Tag Archives: genesis

Our guest today, Thalia Field, is an acclaimed experimental novelist, essayist and poet, modes of writing she often combines in one text. It’s also likely that historical figures, philosophers, or dog trainers, will walk onto the page to be the connective tissue between multiple distinct texts that span decades. In what follows, we’ll hear Field talk about one piece of …

Our opening song is “Brother Malcolm” by Archie Shepp, from his 1999 release Conversations. Archie Shepp, surely one of the great political philosophers of so-called Jazz, accompanies us throughout. While preparing for this conversation another Black man, Jacob Blake, was shot in the back by police, this time in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but it could have been, likely has been, in …

From Alexander the Great’s “pillow book” (The Iliad) to the Mayan Popul Vuh; from Gilgamesh to Harry Potter by way of Goethe and the notion of “world literature”–tonight we contemplate The Written World. World Literature is a concept first expressed by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1827: If we Germans do not look beyond the narrow circle of our own environment, …