Dogs of Our Lives

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:32:01 +0000

Artist Bill Wegman and authors Lisa Birnbach, Stefan Merrill Block, and Susan Orlean speak candidly about the dogs in their lives and in literature. The reading assignment for this episode was J.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip, a polarizing dog memoir that sparked a cult following. While Merrill Block praises what he perceives as Ackerley’s restraint from projecting on the dog a human psychology, Birnbach finds the story to be anthropomorphic to an obscene degree. At turns awed and repulsed by Ackerley’s style and focus, the speakers try to make sense of their own canine love stories.

Class and Classics

admin — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 01:31:09 +0000

Ed White, Rick Moody and Maaza Mengiste discuss the limits of current American fiction. Political correctness, they claim, has taken a toll on literature. Maaza wonders whether there is a form of self-censorship at play both in the writers’ choices of subjects and in the readers’ choices of books. Ed evokes Faulkner and Proust, and the ways in which they are often misread. Rick wonders about the relevance of works whose authors avoid addressing issues of race and class.

Amateur Thursdays

Dogs of Our Lives

Class and Classics