The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published 150 years ago this spring, was the great opening event in American literature; a very strange book, it’s been said, that gets better and more relevant all the time.

The letter was a flaming red A stitched as a punishment in Puritan Boston to the bosom of the defiant single mother Hester Prynne. The “A” stood for adultery, at one level, or Hawthorne’s own Art, or maybe for Angel, or Amor, meaning love; or could Hawthorne back in 1850 have anticipated Aids? Hester takes her Puritan punishment and survives — a prototypical strong woman. It’s the men in her life who do themselves in: the guilty preacher father of her child, Arthur Dimmesdale; and Hester’s obsessively vengeful husband Roger Chillingworth. Can anyone read The Scarlet Letter today and not think of Bill Clinton and Ken Starr?

The endless meanings of an American masterpiece, on this show.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

English Professors: Millicent Bell (Boston University), Walter Herbert (Southwestern University), and Lauren Berlant (University of Chicago).

It’s almost a cliche in polite American circles that girls are in a state of crisis. In high school they’re silenced and demoralized; in college they’re short-changed. Boys, and a culture that indulges masculinity in the classroom, take the blame.
This kind of thinking has filtered down from academic feminist circles to teachers’ unions. But the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers thinks they’ve got it all wrong. The real casualties of the gender wars, she argues, are boys.

Male culture has been deemed politically incorrect, and boys are being penalized for their masculinity. Comparative statistics show it’s boys lagging behind girls in reading and writing. Boys take fewer advanced classes; boys are less likely to get to college. Sommers says what they need is understanding, discipline, and a solid moral grounding. And through it all, parents and teachers have got to let them be boys.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys.

Among the blazing hot stars of Cuban music, none stand taller than the pianist Chucho Valdes — not because he stands 6 foot 6, but because he has flying chops of Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson proportions, because he formed the legendary Irakere big band a quarter century ago with Arturo Sandoval and Paquito Rivera, bringing US jazz under the sway of Cuban sound, because the full catalog of dance rhythms and spirit mysteries under the surface of Cuban music are at his fingertips.

And, perhaps, also because he stayed in Cuba when many others left. Chucho Valdes never defected, never tried to get around the trade embargo to the United States. His music just flew over it, on its own Grammy-winning power. And now in a political thaw, he comes with it. “Brace yourself,” as the New York emcee announced him. “There’s a hurricane approaching from the Caribbean.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Chucho Valdes

The social anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy turns the maternal image of the adoring, protective mother on its head. Mothers are not the passive, coy, self-sacrificing creatures we like to think of, she says, but rather calculating, aggressive and ruthless deal-makers.

Take, for example, the mother kangaroo. When pursued by a predator, she lightens her load by tossing her baby out of its pouch. Flo, the famous chimp that Jane Goodall studied, protected her brood by sleeping around. Male chimps, it turns out, protect the femme fatale, not the virtuous ape. When the babies of female monkeys, called langurs, are killed by outside marauding male langurs, the females immediately solicit these killers for sex. Mother birds control brood size by allowing the older, bigger chicks to horde the worms and starve the younger sibs.

Dr. Hrdy reveals the Real Mother Nature.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Professor of U.C. Davis, author of Mother Nature.

“Liberace” stands for gaudy, tacky glitz in American culture. It stands for flamingo feather capes and sequined suits, rhinestones, candelabras and furs.

Wladziu Valentino Liberace was tacky and vulgar, but he was a revered Las Vegas showman too. He was a piano prodigy as a child, classically trained and inspired early on by European romantic musicians like Chopin, Liszt and Ignace Paderewski. Then he brought his own style of classical music to America’s suburbs and middle-aged women: dumbed down sonatas, and quickie concerti. “I love the fake,” he said. “For me to wear a simple tuxedo onstage would be like asking Marlene Dietrich to wear a housedress.”

Behind all the fakery was a complicated man; a Ronald Reagan republican, a devout Catholic, and a closeted homosexual who died of AIDS.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Asbury Pyron, author of Liberace: An American Boy, talks about the showman of excess and glitz.

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, and he was a man of his word: he chose death over a life without philosophical inquiry. Socrates was famouly, or infamously ugly, a shabby, unkempt gadfly who went about 5th century B.C. Athens asking difficult questions for his supper.

