Billy Collins | Ballistics

October 6, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is a great day on this show. My next guest is a wonderful poet, one of the best in history, in my opinion. His newest book is called Ballistics, it came out on Random House. Wonderful book, and features one of the best poems in my little collection that I keep at my home, which shows a picture of a bullet going through a book, which I love. Welcome to the show, Billy Collins.

Billy Collins: Thank you for having me on.

Dr. Kent: And tell me a little about this collection Ballistics.

Billy Collins: Well, it just came out last year, so it’s in terms of poetry production it’s still very new. You don’t have to get out an article every day like sports writers do. I don’t know, it’s as you said, it doesn’t really have, well it has the two usual themes. The themes of all my poetry are me and death. Those are basically the two threads that run through it. I don’t really have a vision of a book and then write thematic books, except for those two rather important themes. So I just write one poem at a time, basically, and when it comes time to, when I think I have enough poems that may constitute a book, I start putting them together in a pile and seeing what it looks like. And then there’s some organization work. But I sort of figure that because I’m writing each poem there’ll be some kind of thematic connection between it all.

Dr. Kent: Well I’d love to start out by, one of the things I’ve wanted to ask you is, you were the poet laureate under one of the least loved Presidents. What, do you have anything to do with the administration when you are poet laureate? What does that role entail? Was it surprising to you?

Billy Collins: Well I want to first of all take issue with the preposition “under.” A poet laureate does not serve under the White House. The poet laureate, in fact, has an office on top of the Library of Congress. So there’s no connection between the office of the poet laureate and the current, or any administration.

Dr. Kent: Thank goodness.

Billy Collins: Yeah, the poet laureate is appointed by the Librarian of Congress, that’s James Billington, and you’re basically an employee of the Library of Congress, and that’s where your office is, and that’s where you work out of. It’s as separate as the Bureau of Engraving, probably, from the White House. And did it come as a surprise? Yes it did. It was a complete and total wrecking ball from outer space because it’s one of those things I never even actually dreamed of. I never even fantasized about it. It seemed completely kind of much too dignified for the likes of me. And when I finally got to my office in Washington, which is gorgeous, it has a balcony and a view of the Capitol, and it’s quite, very well appointed, hanging on the walls are photographs of previous poets laureate. And when I sat down at my desk they all seemed to be looking down and saying, “What are you doing here? There must be some mistake. Please get security.” So I felt pretty undeserving of the role. At least in the beginning. I kind of grew into it.

Dr. Kent: And it was a difficult time to come into that role, of course, in 2001, where the country wasn’t really keen on comedy or arts, like poetry. What did it feel like in that role in 2001?

Billy Collins: Well I felt like I didn’t want to be in that role. One of the things that happened, I was appointed in June or July of that year, and so 911 happened a few months later. And at that point, for quite a while I was, I thought I was going to be interviewed to death. Because everyone wanted, for some reason, wanted the poet laureate to not just comment, but sort of provide some kind of consolation, or point people toward some poems that would be appropriate to read at this time, due to the fact that no other art form, I don’t think, was looked to for that kind of remedying, or that kind of solace. You know, ballet starts got called up and said what should we do about 911, or movie directors even. So it was interesting that poetry is something that people do indeed turn to in times of crisis, like that’s why they read them at wedding receptions.

Dr. Kent: Right, exactly. (laughter)

Billy Collins: Or funerals, I meant to say.

Dr. Kent: And funerals, yeah. The two most horrible times in a person’s life, right?

Billy Collins: Well, it’s an instability. No one’s ready to get married, and no one’s ready to die, usually. In periods of great dis-equilibrium, poetry particularly with its steady cadence and its use of rhyme has a way of stabilizing things. And because it can be recited over and over again it has a way of ritualizing and calming things down, I think, even regardless of its content.

Dr. Kent: And of all of the poet laureates staring down at you, I mean, the list is incredible, from William Stafford to Stanley Kunitz. What did you, did you go back and page through some of their poetry from their years in the service of the country?

Billy Collins: Well I’d already read their works, I didn’t really consciously go back and see what they produced as laureates. In fact, I had the feeling that if they, if the laureateship affected their production or output as it affected mine, there’d actually be very little to read because one is so distracted by publications and interviews and doing things for the media that one hardly has time to write. In fact I began to suspect that it was some kind of government plot that the government really would single out a poet who seemed to be doing very well and living a happy and productive artistic life, and then make that person poet laureate and thereby bring an end to their writing. So I thought it was probably a way of, it’s a very subtle form of censorship.

Dr. Kent: That’s really funny. And that kind of brings up another thing that comes to my mind, you know, people talk about you as one of the successful poets, which is sort of a contradiction in terms for most poets. What’s it like to be, I guess, leading a world of underappreciated artists?

Billy Collins: Well, I guess when I think about it, it makes me uncomfortable. I just try not to think about it very much. I don’t know, I mean, I think something did happen to my writing. I did, there’s no denying that I’ve acquired a kind of unusually broad readership, and I’m always grateful for that. How it happened, I’m not really sure. I think the poems are okay, but you have to have something else beside that, and I think National Public Radio was an enormous boost for me because if your poem is on National Public Radio, you’re reading to an audience of two to four million people, which is a lot of church basement readings thrown together.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely. Well, you’re also a big favorite of Garrison Keillor’s, and what, last year or the year before, I think it was the year before, we saw you at Town Hall reading some poetry.

Billy Collins: Well he’s been very good to me and very good for poetry itself, I think. His taste does not always overlap mine, but no one’s does. But the Writer’s Almanac presents a poem a day, and he has had poets on his Program Companion, and he’s an anthologizer of two volumes of poetry at least, collections, and he’s just put out a book of his own sonnets. So he is a self-described English major for life, and he’s been, of all those kind of wasteful hours that you can hear on the radio, just people playing records and talking right wing politics, Garrison Keillor uses radio at its highest level. You know, lives, entertainment, and particularly with his interesting poetry. I think he does a great service for the art.

Dr. Kent: Well I’d love to have you read a poem, if you’re willing. Do you have any form the newest collection Ballistics that you might want to read to us?

Billy Collins: Sure, I’d be happy to. Let me read a poem called Adage, which is a poem that plays around with sayings and axioms and that kind of thing, proverbs.

Adage

When it’s late at night and branches 
are banging against the windows, 
you might think that love is just a matter
of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself 
into the fire of someone else, 
but it’s a little more complicated than that.
It’s more like trading the two birds
 who might be hiding in that bush 
for the one you are not holding in your hand.
A wise man once said that love 
was like forcing a horse to drink 
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.
Let us be clear about something. Love is not as simple as getting up on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.
No, it’s more like the way the pen feels after it has defeated the sword. It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.
You look at me through the halo of the last candle and tell me that love is an ill wind that has no turning, a road that blows no good,
but I am here to remind you, as our shadows tremble on the walls, that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

Dr. Kent: A beautiful poem from Ballistics, which came out on Random House. Of course, we’re talking to Billy Collins. What a great poem. Your poetry has such a, I don’t want to say it’s developed a new school in poets, but it kind of is a real inspiration for young poets because you use an element of comedy that is in my opinion really masterful. How do you blend, maybe you don’t do it consciously, but how does comedy find a place into your poetry?

