Lively Lit by Trạm Radio

In this episode, Hà Trang brings in Farid Hamka, founder of @jakartabookhive in Jakarta, Indonesia to talk about his recent obsession with trees. Through a reading of Richard Powers' The Overstory and Catherine Pierce's poem "High Dangerous," the two explore how humans and flora interact and co-exist.  A crucial question comes up during the chat: in order to raise public awareness of the importance of trees and promote a non-human-centric viewpoint, should we describe beings as they are or should be personify them to highlight their close connection with us humans?

What is the value of something that has lasted a thousand years?   Today, Hà Trang and Kim discuss the weight and importance of traditions. Through Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," Kim draws similarities between Jackson's chilling human sacrifice ritual with the recent Grindadrap in Faroe Islands, where over 1400 dolphins were killed in the name of tradition. It begs the question: is the preservation of our own identities worth the rejection, erasure, and even life, of others?   Similarly, Hà Trang reads Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" and ponders about what exactly are we walling out, and more importantly, what are we so bent on walling in? How much of our identity is based upon the continuation of these collective cultural practices and memory? Will we, and our culture, become obsolete if we discard a tradition that has largely become obsolete?

Disclaimer: this episode includes discussion of self-harm and physical violence.    In this episode, Kim sits down with Lan Q. Vo - crime enthusiastic, MA candidate in Women’s Studies, and lover of cheesecake, to talk about Gillian Flynn’s debut book, Sharp Objects (2006), and violent women. As violence is often associated with men, the two discuss how Flynn creates a space for readers to explore women’s rage, violence, and subversion of the patriarchy. Can women be violent? If so, what kind of violence do they perform? And how do Flynn’s characters subvert the many sexist tropes of the violent women? Using feminist theories, Kim and Lan take a look at how we, as a society, understand womanhood, femininity, motherhood, emotions, and of course, murderous urges.

Even though blues and jazz are world-wide adored music genres, not everyone knows the painful history behind such enchanting melodies: black people's struggle against oppression and fight for freedom. In today's episode, Hà Trang and Kim bring the discussion to Harlem where James Baldwin and Langston Hughes each tell their own story of blues.  While Baldwin emphasizes music's power to heal and connect people in the short story "Sonny's Blues," Hughes paints a melancholic picture of Harlem at night in "The Weary Blues." Once again, history is one thing to remember beyond the mesmerizing rhythms: that black people have once fought, and are still fighting, for a life they deserve.

Both a new guest and a new literary genre are introduced in today's episode: PhD candidate in Theoretical Physics at King's College London Rob Jones and the biography. Together with Hà Trang, Rob discusses the relationships between science and art and science and religion through the first full biography of Nobel Prize winning physicist Paul Dirac by Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man. Rob believes that though pursuing distinctive disciplines, scientists, writers and religious leaders strive towards telling a convincing story so that the audience may want to come back to it over and over again. As for the art, his stance is clear: one can't be a scientist without being creative.

This week, Kim and Hà Trang dive into the unavoidable topic of war, going through what feels like the most intense thirty minutes so far on Lively Lit by Trạm Radio. Kim brings the discussion back in time through a reading of Book 11 in the infamous Odyssey by Homer, wherein Achilles reveals a conflicting viewpoint of war: he wishes he was a poor workman rather than a war hero, yet relishes at his son's glorious victory. The tension between promising romanticization and grim reality has been and is still a matter of heated debate when it comes to war, not excluding the current one against the pandemic. Hà Trang takes up the talk with an excerpt from Novel Without A Name by Dương Thu Hương in which the portrayal of a war woman through the honest and respectful eye of a male soldier invites thoughts on lust, human nature and femininity. In the end, as two hosts note at the very beginning of the episode, quoting Thomas Hobbes, human war is "the war of all against all" where no parties win. 

In this episode, Kim welcomes writer and blogger Alina Martin (@accordingtoalina) to discuss all things fashion and consumer culture through a reading of Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise. The two talk about how our daily apparel choices relate to the construction of selfhood, regardless of gender or class. Yet, susceptible as we are to advertising and the ready-made dream of an authentic self sold by designer houses, is the consumer always in control of their own choices? Are we the buyers or the products?

