LA Review of Books

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher speak with musician, author, artist and all-around legend Patti Smith about her latest work, The Melting, an extended piece of prose she began releasing last spring in serial form via the Internet platform Substack. The Melting, started in the early days of the pandemic, finds Smith alone in her apartment, her world tour having just been canceled. As she yearns for the freedom of travel while stuck at home, her living space begins to yield to other spaces: dreams, literature, memory, reflection, and fictions. The melting of the title refers not just to global warming, but to time itself. Also, NoViolet Bulawayo, author of Glory, returns to recommend Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah’s The Sex Lives of African Women.

NoViolet Bulawayo joins Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher to talk about her latest novel, Glory, which explores the waning days and political ouster of Robert Mugabe, the authoritarian leader who controlled NoViolet’s home country of Zimbabwe for nearly four decades before he was overthrown in a coup spearheaded by his Vice President, Emmerson Mnangagwa. Allegorized as animals — in the style of George Orwell’s Animal Farm — the major players in Mugabe’s ouster and a chorus of citizens tell the story of utopian promise that becomes totalitarian terror, of ruthless political subterfuge and everyday survival, of a country torn between the righting of old wrongs and the almost cyclical production of new ones. At once an allegory of Zimbabwe’s history and a deeply poignant reading of the fractious moment we are all living through, Glory looks at how leaders command and forfeit power, as well as at the lives of ordinary people caught in the roiling waters of politics. Also, Danielle Lindemann, author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, returns to recommend Lorrie Moore’s short story collection Self-Help.

This week it’s a LARB Radio doubleheader. In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf talks with John Markoff about his latest book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. Brand is probably best known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural magazine he published regularly between 1968 and 1972, and then infrequently up until 1998. With influences ranging from the Beat poets whom Brand met as a youth in San Francisco to his experimentation with LSD, the wisdom of indigenous cultures, and the philosophy of Buckminster Fuller, Whole Earth Catalog featured articles on sustainable living, ecology, and emerging technologies. As Markoff shows in his book, Brand — who’s worked as a photographer, writer, political advisor, and environmental activist, among other things — is not an easy person to pin down. His sympathies have ranged from libertarianism to eco-pragmatism, which stresses “useful technologies,” including nuclear power. Brand is now 83 and Markoff’s book is based on many years of interviews with him. In the second half of the show, Kate is joined by artist Ulysses Jenkins on the occasion of his first, long overdue retrospective, Without Your Interpretation, which runs until May 15th at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Jenkins’s career spans five decades and he’s known especially for his pioneering video and performance art pieces, which often explore questions of race, multiculturalism, ritual, representation, and technology. Born in Los Angeles in 1946, Jenkins has been integral to the artistic evolution of the city, collaborating and forming collectives with many other important artists, including Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, David Hammons, Nancy Buchanan, Harry Gamboa Jr., May Sun, and Kitt Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

Danielle Lindemann joins Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher to talk about her latest book, True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us. Drawing on the ideas of major thinkers in modern sociology, including Emile Durkheim, Michel Foucault, and others, the book explores how reality TV both reflects and reproduces real-world social tensions, inequities, and slippages around class, race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of being. Rather than merely trash TV — or perhaps in addition to being trash TV — Lindemann argues that our favorite shows are lenses through which we can better understand our world, our social lives, and the powerful forces that shape them and us. Also, Jonathan Alexander drops by to recommend Mia McKenzie’s Skye Falling.

Adam Phillips joins Kate Wolf to discuss his two latest books, both published this year, On Wanting to Change and On Getting Better. The series looks at the very human impulse toward transformation, from religious and political conversion, and the conversion to family life from which one must ultimately emerge, to the aims and practices of psychoanalysis, along with more quotidian ideas of self-betterment. As always in his work, Phillips attends in these books to the aspects of ourselves that can be hardest to bear, and that can lead us to desire more rigid structures — intellectual or otherwise — or desire to be someone else, while also quietly petitioning for a more complex and thoughtful mode of change in which, as Socrates encouraged his pupils, we learn only to be ourselves. How might we get better, Phillips wonders, at talking about what it is to get better? Also, Pankaj Mishra, author of Run and Hide, returns to recommend Josep Pla’s The Grey Notebook.

