Episode 412: T.C. Boyle, Joy Harjo, John Lurie

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• Author T.C. Boyle lets the chimps speak their evil in 'Talk to Me'

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  “I was living with a woman who suddenly began to stink.”

  That is the opening line to prolific author T.C. Boyle’s 1977 short story, “Descent of Man.” It’s an absurdist tale about a chimp named Konrad who is at the center of a love triangle between his handler and her professor boyfriend. Boyle was inspired by the experiments of the era to try and teach chimpanzees sign language to communicate.

  The story was picked up and published in The Paris Review. For a young Boyle, this was a huge moment in his budding career. Now, nearly 50 years and 30 books later, Boyle has revisited the subject with his novel, “Talk to Me.”

  He tells WPR’s “BETA” that while the subject matter (and the love triangle) may remain the same, the approach isn’t anchored in absurdity.

  “There is certainly humor in my portrayal of Sam the chimp at the center of (‘Talk to Me’). But also, there’s a great deal of tragedy, too, in the book,” Boyle said. “And it is not absurdist. It is sticking to what actually happened in some of these experiments.”

  Basing “Talk to Me” on the actual experiments of the ’70s and ’80s and using texts like Elizabeth Hess’ “Nim Chimpsky” and Robert Fouts’ “Next of Kin” that documented them, Boyle is primed to move past the surface level conceit of a love triangle and explore deeper philosophical questions about interspecies communication and consciousness.

  “I think the hope was not necessarily a Doctor Dolittle kind of thing, but the hope was if the chimp could learn our language in the way that a three and a half year old child does, and this is the intelligence level of a chimp, that perhaps it could communicate something to us about the mystery of this life on this planet and who we are and why we are and what it means to be alive,” says Boyle.

  Boyle’s approach to this is to actually give Sam the chimp point of view chapters. It’s a compelling structure to the novel and allows Boyle to play with language to achieve his themes.

  “The job of the writer is to inhabit anybody, anytime, anywhere and make it credible,” he said. “That’s the beauty of fiction, to create different points of view so that everyone can experience something outside of him or herself.”

  Boyle employs a device in these chapters by only capitalizing the words Sam the chimp is aware of and understands.

  “The words that I emphasized, that are capitalized in the text, these are the words that he knows very well. And this is how he is trying to adjust to this world, but meanwhile the narrator stands back and says, ‘Well, this is a term he didn’t know, but he wanted to know it,’” Boyle said. “We get his emotions, and we also get his perspective. It was a challenge, and it was a delight for me to write these chapters.”

  Throughout “Talk to Me,” Boyle is raising larger questions though about animal consciousness. Do they have a soul? Do they worship a god? He’s picking at the concept of self-awareness in other species and wondering whether that would bring out the human elements in them and perhaps allow us to better recognize our animal instincts.

  “I don’t think that they are self-aware in the way that we are,” Boyle said. “They certainly have free agency, but I don’t think they can foresee consequences of an act in the way that we can. On the other hand, I see that a lot of our behavior is mandated by our animal being.”

  “We try to deny it. But I think it is true,” he continued. “So much of what we are is controlled hormonally and also, we are built to reproduce the species. That’s what life is. The only purpose of life is to make more life and we can rationalize it all we want. But a large part of what we are seems to be rather mechanistic, too.”

  When posed with a hypothetical scenario where he could indeed ask another species anything, Boyle states he would focus on the how do they do what they do, arguing we will likely never get to the why. He says that generations of humans haven’t sorted that yet.

  “We all assume that we’ve progressed beyond the other apes to this is brilliant status and so on, and this is positive. But in fact, maybe all we needed was to survive in tribes and have enough brain power to bring down our prey and feed ourselves beyond that,” Boyle said. “Look what we have wrought. What we have wrought is complete destruction on all the other species and soon a suicidal destruction of ourselves. Maybe our brains are an evolutionary backwater. The chimps left alone in the jungle would be far better off than we are in our towers.”

• Joy Harjo finds spiritual understanding through music and poetry

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  Joy Harjo never intended on becoming a poet. Yet, she is beginning her third term as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. As a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, she is the first Indigenous person to hold the post. In addition, Harjo has written nine books of poetry, plays, children’s books, two memoirs and seven music recordings. Her second memoir is called “Poet Warrior.” Joy Harjo talked with WPR’s “BETA” about her new book and her journey to becoming a poet.

