Cultural Mixtapes

A Love Letter to Excess with Writer Becca Rothfeld

There are very few critics that are able to effortlessly move between writing about novels, movies, TV shows, non-fiction, politics, culture, life, ethics and more. But today’s political climate and attention economy that seems to demand more and more from those who aim to catalogue the winds that drive our culture, requires just that: an ability to place different forms of media, fictional and not, in conversation with each other, to develop cohesive criticism of the present moment. Becca Rothfeld is one of those critics. As the non-fiction book critic at the Washington Post, she has taken on everything from works of philosophy to political memoirs to postmodern novels to as recently as last week, The West Wing.  Becca’s criticism brings a steady hand to analyzing often chaotic and multifarious narratives, and is grounded in her Philosophy background. Reading her, it’s immediately obvious that no piece of culture is off limits, and she’s willing to mine even the most banal texts to find some sort of value -- and that value for her comes in the form of a deeply nuanced critique of how we live. Becca’s 2024 essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, published by Macmillan, is a celebration of excess. Her subjects range from Marie Kondo, to Sally Rooney, to David Cronenberg, to love. Through this diverse cast of characters, her thesis is clear, and as you’ll soon hear in the interview, the collection somehow brings together disparate ideas to create a sort of manifesto of liberal artmaking that often encourages you to introspect about not only your cultural consumption but also your habits, ethics, and politics… the hallmark of an effective essay collection.  Becca and I sat down to primarily talk about and read from her book, and we touch on several of my favorite essays from the collection, as well as her writing on other platforms. We also speak about one of our shared obsessions, the novelist Norman Rush, as well as the writer whom everyone seems to have read these days, Sally Rooney. But there comes a point towards the end of the conversation where we turn to the present moment; and like all of my favorite episodes of cultural mixtapes, Becca starts to essentially perform criticism on the present moment, dissecting the ways in which political movements in the United States are influencing artmaking in various genres; and our conversation, albeit slightly dated, elucidated some prescient truths that are becoming more and more obvious as we continue to explore what this unique political and cultural moment has in store. https://www.beccarothfeld.com/

