The State of Things; Fundraiser

faith teaches jesus and mary hartman listen to some of our best interviews as a thank you supporters during our first taliban about his translations of poetry of a beloved nineteenth century between these female poet also north carolina native and author stanton often talks about his latest novel the night with the first john callahan the cultural history of vietnam has long gone under appreciated in the united states because of the language and cultural divide many americans have little knowledge about libya needs literature however north carolina state university professor of english john taliban has brought the work of a nineteenth century viennese boy to life with a new translation it was no easy task considering the work of hose wan who of female

poet was written in a language that perhaps only thirty people in the world know how to read bell band has translated these phones in three languages side by side in a new book called spring essence the work of ho's one who the presentations that i did or promo modern buildings which is a roman square which the music been using since seventeen hundred on the use of because it's easier to use than the old script that third script in the book called mom and now missouri calligraphy the burmese about that to be independent of reading chinese and to represent the family's speech but for a thousand years the attendees wrote a no poured in the book course one who wrote in home she wrote in her because she was being defiant about the burmese culture as opposed to chinese literate culture she was steeped in both which he was she reopened time low social collapse in warfare

where in fact there was a row of rubble dynasty from the people that sprang up to which she was related barber and a part of her interest was and using this language has opposed a classical chinese which she knows well so at first i just wanted to find a few examples maybe one going to vietnam to find while komen our own handwriting because most of nominate years passed down by hamish tests confirm that rumors that there's some around and then our laws and really to understand what she was writing sensors some of variations of time he had to look to know is it true that only thirty people in the world actually knew how to read that language that's true now that used to be true on every literate person in vietnam i knew how to write that language there is a time when there was a lot of all government documents in marriage beads and arrest records and historical records and

things like that all those written om bought in our generation that an arm is about to disappear over seventy nine million vietnamese and as you say about thirty people worldwide can read know it's a really beautiful thing to look at the figures on and the shapes and it's it's a very artistic wave riding with beautiful suits looks like chinese in fact one chinese readers see it they think it is chinese normally look at it and theyre perplexed mechanic had tailed out of the chinese concert calligraphy and a stroke system like chinese but rubio represents be in the sound system what did you make out details about how did you go about doing this so i did it take it took about ten years i worked on another nominee not one of the thirty people in the world can read it but i work work from the yearling movie modern romance repressive regimes and the fact that they're often known for these last ten use at first i got into it with a kind of innocence thinking that since i've translated the folk poor korea vietnam i could

probably do this as well since a lot of the words start the actual words of addiction that make make up the corpus of her poetry was familiar to me from the airport for corporate then i realized there was a whole layer of complexity beyond that that i wasn't aware that first this whole interesting double meaning such an answer that one word landed at that plant tour was only a long ago and decide it was too much trouble a number of times and gave up when there was no no that's she's amazing let's talk a little bit about who has won who and the kind of woman she was the kind of life that she led she was a concubine but what exactly does that mean it doesn't mean i think what spring's the mongoose a word concubine to sort of a sex slave or something and in western ocean she was an aristocrat i born and she was of all where is that the german second wife and that meant that there was a first wife who had most of the privilege in the marriage

and then they curb their can be otherwise a second wife and that wasn't exactly a happy condition and she resented it but most one amongst life are the condition of women have sharply the curator of the enemy's women historically led armies into battle against the chinese they had huge political power and maybe these women today still control to build the wealth of the country but by eighteen hundred after a something like forty years of continuous warfare with the various clans fighting each other and with foreign fighters coming into vietnam society does began to unravel with that unraveling became a social collapse the moment the condition of women is was reduced so she married but a high ranking member and we know this because there's a court record for making nineteen ordering his execution because he was so corrupt and taking bribes and so on that the emperor of a side the army could do things they have beheaded in court records as the