Billy Collins: Well, if you go back to the perspective of 911, you would think when people were saying we live in these very uncertain times that it really would require humor, you know as a way of again, kind of stabilizing things, or relieving anxiety. I think of humor as a sort of device in poetry, as a way of engaging a reader and weaving a reader into something. Also I think if you provoke a laugh or a humorous reaction, you become somewhat more reliable than another speaker in a poem. At least you can be, at least you and the readers share that common ground for a line or two. And I think of humor sort of as a portal into the serious. It’s a way to access more serious business. I certainly don’t think of humor as being kind of the be all and end all of a poem. I think it’s, I like poems that start funny and then become serious, or they start serious and they crack themselves up at the end. I like something that turns either away or towards humor, so the poem is always looking for a new bearing.

Dr. Kent: When do you feel like you started to really develop your own voice as a poet? Has there been a point where all of a sudden you started to feel comfortable in your own skin with your poetry on the published page or in readings or just in general?

Billy Collins: It’s said that everyone is born with about 300 bad poems in them. And I think I had maybe 5 or 600 bad poems that I had to write, you know, and certainly in high school and graduate college, and graduate school and beyond, until I kind of got them out of my system. I think I wasn’t really in, it wasn’t until I was in my 30’s that I got a sense that I was writing in a voice that I could call my own. And I think the way I got there was a matter of choosing a different set of influences and then combining them in, I don’t think my voice is original, I think maybe if there’s anything original, it’s in the way that I’ve combined influences. You know, like taking humor from someone and taking darkness from another person, learning how to do the dash from Emily Dickinson, learning intimacy from Walt Whitman. I mean, you take so many little pieces from different poets and then if you can find a way to kind of put them into a new configuration, that’s about the most originality you can expect to achieve.

Dr. Kent: Well and there’s, some of the work that I love the best I don’t know how much you were involved in it, the animated poems that are online are just spectacular. To see, to listen to the word, to see visuals, what’s it been like to sort of be brought into, I guess Web 2.0 world?

Billy Collins: Well, I was completely complicitent in all that. That was really started at the request of the Sundance Channel, the television channel, and they wanted to, someone came up with the idea of animating some poems. And then they hired Jay Walter Thompson, the ad agency to approach me, and then they brought me into the studio and I recorded the poems, and then I was able to kind of approve of the animations. And I think all but one were completely acceptable, and they got a very hip group of animators. You know, this was not Hanna Barbera stuff, (inaudible) and it’s Eastern European influenced animators. So I’m very happy with them. I’m a great believer in poetry in surprising places. When I was poet laureate I established a poetry channel on Delta Airlines, which lasted for a year or so. So in flying around you could put on your headset and listen to the poems. But I’m all for poems on billboards or subways, poems that hop up on the radio, and poems that you see on You Tube. I think it’s, poetry needs to jump out of the book. I mean, I still write for the page, but I think it’s good that poetry is kind of getting out of the leather bound book in the study and getting into more of the mainstream of contemporary life. And you know, poetry on ipods is something that is kind of growing, a growing business.

Dr. Kent: And there was, in the poem you read there’s a line that I connected to. And the fun thing about poetry is everyone hears it or reads it in a different way. And you talked about the pen that feels, how the pen feels after it defeated the sword. There’s just a little bit of politics in that. How do you sneak in sort of your feelings about current political happenings and things like that into your poetry?

Billy Collins: Well I try not to, really. I don’t want to write poems that try to keep up with the headlines, you know, as (inaudible) called poetry, the “news that saved new.” And you can talk about yesterday, but who wants to read yesterday’s newspaper, but most of the poems I’m reading were written yesterday or 500 years ago, and the good ones still hold up. It’s a delicate balance I guess, I suppose some images that would suggest a look toward the political world find their way into the poems, but basically politics is about history, or politics is part of history. And poetry is not really about history. Poetry is about time and mortality and someone, I forget whom, defined history as “the violent misuse of time.” And I think that’s where I sort of have my sense of it, is that poetry subject is time and the passing of time, and finally human mortality.

Dr. Kent: And again, back to what you said, all of your poetry is about yourself and about death.

Billy Collins: Well, isn’t that true. It’s a little unavoidable. Well that’s a great subject that lyric poetry is mortality. You know, that’s the shadow of mortality, it falls across most pages, and the oldest theme in poetry is probably carpe diem, and that just means that you have to carpe your diems because you don’t have an infinite number of them. And that urgency that you find in lyric poetry comes out of the sense of not using your time particularly wisely, but being aware of, even if you’re squandering it, knowing that you’re doing it.

Dr. Kent: Well, I would love to hear another poem from you. Do you have another one laying around that you could read for us?

Billy Collins: Well, that’s pretty much what they do, here’s a poem, well this is a sonnet, and it’s kind of a reaction against something, which is the development of, condo developments, some gated communities, and it’s about the way they’re named. It’s a poem that’s called Golden Years.

All I do these drawn-out days is sit in my kitchen at Ridge where there are no pheasants to be seen and last time I looked, no ridge.
I could drive over to Falls and spend the day there playing bridge, but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.
I know a widow at Fox Run
and other with a Condo at Smokey Ledge. One of them smokes, and neither can run, so I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.
Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge? I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.

Dr. Kent: (laughter) That so beautifully expresses the world we live in. How do you write? What’s your process? Do you wake up early in the morning, are you an owl? Do you write here and there on napkins?

Billy Collins: I don’t have any real what you would call work habits. I just write when it comes to me. There’s a lot of waiting around and there’s a certain amount of impatience that comes into play at some point. But yeah, I can write while driving, I can get up in the middle of the night and write. The best time is usually in the morning before I’ve heard a lot of language, before I’ve gotten into a conversation or been influenced by the language of journalism or the language of television or radio. You know, in the morning you’re closer to the dream state, not that I would bore anyone with my literal dreams, but you’re a little more open minded. You haven’t gone and set yourself up against the day in some way. So that’s usually the best time for me, but usually I’m ready to drop anything at any time if something comes along.

Dr. Kent: And you have a very active reading life. You do a lot of public readings. What’s the difference for you between the poetry creating and the poetry reading?