He barely possessed the clothes on his back and entirely failed to provide for his wife and children, but he was a courageous soldier, a true friend, and a good citizen. To Plato he was the greatest teacher of all time, the man who practically invented the method of philosophical inquiry and gave it meaning. What he taught above all is that the search for truth is part of living the good life, and the two have been joined at the heart of philosophy ever since.

Knowing what we live and living what we know – a consideration of the examined life.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law, Philosophy, and Classics at the University of Chicago

Stanley Crouch is a one-man race conversation – a sex, class and culture conversation as well, a sort of jam session of arguments that have taken the shape, now, of a novel. White girl singer from South Dakota in this story meets black tenor saxophone star from Texas: can they keep it together?

Jazz has been Stanley Crouch’s passion and his metaphor of an ideal America where solo expression lifts the whole band, where innovation acknowledges tradition, where democracy drives excellence. The melody under his riffs and rants over the years and his run-ins with black nationalism was the theme that black and white America – no matter the tensions – are unimaginable without each other; that Negroes made the nation and made an identity that’s American deeper down than it’s any one color.

The novel’s question, for white Carla and black Maxwell, is whether love and music can beat the skin game?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Stanley Crouch, author of Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome.

Thirty-four-year-old Bashar Assad of Syria is part of a new generation of Middle Eastern leaders. He’s a Western-educated eye doctor with a passion for Phil Collins and the internet – different in many ways from his father, Hafez-al-Assad, the Lion of Damascus.

Assad Senior was to many the standard-bearer of Arab nationalism and may be remembered as the guy who didn’t make peace with Israel. He transformed Syria into a major player in the Middle East, but his iron rule sealed off the country once known as the great capital of Islamic civilization.

For Assad’s mild-mannered son Bashar the job is first to gather up the reigns of power in Syria, then face the real tests. The Syrian economy is stagnant, the country fell off the technology bandwagon years ago, 30,000 Syrian troops are still in Lebanon, and the ruling Alawite minority seems set against peace with Israel. Where will Syria go now?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ahmed Khalidi, Middle East writer and senior associate member of St. Anthony’s College at Oxford, London

Scott Peterson, reporter for the Christian Science Monitor who is covering the funeral of the president in Damascus

and David Lesch, Associate Professor at Trinity in San Antonio and commentator on the Middle East.

In 1997, When Robert Pinsky was appointed the thirty-ninth poet laureate of the United States, his aim was to get more Americans without English degrees reading Longfellow, Dickens, Rita Dove, and Langston Hughes.

And so he did. His stint as the public face of American poetry ended last month. Throughout his term, he’s tried to get people to stop thinking about poetry as a scholarly pursuit, and start enjoying it. The measure of his success is not having created more poetry readings featuring prominent writers, it’s that regular people are in the audience.

He has been arguably the most visible and mainstream of poet laureates – on-line, on network televsion, on PBS. With his democratic attitude he created “The Favorite Poem Project” and invited all of us to think about the stanzas we cherish most. His dearest hope, he says on his way back to life as a regular poet, is that this particular effort changes the way poetry is taught in school.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert Pinsky, poet, Professor at Boston University, and author of Jersey Rain.

Jeff Benedict has written a kind of Civil Action story about the world’s biggest Indian casino. It’s the story of how lawyers, politicians, and activists turned a nearly defunct Indian reservation on a few hundred acres in Connecticut into the wealthiest and most powerful Indian tribe in the country. Along the way, serious questions of lineage and legal practice have emerged.

The success of the Pequot reservation’s Foxwoods Casino has turned a national spotlight on Indian tribal recognition and sovereignty. Most Indian reservations are by and large underdeveloped, but a significant minoriy have followed the Pequot model and built remarkable wealth over the last decade. And another 200 tribes nationwide are on the waiting list for federal recognition.

There is big money at stake, and the dysfunctional federal bureaucracy is breaking down under pressure. Jeff Benedict’s book “Without Reservation” has jump-started an idling issue. The question is: who’s an Indian, and what does America owe them?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jeff Benedict, and lawyer and Comanche Indian Dennis Chapabitty