wife of this man was a woman named host one who the woman famous for her talents in poetry and in politics and so she must've been involved as well on the corruption and the rootless one of the legendary coaches wanted another creature entirely and there may be a good deal of overlap between these two identities but the legend is that there was this woman named horse one home so incredibly clever poems there were no men are equal and poetry that you could then pose off the top of her head these perfect i'm sure the league school the son of my creations about anything and that knowing nomination do it off the top of her head but she could do to them once and edwards hired one inside the other and while the first collapse with proper and structure and themes and topics the second was almost always an audi and a double entendre then something to do with sex which was actually forbidden in these mature resumes and confucian manager in china now

whether she was married several times is the palms that we have of hers would indicate may wind up true big new skeleton know better than i do suggest that it's not possible because given the dates for the senate was such a woman paul who intrigue the society that she lived in japan who two hundred years after death still is a fascinating figure in indian life do you have a poem in particular that might be an example of her kind of core a writing style double entendre sure there's one called three members the cliff face another and still a third who was so skilled the core of this craggy seen the cavernous red northern regions narrow clef the black mold beard little monsters a twisting pine boughs plunges in the wind showering the willows leaves with glistening drops gentlemen lords who could refuse though weary and shaky in his knees to mount one small portion get to the word marked the end of the paul minn you realize that there's not just cliff climbing that's going on

here but she also does something out she uses the word that they'll win the title and they'll buy your e mail was a cliff face but because you know the enemies he know that there's a tonal echo of that which means something obscene so it's not just as a citizen first line malt dale malt dale dale a cliff face another storm third but it's an obscene act another and still are we'll return with more from john bel bandages to moment in depth interviews like this and others you hear on the state of things are only possible with your support what you take a moment now to show your support for the state of things in other programs on w and c the number to call is one eight hundred nine six to nine eight six two the pittsburgh you're listening to the state of things on ninety one point five w and c i'm very hard night and today we're

talking about the poetry of hose wan houdini's poet who lived in the early nineteenth century with north carolina state university professor of english and translator john ballot and the book is called spring assets that amount on your interest in the emmys cultural issues all things the enemy's is nothing new you spent some time during and after the vietnam war in that country but you went i want to go as a conscientious objector there are calm gentle music the term instead of doing military service i volunteered to go an alternative service and i taught linguistics at the knees university university got bombed i was out of a job and i came back to united states and returned a month to work for another group which to do a warrant to children a group called the committee a responsibility that i did that for the rest of my alternative service but by that time i was hooked on vietnam and returned again on and ran an eye traveled the countryside with a tape

recorder going up to people collecting an oral poetry called chi announce some more poetry and not oral poetry led me to doing these poems of course what you've revealed several books about vietnam was about the culture that intrigues you so much that's a good question and it's probably leno but i can imagine a culture where won so easily steps into a world of poetry whether it's the portray people who don't read or write the common people of the countryside in the rivers and fisheries who know the oral for prey dollar heads my memory passed down by word of mouth or whether the higher literary culture of postwar know these constructions of hers used to share or amazingly tight poetic things in common people haven't memorized as well i'm a blind palm that rhymes on the first second for six of a line seven syllables derby line rules for the forum little lines having syntactic parallel structure rules for where certain word tones can place within the political alliance a

masonry structure the enemies from ordinary people onto the literary elite simply taken the lighting the function for korea it's hard to imagine who really is will argue gamble oh yeah you can win an argument in vietnam with an a aphorism what this music and was appalled to prove to their local of the poor end of argument and it's just not at a construction loader a construction imagine easily in the west as an american raid pleased to see you happy to see us was there any lingering feelings of veterans ah when i was recording the war was still going on so i wondered how safe i was often in the recordings and those firefights recorded sometimes at night and in him or fire civil war was only the breath of the river often from where we were recording and oddly i seem to have been separated out young americans at the time though i was and

