Podcast
The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly
Hosted by Lapham’s Quarterly · EN
Donovan Hohn, the acting editor of Lapham's Quarterly, interviews historians, writers, and journalists about books that bring voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. New episodes are released bi-weekly.
25episodes
Episodes
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Episode 19: Jeremy Eichler on “Time’s Echo”
Dec 501:20:14Tap to summarize“When it comes to thinking about the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust, we’re nearing the end of the twilight of living memory,” says Jeremy Eichler in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Pretty soon, there will be a time when not a single living soul on our planet has firsthand lived experience—felt contact with this particular world, these historical events. And our ways of accessing and understanding them will be exclusively passed toward dealing with different aspects of the historical record. I wanted to invite readers to join me in thinking about how music as an art form can actually burn through history’s ‘cold storage.’ Unlike another book on the era, music itself can release into the present something of the raw emotion of these earlier lives and earlier eras in order to allow for an expanded contact with the now. When we have an older work of music played again in the room right before us, we’re hearing in a very literal way the past speaking again in the present. In that sense, music is the language of time’s non-linearity and brings these distant moments closer to us.” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Jeremy Eichler, historian, former chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe, and author of Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War, which considers the lives and the works of Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten. Eichler practices what he calls “deep listening.” Traveling to places associated with musical war memorials written by each of his four composers, he returns “these works to history, not for their sake but for ours, so that they may become, among other things, a prism through which we ‘remember’ what was lost.” Audio excerpts of works by Bach, Schoenberg, Strauss, Shostakovich, and Britten punctuate the conversation. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Episode 18: Stephen Greenblatt on Christopher Marlowe
Nov 2101:09:13Tap to summarize“Marlowe is—astonishingly—inventing this; it’s not as if he can draw upon Shakespeare,” says Stephen Greenblatt in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Doctor Faustus was already written. It’s a remarkable, almost inexplicable achievement to figure out how to get inside in a play where, after all, people are standing up before 2,000 or 3,000 people and revealing something. How to get inside the character quietly. In this case, it’s a scholar who has reached the end of his rope, feels despair at the exhaustion of his own learning. It has to be something in Marlowe. It’s Marlowe’s genius, but it also has to draw upon something deep inside him and his experience. Shakespeare couldn’t do quite that. Shakespeare does amazing things with Hamlet and with Prospero in The Tempest, but he wasn’t at university and wasn’t intellectual in the sense that Marlowe was trained. So this is Marlowe’s extraordinary invention, and you have to think that Marlowe was murdered at twenty-nine. If Shakespeare had been murdered at the age of twenty-nine, we would say, ‘Shakespeare, who’s that?’ ” This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, about Greenblatt’s new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, a history of the life and times of Christopher Marlowe, cobbler’s son turned gentleman-scholar, turned spy in Queen Elizabeth’s secret service, turned playwright and poet who collaborated with Shakespeare. In Greenblatt’s telling, Marlowe’s career, cut violently and mysteriously short, is almost as improbable and tragic as that of his most famous creation, Doctor Faustus. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Episode 17: Queequeg and Ishmael in Love (with Alexander Chee, Aaron Sachs, and Caleb Crain)
Nov 702:00:13Tap to summarize“There is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends,” Ishmael tells us in “A Bosom Friend,” chapter ten of Moby Dick, excerpted in the “Friendship” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. “Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon lay I and Queequeg—a cozy, loving pair.” In an extended, three-part installment of our intermittent series on Moby Dick and the history of the sea, this episode of The World in Time considers the novel’s love story—the story of Queequeg and Ishmael’s friendship and marriage—as well as the novel’s dedication to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Novelist and essayist Alexander Chee joins Donovan Hohn to talk about chapter four, “The Counterpane,” in which Queequeg and Ishmael, having just met, spend the night together. Melville scholar and historian Aaron Sachs closely reads the ideological, philosophical, political, and ecological implications of chapter 72, “The Monkey-Rope,” wherein we find Ishmael and Queequeg tethered to each other by a hemp line, Ishmael aboard the Pequod, Queequeg balancing perilously atop the carcass of a slaughtered whale. Finally, novelist Caleb Crain goes swimming around in the Platonic mysteries of chapter 110, “Queequeg in His Coffin.” Both Chee and Crain propose that the entire novel, dedicated to Hawthorne, might be read as “a love letter.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Episode 63: Jacob Goldstein
Dec 11, 2020Tap to summarizeLewis H. Lapham speaks with Jacob Goldstein, author of “Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing.” Thanks to our generous donors. Lead support for this podcast has been provided by Elizabeth “Lisette” Prince. Additional support was provided by James J. “Jimmy” Coleman Jr. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Episode 27: Barbara Ehrenreich
May 18, 2018Tap to summarizeBarbara Ehrenreich thought there was something strange going on with the smart middle-aged people she knew. They seemed to be obsessed with their bodies in a novel and unexpected way, exercising frequently, assessing the value of every bite they considered, and obeying every preventive measure offered by doctors. “I did not share this obsession, I will admit,” she says on this episode of The World in Time. Annual visits to the doctor, constant medical tests—it all felt futile, or at least unnecessary. “It's in my nature to question everything,” she explains, “so in each case…I would do some research, and see if this indeed did any good.” Her new book, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, is a result of that research, and she discussed her findings, scientific and philosophical and cultural, with Lewis Lapham. And yes, Gwyneth Paltrow does come up. Lewis H. Lapham talks with Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer.
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