Billy Collins: Well, as I said, I write for the page. I write in a room in silence with a pencil, and in thinking about a reader, not anyone in particular, clearly, but going back over the lines as I write them and asking myself how would an average reader take that in. How would a person who doesn’t really, isn’t privy to my inner thoughts, what would they think about that? So I’m writing to that one person. But reading in front of a group of people is strange at first because it’s very different from the experience of composition. I mean here’s 50, or if you’re lucky hundreds of people listening to you, and that audience of one has strangely multiplied into an auditorium full of people. And I don’t know, there are a couple of, it’s enjoyable to read. You can sense the reaction. I mean, when you’re sitting at your desk, you don’t hear anyone applauding you, you don’t hear laughing. So it’s interesting to take the silent piece of paper, say it in front of a microphone, and then experience all of these noises of people laughing or sighing or clapping or leaving, or whatever they’re up to. But it’s a very different experience, I should say.

Dr. Kent: And in that experience you’ve spoken many places, one of which is Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I know that when my parents have any sort of guests of significance they parade them by the Praying Hands. So you read in very interesting locations, whether there or in the middle of New York City. What’s the difference for you? Do you think, who’s my audience? Who are these people staring up at me?

Billy Collins: I do remember the Praying Hands, I was taken there and took a photograph. I hate to say this, it sounds like such a cliché, but I think audiences are pretty much the same. You know, it’s like people say, people are the same wherever you go. I get the same basic reaction. Maybe it’s because people who would actually come to a poetry reading have a shared predisposition with other poetry loving people, whether it’s in Tulsa or the lower east side of New York. So I don’t find, I find if I go to England or Ireland, it’s very different, because I start realizing that my poetry is very American, there are a lot of references. Like this one poem where I mention a state flower. You know, every flower has a state, and when I read that poem in England I realized that they thought I was saying an estate flower, because they don’t have state flowers. So I didn’t realize how American my poetry was until I read it in England. I think going across the country I find that audiences are, just the fact that they would come out to hear someone read poetry makes them rather unusual people.

Dr. Kent: And what do you think about the way that a publisher or an editor or you yourself have to combine poems into a book. It’s sort of like an album or something, you have to find some sort of common thread between your poetry. How is that process?

Billy Collins: Well I just, to me, as I said, the themes are me and death, so they don’t have to worry about anything other than that. But I basically take all the poems and, if I have 60 or 70 poems that are potentially going to be squeezed into a book, I put them all out on the floor. I lay them all out on the floor in any order, just lay them down there. And then I walk around in my stocking feet and try to look down and try to figure out which ones want to be with the other ones. And that way I start forming little groups, and I don’t do it, the group is not based on a common subject, like every poem of a bird goes here. It’s much more mysterious than that. I’m not sure if I could explain why I think these poems should be with each other. But I do, in some way, and I keep shuffling them around until I get easily four different piles, and they become the sections of the book.

Dr. Kent: Well I would love to –

Billy Collins: The thing is no one, sorry –

Dr. Kent: Go ahead.

Billy Collins: I was going to say that nobody, hardly anybody reads a book of poems from front to back. You know, except maybe a reviewer or an editor. Most people pick up a book of poems and just kind of cruise around in it or, you know, treat it like a slip book almost. So all the effort an author expends in organizing his or her poems into this thematic book is entirely wasted on readers. And it’s a fact of vanity.

Dr. Kent: So I would love to hear one more poem, if you have another one handy. And the book of course is called Ballistics, and it’s available everywhere. It’s a wonderful book by Billy Collins.

Billy Collins: Well let me read a book that is certainly not political, and maybe really is potential nonsense, but I’ll read it for you anyway. It’s called Hippos on Holiday.

Hippos on Holiday

is really not the title of a movie
but if it was I would be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and their big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theater.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.

I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?

Dr. Kent: I love how you turn the tables and always keep us guessing as readers of your poetry. And it’s been such an honor chatting with you. And the book is again called Ballistics by Billy Collins.

Billy Collins: Well, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. I’m very happy to have been on your program, and talk to your listeners.

Dr. Kent: And there’s a whole bunch of great stuff that listeners can also find online, including those animated poems. Google that, or go to his Wikipedia page and there’s a whole bunch of audio readings and poems and all sorts of great things. And then support Billy Collins and his publisher by going you and getting a copy of Ballistics. Well thank you so much for being on the show, this has been a real honor, and I can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

Billy Collins: Me too. Thank you very much. Take care.

Dr. Kent: All right, my next guest on the show is a musician. His name is Johnny Helm, and we’re going to listen to a couple songs from him and then talk to him about his latest album. Here’s a song called Shed from Johnny Helm.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Entertainment, Poetry, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Lynne Serafinn | The Garden of the Soul

October 6, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Dr. Kent and friends. As they say on the little announcement, this is Sound Authors, and my next guest on the show is Lynne Serafinn, and she’s written a book called The Garden of the Soul: Lessons From Four Flowers That Unearth the Self. She’s a best seller in the UK with this book, and I’m excited to talk to her about it. Welcome to the show, Lynne.

Lynne Serafinn: Hi there, Dr. Kent. Thank you for having me today.

Dr. Kent: Absolutely. Well let’s talk about this book. Tell me a little about it.

Lynne Serafinn: Ok, it actually made, it squeaked into the bestseller list in the United States as well, in the Self Help category. It was, here in the UK it was in the Spirituality and Mind, Body, Spirit categories as well. It’s actually a book of my own personal transformation. It uses metaphors of the four flowers to represent different aspects of the self that are parts of us that need to bloom in order to be whole people. They’re aspects that unfolded for me as I went through my own transformation. People always tell me, “How did you think them up?” I didn’t, they kind of found me.

Dr. Kent: And what is it like for you, the process of writing a self-help book? I’ve often heard that it’s a real transformative process for the person writing as well.

