Episodes
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Welcome to the fourth episode of ‘Cultural Obsessions,’ a series organized for the Meltemi podcast, the official podcast for La Piccioletta Barca magazine.
In this episode, Eleonora speaks with Micaela Brinsley on one of her many Cultural Obsessions: the persona and work of Elena Ferrante.
A pseudonymous celebrity, Ferrante has achieved a literary fame unusual for writers in the twenty-first century. Best known for her tetralogy together called The Neapolitan Novels, she has become well-known for writing about women in the spaces in-between, in the negotiation of their private and public selves. In forensic detail, Ferrante deconstructs friendships, the feelings of ambivalence many women have for the trappings of femininity, and the explosions that emerge from people who’ve silenced themselves in order to survive. By removing her true identity from the marketplace, Ferrante also functions as a symbol: a message advocating for creative solitude, for safeguarding prose as a sacred encounter between language and the mind of a reader.
We discuss both Ferrante’s second book, The Days of Abandonment, as well as her most recently-published text, The Lying Life of Adults. The conversation is also bookended by a discussion of the phrase ‘an absence of sense,’ the thematic anchor of The Days of Abandonment. Spanning topics as far-ranging as Italian dialects, what constitutes something as ‘womanly,’ the contemporary value of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and the history of pseudonyms themselves, our conversation itself is a critical examination, an absence of sense, and exploration of fiction as a touchpoint for better engaging with the wider world.
For those interested in reading some interviews Ferrante conducted with literary magazines, please check out the links listed below.
The Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante
Los Angeles Times: https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-elena-ferrante-interview-20180517-htmlstory.html
Elle Magazine: https://www.elle.com/culture/books/a33834141/elena-ferrante-interview-the-lying-life-of-adults
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Welcome to the third episode of ‘Cultural Obsessions’, a series organised for Meltemi Podcast, the official podcast for La Piccioletta Barca magazine.
In this episode, Eleonora speaks to Eponine Howarth on one of her Cultural Obsessions: diplomat, writer, film director and World War Two pilot, Romain Gary. Born in Vilnus in 1914, Romain Gary moved to France as a teenager. A master of multiple personae, he was a decorated hero of the French resistance, worked in the French diplomatic service, became acquainted with Hollywood while Consul General in Los Angeles, and is the only author to have won the prestigious French literature award, the Prix Goncourt, twice (impossible according to the rules).
We will discuss one of Eponine’s favourite novels, ‘The Talent Scout’. The story is set in an imaginary South American country ruled by a ruthless dictator called Almayo who decides to have a convoy of visitors (including acrobats, a talent scout, his mother, and his fiancé) executed. The book touches on themes including morality, human nature, God and the Devil, the nature of autocratic regimes, means of finding legitimacy, and American foreign policy. Our guest confesses finding a certain comfort in a shared despair for the state of the world, politics, and humanity.
If you’d like to read more about the greatest literary conman: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180619-romain-gary-the-greatest-literary-bad-boy-of-all
Learn about Gary’s moral vision: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/01/the-made-up-man
Hear Romain Gary talk about the Talent Scouts (in French with subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixhWfHghJQA
Learn more about his relationship with American actress Jean Seberg (in French with subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2JkLnvHbgs
Or watch the trailer of his film ‘Kill’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awRAUcJ_yTg
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Missing episodes?
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Welcome to the first episode of ‘Seafarers’ a series organised for Meltemi Podcast, the official podcast for La Piccioletta Barca magazine.
In today’s episode we will be discussing Clarice Lispector’s book Água Viva. Novelist, short story writer and journalist, Clarice Lispector was born in western Ukraine to a Jewish family who fled to Brazil to escape anti-Semitic violence. She went on to become a journalist, study law and spent much of her adult life writing as she lived around the world with her husband who worked for the foreign service. She returned to Brazil in 1959, and lived in Rio until her death in 1977.
Lispector’s writing style is characterized by a blend of poetry and prose. Her texts tend to be concerned with a moment of rupture in an otherwise orderly-life that causes a spiritual crisis within the protagonist, who tends to be a woman in search of her own autonomy. Lispector is one of the only women writers - a contested category in of itself - to have written texts in conversation with her own inner life as she aged.
In this episode the book club discusses one of Lispector’s more remote yet rigorous texts, Água Viva. Structured as an unordered meditation on the nature of life and time, it has exercised a powerful influence on Brazil’s greatest artists: one musician read it one hundred and eleven times. Formally innovative, philosophically radical and stylistically playful, this English-language translation by Stefan Tobler from New Directions Publishing begins with the incomplete sentence: ‘It’s with such profound happiness.’ The book soon becomes consumed with the protagonist’s attempts to reckon with how to find pleasure in the present moment, Lispector calls the ‘instant-now.’ By positioning the painter-protagonist as a thinly-disguised version of her own work as a writer, Lispector calls into question the relationship between words and images, meaning and the evocation of it, and gives us permission to bear witness to her own search for how it feels to create art about what it means to live in the present moment.
