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  • Survival and Global War: USA 2020
    Last week was a tense time for many, as Joe Biden has claimed victory in the presidential election, and for the first time in one hundred and fifty years, the sitting president has refused to concede. This has raised the prospect, however distant and indistinct, of civil war and called survival into question.

    It’s in this context that Interchange producer Bella Bravo spoke with Indiana University professor Edgar Illas, whose most recent book, The Survival Regime: Global War and the Political, was published by Routledge in 2019.

    Drawing on the work of Frederic Jameson, Illas re-approaches the supposed "postmodern condition" with a practical mindset, finding that on a global level, the cultural logics of the late 20th century have given way to the emerging predominance of the logic of war and survival. Black Lives Matter, in laying claim to the importance of survival in the face of the naked reality of ongoing racist police murders, exemplifies this transition domestically, while the predominance of aerial bombing in contemporary conflict is an important reference internationally.

    What does it mean to survive today under global capitalism and global war? In The Survival Regime Illas takes up that challenge by examining how living bodies and institutions struggle for existence while at the same time producing forms of life able to withstand the drift of state of protection. Illas defines survival as the central question of our time, a necessary step to becoming active and militant.

    The impossibility of smoothly mediating contemporary conflicts has now returned to the arena of US politics. Illas's reflections on the contours of war and survival today are key to understanding this moment and the fundamental problems we will continue to face in the 21st century.

    Illas will also be speaking at this weekend's online conference on the Undercommons and Destituent Power, hosted by IU as part of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Symposium. Registration for the conference and more information can be found at Destituent Commons. Illas is on Panel #3 - Hostility Inside and Around the Fort: Fugitive Approaches to COVID-era Conflict (Zoom link) on November 15, 2020, 1pm-4pm EST.

    GUEST
    Edgar Illas is an associate professor of Catalan Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has published Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City (2012) and various articles on Marxism, politics, and architecture.

    RELATED
    Survival, or, the War Logic of Global Capitalism by Edgar Illas
    The Global Ontology of Separation by Edgar Illas
    Is Catalan Separatism a Progressive Cause? by Edgar Illas
    Catalan separatists use coronavirus crisis to argue for independence

    MUSIC
    All of our music for this episode features Rashied Ali who was an American free jazz and avant-garde drummer born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
    "Swift Are the Winds of Life" (Swift Are the Winds of Life)
    "Face of Forgotten Thought (Moon Flight)
    "No One in Particular" (No One in Particular)
    59 min
  • Interchange – The Negative Example of Clint Eastwood (Repeat of “Mixed Nuts”)


    It’s Election Day, Tuesday, November 3, 2020, and you’re listening to Interchange on WFHB.

    Okay, so, this is a repeat airing of a program that appeared BTD or Before The Donald, in what seems decades ago, August of 2015. Tonight, while we chew our nails and continually refresh our favorite likely partisan election results site on our phones, we can still be entertained, right? To help with this, we offer Mixed Nuts: Clint Eastwood’s Life in the Movies. Now, if you’re a regular listener of Interchange over the past seven years you might guess that the decision to play this show tonight has meaning - as Melville would say of the whale, this is the key to it all...well, I wouldn’t go that far. But to me, Clint Eastwood typifies something we need to be rid of as an example of masculinity. I would only suggest you watch an Eastwood movie if you want to learn the worldview that has brought the very planet to the brink of collapse and catastrophe - this is "the American way" - the materialization of the small-minded assertions of individualism and manifest destiny for only one type of human...the monoculture man with a gun. This American, Clint Eastwood, has been giving us life (or rather death) lessons for half a century.

    That may be heavy-handed, but really, we all know there’s a better way.

    In a 2002 interview, today's guest, Patrick McGilligan said of Clint Eastwood, “I think he’s a lazy actor and a lazy director. He’s a great image. This book is about how the image and the reality complement each other. There’s a false morality about Clint, the false morality of his life, which becomes the false morality of his films. It’s a disgusting reality, it’s all right to get revenge and kill people in nasty ways. It’s OK to triumph in comic book fashion over people as long as they’re evil. The message of his films in human and moral terms is that Clint wins, Clint survives, and good triumphs over evil because he’s always defined as good despite how many people he shoots…”

    For “Mixed Nuts” we talk with McGilligan about Clint Eastwood’s life and look specifically at a few representative films: Dirty Harry, Unforgiven, and American Sniper.