Lynne Serafinn: Yes, that’s true. Well, I never intended to write a self-help book. I just wanted to write. And actually I was writing lots of little stories for many years, like really short stories. I called them vignettes. And they were like, you know, I’d go somewhere and I’d see something and I always see metaphors in things. I see metaphors in real life things. In the book for instance, I’ve used the metaphor swinging on a swing as a child for being stuck in a situation holding onto the chains and not letting go of (inaudible), not being able to fly. Or I watch the river quite a lot here in Bedford, I lived in England, too, you may not know from my accent, but my accent kind of floats in and out, but I lived in Britain. I’m American, but I’m also British, I’m dual citizen, and I lived here for ten years. So anyway, by the river, I might watch the river and see things in that that makes me think about life. And just different metaphors that hit me. But the process of writing a self-help book never came into the picture at all. But one day I literally just woke up and I had written a fairy tale some years before that was quite spontaneous and I didn’t quite know what to do with it, in which these four flowers had appeared. And the four flowers were the rose, the iris, the daffodil and the lily, and I kind of sensed that they had something to do with personality and self and being a whole person, but I didn’t know exactly what. And then about two and a half years ago I just woke up literally woke up in bed one morning and I said, Well, I understand this emotionally and on a personal level. You know, I could type metaphorically what they represent. And what they came to represent were the four principles of give, receive, become and be. And I found that they’re very rich principles, because they’re not quite as straightforward as just giving and receiving, that one might think that you give to somebody and you get back. It’s not like that, giving, for instance, I won’t go into them that deeply, but giving, for instance, is anything that comes out from you. Like personal expression. Life purpose, drive, courage, boldness, all these things that come out from you that are like an arrow coming out. That’s giving. And then receiving is being really open, really aware, it’s about holding your senses open so that you can see opportunity, you can appreciate and you can feel all of the things around you. You can see the gift in every moment. So to flow between the two become a balancing act, it’s how we interact in the world. And becoming and being our symbolic (inaudible), a chance to change and growth and expansion. And from that also means letting go and rebirth. And being is the opposite, in that it’s a sense of continuity and intimate. You know, just being self and always knowing who you are. And those two things are very important, too. You’re not happy in life if you’re stagnant, and you’re also not happy in life if you don’t have a sense of continuity. So having these balances between these four principles are what I found were the key to my own transformation and also to recovering when invariably life makes you wobble and you may fall out of balance. And these are ways that I find that I can bring myself back. And also I’m a coach, I’m a personal transformation coach, and I use these principles with my clients, amongst many other things. But these are ways that we can sustain ourselves when we actually have found a reasonable amount of self-awareness, these are the kinds of things that we can use to sustain ourselves. And yes it was a transformative business. I wrote the book three times, I did three drafts before I was finally convinced that I had shown up fully in the book, and I had let go of all of my hang-ups. So it was a very interesting process of writing, just surrendering to the writing, surrendering to the metaphors, and not getting into a place where telling the reader what to think. I didn’t want to do that. That’s why I don’t actually call it a self-help book, it reads like a novel. It actually reads like a novel.

Dr. Kent: Well you’re, you have a very interesting background, and actually quite similar to mine.

Lynne Serafinn: Yeah, I noticed that.

Dr. Kent: You’ve spent a lot of time in the music industry.

Lynne Serafinn: I sure did.

Dr. Kent: And now you’re an author and a speaker, and a radio host as well. Tell me about your transformation from studying music, classical, going into pop music, starting to work with people, studying in India, you know. How do all these things hang together in your life?

Lynne Serafinn: I’m 54 years old, so you know the older you get the more you tend to live racked up in the experience category. Well, I started as a classical musician when I was very young. I started as a violinist, classical violinist. I was a professional violinist for many years in various symphonies and opera companies, I also sang opera and stuff. And just performed classically for a long time. And it was in my early 20’s that I traveled to India and wanted to learn more about Indian music. Well, I loved Indian music, I kind of never really focused home with it because it was such a complex system that I had to unlearn so much of what I already knew. So on the intellectual platform I loved it, but on the playing platform I didn’t have that much fun with it. But I really got into the philosophy and religion for quite some time. And for 20 years or more I combined, I was married at the time, and my husband and I combined the East West things into the music and also I went into, I kind of got back into my writing gradually by transcribing lectures of various Indian teachers and kind of being a ghost writer for upscale published books. You won’t see my name anywhere because I was actually a ghostwriter for them. And that kind of opened me back into the writing. In the 80’s I got into electronic music and then I really discovered my love for that. Because I got tired of, I kind of said one day I woke up and said, if I wake up one more Christmas and realize that I have to play the Nutcracker Suite one more time, I’m absolutely going to, you know, just bash this violin into a thousand pieces. And so I really wanted a change musically, I was really in a rut. There wasn’t enough challenge for me. And I never really felt myself, I did talk about this in the book, I talk about how I could not find my self-expression through the music because the music industry, at least at that point in time it was the classical industry that I (inaudible) in other aspects of the industry. The music industry I felt was very for me, restrictive. And especially the classical industry. It became too critical. And I was top critic. I could hear, I was a really good analyst and stuff, I had the best ears, I taught so many students, I’ve taught tone-deaf students how to hear. It’s just, I got really, really, really into hearing the sounds, the music totally left me. But when I got into trance music in the early 90’s, that’s when I really started getting connected again to composition, and we actually had a number one transcript in 1994. And then after a while, I kind of burnt out on that and I quit music altogether and kind of drifted around teaching and trying to find myself and went through a huge life change. After the death of my father I went through a divorce, I went through a change of life, a change of career, a change this, a change that, I changed location. And then eventually I (inaudible) the educational system and I started my life completely over again with nothing but my computer and a box of clothes and moved up here to Bedford and became a, and eventually became a coach. And now that’s what I do. And I decided yes, I want to finally be a writer. That’s what I want, finally, finally, give myself that opportunity. And to speak. To speak in public, to do workshops and tell people that you know what, you’ve got this life, step into it and have fun with it, love it, live your purpose, find your purpose. Claim it, go out and live the life you were born to live. And it’s not a selfish thing to do. The world actually needs you. The world needs you to be happy and fulfilled and to help others to be happy and fulfilled. That’s what the world is asking you to do. That’s really what the book is about. It’s a call to action for everybody to live the life they were born to live.

Dr. Kent: Well, the book is called The Garden of The Soul: Lessons From Four Flowers That Unearth the Self. And clearly Lynne Serafinn is a worthy author, and you’re going to have to check her bio out online. It’s fascinating and deep, the things she’s done, and they’re certainly also revealed in the book. And you can visit her online where?

Lynne Serafinn: Well, my book blog is at www.give-receive-become-be.com. And those are all hyphenated. So those are the four principles in the book: give, receive, become, be, dot com with little hyphens between each word. And my coaching site is at create-a-life.co.uk, that’s create, hyphen a, hyphen life dot co dot uk. And lastly if people are fans of Blog Talk Radio, please come and hear my show on Wednesday nights. I have a great show, I interview a lot of authors too, and I interview coaches and spiritual speakers and healers and all kinds of interesting people, artists of all kinds. And that’s on Wednesdays at 6:00 p.m. UK time or 1:00 p.m. Eastern time. Every Wednesday. It’s called Lynne Serafinn’s Garden of the Soul.

Dr. Kent: And of course Lynne Serafinn is also on Twitter, and you can find out all of what’s going on, I’m also on Twitter and I just added her on Twitter. It’s a fun thing for me to be involved in Twitter and see what authors and all sorts of journalists are saying live. So that’s pretty neat, too.

Lynne Serafinn: Yeah, and I follow anybody who engages me. So if you find me at Lynne Serafinn with two n’s in each name, and anyone who engages me saying, “Hi Lynne, it’s me,” you know, I’m a real person, I’m not just somebody trying to get your name. I’ll follow anybody who contacts me.

Dr. Kent: Cool.

Lynne Serafinn: And the other thing, just one last thing, Kent. I do have a Facebook called The Garden of the Soul, and the people in that group are actually helping me write my next book, which is the companion guide to the Garden of the Soul. So if anybody’s on Facebook, go look up the group The Garden of the Soul and you can help me write my book, and you might get your name on the radio, and also might get your name in my next book.

