I've heard folks wax nostalgic for the days when literary writers, especially novelists, were at the center of the public conversation. The people wanted know what these (nearly always male) writers thought about critical questions of the day. Whether it was Albert Camus on the death penalty, or James Baldwin debating William F. Buckley on the American Dream, or Mario Vargas Llosa running for president and writing of black markets: elegiacs mourn a time and culture where literary minds are at the center of politics and social debate, rather than in some sort of hazy dream-filled periphery.
But of course, today we have Junot Díaz.
The much-celebrated novelist and story writer speaks as honestly about race, immigration, inequality, and privilege as anyone I've ever heard. He sat at the table recently with Bill Moyers, who, via journalism, also manifests fierce curiosity about politics, poetics, and where the two conflate.
Their conversation on "Moyers & Company" deserves special attention. It moves in and out of fiction (why Díaz starts off his literature classes with H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, the color of bestseller lists, narrative structure, Moby-Dick) and nonfiction (why America doesn't talk about whiteness, empire, surprising revelations of power). The episode's titled "Rewriting the Story of America." A transcript is available.
You can join the conversation on January 3 at 1pm EST, when Díaz does a live chat on the show's site. "He will answer your questions about teaching, the art of writing fiction and his new book This Is How You Lose Her."
Related:
Haha, so in accord with this evening's thread of discussion about acquainting oneself with great works before engaging another person with ideas on smaller scales, I just remembered a few snippits of thought that were stirred and deferred by this post/its accompanying video.
I didn't make it very far in watching/listening to the show when you first posted this over the holiday season, but two notes:
"You need to cultivate the marti* mind..." - Diaz ~01:58
That's an iteration of aikido in concept. I'll even link to a post of mine that pulls a few descriptions of the idea into one place if you want to find more, but that's pretty much it. The only part now missing from the internet that makes aikido relevant and compelling is a brief essay about "do" as a process of losing the self, which I came to realize was discovering underlying/overarching humanity.
The Moyers quote I mentioned in the cafe:
“What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called ‘hocma’—the science of the heart. . . the capacity to see. . . to feel. . . and then to act. . . as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.”-Bill Moyers
I liked the quote a lot, but never actually read or saw anything else by Moyers until now!
Posted by: Ian | January 07, 2013 at 11:39 PM