Poetic Evolution & Media Technologies with Writer Ryan Ruby

Throughout conversations on Cultural Mixtapes, Ryan’s work came up several times as I examined the zeitgeist of creative and cultural production with several writers. I first came across his work as he started publishing this hybrid piece of poetry, history, and literary historiography in sections, in various literary magazines around the world, and I’d hunt them down whenever they’d drop from the various corners of the internet. I was intrigued, and baffled at the fact that he was able to create robust arguments about the trends of poetic production, within a structure of blank verse iambic pentameter.  Ryan is a very prolific literary critic who has published pieces on fiction, poetry, non fiction, and other genres of art in storied magazines around the world. He is also the author of the novel The Zero and the One, and the forthcoming book of essays Ringbahn, a psychogeographic exploration of his adopted home-city, Berlin. We touch on his other work, but this conversation centered upon his latest work, Context Collapse.  The book’s argument teases out ideas that are commonly not regarded in the study of literature: He places poetic works in conversation with media theory to elucidate how the environments of capitalism, and technological evolution influenced the works, and in several instances, helped bring them into existence.  It’s funny, the line of poetry that is always running through my mind is from W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” The various meanings and wit behind that line have been interrogated in english classes around the world, so I’m not going to do that here; but in a time when poetry and literature seem to be the last thing in everyone’s minds, I wanted to give it some time; and what came of this conversation were some pleasantly surprising arguments that reaffirm what literature can do; and cements its place an art form of the now, and constantly articulating the core ideas and sentiments of the present.  https://www.ryanruby.info/ https://www.sevenstories.com/books/4657-context-collapse?srsltid=AfmBOoqMFcAJPafhWG0atg8AMOyfCFw5-a-RrxO7TBl7SCfKZbqBGZe8 Gary Indiana [https://www.semiotexte.com/852] Recommendations https://www.amazon.com/Utopias-Debris-Selected-Gary-Indiana/dp/046500248X The Political Unconscious - Frederic Jameson [https://www.amazon.com/Political-Unconscious-Narrative-Socially-Symbolic/dp/080149222X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1EBBX3ZHEZTH3&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.XGTdrvro4lTUbM6-2dXEyuJ_WCziAatS7pNONaId4aN74gBw1ZLaOqxTDigny0q3xZC88NUvUz7SlFWteFhsQ3gBoAD--c6nSQf-bXqsul_w60iUxUm-L0t-txalVSKT0MC2XwMjlIO_jBbfd8igh06zKxB7oTfSp7P6CqUpOv2T9_9qG_vdHg9Vbny9qceo.4EPqeWwtfeBgqSgOMT1vWHvG3R_xWzITiteOw4Yvr5Y&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+political+unconscious+jameson&qid=1749423392&sprefix=the+political+unconscious%2Caps%2C99&sr=8-1] The Dunciad - Alexander Pope [https://www.amazon.com/Dunciad-Four-Books-Valerie-Rumbold/dp/1408204169/ref=sr_1_1?crid=W6OC0QVFTH4G&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.b3wZMOr5wti-nK22X7RoIbfiYr1_TlM-MtS_I1goRHz5uDS61bNeEl7PaD984pDEgz_CyYy7Hmj2yhZoG32-KM6goafFa0bva_Lu4nBNzs4srIVY6kA81Jou5NXFuwpqsJHKEbZ0GmqEQsBkTpz07o13W2OCuJH8DO0NwBiCny31Bf3FOseKq_4dfUEyoCm6wXCitWY-cOlP0QPAzIKIYqVu1fmq13s8qiyEeJ8g5j8.mGV1RPaCRByL7pCIxQpEK06Hhsnl1mHt3QDpiSTyiJc&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+dunciad&qid=1749423473&sprefix=the+dunciad%2Caps%2C115&sr=8-1] https://www.amazon.com/Audible-The-Leopard-A-Novel/dp/B09V3HG5QX/ref=sr_1_1?crid=YGM0UHIALZ5J&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.0s4xvQRr5h3kzNDgL0XZuFMagRY3Oo_CvtaYa3SRPC3rKI7AHDZIiVd8xdxEIGu7qdFcOdij6CcsmoSX7H21cVZLmbRyqHxZXguniU15VDDIPegvAbi7dwW8yn05hgnsz1W2IcRER-4nR_w9VNljEeUtHXaBm_d3fsdCPaFFMuaihT1vj5eHwLs9e-7ChTXranVX-c08dZtFfqmUwnmrYzSr_mIqZapPlFlVltLaneE.Fv6EqlwYI0K_hHCgI314Kfuc7tFyXWZsmDZ1OkxmiMk&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+leopard+giuseppe+di+lampedusa&qid=1749423509&sprefix=the+leopard+%2Caps%2C134&sr=8-1

Crystallizing and Unraveling The Now with Novelist Paul Lynch

Sometimes I find myself in the throes of writing agony. I don’t like the term writers’ block because it implies a certain impermanence. But what is vernacularly referred to as writers’ block, is part and parcel of the creative act itself.  Anyone who’s tried to do something creative for an extended period of time can vouch for this. No one can exactly figure where creative impulse comes from,  just that you have to be ready to receive it when it does. I was in one of these meandering phases where I couldn’t write much of anything. I’d abandoned a long story that took a few months to write, because of its lack of pulse, and overt dogmatism, and I had resolved to just write academic papers for the time being. This was before I spoke to 2023 Booker Prize Winner Paul Lynch.  I wanted to chat with Paul before he won the Prize. I’m a sucker for Irish fiction, and came across Prophet Song during a binge of Dublin-based novels. The novel fundamentally reimagines the city of Dublin in an ambiguous and ahistoric time-period where autocratic forces have come to power. These forces have clearly systematically disbanded the functioning democracy. The story is exceptionally contemporary, but there are no historical references as to why the situation is the way it is. Lynch’s writing has been stuck into the umbrella category of dystopian fiction, but it’s really not a dystopian novel. As you’ll see from the reading he gives at the beginning, he juxtaposes a beautiful and plaintive prose style with horrific events to find meaning in the spaces between them. Lynch chronicles the methodical unraveling of a world through the lens of his protagonist Eilish Stack, a mother and scientist whose husband has been taken by the police forces of the new regime. Through this personal conceit, Lynch interrogates ideas of grief, unity, longing, and the veiled ways power is accumulated and utilized in space.  My conversation with Paul centered around the novel, but it turned into a poetic articulation of creativity. From the first question to the last his answers provide a picture of artmaking that quelled any writers-block induced self-loathing that I had, and led to tremendous creative inspiration that fueled a semester of writing prose and poetry. I’ve been lucky on this show to get many writers to speak candidly about their processes, and it’s clear Paul has thought deeply about the art he makes. We weave between the textual and the impalpable and create a vision for how art and fiction can function in contemporary times.  https://www.paullynchwriter.com/ Prophet Song [https://bookshop.org/p/books/prophet-song-paul-lynch/20428618?ean=9780802163011] Recommendations Louise Glück Mary Oliver Other References Don DeLillo Cormac McCarthy Joseph Conrad Louis MacNeice