    Our opening songs, plural, are "Gran Torino" and "Tumbling Tumbleweeds," both performed by Clint Eastwood, about 50 years apart.

    Photo by William b. Winburn

    GUEST
    Film historian and writer, Patrick McGillian. His unauthorized biography of Clint Eastwood, Clint: The Life and Legend, first published in 1999, was re-issued and updated by O/R [or] Books and released in 2015. His biography on Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light was a finalist for the Edgar Award. in addition to Hitchcock and Eastwood, he has written biographies on Robert Altman, James Cagney, George Cukor, Fritz Lang, Oscar Micheaux, Jack Nicholson, and Nicholas Ray. He is also an editor of Backstory, which features interviews of Hollywood screenwriters and is published by the University of California Press.

    RELATED
    Eastwood settles over wife-beating allegations
    The Man With No Name BBC 1977 Documentary
    At Home with Clint Eastwood (1970)

    MUSIC
    Intro: “Gran Torino” (theme) mixed with “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” performed by Clint Eastwood
    First Break: “Don’t Fence Me In,” performed by Clint Eastwood
    Second Break: “Barroom Buddies,” performed by Merle Haggard and Clint Eastwood
    Outro: “No Sweater Cheater Than You,” performed by Clint Eastwood

    CREDITS
    Producer & Host: Doug Storm
    59 min
  • Interchange – On Just Being with Scott Russell Sanders (Fund Drive)
    Last week I spent a few days with Bloomington’s Scott Russell Sanders, a well-known writer of novels, short stories, children's books, and essays. His work is generally described as “nature writing” though as we’ll hear, Sanders does not accept this, insisting he’s an “earth” writer.

    To clarify, I didn’t actually spend time with Sanders - though he and I do live about a block apart - with new COVID cases steadily reaching about 30 per day for the last month, we connected for our discussion via Zoom. Perhaps we should have used some twine and two soup cans.

    But I did spend some quality time with Scott Sanders - I read his new book of essays, The Way of Imagination, out earlier this year from Counterpoint. Sanders, at least in this book, offers enough of himself, of his life - from youth to the present - including intimate details about his family’s well-being - to make even essays that are primarily didactic feel personal.

    So what are these essays about? Sanders treats three primary themes: first, the role of imagination in art, science, social reform, and compassion (unsurprising given the book’s title); the second is neighborliness, kinship, and community; and finally the personal and the public - (it’s not just neoliberal capitalists that blend these modes!).

    As I made my way through the book it surprised me that I had never spoken with Scott Sanders on Interchange before: so many of his subjects and even references are shared in past programs. There’s an essay on Thoreau (and, listener, you know we’ve done a few shows on Thoreau’s life and writing); there’s an essay that discusses the thinking of John Woolman, an 18th century Quaker born in New Jersey who was anti-slavery, anti-war, and vegetarian, and this is ground tread in our program on Benjamin Lay, another Quaker with the same fiery stance against the status quo of the times and the so-called New World; there’s a strong pacifist tone throughout - noted particularly in the essay on the Trappist Monk Thomas Merton who lived most of his writing life in Kentucky; we can pair this with our program on anti-war and labor activist, the clergyman A. J. Muste. And I could go on...but I don’t think he mentions Melville! Nobody’s perfect.

    The centerpiece in today’s program is our talk about the essay “The Suffering of Strangers” which details a visit Sanders took to Charleston, South Carolina touring two former slave plantations - one still in the hands of the family that enslaved Black men and women and one run by a non-profit trust supported by donations. The differences of “presentation” are striking and instructive of so much that troubles this country. It’s a seven-page essay that I think admits more than its author might want to about necessary trouble (to quote John Lewis). That essay opens with an epigraph from Thomas Paine that we should all commit to memory: “It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow.” That distance is killing us.

    GUEST
    Scott Russell Sanders (The Way of Imagination, Counterpoint Press)
    Among his more than twenty books are novels, collections of stories, and works of personal nonfiction, including Staying Put, Writing from the Center, Hunting for Hope, and A Private History of Awe.He spent his teaching career at Indiana University, where he was a Distinguished Professor of English. His writing examines the human place in nature, the pursuit of social justice, the relation between culture and geography, and the search for a spiritual path.

