The Spirit of ’68

… Capper.
Listen to all five episodes of Exploding the Canon:

Sing, Muse
Reedies Against Racism
The Spirit of ’68
Let Us Compare Mythologies
Changing the Lens

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Transcript:
The year 1968 is remembered as tumultuous for many

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Reedies Against Racism

… Exploding the Canon:

Sing, Muse
Reedies Against Racism
The Spirit of ’68
Let Us Compare Mythologies
Changing the Lens

Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)

Transcript:
On September 26, 2016, a group of Black students at Reed College staged a boycott of …

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Sing, Muse

… Exploding the Canon:

Sing, Muse
Reedies Against Racism
The Spirit of ’68
Let Us Compare Mythologies
Changing the Lens

Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed
Download the audio here (right click to “save link as …”)

Transcript:
A few years ago, I was surprised to see my alma mater making headlines—a lot …

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Our Pets, Our Plates

… whipped to exhaustion, a mother cat mourning her drowned kittens. But after the Civil War, America’s human population doubled in 35 years to 70 million, and feeding the hungry cities meant animal suffering on an astounding scale. Meat lords like Gustavus Swift and Philip D. Armour segregated livestock from human society as never before …

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Five Poems

… Then circle it again—
60,000 miles laid end to end.
Vessels, thresholds, life force,
ruins—these too I love,
immeasurably.
Reproducing at astonishing rates,
fruit flies feed on nectar, plant sap,
decaying fruit. I watch them gather
on the bowl of peaches in my room.
What room?
To make a room you fill it …

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The Homesick Composer

… Third Symphony. Then, miraculously, came two late masterpieces. The first, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, is concise and ingenious, witty and warm. It also somewhat feeds on the smart syncopations and wicked virtuosity of Harlem piano. The second is the Symphonic Dances he so memorably sampled for Eugene Ormandy. Summoning his waning energies …

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The Dawn

… years. Before she’d finished the story, she’d already started bracing herself.
Geoff was silent for a while. “It’s very cruel, actually,” he said, at last, “to feed birds mincemeat.” His face was hardening. “It will catch in their beaks and rot. And then their children will die from brittle bones, from calcium

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Heavy Mettle

… effects of smothering racism and, in Smith’s depiction of her father and his family, the smoldering ambition, intelligence, and commitment to living a full life that feed the soul. Smith defines the soul as proof of the undying and holy within us—intangible and yet so fully present in secular and nonsecular settings that …

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Shooting a Dog

… a kind of home in the shady brush near the Iraqi National Guard (ING) headquarters in Jalawla. When our platoons stopped there every day, our soldiers would feed and pet it. Stray dogs were everywhere. They wandered the streets, the desert hills. Many Iraqis we knew viewed them as unclean, nothing more than annoying pests …

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In the Forest of the Colobus

… footed creatures expert at raiding crops. Occasionally, a lone adult male Campbell’s monkey (Cercopithecus campbelli ) would wander into the reserve, spend some time resting, grooming, and feeding on fruits with the colobus, and wander out again. I have no idea where these lone males came from (the nearest known troop of Campbell’s monkeys …

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