To celebrate Kim's belated birthday, the opening episode of Season 2 will veer towards birth, or specifically the relationship between a mother and her child. Kim begins the discussion with a long reading of excerpts from Behind The Scenes At The Museum by Kate Atkinson where the experience of conception and childbirth is told through the intensely biased and judgmental voice of the baby. By contrast, Hà Trang takes up a more traditional approach with the perspective of the emotional mother. Both poems "Song For Baby-O, Unborn" by Diane Di Prima and "First Fall" by Maggie Smith unveil the mother's anxiety for the future. Whether toxic or not, the desperation for the child to live happily and love the world can't be more real.

What is the similarity between a nanny and a poet? Overlooked labour, or the topic Kim and Hà Trang engage in in today's episode.  Hà Trang starts the conversation with extracts from the 2016 Prix Goncourt winner novel Lullaby by Leïla Slimani, which opens with the murder of two children by the family's nanny. Kim diverts from the traditional labour and delves into artistic labour with poem "Poet's Work" by Lorine Niedecker, asking whether poetry that sells should be so demoralized and so commenting on the famous example of Rupi Kaur. Although both agree that Kaur's poetry is not appealing to them, they cannot deny the fact that her work is widely appreciated all over the world.

It's July, it's summer, it's hot. Amidst the scorching heat, Kim and Hà Trang slip into a discussion about works whose settings are summertime, yet whose interpretation of summer is radically different. In extracts from Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman, the summer is ideally elitist and enchanting, one full of burning desire and coming-of-age infatuation. The high-class castle and white romance make up a Western tradition of secluded and sexual summertime. By contrast, "Chinatown Diptych" by Jenny Xie presents a steaming July in Chinatown, where bangs are softened with grease and night shifts are followed by day shifts. This is what summer looks like to immigrant workers in the intensely hybrid Chinatown; you consume as much as you are consumed, and any effort to preserve your culture manifests into attempts to sell such exoticism in a Western world. 

After hitting three golden tabloid themes of shock, sex, and sappy romance, Kim and Hà Trang continue to uphold the spirit of trending topics with "the sensational." Hà Trang opens the discussion with poem "Ghost" by Cynthia Huntington and poses the questions of whether ghosts are real and why they should be so interested in us.  The horror is taken up by Kim through extracts from We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson, a novel much inspired by the author's own personal life. Humans, as much as invisible spiritual beings, are creepy and terrifying. 

In this week's episode, Hà Trang and Kim take on a matter of greatest pleasure yet greatest pain: sex. While Hà Trang presents 17th-century poem "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell, examining the poet's amusing rhetoric aimed at convincing his mistress to consummate their relationship before time and grave worms eat away her virginity, Kim taps at the issue of sexual harassment through excerpts from This Is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill.  Both works drill into the idea of female coyness; that is, women have unspoken sexual desires and demand gratification. Yet a reading of the poem and the novella side by side leads to the discussion of consent and personal boundaries. One thing is for sure: women should be sexually satisfied, in a respected manner. She can be coy, but she is not to be toyed with. 

Forever weeping and wailing, the complexities around the portrayal or women in Greek mythology has always been a fascinating topic. Mother, daughter, sister, wife, they are always defined by their relationship to a masculine heroic figure, but can never be the hero. She who speaks without restraint, like Medea or Athena, are either a monster or a goddess—neither can simply be a woman.    In this week's podcast, Kim leaps in excitement discussing Madeline Miller's brilliant novel, Circe, with a focus on the extract where Circe's sister Pasiphaë speaks for herself. Hà Trang gives a beautiful and heart-rendering reading of H.D's poem "Eurydice," to further highlight the fact that we have always forgotten that without Eurydice's death, Orpheus would never be able to achieve his immortality. These women in the rewritten tales are angry and outspoken; they are no longer weeping.