no i think they thought that the port through was so intrinsically interesting that why wouldn't the americans so these poems sound almost modern in and the complaints about the husband and the curious about the children and the end all the problems that the women have were those issues that where do you think a problem for women back in those days as well are aren't you think there's another reason for this post want to open a way of speaking about to be enemies human condition of them exist before she wrote the writing hundred and she spoke for women in a way that women had been spoken for in vietnam it may be perfectly possible all poems in this book although they've traditionally are pretty good or were written by and there's one call but you're probably thinking of which is the most suspicious of because there's no number region before which may mean no not necessarily that was created in modern times and this is a poem called the condition of women even the title

doesn't quite belong to the rhetoric of two hundred years ago what's interesting about this is that because she opened up a way of speaking other people started to write poems and cousins she she listed a whole array of topics unknown aired address sex in particular or simple social rebellion in very own rebellious time but there maybe many swings in other words some between scholars think they're three four five other people became hoarse one bone at least they signed her name to their palms because she had open abdomen for what they're talking about so here's that the condition of women in vietnam is the travelers find and sisters you know how it is on one hand the bawling baby on the other your husband sliding on your stomach does little song still howling at their side yet everything must be put in order rushing around all helter skelter husband and child what obligations

sister you know how it is really read another one somewhere but deadly a poem of hers and maybe one of the most famous is called on sharing her husband screw the fate that makes you share a man one couple's undercut and blankets the others call every now and then well maybe or maybe not once or twice a month olds like nothing you try to stick to a microphone rice the rice is rotten you slay like the maid but without pay if i'd known how it would go i think i would've been below her mother was a lot less nerdy concubines well albeit again a high ranking animal sounds like those are stories you might hear an oprah and in some ways you satisfy be oprah hunger in the avenues society to you there's a beautiful home dedicated to her job at forty two then emperor acute trees brother younger brother who is in hanoi

and he was escorting a chinese investor around the city and they came to a place in the lake where close one is supposed to have been buried in his when he wrote here the lake is filled with low doses tell the flower girls depicts i'm not stepping on host one who's brave in the golden springs beyond she's still angry about lost love lipstick dry power faded to unintended swan who has gone so this is probably maybe twenty years after her death on it clear she was in person but he's talking about last long and this is her central theme was we in is that even these notion for lovers so faded and it's actually a pre ordained in heaven and that even if two people try to avoid it or for circumstances beyond their control never come together they will that within three incarnations they will have to join in it's something she was

looking for a life has always looking for men as clever she was then for a year true love as well and of course no information ever again something women are looking for right now right now what happened in the end to this woman and you say that her husband ended up being executed would happen to her after that no one is very much at all about some trouble she married because she wrote poems about those troubled we know about places she's visited because the reporters it was unknown until nineteen seventy four in fact her husband had been a high ranking manner we now know by name and so and because of the outrageousness of the of what you write about so often many people believe she was a fiction no words a fictional preacher created by some mandarin who dared not write about these things under his own name and he gets a naive you and knowing there's another historic record in the kitchen of the system

the legend about or wasn't she was so clever and this may be true so clever that she ran tea shops in hanoi what was then pretend on her mom and that young man who had just passing through exams would come and banter with prada match wits with her poetry as a kind of game the midst of this but and that one of them has just one store that one of them had come in place for high in the exams in showed up with his younger brother tea shop made went back to warehouse one was to tell her that there was another young guys won the match wits with her in poetry and she work on a carpet laid back our young men are supposed to fainting dead away cause the couple so impossible to respond to his younger brothers poster doused with water to browse then he answered with a cup at which the major factor host one homeless post and looked at it and said not that i'm

married can you show love for a woman to have such acclaimed in that place and time are you in that particular place in early or maybe not so much with hundreds of years earlier reading these women were leaving peasant armies into battle on her own war elephants that such figures are famous when figures national heroes are famous for history but by her time to confucianism of the les dynasty which itself was crumbling have become so calcified and rigid but everything has a metered been requisitioned out so that the number of wired is an individual in a certain place in society can have would be right now so you had a follows rules for instance she wrote poems in favor of having children out of wedlock actually forbid notion of the country girls did this all the time and it was no radiation but for a woman no post one whose class to have a will a child out of wedlock was punishable by death and particularly awful in a war