    RELATED
    "From Plantation to Planet" by Scott Russell Sanders ("The Suffering of Strangers")
    1 hr
  • Interchange – Concentrating Caliban: A Fund Drive Anthology
    ‘Scene from The American Tempest,’ Punch, January 24, 1863.

    The deeply racist Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Faulkner once wrote in his 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun, that the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past. In that same book Faulkner has the “nun,” which carries the meaning of prostitute in Shakespeare’s time, a Black drug addict named Nancy, offer that salvation comes from suffering. And though this is God’s will it’s also something of an unseen consequence of his role as Master over so many souls, like a man who’s got too many mules penned in his pasture.
    All of a sudden one morning, he looks around and sees more mules than he can count at one time even, let alone find work for...when Monday morning comes, he can walk in there and hem some of them up and even catch them if he’s careful about not never turning his back on the ones he ain’t hemmed up. And that, once the gear is on them, they will do his work and do it good, only he’s still got to be careful about getting too close to them, or forgetting that another one of them is behind him, even when he is feeding them. Even when it’s Saturday noon again, and he is turning them back into the pasture, where even a mule can know it’s got until Monday morning anyway to run free in mule sin and mule pleasure. - Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner
    Anyway, today we’ll share selections from past shows in order to offer perspectives on this “concentration” of mules, or if I may allegorize the allegory, a concentration of Calibans - those humans apparently not made in the image of some deity, but rather made to be used by those who do shine forth the rays of divine white conquest.

    We begin with Daniel Nemser on the Infrastructures of Race interviewed by Cole Nelson. Nemser’s work focuses on how the Spanish organized colonial Mexico in the 17th century and how oddly familiar all of that still is today particularly in the large cities of the US - he calls these forms of concentration.

    We mainly stay in the 17th century for the next segment which selects from Prospero’s Roaring War - and again we allegorize - here is a play that shows a world in transition from feudalism to capitalism, from alchemy to chemistry, where power and conquest shift modes but the order of beings remains the same and Caliban knows the score. Helen Scott is our guide here.

    And finally, we leap into the 20th century and hear racist condescension as Malcolm X explains the meaning of X from our show on Black-Mindedness with author Michael Sawyer.

    Honestly, where has 300 years gotten us? There are still concentrations of penned up people in ghettos across the nation.

    ***

    This is our Fall Fund Drive where we ask you for money to support your community radio station - it’s the only way we are able to operate - most of that operating budget comes from listeners like you. Thank you.

    Today, Interchange shared segments from three episodes that aired throughout the year - they all three touched on aspects of our current moment without needing to really speak about this moment right now. We can look at the distant past, or look at the near past, and we continue to find clues to our problems...and too often these are glaringly obvious and still unheeded.
    59 min
  • Interchange – Five Days in Spain: Muriel Rukeyser and the Revolutionary Muse
    In 1936, twenty-two-year-old Muriel Rukeyser, who had just won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book Theory of Flight, was suddenly (almost accidentally) in Spain as a journalist to cover the Olimpiada Popular, or People’s Olympiad, a protest event against the 1936 Berlin Olympics presided over by Hitler and the Nazi Party. Intended to take place in Barcelona, the capital of the autonomous region of Catalonia, the People’s Olympiad was never held due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

    Rukeyser was only in Spain from July 19th through the 24th but it was an experience that would inform her thinking and writing for the rest of her life. And though she wrote about it often and in several forms and genres, that experience is most fully related in her “lost novel” Savage Coast, and it can be seen as a key to so much of her subsequent work.

    Today's guest, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, describes Savage Coast as a young woman’s political and sexual awakening imbued with the anarchist spirit of the moment; it’s messy, strange, and psychological. Rukeyser begins living and writing in ways that will expose the authoritarian nature of gendered oppression while asserting that sexual liberation is radical and anarchistic. In every way, Muriel Rukeyser and her art came to embody antifascism.