Dr. Kent: Well that’s pretty neat. So go visit her on Facebook or on Twitter or on the web. I think Google will send you to many of those places as well. So thank you so much for chatting with me, Lynne Serafinn, and her book is The Garden of The Soul.

Lynne Serafinn: Thanks so much, Dr. Kent. Have a great rest of the show, and thanks for asking me.

Dr. Kent: And my next guest on the show is going to be the author of Astrology for Enlightenment. She has been an astrologer to some pretty unbelievable people. And I’ll talk to her about her latest book, her name is Michelle Karen. Come on back for that.

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Posted by jamie | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, Motivation, Spirituality, Inspiration, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Ian Buruma | The China Lover

October 5, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is an exciting day on Sound Authors. We’ve got three guests on the show instead of the usual four. At the end of the show there’s a musician, Johnny Helm who’s going to join us, and he’s got some amazing tunes that we’re going to listen to. And of course, he’s an author of sound. And before that we’re going to listen to a couple of Sound Authors. I’ve got Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States and the poet laureate of New York. We’re going to talk to him later on in the show. And at the beginning, without further ado, I’m excited to speak to author Ian Buruma, who’s the author of The China Lover. Welcome to the show.

Ian Buruma: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: Well, tell me a little bit about The China Lover.

Ian Buruma: Well, it’s a novel, but based on the real life of a movie star who’s still alive, although now I think in her 90’s living in Tokyo, and she was born in China, northeast China, in Manchuria, and grew up speaking both Chinese and Japanese. So she came in very usefully during the war when the Japanese wanted to convince the Asians that the Japanese Empire was there to liberate Asia from the West, and unite Asians and so on. She was always cast in Japanese movies, propaganda movies, as the Chinese girl who was in love with Japanese soldiers, or brave pioneers. I first came across her as a film student in Tokyo when I actually saw some of these films in the film archives. The most famous of these films was actually, was recently well known in the United States, too, because it was used during the war for American Intelligence soldiers to learn Japanese.

Dr. Kent: Now you’ve gotten several awards recently. One for this book, and it was published last fall, and it was named one of Asia’s best books. What makes this book different from the many books you’ve written in the past?

Ian Buruma: Well, I’m not known as a fiction writer, so that’s different. I’ve written one novel before and there’s a very different kind of writing in that you’re not arguing any kind of case, or you’re not simply presenting a history or a section of history, or trying to breathe life into characters. That’s a different entity.

Dr. Kent: Well, and your most recent book before this was about Theo van Gogh, and fascinating story, the whole world was watching from Amsterdam. What is the difference between putting a book like that together, which is criticism and history and that, and then writing a fiction story that kind of gets at the same issues in a way, but it’s fiction?

Ian Buruma: Well actually, in the text of that book, the difference is not all that large, because that was a story with different characters, all of whom were very colorful. And in a way I used, didn’t make anything up, but I used sort of a novelistic form to describe what happened in Amsterdam. So I did take the various characters who ended up being involved in this terrible murder in a kind of fictional way. But again, without making anything up, which of course you do do in a true work of fiction.

Dr. Kent: And where did your interest in all of these subjects derive? Especially for the latest book, your interest in Asia? Where did that all start?

Ian Buruma: Well, my interest in Asia came fairly late, I didn’t grow up in it, there’s no colonial background in my family, or anything of that sort. Like most people who grew up in the 1960’s, I had a sort of vague attraction to the exotic East. And when I studied at university I thought I might combine that attraction to something that might be useful. So I studied Chinese, which now of course is quite useful. In those days that wasn’t really apparent yet. And I ended up finding, being more drawn to Japan than China, I thought maybe because when China was still on the (inaudible) and was not very accessible, nor very attractive, at least not to me, I wanted to make films. And so I got a scholarship to study film in Tokyo at a film school. And one thing sort of led to anther, it turns out I wasn’t really made for filmmaking, I didn’t have the patience, and I started writing. And so film and Japan, the Far East, China and film, all these things really came together in this novel.

Dr. Kent: And it’s really a fascinating thing, you know, the New York Times talked about how your novel is put together in several different ways, and of course it’s based on the real life character. How did you come across this character, and how do you go about fictionalizing an interesting character like her?

Ian Buruma: Well that’s always a tricky problem, especially when people are still alive. You don’t want to make some silly things up about them. And I have met, in fact for many years when I, I always wanted to write her story, and I never quite figured out how to do it. And I thought in between I might do it as a (inaudible), and I did talk to her, she was very forthcoming. Her life in Japan is a legend, literally the stuff of legends, I mean there are comic strips, and there’s a musical about her life there. There is at least one movie, there’s a TV soap opera, and so on. And so the last thing she wants to do is sit down with somebody with a recorder and depart from the legend. So I never got much out of her, and I decided that to really get inside the story that I wanted to tell, it was better to use my own imagination. Now in her case everything in the novel is pretty much recorded. It’s true. And where I’ve made things up are the people around her, and the narrators, of course, are made up, even though there are three in the book. People who knew her, based loosely on many different people. And they’re fictional.

Dr. Kent: And what got you into writing in the first place? Way back when, what inspired you to write your first book?

Ian Buruma: Well this was in Japan when I was there, as I said, first as a film student, and then I started making some films, and then worked as a photographer. But to make money I also wrote movie reviews for an English language newspaper called The Japan Times. And it turns out I was quite good at it, or so people told me. And I began to write more and make films less. And I sort of, I slipped into writing. But in my late 20’s, so unlike many writers I didn’t start on the school magazine and that kind of thing.

Dr. Kent: And what are you working on these days?

Ian Buruma: I’m now writing various essays, one of which is going to come out in the spring next year on religion and democracy.

Dr. Kent: And will those go into a book at some point?

Ian Buruma: Yes, and it’s coming out in, it is coming out in a book, by Princeton University Press in the spring.

Dr. Kent: Well, wonderful. And so, The China Lover, of course, was published by Penguin USA. Was this one of your most enjoyable projects? Was it sort of, did it take over your life and you’re happy to get it out? What was it like?

Ian Buruma: No, well, I find writing, especially fiction writing too hard for it to be entirely enjoyable. It’s enjoyable to have done it, more than the actual process. But no it, well, it takes over your life sometimes. I didn’t write it in one sort of fell swoop, I did it in various stages, and so I don’t know. I try to take it in stride.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s been such an honor talking with you. And the book is fascinating, and your career is also fascinating. People can find out more about Ian Buruma at his website, ianburuma.com. There’s a whole bunch of great stuff on there, as well as links to The China Lover. Thank you so much for chatting with me today.