elephant would be brought up movie yes that lie down and the elephants foot would be placed on their stomach and more until the woman and child pregnant women and unborn trump b q on southers as if there are two standards of conduct one for the high born in another for the common people you're also working on a project to try to preserve the culture of this mausoleum glitch we've begun a foundation has been a spinoff from this book myself and to be in these experts on computers in linguistics and the foundations called of the enemy's noam preservation foundation and we want to say you know i'm from going completely extinct in this life as a center seventy nine million newly that the attendees thirty can read know and yet a thousand years of their heritages walked up and all that's john taliban professor of english at north carolina state university and the translator of the work of nineteenth century viennese poet who was

one who the book is called stringer since the work of hans one who he's a little vanity his new book it takes time and money to bring you our team were hearing from today now's the time to show your support for in depth stories on w wincing the number to call is one eight hundred nine six to ninety six to one the pain you're listening to the state of things on ninety one point five w and c and mary heart that no discussion with raley

native and writer armistead maupin mother was known to many readers and television viewers as the author of the tales of the city lofton who is now based in san francisco has written a new book called the night listener it's based on his own life experience as a gay man facing middle age i generally describe the nih listeners being emotionally autobiographical i found from long experience that when i write about my own life my own feelings i'm able to connect more closely with the readers than when i'm inventing something out of whole cloth so i have borrowed elements of my own life in a big way more than i ever have before this novel but that doesn't mean that i can play fast and loose with the facts in order heightened the drama of any given situation so it's always risky to say that it's autobiographical because and people assume that everything is true which is not the case but certain the feelings are accurate and i have cast a number of people in my life

in this story of my own invention as a character there very strongly resembles my own father on another that resembles my ex partner carrie anderson mm hum so yeah i get pretty close to it but not so close that i i would feel responsible for them oh oh the main character in the book is a man who's in midlife and he's going through a lot of emotional challenges his lover leaves him and he's trying to come to grips with his own father and then he meets a young boy who's very ill and has written a wonderful book yeah about his own horrific experience so growing up during which time he was abused by his parents all and sold out basically as a sex slave but this kid who who has so fixated on on gabriel moon the radio storyteller has this amazing bright strong spirit that's extremely comforting to

this man who feels his own life seems a fairly un dramatic by contrast and they and they connect by way of the telephone so the novel is about away we imbue voices with a certain power away voices sound seduce us and comfort us and mislead us i wanna talk too much about the plot because there there's a big shift that occurs about halfway through the novel a friend of mine once said it's not what his novels were you you say don't give away the ending you have to say don't give away the middle i was heavily influenced by the film vertigo when i was a teenager and i'd always wanted to write a novel that created that same feeling when i think of as a kind of thriller of the heart and the mystery is all about the human condition and and personal feelings of longing and love and loss but it is a mystery it is it is something that makes you wonder all the way through i don't think i'm giving

away too much to buy it by saying that the main character is from a southern town and you yourself are from a southern town yeah i am i am i grew up in raleigh and i went to chapel hill graduated back in nineteen sixty six as a matter fact i just finished doing a signing at the bulls had bookshop and it was very eerie going to be returning to my old stomping grounds so many years later i was served the department vice president of the class of nineteen sixty six and as such i got to spend the classes money i spend on a memorial to thomas wolfe it's on the unc campus so as we speak are still do you think that you've still got a lot of that in southern upbringing and you you don't sound like you have much of a southern accent left i don't know that i ever had one very strongly i think for some reason i was the one member of our family with this character i have a southern accent it gets had mine gets thicker when i read from the southern

