Catch Elijah Anderson on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" earlier this month.
Anderson visits tomorrow, Tuesday 4/26.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Elijah Anderson on NPR
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Code of the Street: Elijah Anderson
Code of the Street (1999), Elijah Anderson's landmark study of urban etiquette in Philadelphia, is widely assigned as a college text. The book grew out of a 1994 cover story in The Atlantic.
An Atlantic interview about the book with Anderson (who visits Tuesday, April 26) appeared August 18, 1999:
Q: To what extent are the dynamics of inner-city life in Philadelphia representative of inner-city life throughout the nation?
A: Wherever there are pockets of poverty and alienation -- whether you're talking about Chicago or New York, Rio or Johannesburg -- you have the code of the street. As a social scientist I am trying to represent this reality as accurately as I can because I think it's very important to get the real story out. My concern in this work is to develop a model that allows for an understanding of Philadelphia that has implications for understanding similar places. To the extent that there are similar problems, there may be similar solutions. More.
Cosmopolitan Canopy: Elijah Anderson
Elijah Anderson, leading sociologist of the Black urban experience, visits the Writers Institute this coming Tuesday, April 26, to talk about his new book, The Cosmopolitan Canopy (2011).
Sudhir Venkatesh gives an in-depth review in Slate:
"This is timely terrain, and it is sociology at its finest. There are few writers openly exploring this undercurrent of hostility and self-doubt experienced by a historically subjugated group that just managed to elect one of their own as president. Not since DuBois' impassioned declaration a century ago, that black Americans had a 'double consciousness,' have we seen such sharp use of social analysis for truth-telling." More.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
The Pulitzer Winners and Finalists
Congratulations to Jean Valentine, who was short-listed for this year's prize for her collection Break the Glass (2010). Valentine, who was named State Poet Laureate by the Writers Institute and the Governor of New York State in 2008, last visited us on November 16, 2010. Here's a YouTube clip.
Congratulations to past Writers Institute visitors Jennifer Egan for winning the prize in fiction, and to Eric Foner for winning the prize in history (Foner participated in the Institute's "Telling the Truth" symposium on nonfiction in 1991).
Chang-rae Lee, who visited in April 2010, appeared on the short list for fiction for his new novel, The Surrendered. Alan Brinkley, short-listed for biography, also participated in "Telling the Truth" two decades ago.
Read More......
Monday, April 11, 2011
Artificial Summers and the Talking Heads: Susan Choi
"Why had it never occurred to me that summer was for the outdoors, for nature, until I was more than 20 years old? Maybe because it wasn't — not in Houston, where I grew up.
Houston is fantastically unnatural, and its summer is the season for embracing all that is contrived, ameliorative and just plain fake about Houstonian life."
Susan Choi (who visits Thursday) talks about the air-conditioned artificial summers of her youth, and her teenage affinity for the music of the Talking Heads, in a 2004 New York Times article preserved on the website of the Talking Heads' David Byrne.
Good Intentions Taken to Extremes: Susan Choi
Novelist Susan Choi, who visits Rensselaer (RPI) on Thursday, talks to the TU's Susan Comninos about her attraction to episodes of social upheaval in recent American history:
"I've always been interested in social justice movements," she says in a telephone interview, "in good intentions taken to extremes." She fed her interest by earning an M.F.A. in fiction writing at Cornell University, where the counterculture still reigns: "I have at once a fondness and horror of that kind of college town. There's a kind of thought-police going on: a monoculture of liberal-progressive politics, recycling -- trying to resurrect the barter system," she says, referring to an alternative business practice launched there in the '90s.
"At the time, I thought," says Choi, whose humor belies her dark subject matter, "'Aww! That's so sweet. They're trying to do away with currency. Good luck with that.'"
Read More......
Why She Doesn't Write Novels
Award-winning poet Rosanna Warren (who visits tomorrow, April 12) explains to literary blogger Louis Mayeux why she doesn't write novels:
"I wrote stories all through my teens, and dug myself fairly deep into a novel the year after graduating from college. But in the middle of that story, I quite suddenly realized — after reading Gertrude Stein's 'Ida'— that I had no idea what I was doing. I stopped it cold. Now I write fiction only in my dreams. I could no more write a novel than I could build a 747 in the back yard. One of my main qualms about fiction was my panicky sense that I didn't know how to move my characters through the door from one room to another. It seemed too laborious." More.
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