Ian Buruma: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: And my next guest on the show is Billy Collins, who was once the poet laureate of the United States. Comes on back and we’re going to talk to him.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under TRANSCRIPTS, History, Fiction, Entertainment, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Hollywood, PODCAST 

Adrian Goldsworthy | How Rome Fell

October 5, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: Welcome to the show. It’s Sound Authors with me, Dr. Kent, and I’m excited about the four guests that I’ve got on today. As always, three authors and one musician. At the end of the show, musician Victoria Vox is going to be on with me. She’s got an incredible sound, and I actually first saw her music on Twitter, believe it or not. I’m an avid Twitterer, and she was one of the folks that I discovered there, great musician. And three authors on the show today, Michelle Karen, and I’m excited about all of them. Michelle Karen wrote the book Astrology for Enlightenment. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily be in on that, but she sent a copy of the book, and it’s fascinating, I think. And before that, I have on the show Lynne Serafinn, and she’s the author of a wonderful book, and it’s called The Garden of the Soul: Lessons From Four Flowers That Unearth the Self. And that’s, she’s a bestseller in the UK with that book. And without further ado, my first guest on the show is Adrian Goldsworthy, an incredible book that he’s written called How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower. And it’s such a fascinating thing, to think about Rome and the long reign of that empire. Welcome to the show, Adrian Goldsworthy.

Adrian Goldsworthy: Thank you, it’s nice to be invited.

Dr. Kent: Well, tell me, you’ve written several books that are all these long, sort of, epic stories of the fall of the West, and In the Name of Rome. What’s you’re newest book, How Rome Fell, what’s it all about?

Adrian Goldsworthy: Well, it’s really about the, perhaps the biggest question of Roman history because you can look (inaudible) the Empire that conquered this vast area, last for several centuries, but in the end it folds. And when it folds, the world gets a lot more primitive, a lot more basic, a lot more violent than it had been in the Roman period. So it’s explaining how you can have an advanced civilization, you know, it wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty sophisticated, and that (inaudible). So it’s trying to understand that, but what caused that.

Dr. Kent: And tell me a little about the Roman Empire. For folks that sort of say, “Well, you know, I know what that was, but I’m not sure exactly, you know, I don’t know all the specifics of it.” Personally, I’ve been, I’ve seen some of the ruins, and I’ve read some of the history, but what is the Roman Empire?

Adrian Goldsworthy: It’s, I mean, it’s a cultural thing as well as a political thing. When you think the basis for the law systems of a large part of the planet are based upon Roman law, which, and certainly all of the European systems, not necessarily England or America, are those that are influenced by it. So you’ve got that basis, you’ve got a lot of cultural ideas. Physically it was this huge empire that stretched from the north of Britain to the Sahara, out to the Euphrates, to the Atlantic. It’s a very big area in a time when communications was much slower. You know, this is before anyone couldn’t move any faster than a horse could gallop or a ship could sail. So distance has become bigger. So it’s not just huge, it’s important culturally, but it’s there for a very long time, for centuries Rome dominated the known world, and modified Greek culture, you know, Greek and Roman culture along with the Judeo-Christian tradition. Those are really the two main pillars of Western culture. So it’s got a profound influence on us even up to today.

Dr. Kent: Well this book is called The Fall of the West in Britain, and it’s called How Rome Fell Here. How do you go about navigating a book with two different titles?

Adrian Goldsworthy: Well, blame my publisher is all I can say. (laughter) I wanted it to be called the same thing in both, but once they get an idea, and once they printed the cover, you can’t really do anything. Everyone tends to do a parallel, can we learn something for the modern world. The question you asked, time and time again it’s, you know, America with the one dominant super power in the world, if you (inaudible) you get the same in Rome. So I thought well, I know people ask those questions, and while, as a historian, I think it’s vital that you understand the history first before you try and draw any lessons from it, so talking about the fall of the west, talking about super powers, we then need modern parallels. The other thing is that if you’re looking at the fall of the empire, it really is two questions. Because although the western half of the empire falls, so Italy, Spain, France, North Africa, all of that goes, the eastern half, the empire that’s based on Constantinople, modern day Istanbul, survives for another thousand years, up until the 15th Century. So in a sense it’s two questions. It’s why did a large part of the empire fall, but also why did one bit of it stay on with basically the same culture, basically the same political system, military system. So it’s kind of put a lot into the title, both the modern relevance (inaudible), the problems actually begin in the past.

Dr. Kent: And one thing I’ve never really understood about Rome, now, they wanted to acquire more land. Explain that. I mean, that is one thing I feel like the United States does sort of have an empire mentality, but are we still doing the same thing with acquiring countries and expanding our reach?

Adrian Goldsworthy: Not in the same way. You’ve got to remember that in Latin imperium, the word we get empire from, literally means “power.” It wasn’t at it roots about physically occupying and having a province, although the Romans do end up conquering this huge empire. But what they always thought they were expanding was their power. And it wasn’t so much an active thing, it wasn’t really that you wanted other people to do what you wanted, it was more that you didn’t want them to do anything you didn’t want. So in that sense there’s a similarity in that, you know, you can see, obviously you can look at the whole problem of rogue states, and listen to their (inaudible) proliferation, that sort of thing. So in a sense the Romans would have (inaudible) in that you’re not, you don’t want to physically go and occupy North Korea, but you don’t want North Korea to go and do anything really stupid. So there’s another mental, not just having power, but being able to use it and stop things from happening as much as make them happen. So there’s similarities, but the Romans absorbed people. And you have Roman citizens from all over the world. You know, if you look at the New Testament, you’ve got say Paul, who’s a Jew from Tarsus in modern day Turkey, as far as we can tell doesn’t speak a word of Latin, but is a Roman citizen, and his family are Roman citizens who get all the legal rights. So the Romans, they don’t just conquer but they turn the world Roman. They make the people who live in the provinces Romans like themselves, at least some of them. So that’s a very different thing. And almost no state in history has done that quite so well as the Romans. I mean, most empires very much have the rulers under the conquered people, and the two don’t mix so much. The Romans just absorbed everybody.

Dr. Kent: And what got you interested in the beginning in doing, in studying Roman history and digging into the past, and you’ve been doing this for quite a while now. What started you off on that?

Adrian Goldsworthy: I’ve always found history fascinating, and I find almost any period, if I visit anywhere, I can get interested in the local history of a small village and 50 years ago as well as anything of hundreds or thousands of years past. I think it helped growing up in the western Britain, about 20 miles from where I lived there’s a Roman amphitheater, or its remains, there’s a Roman legionary fortress, so as a child I could imagine my parents, when they took me to these things and I crawled all over these monuments, it made it very much my history. You know, these were real people who’d been to where I lived. It wasn’t like the ancient Egyptians or the Greeks who’d stayed a long, long, long way away. There was something very immediate, very personal about it, and I think that stayed with me until the present day.