Pankaj Mishra joins Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman to talk about his new novel, Run and Hide, which takes up many of the themes explored in his political nonfiction. The book explores the lives of the literary translator Arun — our narrator — two of his friends from college, and Alia, a woman with whom he has an impactful romance, as they all grapple with the moral and emotional scars of economic globalization. Their story, as Run and Hide frequently points out, is also the story of modern India, a country in which rapid changes to centuries-old inequities bear both great boons and great costs. Also, Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Checkout 19, returns to recommend Celia Paul's Letters to Gwen John.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by Claire-Louise Bennett, whose new novel is Checkout 19. It follows an unnamed young woman born into a working-class family, who is slowly discovering her own sense of self through the many books she reads and the stories she writes. Her relationship to her own experiences is partly filtered through the words of other writers, as she eventually attends college, finds work as a checkout clerk, in a grocery store, and dates a few inadequate, jealous men with literary ambitions of their own. The book seamlessly moves between literary analysis, fantastical storytelling, and life itself, eventually confronting the realities of sex, violence, and death. Also, Isaac Butler, author of The Method, returns to recommend Amanda Vaill’s Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins.

Writer Isaac Butler joins co-hosts Kate Wolf and Eric Newman to speak about his new book, The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act which was published this month by Bloomsbury. The Method traces the dissemination of a style and way of thinking about acting that’s so prevalent, it’s hard to imagine the performing arts without it today. Originally envisioned by the great actor and textile heir Konstantin Stanislavski, in Moscow, in the late 1800s, the Method, originally known as the System, stressed the importance of emotional realism, research, a character’s motivation, and the actor's organic experience. Stanislavski believed actors were meant to be truth tellers and to this end, he developed empathic and imaginative exercises to enhance the authenticity of their performances such as “affective memory” and the “Magic If.” When the Moscow Arts Theater, which Stanislavski co-created, toured its productions in Europe and the US in the early 1920s, it inspired a whole new generation of actors and teachers, including Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, who would go on to teach the Method to much the acclaim and controversy in the United States. Also, Lewis R. Gordon, author of Fear of Black Consciousness, returns to recommend three books: Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde; Living While Black: The Essential Guide to Overcoming Racial Trauma by Guilaine Kinouani; and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

Lewis R. Gordon, head of the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut, joins Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher to talk about his latest book, Fear of Black Consciousness. The book explores contemporary racism and the long historical movement from black consciousness with a lower-case “b” to capital “B” Black consciousness, an active and more liberatory mentality that sees through the lies of white supremacy and works to build a better and more democratic society. Gordon examines these weighty topics through sustained readings of popular film and culture, including Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther. Also, Sheila Heti, author of Pure Colour, returns to recommend Elif Batuman’s Either/Or.

Sheila Heti joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her latest novel, Pure Colour. A mythical and tender telling of the life of a woman named Mira, Pure Colour imagines our present day as taking place in the first stages of God’s creation. The world as we know it is but God’s first draft, and the complaints of human beings about its difficulties are being logged by him as input for his second. In this first draft world, people come in three categories: birds, fish, and bears. Mira is a bird — she relates to the world aesthetically and studies writing and criticism — while the woman that beguiles her, Annie, is a fish — a pragmatist who believes in justice for all of humanity. Mira’s father, meanwhile, is a bear, devoted most to the people he loves. When he dies early in the novel, questions of how to reconcile these different positions, how and at what distance to love someone, and how much to let go of that love, take the fore, as do other deeply philosophical inquiries about time, the future, art, and the universe as we know it. Also, Francesco Pacifico, author of The Women I Love, drops by to give a glowing recommendation for Gertrude Stein’s classic The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.