  “I had no plans to become a poet,” Harjo said. “There were no poets in our neighborhood. There was no table for career day that said ‘poet.’ I started writing poetry when I was an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico and as part of the Kiva club, the Native student club. We were very politically and socially active and began work to be helpful and assist. That’s when I began writing poetry.”

  “Poet Warrior” weaves ancestral and family stories with poems that tell the story of Harjo and how she found her way to her art. In “Poet Warrior,” Harjo chronicles her life with a father who struggled with alcohol addiction, who left only to find herself under the thumb of an abusive stepfather. She says he became one of her greatest teachers, which caused her to find her way to the spiritual world.

  “I think whether you’re a prisoner of war, in the encampment of the enemy, or you’re a child growing up in an abusive home or the middle of an extremely stressful situation. We construct, or these places are constructed for us in some way, and we participate in them so that we can move through what might be too difficult to bear at that time,” she said. “What calls to me or what has always motivated me, is the spiritual realms. I think I came to poetry for that because poetry is not rhetoric. Poetry is a language that can speak of things that we can’t hear or see or know, or sometimes even feel yet.”

  As she grew up, Harjo found that one way to deal with difficult situations was to write down her stories. She sees it as a way of healing.

  “What writing (‘Poet Warrior’) taught me is that it helps give perspective, and it’s like breathing it out. That gives you a better context and perspective for understanding. Telling a story or writing a story in a way is transforming it. So, to take it from one place using a tool, whether it’s digital for sound, speaking your story, or taking a pen, you’re in essence transforming it.”

  Poetry led Harjo to music. In her 40s, she learned to play the soprano saxophone and befriended famed Native jazz performer Jim Pepper while in New York for a poetry performance. She visited Pepper intending to get a saxophone lesson, and from there, they became lifelong friends. They talked about great past players, like Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, and how they developed a sound all their own born of the times in which they lived.

  Harjo began her recording career with her first album called “Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century,” which came out in 2003. The album features Harjo reciting 10 of her poems set to music arrangement by her and her band Poetic Justice.

  Her seventh album, “I Pray for My Enemies,” was released in March 2021 and featured Peter Buck of R.E.M. fame on guitar.

  It was recorded at the height of the pandemic.

  “My co-producer, Barrett Martin, called and said, ‘I’m up here in Port Townsend, Washington, and I have my setup here, and we can get some bass tracks down and voice down.’ So, we drove in the middle of the pandemic from Tulsa to Port Townsend. Peter Buck came in and added some really cool guitar parts,” Harjo recalled.

  As poet laureate, Harjo found new ways to reach out and share music and poetry with people across the U.S. It’s a position she’s taking full advantage of whenever she can.

  “I do what I love, and I’ve been lucky to get to do poetry. In my life, it’s taken me to a lot of places. With the poet laureate position, I’m doing what I’ve always done. I go into communities, I talk with people, I listen, we write poetry and listen to poetry. I’ve been doing that for years, all over the country and around the world. And so, I’m doing what I’ve always done,” she said. “Being the poet laureate certainly gives me more of a calling card that I did not have before.”

• Musician. Composer. Painter. Actor. John Lurie is a man of many talents

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  John Lurie had a huge impact on the world of art and culture in downtown New York during the 1980s — and beyond. As a musician, composer, artist and actor, Lurie follow his ambitions and relentless imagination to make things happen.

  And he did it his way, as he explains in his new memoir, “The History of Bones.”

  Lurie co-founded the legendary band the Lounge Lizards. He acted in such pivotal films as “Stranger than Paradise” and “Down by Law,” which led The New Yorker to call him “The Humphrey Bogart of the Eighties.” (An aside: Does this mean that Humphrey Bogart is “The John Lurie of the Forties”? We’re still trying to figure that out, and we’ll keep you posted.)

  In his memoir, he admits he never would have said this out loud to anyone, but his life goal was to find and express God through music.