Dr. Kent: And when I spent some time in the Middle East I was just fascinated by things like the water systems, and such expansive structures that the Romans put in place in so many places in the world, what have you found most fascinating about the Romans through the years?

Adrian Goldsworthy: It’s often the most basic of human details, and there’s something about the Romans that tells you the level of the communism in their society, but they devoted so much effort to things like bath houses, you know, in which you have under floor heating, you have flues in the walls so you’ve got central heating actually into the walls of the building itself. And it’s one of the most advanced pieces of engineering, advanced piece of technology the Romans came out with, but it is essentially there to make life more pleasant and comfortable. You know, it isn’t an essential. It’s not about producing food or anything in it. It tells you about a society that’s got to that stage, where they’re able to devote some of their best and brightest minds to making life more pleasant. Which again makes it very modern. So there’s an element of that that you, you know, you see things about Roman society that does seem familiar, very human, but they are also then the startling differences. It’s that mixture of how people could (inaudible). It’s just a normal thing, but nobody ever really challenged. For a century this just goes on, it’s normal. That’s so very alien to us. So it’s that odd mixture of the very immediate, the very natural, the things that, you know, you could read a private lesson written by (inaudible) in the first century, or discovered on a bit of papyrus Egypt. And you can identify with the emotions, say look, this is a real human being talking. And yet there’s these other things that are very strange. So it’s trying to understand both sides of that, I think it’s still just fascinating.

Dr. Kent: And Rome was geographically really huge. Were they simply not able to, tell us how, I guess, let the cat out of the bag. How did Rome fall?

Adrian Goldsworthy: Well, in the end it drops from the top. The problem is that from about 218 A.D. onward right the way until the end of the 5th Century when the Western empire falls, there are only three decades in that two and a half centuries where they don’t fight a civil war. So generation after generation you keep (inaudible). So more Roman soldiers get killed fighting over Roman soldiers than they do foreign enemies. Nearly all emperors die violently, and almost all those at the hands of other rogue men. So you end up with a system of government that’s all about survival. It’s all about emperors trying to stay alive and in power, and it filters all the way down. If you’re a general, if you’re a civil servant, a bureaucrat, you can’t trust anybody. Because the best way to prove your loyalty to the emperor is to rat on somebody else, to report them for disloyalty, whether true or false. So you end up, it’s a system that, it doesn’t encourage anybody to do anything well. It doesn’t encourage the emperor to rule well, his servants to be efficient, because if you’re a general and you’re too good, then you’re immediately popular, which means you’re a rival, which means they have to probably treat you with suspicion and have you killed. So it’s a system that is so huge, it’s so successful, so wealthy that it can’t fall quickly. And it can afford these generations of instability, of in-fighting. It steadily rots and decays from the top and from the very center, and in the end it sort of (inaudible). Somebody comes along and attacks them, there’s a crisis, a bit of the empire goes, and they lurch along again for another few decades. But it’s quite a depressing story of just how human beings can mess things up really.

Dr. Kent: And what I find, I always discuss with friends that live elsewhere how different the American democracy is than say the British democracy or the German democracy. And we do have this sitting head of state, even though he has checked powers, he has a whole lot of powers and we see that in the Bush administration. What is the parallel you draw with modern history in Rome?

Adrian Goldsworthy: I think the dangers, I mean the reassuring thing is that all this, the whole problem, this fascination and civil roaring is not one yet that has come back to haunt democracy in the same way it did with the Romans. So that you know, Presidential candidate leaves with an election. He doesn’t go and raise an army and march on Washington. By the third century A.D., (inaudible). It is different. I mean, with any system that, there’s always the crisis where it’ll be that the tension between centralizing power, the idea that the man in the center if you give supreme authority to someone they can solve any problem. And the danger of that actually making things worse and making them more distant from where the problem is. But the striking lesson with the Romans in that in about the second century A.D. when you had emperors like Adrian, like Marcus Aurelius, you had the good emperor at the start of the movie Gladiator, you have maybe a thousand bureaucrat in the entire empire, and that’s a very generous estimate. By the end of the third century you’ve got over thirty, thirty-five thousand of them. And that’s a very low estimate. Central government gets more and more power and played more and more people, but it becomes less efficient at the same time because very different government departments forget why they’re there. And I think this is a danger where we can see a parallel with Rome, and you can end up with, whether it’s Washington, whether it’s Parliament in London, an isolated group where you simply have (inaudible) lobby groups, increasingly large bureaucracies that see their own interests and their own needs and their own budget as a priority rather than actually achieving anything because they, what they see is such a distant, hard to measure thing. It makes it harder and harder to get things done. And I think that’s the danger, that’s where we could follow the Roman experience, but I hope we don’t go too far down that path.

Dr. Kent: Wow. Well, and we don’t refer to one another as barbarians these days very often. What does that term mean, just for my pure curiosity?

Adrian Goldsworthy: It’s originally from the Greek. It’s the Greek term for everybody who wasn’t a Greek and didn’t speak the Greek language, and it’s the simple root, is that the words of these people just sounded like the noises sheep made. So it was baa, baa, baa, that was very plain for them, and the Romans took the world on, but some, they never quite had the same level of arrogance as they Greeks. The Greeks basically assumed they were at the top of the pyramid, that everyone else was inferior. (inaudible) like Persia, but in many ways were more sophisticated than Greece. But the Greeks produced better ideas, better philosophers, and who affected our culture far more. So the word has stayed. With the Romans, I believe it’s the difference that they felt they could turn that word into Romans, which at least means you feel somebody can become like you. It’s still rather a patronizing view, but nevertheless it’s a possibility. But no, it was originally a Greek term, but the Romans took over, and it just stayed within the language.

Dr. Kent: So what do you think about the Iran conflict? Is that a little more like what was happening in Rome, in modern times? When I look at this President’s being the puppet of the religious leader, and you know, it seems like quite a drama over there.

Adrian Goldsworthy: Yes, I mean, by the time you get to the Roman Empire, well, the Romans were battling beating the pretensive electrons, so you know, it’s blatantly another dictatorship from the start. (inaudible) is much, much weaker. I mean, with the Iranian situation you’ve got this façade of the free and fair election, and yet everybody seems to know that it hasn’t been, but you do have that problem when somebody controls all that power, when the religious leaders in the end half of the Iranian is done at the public, if they want to support the government, they want to support the President. It is extremely difficult choice of violence to do anything about that, unless you can pull (inaudible) back down. So there is the danger of the Roman situation, but the establishment is much more powerful, and as long as it keeps significant forces at its control, which seems to be the case, there doesn’t seem to be that much weakening, although some of the protests have come from people inside the system. So you know, you can see the grim side of the sort of internal problems that plagued the Romans time and again. So it’s very grim to watch. And there’s a big difference, I’m sorry.

Dr. Kent: And now you’re working on your next book, which is a little less, well, in some ways a little bit less massive and less national. It’s the story of Antony and Cleopatra, is that right?