passages of the tightest shirts really funny i found myself sort of falling back into those patterns and i liked being able to celebrate my southern roots this time around of the novel i'm often described as a california writer but i think of myself in many ways as a southern writer i think of myself as having come from that that tradition of storytelling the anecdotal nature of writing it hurt your butt calls himself a fabulous too what exactly does any well it's a fabulous fabulous is a good term because it can be someone who invent stories is a storyteller who i am but as a sort of dark side of it and it can also be a nice way of calling someone a wire you make things up well that's what a liar doesn't that's what a storyteller doesn't the end of the line between the two can be quite blurred sometimes especially if you have that instinct from an early age gabriel moon warns the reader that he he's like the magpie he only save the shiny stuff

what all he really cares about is the geometry of the story as he puts it and that's very much the way i am i i can i collect stories of things that happened to me and i polish them and make them work really well in a dramatic way real life tends to be a haphazard and contradictory and boring most of the time and is the job of the writer to whittle away all that stuff in shape it into something that's compelling and that's not that far different from the process of someone is lying to you so the real issue in the night listener is ends up being who's lying and to whom and about what you're listening to the state of things are ninety one point five w and c i'm mary hart met today we're talking with artist at martin author of a new book called the night listener a lot of people know you from tales of the city from the book and from the series that impacted the success of that have on your

career well that was my career that is my career my last novel was unrelated details of the city maybe the moon and except for a few minor characters that crossed over i might add that the same is true of the night listener there's a character in the night listener who was born in tales of the city it was my way of reminding myself that i'm still writing in the same universe but i am i think that it's safe to say that my success is really based on the mythology of tales of the city and the degree which it's survived over the last twenty five years is very surprising now to go and find teenagers in a line in my book signings who are completely wrapped up in the story of tales of the city that story that occurred before they were born i thought oh that is extremely of them are old thing at the time i was writing for a newspaper and writing about events as i saw them unfolding in san francisco so in some ways it was a kind of private joke i thought only san franciscans will get this but fortunately i was proven

to be wrong and has had success pretty much everywhere now the first three tales of the city books are currently on the french paperback best seller list their of their booming over there in the moment and it's about to be appear on the internet in japan japanese so whatever it managed to hit on there in terms of my description of this extended family of people who are gay straight and in between seems to be finally understood boehner the world at large some critics have said that your big success story and of the gay press but you don't necessarily see yourself just writing for people who are gay well i'm not because that's not his danny alive in my books it's a wonderful mix of people and i've always been writing for everyone i had to i was working initially in a daily newspaper so i have to assume that anyone picked up the paper should

be able to find something to entice him or heard or read further and so my whole effort was towards making the story is universally interesting as possible and i think it's a daily that bomb that makes is is why it's been successful it's precisely the appeal of that everyone feels validated by everyone feels connected to their own friends because we don't move about the world in a way but i don't know any gay people who have only gay friends and i don't buy any straight people will mean either refused to people who have only state fans or think they have only straight friends put them by large in the world today we don't we don't make those distinctions about each other anymore how i'm happy we've arrived at that point where we can just be human beings and her away to each other in that way in find the commonality of our experience because that's the way we move forward i think one of the characters in tales of the city right his parents a letter and yells and that he's gay and how that correspond

do your only experience exactly it was the same thing it was that was the way i told my parents that i was gay bi or having that character write that letter to his parents my parents were subscribing to the seven just a chronicle in order to follow the cereal and anita bryant's anti gay crusade was getting whipped up in florida and i was out everyone i knew and seven sisko were not my parents back in north carolina and i knew that it was high time that i told them what i was about and who i was and that i love them but i didn't hold him responsible for my homosexuality and if if they were responsible i thank them for that because i felt that it was the great joy of my life i had the character say this to his parents and my parents realized i was talking to them and that's the way i took care of that i've often used fiction to explain myself to the people