If you enjoyed this episode please consider taking a look at the Piccioletta Barca magazine at: https://www.picciolettabarca.com/
The only televised/recorded interview with Lispector (in Portuguese with English subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1zwGLBpULs
A short story called Clandestine Happiness by Lispector, translated by Rachel Klein for BOMB Magazine: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/clandestine-happiness/
A short story called Good Friends by Lispector, translated by Giovanni Pontiero for BOMB Magazine: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/good-friends/
For more information on Clarice Lispector and her life, check out Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, written by Benjamin Moser: https://www.benmoser.com/books/why-this-world/
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Welcome to the second episode of ‘Cultural Obsessions’, a series organised for Meltemi Podcast, the official podcast for La Piccioletta Barca magazine.
In this episode, Eleonora speaks to Ignacio Oliden on one of his Cultural Obsessions: author and poet Rudyard Kipling.
A very much discussed literary, political and cultural figure, Kipling’s literature is much more complex than what his disgraceful attributes illustrate. For Ignacio, Kipling represents the craft of fable, of storytelling, of song, and with that, Ignacio’s own way of perceiving literature has been shaped with a criteria based on the economy of words, and a sense of adventure, of fantasy and of music, which Ignacio wants to find in his readings, and of which he dreams of invoking in his writings.
We will talk about reading and maintaining afloat controversial authors, and we will discuss the reading of one of Ignacio’s favourite short stories, ‘The Finest Story in the World’, from Many Inventions (1893), in which Ignacio finds a story that fills in for the autobiography, the aesthetic essay, the poetry, and meets his requirements of the dramatic emotion and imagination. Our guest confesses taking this short story as a criticism and writing manual for himself.
If you'd like to read some poems by Kipling translated into Spanish by Ignacio, here's the link (bilingual English & Spanish versions): https://buenosairespoetry.com/2021/07/25/4-poemas-de-rudyard-kipling/
On separating the author from the man: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/in-defense-of-rudyard-kipling-and-the-jungle-books/2016/08/02/86f5cb38-559c-11e6-b7de-dfe509430c39_story.html?fbclid=IwAR1zKpGWYPPVWxH2tMIY3MFzmDOL9rljvBw3EAFClgF0wyji2cuDbcpBxYk
On discussion about his work: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2018/10/rudyard-kipling-racism-sexism-misogyny-imperialism-colonialism-fiction
A watch Kipling giving a speech about truth on writing in 1933 to the Royal Society of Literature, in Canada: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/07/26/watch-kipling-on-truth-in-writing-1933/
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CULTURAL OBSESSIONS SERIES, EPISODE 1
Welcome to the first episode of ‘Cultural Obsessions’ a series organised for Meltemi Podcast, the official podcast for La Piccioletta Barca magazine.
In this episode, Eleonora speaks to Facundo Rodriguez on one of his most prominent Cultural Obsessions- author, poet, philosopher, Jorge Luis Borges.
This Argentinian, controversial, cultural figure has marked literature and poetry with his innovative style intertwining philosophical themes and the fantasy genre. To most of us he’s known for his short-stories, such as The Aleph.
However, Facundo’s take for this episode is slightly different. This author has had an enormous impact on both Facundo’s personal and academic life. This is at the core of this conversation, and informs a completely new reading on the author.
Facundo’s own interest in both poetry and philosophy motivates his understanding of Borges, focused on Borges’s relationship to philosophy and literature and their interaction. We delve into ‘Feeling in Death’ (Sentirse en muerte) from El Idioma de los Argentinos as well as the poem ‘Inscription on any Tomb’ from Fervour of Buenos Aires collection.
We also touch base on ‘New Refutation of Time’, which provides more context on Jorge Luis Borges’s literature. Tune in to discover more on Borges, his literature and how much he has been the figure of Facundo’s cultural obsession.
Finally, if you enjoyed this episode please consider taking a look at the Piccioletta Barca magazine at: https://www.picciolettabarca.com/
If you'd like to read an article that Facundo wrote on Borges and Carriego as mentioned in the episode, here's the link https://www.picciolettabarca.com/posts/your-secret
If you’re interested to find out more about Borges, other podcasts that can be of interests are: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0076182 http://historyofliterature.com/tag/jorge-luis-borges/ (as an interesting listen for authors who have written about Borges). For a French speaking audience https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/series/jorge-luis-borges. On the short story collection: Ficciones (If you want to have an in-depth analysis of the short stories) https://soundcloud.com/thecasualacademic/episode-4-narrative-pathways-alternate-histories-in-jorge-luis-borges-fictions Hearing Borges’ words in translation read by famous authors: https://play.acast.com/s/guardianculture/will-self-reads-on-exactitude-in-science-by-jorge-luis-borges https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/mohsin-hamid-reads-jorge-luis-borges https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/orhan-pamuk-reads-jorge-luis-borges