Adrian Goldsworthy: Yes, that’s right, because before I came to this one I did a biography of Julius Caesar, so it seemed the logical thing to go on to them. Again, it’s a remarkable story, it’s one of those things that tells itself. And the advantage with Antony and Cleopatra is because they killed themselves relatively young, the book doesn’t have to be quite so long. But it’s interesting because Cleopatra in particular still fascinates. But I think we misunderstand her a lot, and we always want to make her Egyptian when she wasn’t really in any meaningful way. She still is essentially a Greek and particular Macedonian, that’s the family, that’s the language, that’s the culture. And her family had controlled Egypt for 300 years, but they are still very much a foreign entity that has come in and seized power and remains (inaudible). In fact, she was the first member of her family in all that time to learn to speak Egyptian. So you know, we misunderstand that because of the glamour, the romance of ancient Egypt and the pyramids, but if you think about it, the great pyramids at Giza, Cleopatra’s actually closer to us in time than she was to the building of the pyramids. You know, our image of an ancient Egypt is of a much, much older, much earlier Egypt that had very little to do with her. And yet, it’s what Hollywood tends to give us because it is such a rich-minded, iconic set of images that played in all of this. You know, it screams out for something different, and there’s been a fascination with it really since the late 18th century. But it’s, if you want to understand the real Cleopatra you have to get past that.

Dr. Kent: Well it sounds fascinating, as is the present book. I only cracked it open and I’m excited to keep reading. There’s many books that you’ve worked on, and I think people eagerly anticipate every new one that you write. I’ve been speaking to Adrian Goldsworthy, and his book is called How Rome Fell, that’s in the United States, of course, from Yale University Press, just came out in May. And then of course the British edition is The Fall of the West. Thank you so much for talking with me, I could talk all day.

Adrian Goldsworthy: Thanks very much for inviting me. It’s been fun.

Dr. Kent: And my next guest on the show is going to be a very interesting guest, she’s the author of Garden of the Soul: Lessons From Four Flowers That Unearth the Self. And she is a best seller in the UK as well, and I’m excited to talk to her in a minute. Come on back for that.

(commercial)

Posted by jamie | Filed Under History, TRANSCRIPTS, AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

Rosi Golan | Singer and Songwriter

October 3, 2009 | Comments Off

Dr. Kent: I’m excited to move on in this wonderful Sound Authors show. We’re featuring all these authors of sound. My next guest on the show is Rosi Golan. She’s an amazing singer and songwriter. Welcome to the show, Rosi.

Rosi Golan: Hi, how are you?

Dr. Kent: I’m great. You won this ASCAP Robert Allen award for songwriting excellence, you’ve performed at the Lincoln Center. All sorts of great things happening. Tell me about what’s going on for you.

Rosi Golan: I’ve released a record independently last year, and have been touring on it all year this year. I’ve had some really great luck with film and television placements. At the moment I’m in the middle of a house concert tour.

Dr. Kent: A house concert tour. Wonderful. Tell me about house concerts in general, because most of the musicians we feature are actually through Concerts in Your Home, and you remember them as well. Tell me about house concerts.

Rosi Golan: I did one in January when I came to Utah, which is where I am at the moment. I was in Utah for Sundance, and someone asked me to do a house concert; I’d never heard of them before. I was a little apprehensive at first. Then we agreed to do it, and we had such an awesome experience, that I decided later in the year to put a full tour going across the country together in houses. So that’s what I’ve been doing. I have a few club dates in between as well, because most house concerts happen between Thursdays and Sundays. It’s been a really great experience. I get to meet all sorts of interesting people. People actually put you up in their homes as well, and you just learn how nice people really are.

Dr. Kent: Are there screaming fans waiting outside the house every time you open the front door?

Rosi Golan: [Laughs] No, nothing like that. I do have fans in difference cities that have been allowed to come to the house concerts, which has been really great of the people who are hosting to allow people that they don’t know as well to come into the house and watch the show.

Dr. Kent: Very cool. I’d love to listen to a song. Let’s start out with ‘I Don’t Wanna Wait.’ Tell me about this song.

Rosi Golan: That’s actually a song I wrote not too long before I made my record. I always say this; it’s kind of how I try to live my life. I think that’s the best way to sum it up.

Dr. Kent: All right. Let’s listen: ‘I Don’t Wanna Wait’ by Rosi Golan. Here we go.

[Music]

Dr. Kent: What a beautiful track from Rosi Golan; she has a voice of velvet. Where did you learn to sing? Do we have Rosi on the line? I think we’re having some technical difficulties. What a gorgeous song that was. I think I might play another track and then get her back on the line. What an incredible voice. So we’re going to listen to another track from her, then we’re going to talk to her right away. This song is called, ‘Think of Me.’ Listen to this, and then we’ll talk to Rosi right after this.

[Music]

Dr. Kent: That’s another beautiful track from Rosi Golan. That one’s called ‘Think of Me,’ and before that we listened to ‘I Don’t Wanna Wait.’ Welcome back to the show, Rosi.

Rosi Golan: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: Beautiful songs. You have such an amazing voice. Where did you start learning how to sing?

Rosi Golan: I think, not really until I was 20, so pretty late on. When I was younger, I liked singing. I kind of sung a little bit, but I didn’t really try because I didn’t think I was really good at it. When I was around 20, I decided I was going to pick up a guitar and see if I could do it, and that was it. I’ve been doing it ever since.

Dr. Kent: You’ve got so much international travel in your past. Does that affect your music?

Rosi Golan: Yes, I think so. I think if you listen, lyrically - I didn’t actually ever really notice it until someone pointed it out to me - I happen to sing about leaving a lot [laughs]. I think it’s because I’ve moved around so much. That’s definitely kind of stayed in my blood. I called my record ‘The Drifter and the Gypsy,’ and that’s kind of how I’ve always been. I’ve always moved around a lot.

Dr. Kent: What amazing songs. Again, the album’s called ‘The Drifter and the Gypsy,’ Rosi Golan. It’s a beautiful record. Now where will you go next? Where are you right now, and where’s your next group of concerts.

Rosi Golan: I’m in Utah right now. I’ve got a house concert tonight. I’m playing a benefit tomorrow. Then I’m going to California. I’m going to be doing probably about eight shows in California, up and down the coast. I’m really looking forward to it. I grew up in Los Angeles, so it’ll be really nice for me to see some friends and family, especially after being on the road for a straight month; I’ll be somewhere a little bit more familiar. I’m just excited also to play my home town.

Dr. Kent: Well, it’s a beautiful record, and thank you so much for coming on the show. I hope we talk again.

Rosi Golan: Yes, thank you so much for having me; I really appreciate it.

Posted by jamie | Filed Under Pop, Concerts in Your Home, TRANSCRIPTS, Folk, MUSICIAN INTERVIEW, PODCAST 

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