  “I don’t know how to talk about that kind of thing,” Lurie told WPR’s “BETA.” “One, when you mention God, that means a million different things to a million different people. And I think that this is something I could really only express through music. And to talk about it, it seems to cheapen it and make it something that it really isn’t. So I’m hesitant to go there. You know, if I was Rumi or Lao Tzu, I might attempt to do it. But I’m not. I’m shy to go there.”

  In 1979, Lurie and his younger brother, Evan, co-founded the Lounge Lizards. The legendary rock critic Lester Bangs wrote that the band was “staking out new territory that lies somewhere west of Charles Mingus and east of Bernard Herrmann.”

  “Isn’t that a nice thing?” Lurie said. “Lester was one of the few music critics that I actually respected. And then, to pick two of my complete heroes, that was just a nice moment. That was really nice because we were being written off as a bunch of phonies.”

  In 1986, the Lounge Lizards recorded a live album in Tokyo. In his book, Lurie writes that walking back to the hotel listening to “Big Heart” cranked up in his headphones was one of the happiest moments of his life.

  “I don’t often do that, walk around listening to music with headphones. But when you do, the place becomes modified,” Lurie said. “So Tokyo is visually quite fascinating anyway, especially during a bustling time and also the ancient and modern stuff mixed together. And some guy unloading fish from a cart and then the neon lights going off. And the sound of the song overwhelmed the visual experience and it just sounded good.”

  The origin story behind the title track from the “Voice of Chunk” album occurred in the West African country of Ghana, where Lurie was acting in Martin Scorsese’s film, “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

  Lurie spent a lot of time with the Ghanian musicians.

  “Their music just moved me really deeply,” he said. “And that call and response between the two saxophones is a nice thing but that doesn’t sound Ghanaish. And then (guitarist Marc) Ribot takes a solo that’s phenomenal. Night after night, he would take these amazing solos on that.”

  Lurie was unable to find a record label to release the “Voice of Chunk” album in 1989. So, as he writes in his memoir, he set out to “become the Boxcar Willie of jazz.” Boxcar Willie was an American country singer-songwriter who adopted a hobo persona and aired late-night commercials for his album. So, Lurie decided to do the same thing.

  As he writes in “The History of Bones”: “This is late ’89. There was no internet. This was the only way I could think of to get people the music without having the gatekeepers involved.”

  Lurie has said that what he might have been best at in his life was doing film scores.

  “The two that I’m kind of most proud of were the “Variety” score for Bette Gordon and “Manny & Lo” for Lisa Krueger. I was proud of those because they were done for zero dollars,” he said.

  Lurie hired musicians off the street and gave them $75 each for the afternoon. The sessions were recorded quickly, in just a day or a day and a half.

  In 1999, Lurie created an alter ego named Marvin Pontiac and recorded two albums under this name. He did this because he had accumulated all of this music over the years that wasn’t quite right for the Lounge Lizards and wasn’t right for a film score. It needed vocals.

  “So I had to create a character so I’d have a mask to sing behind,” Lurie explained.”It would give me a little bit more confidence because ‘John Lurie Sings!,’ I just couldn’t do that.”

  Lurie started getting quotes from people like Flea, Angelique Kidjo and Iggy Pop to bolster the idea that Marvin Pontiac was a real musician.

  “Bob Dylan said he didn’t give quotes and I needed somebody from that kind of demographic to say Marvin Pontiac was a big influence on me or something,” he said.

  Lurie remembered that his travel agent, Barb, was also Leonard Cohen’s travel agent. She eventually gave him Cohen’s phone number.

  “So I dial the number and the voice on the other end goes ‘Helllloooo.’ And my mind takes a moment to realize ‘You’ve just called Leonard Cohen, you idiot.’ And I’m not prepared to talk to Leonard Cohen. I didn’t have my spiel ready. And then he goes ‘Helllloooo.’ I started to laugh. So I had to hang up on Leonard Cohen.”

  In January, Lurie launched his new HBO show, “Painting with John,” written, directed, and starring Lurie. The program proves that he remains a creative force.

  “We were going to just make these two-minute things to cheer people up a bit. People just seemed so depressed. And we were going to just make these two-minute vignettes of Nesrin, my assistant, and I teasing each other while I painted. Because they were cute, they were funny.”

  HBO has renewed “Painting with John” for a second season.