    Our opening song is "El pendón morado" performed here by Coro Popular Jabalón and recorded in 1977. An old war-song of those fighting to restore the Spanish Constitution of 1812 which had been abolished by Ferdinand VII, it was a popular song of Republican Spain during the civil war that began in 1936, a so-called “dress rehearsal” to World War II.

    Muriel Rukeyser tells us “this was the song of the purpler banner, the soldier’s guide, the good citizen, which became the symbol of Spanish Liberation. In its chorus the word ‘servilon’ is the term of contempt for the reactionaries -- a historic term like our ‘lobsterback’ during the American Revolution,” the derogatory term for Redcoat.

    We begin, perhaps surprisingly (perhaps not), with Orson Welles, and be sure we will find our way to Herman Melville in the end as well.

    GUEST
    Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, a Lecturer in Gender and Women's Writing of the 20th and 21st Centuries at the University of Bristol and editor of the 2013 edition of Muriel Rukeyser’s Savage Coast. She’s completing a manuscript titled My Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser between Archive and Authorship that is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.

    RELATED
    Recovering Muriel Rukeyser’s Savage Coast by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
    The Spirit of Revolt: Women Writers, Archives and the Cold War by Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
    Out of a Brick Throat: How Poets and Poetry Matter (Interchange on Left Poetry with Sarah Ehlers)
    Ears to Hear: Orson Welles in Brazil (Interchange with Catherine Benamou)
    Just a Spoonful of America: Prescribing American Studies to Fight Fascism (Interchange with George Blaustein)
    The Unknown Knowns of Cultural Diplomacy (Int...
    59 min
  • Interchange – The Communists Made Us Do It: The Cold War Cover for Mass Murder
    In April, 1955, representatives from twenty-nine governments of Asian and African nations gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to discuss peace and the role of the Third World in the Cold War, economic development, and decolonization. The twenty-nine countries that participated represented a total population of 1.5 billion people, 54% of the world's population. The conference was organized by Indonesia, Burma (now Myanmar), Pakistan, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and India.

    On April 17, 1955 President Sukarno of Indonesia opened the historic Bandung Conference in this way:
    This is the first intercontinental conference of colored peoples, so called colored peoples, in the history of mankind. I am proud that my country is your host. It is a new departure in the history of the world that leaders of Asian and African peoples can meet together in their own countries to discuss and deliberate on matters of common concern. In spite of diversity that exists among its participants, let this conference be a great success. Yes, there is diversity among us. Who denies it? Small and great nations are represented here with people professing nearly every religion under the sun...almost every political faith we encounter here...and practically every economic doctrine has its representative in this hall...But again, what harm is in diversity, when there is unity in desire. This conference is not to oppose each other; it is a conference of brotherhood.
    What harm can come from a desire for self-rule and an end to neocolonialism? In response to this expression of unity, millions of people were murdered, continue to be murdered, by the forces of reaction, encouraged and supported by the reactionary and racist government, military, and corporate leadership of the United States. What harm indeed.

    Sukarno and Fidel Castro, 1960.

    If your country espoused the principles of the Bandung Conference, and your citizens were so-called “colored peoples,” you would not be tolerated.

    This is the anticommunist playbook that our guest Vincent Bevins calls "The Jakarta Method" as its great success (the nearly overnight erasure of the largest unarmed socialist party in the world) prompted replication in several other countries in South and Latin America.

    The result of the 1955 Asian-African Conference was known as the Ten Principles of Bandung, a political statement containing the basic principles in the efforts to promote peace and cooperation in the world.

    Or, to the USA, reasons for extermination.

    1. Respect for fundamental human rights and for the purposes and the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.
    2. Respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations.
    3. Recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations large and small.
    4. Abstention from intervention or interference in the internal affairs of another country.
    5. Respect for the right of each nation to defend itself singly or collectively, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
    6. Abstention from the use of arrangements of collective defense to serve the particular interests of any of the big powers, abstention by any country from exerting pressures on other countries.
    7. Refraining from acts or threats of aggression or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country.
    8. Settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means, such as negotiation, conciliation, arbitration or judicial settlement as well as other peaceful means of the parties' own choice, in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations.
    9. Promotion of mutual interests and cooperation.
    10. Respect for justice and international obligation.