The Convergence of Food, Memory and Language, with writer Rachel Khong

I came across a novel that used food as tool for reflection into the life and mind of a few characters. Rachel Khong’s first novel Goodbye Vitamin, is about a woman who moves back home to care for her father, who has started to develop Alzheimer’s. And Khong meditates on this family by refocusing on their daily activities. From cooking to eating, to morning conversations, we see how mundane routines can change, bend and break under stress.  Food was my entry point in the novel, but my discussion with Rachel starts to incorporate other ideas that she was interested in during her writing process. We’ve talked a lot about memory on this sh ow, and Rachel’s very interested in the simultaneous perfection and imperfection of memory. What happens when a character goes about their daily life on a faulty memory? And what happens when everyone else has to watch the memory of someone they love, dissipate..  We take a step back, and start to think about the memory of a writer, how does a profound mistrust of one’s memory change the way they perceive scenes and characters in a novel.  We thread these ideas in with Rachel’s new novel Real Americans which is out April 30th from Knopf. Her new novel is entirely different in style and structure to the first one. It weaves between two timelines that show the intersection of two vastly different families, immigrants from China, and a pharmaceutical empire with generational wealth. We talk through her writing process for this novel, and how she sees part of it as a response to the world we’ve lived in, since 2016. The novel’s not overtly political, but you can start to see what Rachel’s project is with this new work, and we dive into how she spent the last few years writing it.  Real Americans is out April 30th.  Rachel's Website [https://www.rachelkhong.com/] Real Americans [https://bookshop.org/p/books/real-americans-rachel-khong/20272837] Recommendations Martyr - Kaveh Akbar [https://bookshop.org/p/books/martyr-kaveh-akbar/20032523?ean=9780593537619] Monk [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0312172/]

The Future of the Humanities with Professor and Critic Merve Emre

In August, West Virginia University announced that it would be dissolving its Department of World Languages, Literature and Linguistics. And a couple months after that, my school Middlebury College, chose to eliminate a faculty position in its creative writing department. As someone studying English Literature, and who cares deeply about the future of humanities education, I was curious to talk to someone who has been thinking about what the study of the humanities looks like in today's world. Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg University Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She was also a judge for The 2022 International Booker Prize. I’ve read her essays on various literary topics at The New Yorker, and other publications and it’s obvious that her criticism strives to innovate literary study for a changing world. I’ve been talking a lot about criticism on this show this year. I spoke to Christian Lorentzen over the summer about the future of literary criticism, an art that’s been required to reinvent and revitalize itself over the past few years. And my conversations with Jerome Lowenthal and Ethan Iverson focused on how classical music and jazz are received. I think studying the way we approach and talk about art and culture is crucial to the function of the humanities and this conversation gets to the heart of that.  Merve and I start by talking about the school and the trends that literature departments are seeing, but then we progress to a larger discussion about access to the humanities. Merve is a strong advocate for treating aesthetic experience as a social good, and this takes us to the end of our conversation where we try to articulate how the academy and public media, and social media can simultaneously further the reach and scope of humanities education and dissemination in their own ways. This was another work of audio criticism. Regardless of whether you’re interested in literature or culture, the topics we discussed are ubiquitous in today’s society, and if there’s one throughline in all the episodes of Cultural Mixtapes, it’s the importance of art in our world. merveemre.com New Yorker Page [https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/merve-emre] Recommendations Middlemarch - George Eliot [https://bookshop.org/p/books/middlemarch-penguin-classics-deluxe-edition-george-eliot/226687?ean=9780143107729] Inland - Gerald Murnane [https://bookshop.org/p/books/inland/19649068] R.P. Blackmur F. O. Matthiessen [https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/hopwood-assets/documents/Hopwood%20Lectures/HopwoodLecture-1949%20F.%20O.%20Matthiessen.pdf] Elizabeth Hardwick [https://harpers.org/archive/1959/10/the-decline-of-book-reviewing/] Renata Adler Rebecca West [https://newrepublic.com/article/71896/duty-harsh-criticism]