i love there are passages in the night listener that do that in terms of my own relationship with my father in raleigh and but the really good news is that my father has been enormously supportive when it comes to this work i think it must have shocked him a little to see me saying something's implant that i may have never even said to him in private but it clear the air in a dramatic way and i think brought us much closer together recently more certain of our love for each other than we ever have been in the past and so on and so after writing committees continues to serve me in this way what was your reaction to some of the controversy over aereo tales of the city on tv it seems at first it was on pbs and then it was on cable well it was all set to be to continue on pbs tales of the city when it appeared on pbs was the highest rated drama series ever broadcast by the network had a huge critical and

arm public response but a tiny handful of people led by the reverend donald wildmon of the family marriage and family association down in tupelo mississippi the cultural capital of the us on this theft organized against the show and ann gave a very misleading picture of it to members of congress it was condemned in the legislatures of georgia and south carolina and oklahoma was a bomb threat in chattanooga tennessee at the pbs station the night the show aired and all that pressure combined made pbs run scared from tj from supporting and running the second series they were all set to do it by the way but they pay knuckled under to that pressure pbs the president of pbs changed during that time and there were a lot of people who felt that newt gingrich's anti pbs attitudes required real caution on the part of a network i'm sure they're kicking their own butts right now because

tales of the city is very much in line with a lot of things are being seen on network tv now it's a very sweet story really it's very innocent the fact that there were men kiss each other on camera i think was what was most shocking to people was very new world that was very new them and i'm very proud that we pioneered that i remember the night we shot that scene and i thought i'm i'm really very proud that i've been able to humanize this experience for so many people because anybody who's really a kiss is just a kiss anybody who's ever had the thrill of a kiss from whoever the nose knows what it's all about and that's all i was trying to say that we feel the same thing that that any romantic heterosexual couple feels when that moment occurs this book was published in audio form on the way out there wouldn't you decide to be that carrie anderson who remains my family and

my business partner heavy idea he he looked at me said look this guy that so much like you is on npr he tells the stories on npr home so why don't you think about recording it a man broadcasting in in this new streaming audio format on the web i don't even know what the new streaming audio format was i didn't know you could get get the words out of your computer i mean hear things like that the radio but home alone consequently we became the first that i was there was the first novel ever broadcast in audio form on the way and in its entirety prior to publication and to hear now from the people that i meet around the country he was quite popular they they would tune in every night listen to another chapter the way people used to listen to radio cereals back in the forties and

fifties it was perfectly suited to the material it's good as i mentioned before the banal is all about voices and that the way we connect with them so it adds an additional dimension to have me reading work i am also acutely aware that i've never written a paragraph without imagining how would sound when read aloud my whole process is about making my written language like my spoken language so it's very much like being in a conversation with me one when you listen to the to the spoken word cereal you seem to have a real ear for dialogue the dc writing more for tv more from movies perhaps is as well as writing books it has occurred to me that my next project might be an original screenplay i think that might be a great deal of fun and the lovely adapting of tales of the city for television so i've learned how to do it and i think it might be fun to take on something brand new and modern the great frustration about adapting tales of the city is that i'm

working on material thats twenty years old and i've always enjoyed reflecting on the book the quality of the times whenever i'm writing i think that's that that accounts for the success of the serial it's very much in the moment when you read it on the page the night listener is is set in modern times of course and i don't like to write a screenplay i think that does the same thing that has some something new to say the bailout of wonderfully inspirational screenplays in the last couple years things like being john malkovich and american beauty both of those movies made me want to go out that's artist at a north carolina native has a new book out called the night listener that's it for this edition of the state of things be sure to join us next week for more stories about the people and places of north carolina that's next saturday at fortune around here ninety one point five w nc if you have a question or a comment about the show

let us know you can call us at nine one nine sixty five one thousand you can email us at s o t e w n c dot org and hear archived editions of the show or website a w and c dot org the producer of the state of things is pollock krasner i'm mary hartman thanks for listening and for your support and shows like the state of things are only possible because of your continued support and now's the time to show that support by calling one eight hundred and six to ninety six to one