    GUEST
    Vincent Bevins has been a journalist for thirteen years and is the author of The Jakart...
    59 min
  • Interchange – Draining the Heartland: Authoritarian Populism in Rural America
    The 1980’s farm crisis defined an entire generation of farmers and the rural communities that surrounded and relied on them. Interest rates soared. Farm land value dropped. A decade of record-breaking production in farm commodities led to a glut, a surplus, that depressed prices. Exports declined as the U.S. imposed an embargo on the Soviet Union. Farmers went bankrupt, foreclosed on their farms, or sold them. They rarely made their money back on the land.
    We know now that the farm crisis of the 1980’s can be traced at least as far back as the rising land values of the 1940s. The crisis, however, continues today. Since 2008, farmland across the world, and especially in the Midwest, has seen greater investment by financial actors such as hedge and pension funds, insurance agencies, and other private equity investors. This has led to a process of land consolidation that has increased the size of farms and shuttered family farms throughout the country.
    Rather than bring investment to rural institutions, the neoliberal policies of the 1970s and 1980s combined with the financial crises of the 21st century to create a hostile climate for life in rural America, what our guest today calls “sacrifice zones.” In response, many people have opted to flee rural communities for the suburbs. In doing so, they leave behind them sometimes desolate small towns. Hospitals, post offices, mom-and-pop shops, even schools have closed their doors as rural communities have been hollowed out, abandoned to the forces of the financial sector. Despite the fact that many people who support today’s slide into authoritarian populism are wealthy suburban residents, a non-trivial portion are members of rural communities that have been the subject of multiple crises, from the loss of farmland and the shuttering of family farms to the opioid crisis.
    Today, Bradi Heaberlin speaks with Marc Edelman, an Anthropology professor and affiliate of the Graduate Center at Hunter College in New York City. Though Marc Edelman’s work on land tenure, social movements, and agrarian issues spans continents, we focus today on Edelman’s work on the hollowing out of rural America and the rise of authoritarian populism. Edelman argues that the ways in which rural communities have been abandoned by capital have been a cornerstone in the rise of authoritarian populism and racial resentment.
    Authoritarian populism, Edelman argues, cannot be defeated until and unless we address the ways that rural America has been abandoned.
    GUEST
    Marc Edelman teaches anthropology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is working on a project on the history of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), which the General Assembly adopted in 2018 after a seventeen-year campaign by transnational agrarian movements and human rights organizations. He was part of the convening group of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative, an international research and action collaborative on authoritarian populism and the rural world.
    RELATED
    How Capitalism Underdeveloped Rural America by Marc Edelman
    Chris Hedges on Capitalism’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’
    Mobile home parks move from mom-and-pop to corporate
    The Rise of the Citizen Protector (Interchange)
    59 min
  • Interchange – Draining the Heartland: Authoritarian Populism in Rural America
    The North Lamar Community Mobile Home Park in Austin. Photo by Jen Reel.

    The 1980’s farm crisis defined an entire generation of farmers and the rural communities that surrounded and relied on them. Interest rates soared. Farm land value dropped. A decade of record-breaking production in farm commodities led to a glut, a surplus, that depressed prices. Exports declined as the U.S. imposed an embargo on the Soviet Union. Farmers went bankrupt, foreclosed on their farms, or sold them. They rarely made their money back on the land.

    We know now that the farm crisis of the 1980’s can be traced at least as far back as the rising land values of the 1940s. The crisis, however, continues today. Since 2008, farmland across the world, and especially in the Midwest, has seen greater investment by financial actors such as hedge and pension funds, insurance agencies, and other private equity investors. This has led to a process of land consolidation that has increased the size of farms and shuttered family farms throughout the country.

    Photo by Benjamin Herrold

    Rather than bring investment to rural institutions, the neoliberal policies of the 1970s and 1980s combined with the financial crises of the 21st century to create a hostile climate for life in rural America, what our guest today calls “sacrifice zones.” In response, many people have opted to flee rural communities for the suburbs. In doing so, they leave behind them sometimes desolate small towns. Hospitals, post offices, mom-and-pop shops, even schools have closed their doors as rural communities have been hollowed out, abandoned to the forces of the financial sector. Despite the fact that many people who support today’s slide into authoritarian populism are wealthy suburban residents, a non-trivial portion are members of rural communities that have been the subject of multiple crises, from the loss of farmland and the shuttering of family farms to the opioid crisis.

