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1 month ago | 
publicseminar.org | Gabriela Rendón |Tracy Rosenthal |Leonardo Vilchis |Evangeline Riddiford Graham
Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles (2017) | Creative CommonsHow do we remake our cities for the people who actually live in them? Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, two cofounders of the largest tenants’ union in the country, propose an answer in their new book, Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis (Haymarket, 2024).
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1 month ago | 
publicseminar.org | Gant Roberson |Federico Finchelstein |Joseph Matthews |Evangeline Riddiford Graham
11th Anniversary Celebration of El Maizal Commune (2020) | Katrina Kozarek / Venezuela AnalysisIn the central western region of Venezuela, a vast scenery of fertile land blends with the llanero(herdsman) culture of the people of Simón Planas township. Adults make use of children’s bicycles (received as Christmas gifts from the government) to meet the exigencies of day-to-day life, evoking “a forgotten episode in a magical realist novel,” in the words of author Chris Gilbert.
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2 months ago | 
publicseminar.org | Madeleine Adams |Joseph Matthews |Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Helen Schulman
A bigger burro? | Jürgen Scheeff / Unsplash LicenseIt’s difficult to write about The Rest Is Silence (trans. from the Spanish by Aaron Kerner, New York Review Books 2024) without sounding like Eduardo Torres, the puffed-up literary critic and protagonist of Augusto Monterroso’s metatextual satire—but I will do my best.
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2 months ago | 
publicseminar.org | Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Claire Potter |Alex Rossen |Assaf David
For years now, those of us who are paying attention have heard a range of political positions, from those held by moderate Democrats to socialism, described by MAGA Republicans as something called “the Left.” Sometimes “the Left” is simply invoked by the shorthand “they,” as in: “They tried to assassinate Donald Trump;” or more commonly, “They want you to believe,” followed by some caricature of an idea about women, race, gender, or sexuality.
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2 months ago | 
pw.org | Evangeline Riddiford Graham
There are multiple pathways from Anne Carson’s poetry to Ross Gay’s prose. One need only listen, the Poetry Center at the University of Arizona in Tucson reminds us, and follow the trail of audience participation, decolonization, and ants. In August 2024 the center announced the complete transcription of Voca, the audiovisual archive of its poetry recordings, including its longtime reading and lecture series, which began in 1962.
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Jan 23, 2025 | 
publicseminar.org | Hannah McIntyre |Catherine Texier |Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Helen Schulman
Diana and Cupid (1761) | Pompeo Batoni / Metropolitan Museum of Art Public Domain CollectionAn older woman and a younger man—a trope that operates on elements of fantasy and plays with conventional expectations. The dynamic between an older woman and a younger man is complex; it’s looked down upon, and it never gets tiresome.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Michael Inman |Mary Karmelek |Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Helen Schulman
Postcard of Polly’s Restaurant, Greenwich Village (ca. 1917) | Jessie Tarbox Beals / Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Miss Mathilde Mourraille, 1938This past October, the New York Public Library launched Becoming Bohemia: Greenwich Village, 1912–1923, an exhibition documenting one of the most impactful countercultures in American history.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Mitchell Abidor |Edwin Frank |Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Helen Schulman
“Teenage Boy Reading” | Roy Zalesky / Smithsonian Museum / CC0In the years that Edwin Frank has been at the head of the NYRB Classics publishing house, he has revived forgotten or out of print novels like John Williams’s Stoner and Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate. He has also made available the work of previously unknown authors from America and around the world.
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Oct 11, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Claire Potter |Hannah Burns |Shelley Martin
In Episode 16 of Multi-Verse, Devon Walker-Figueroa reads her poem “Private Lessons,” in which a dying man determines that his young pupil must become a prima ballerina, and chats with host Evangeline Riddiford Graham about the uses of silence, breaking Dante’s rhyme scheme, and what it means to be haunted by lessons long since over. “What use?” her dancer wonders, “in maligning his methods now?”This is not your grandfather’s ghost story.
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Jul 2, 2024 | 
publicseminar.org | Evangeline Riddiford Graham |Nicole Hemmer |Natalia Mehlman Petrzela |Neil Young
It’s true that we very slightly butcher the plot of Brigadoon in this episode of Multi-Verse. But, with apologies to theatre buffs, that’s kind of the idea. An oasis, as poet Philip Metres points out in Episode 15, is evanescent by nature. There, and then not there. What does it mean to seek refuge when the oasis is impermanent? And what does it mean, years later, to remember a mirage?