If you feel overwhelmed or frustrated by news about environmental crisis and literature on ecological disaster, here's some more. In the spirit of World Environment Day, Kim and Hà Trang explore works by two authors who can't be more outspoken about conserving and protecting nature, W. S. Merwin and Yoko Tawada. Whereas "For a Coming Extinction" by Merwin comments on the Anthropocence and how ironical the relationship between humans and nature can be, The Last Children of Tokyo paints a bleak picture of an imagined future where, thanks to irreversible contamination from nuclear activities, elders cannot die and children are too weak to survive into adulthood. Our message is straightforward: if we don't change now, we will leave our own future behind. 

A child's play is something easy and simple, because how else can children be but innocent and uncomplicated? Strangely enough, the motif of the evil child or one full of knowledge and agency in literature is popular, if not ubiquitous. Building up on such common imagery, Hà Trang and Kim read poem "On Children" by Kahlil Gibran and extracts from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.  Both authors challenge the conventional and expected role of the parent, which largely entails guidance, protection and control. While Gibran leans towards a theistical belief that children belong not to parents but to Life, James poses an upsetting question of whether or not children are innocent. What if, Kim articulates, we see innocence as a construction fabricated by adults?

This episode veers the discussion towards African American literature with two woman representatives: Georgia Douglas Johnson and Toni Morrison, the latter very much inspired by the former. Having first examined internalized racism through the case of Pecola in The Bluest Eye, Kim immediately reads Johnson's "The Heart of a Woman" through the lens of racial segregation, although the poem was once criticized to be not explicit and eloquent enough to be part of the Harlem Renaissance Movement. After all, as both hosts agree, the black woman is a caged bird inside out, trapped within their own prejudices against themselves and the social discourse that discriminates against them.

This week, Hà Trang and Kim take on a seemingly more upbeat topic, women in love, not knowing that the discussion will take an (un)expected turn and bring up many questions about whether or not these women are truly adored.  Reading "To My Wife" by Oscar Wilde, Hà Trang proposes that the poet confesses a beautiful and pristine yet humble love to his lover, while Kim finds fault with the absence of the woman and questions the sincerity of his sentiments: is he loving the woman, or is he loving his love for her? The two hosts eventually share the same ground when it comes to extracts from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The love that Daisy and Gatsby share is real and bilateral, yet while she can and in fact chooses to live without it, he fails to accept a life without her by his side. Death is, therefore, to him inevitable.

TRIGGER WARNING: This episode contains description and discussion about extreme violence, self-harm and suicide. As widely discussed as it is nowadays, mental health remains a confusing puzzle, challenging for insiders to make sense of and even more so for outsiders to understand. In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, and as a tribute to a lost friend, Kim leads the talk about mental illness in literature with a long extract from The Vegetarian by Han Kang. By telling the story from the perspective of the husband and by portraying no characters as likeable and sympathizable, the author poses intriguing questions about how mental problems can break down a network of support and become taxing on everyone involved.  In contrast, Hà Trang brings in an insider's point of view through a reading of Sylvia Plath's "Lazy Lazarus." To others they may be shut as a seashell, but to themselves, talking about suicide is no taboo since such talk is what they struggle daily with. After all, it's difficult for everyone, so take care of and look out for your loved ones, even with a simple act of kindness.

We are living in the middle of a global pandemic—imagine what it's like when it's over. How will things change? Will we happily return to the pre-pandemic utopia, will we carry with us traumatic memories and indelible scars, or will certain things stay unchanged?  In this episode, Kim and Hà Trang takes turn to discuss works that share the theme of dystopia: poem "Requiem" by Deborah A. Miranda, a beloved professor and poet at Washington and Lee University where Hà Trang spent her three years of college, and extracts from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

Some two hundred years ago, John Keats made a bold statement that is still a matter of heated debate up till today: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." In this episode, through a reading of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, Hà Trang and Kim explore the concept of time through a social lens.  As much as humans want to conquer and freeze time, we need to progress in time in order to climb the social ladder. Keat's Grecian Urn is beauty in its finest because it withstands the passage of time, yet Dickens' Miss Havisham is a complete loser exactly because she insists on stopping the clock and staying forever a bride-to-be. Time triumphs everything, be it beauty or truth. After all, is beauty ever truth?