    Today, Bradi Heaberlin speaks with Marc Edelman, an Anthropology professor and affiliate of the Graduate Center at Hunter College in New York City. Though Marc Edelman’s work on land tenure, social movements, and agrarian issues spans continents, we focus today on Edelman’s work on the hollowing out of rural America and the rise of authoritarian populism. Edelman argues that the ways in which rural communities have been abandoned by capital have been a cornerstone in the rise of authoritarian populism and racial resentment.

    Authoritarian populism, Edelman argues, cannot be defeated until and unless we address the ways that rural America has been abandoned.

    GUEST
    Marc Edelman teaches anthropology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is working on a project on the history of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP), which the General Assembly adopted in 2018 after a seventeen-year campaign by transnational agrarian movements and human rights organizations. He was part of the convening group of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative, an international research and action collaborative on authoritarian populism and the rural world.

    RELATED
    How Capitalism Underdeveloped Rural America by Marc Edelman
    Chris Hedges on Capitalism’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’
    Mobile home parks move from mom-and-pop to corporate
    59 min
  • Interchange – To Front the Essential Facts: A Plea for Henry David Thoreau
    (Original air date: July 30, 2019)
    Forget the haters – they have not read deliberately nor with imagination, only as partisans.
    You could do much worse than spend many hours reading and studying just two of Thoreau’s great essays, “Civil Disobedience” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” The first, influential for a non-violent response to tyranny, the second, recognizing the necessity of violence in response to the quotidian and incessant violence of institutions in capitalist America.
    Laura Dassow Walls will tell us about how a man, in seeking the best way to be fully alive, gave his life to his neighbors, and the world. In her biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Walls shows us a man deeply engaged with friends, relatives and neighbors, a man thoroughly of his time and place, but in a way that still finds him out ahead of us. In every way we need Henry Thoreau’s work to ring in our ears. We need to front life deliberately and not come to the end of our days knowing that we have not lived.
    GUEST
    Laura Dassow Walls is William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America and Henry David Thoreau: A Life, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
    RELATED
    The Radical Democracy of Henry David Thoreau: A Conversation with Branka Arsic’ (Interchange)
    How Thoreau’s 19th-Century Observations Are Helping Shape Science Today
    Thoreau at 200 (book review) by Randall Fuller
    Laura Dassow Walls: “We have misread Thoreau, tragically”
    The Succession of Forest Trees by Thoreau

    MUSIC
    “Pithecanthropus Erectus” by Charles Mingus
    CREDITS
    Producer & Host: Doug Storm
    Executive Producer: Kade Young
    59 min
  • Interchange – To Front the Essential Facts: A Plea for Henry David Thoreau
    (Original air date: July 30, 2019)

    Forget the haters - they have not read deliberately nor with imagination, only as partisans.

    You could do much worse than spend many hours reading and studying just two of Thoreau’s great essays, “Civil Disobedience” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” The first, influential for a non-violent response to tyranny, the second, recognizing the necessity of violence in response to the quotidian and incessant violence of institutions in capitalist America.

    Laura Dassow Walls will tell us about how a man, in seeking the best way to be fully alive, gave his life to his neighbors, and the world. In her biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Walls shows us a man deeply engaged with friends, relatives and neighbors, a man thoroughly of his time and place, but in a way that still finds him out ahead of us. In every way we need Henry Thoreau’s work to ring in our ears. We need to front life deliberately and not come to the end of our days knowing that we have not lived.

    GUEST
    Laura Dassow Walls is William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America and Henry David Thoreau: A Life, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

    RELATED
    The Radical Democracy of Henry David Thoreau: A Conversation with Branka Arsic’ (Interchange)
    How Thoreau’s 19th-Century Observations Are Helping Shape Science Today
    Thoreau at 200 (book review) by Randall Fuller
    Laura Dassow Walls: “We have misread Thoreau, tragically”
    The Succession of Forest Trees by Thoreau



    MUSIC
    "Pithecanthropus Erectus" by Charles Mingus

    CREDITS
    Producer & Host: Doug Storm
    Executive Producer: Kade Young
    59 min

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