europe and the U.S. In February 1918 the Soviet government switched to the Gregorian system.

GUESTS

Part One: Alex Lichtenstein is a professor in the Department of History at Indiana University and editor of the American Historical Review. He's the author, with Rick Halpern, of Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid in South Africa (Indiana University Press 2016). His latest book was co-authored with his brother, Andrew, Marked, Unmarked, Remembered: A Geography of American Memory (Univ. of West Virginia Press 2017)

Part Two: Lars T. Lih is a scholar who lives in Montreal. His books include Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914–1921, Lenin Rediscovered: “What is to be Done?” in Context, and Lenin, a Critical Lives biography from Reaktion Books.

RELATED

Lenin and His Biographers (ISR) by Paul Le Blanc

Lars Lih online: Recent studies on Bolshevism, Lenin, and Kautsky

In the Back Issues: American Historical Review and the historiographical transformation of the October Revolution by Alex Lichtenstein

MUSIC

"The Internationale" performed by Billy Bragg

"Lenin (Requiem)" composed by Hanns Eisler (Libretto by Bertolt Brecht)

"Eisler On the Go" by Billy Bragg (lyrics by Woody Guthrie)

Credits

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Today, the curious case of Benjamin Lay: Englishman, Quaker, cobbler, sailor, cultural shock firebrand, cave dweller, autodidact, animal liberationist, and outspoken critic of the hypocrisy of slave-owning Quakers in 18th century Pennsylvania.

He would become known as one of the last radicals of the English revolution — an uprising in the mid 17th century against royal power, and an early blossoming of uncensored radical social thought out of which the radical Quaker movement was born.

Born decades after that revolution in 1681 in England, Lay had a relatively easy, quiet life available to him: a farm to inherit in his Quaker community in Essex.

But after a trip to Barbados, where he saw the horrors of slavery up close, Benjamin and his wife became quick converts to abolitionism. And Lay stated proselytizing in a radical way — transgressing everyday norms and often creating public scenes in what would now be described as street theater —tactics to shock Quaker slave owners into realizing the horror of the institution they bought into.

Lay firmly believed that money was the root of all evil--industrial slavery was only one example of this corrupting desire for wealth . He recognized, long before Marx & Engels, that the market disguises exploitation--the cube of sugar also contains the blood of the enslaved laborers who produce it.

Our music throughout comes out of Ned Rorem’s 1976 composition for organ, A Quaker Reader. I’ve chosen Rorem to accompany our show as much for his consistent contrarianism in music, in literature and life, as for what he calls his “birthright Quakerism.” Ned Rorem was born in 1923 in Richmond, Indiana.

The show begins with historian Marcus Rediker reading from the opening pages of his book, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist.

GUEST

Marcus Rediker is Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and Senior Research Fellow at the Collège d’études mondiales in Paris. His books have won numerous awards and been translated into fourteen languages. They include The Many-Headed Hydra (Beacon Press, 2000; with Peter Linebaugh), Villains of All Nations (Beacon Press, 2004), The Slave Ship (2007), The Amistad Rebellion (2012), and Outlaws of the Atlantic (Beacon Press, 2015).

RELATED

You’ll Never Be as Radical as This 18th-Century Quaker Dwarf by Marcus Rediker

Nine Radical Facts about Abolitionist Quaker Dwarf Benjamin Lay

A long-lost portrait of Benjamin Lay

‘Quaker Reader,’ Ned Rorem Organ Suite, Has Premiere (1977)

MUSIC

A Quaker Reader

Composed by Ned Rorem, performed by Leonard Raver

"Evidence of Things Not Seen"

"The World of Silence"

"Bewitching Attire of the Most Charming Simplicity"

“One Sigh Rightly Begotten”

"Ocean of Light"

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Assistant Producer: Rob Schoon

Studio Engineer: Bryce Martin

Executive Producer: Wes Martin