Month: January 2014

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Podcast: The Consolation of Poetry

 

Virtual Memories – season 4 episode 3 – The Consolation of Poetry

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“Poetry chose me at an early age. I think it was connected to the fact that poetry is emotional, pretty, and short.”

Rachel Hadas, author of Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia and Poetry (Paul Dry Books), lost her husband to early onset dementia. We talk about how poetry — hers and others’ — gave her solace during this years-long process. We also talk about poetry is a way for the poet to both release and identify emotions, why it was easier to publish collections of poetry in the 1980s and 1990s, the benefits of poetry memorization, and why the Furies looked the other way when Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia.

“Writing helps us to live through something and then it helps us remember it, if we want to.”

BONUS: You get to hear me record an intro after 35 hours with no sleep, and find out about the huge, life-changing thing I did last week!

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

About our Guest

Rachel Hadas studied classics at Harvard, poetry at Johns Hopkins, and comparative literature at Princeton. Between college and graduate school she spent four years in Greece, an experience that surfaces variously in much of her work. Since 1981 she has taught in the English Department of the Newark (NJ) campus of Rutgers University, and has also taught courses in literature and writing at Columbia and Princeton, as well as serving on the poetry faculty of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the West Chester Poetry Conference. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant in poetry, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Rachel Hadas is the author of many books of poetry, prose, and translations. Most recently, she her memoir about her husband’s illness, Strange Relation, was published by Paul Dry Books (2011) and a new book of her poems, The Golden Road, was published by Northwestern University Press (2012).

Credits: This episode’s music is Strange Conversation by Ted Hawkins. The conversation was recorded at the home of Ms. Hadas on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H4n recorder. The intro and outro were recorded in a hotel room in London on the same gear. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Rachel Hadas by me.

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Podcast: A Place To Rest

Emily Raboteau tours the Promised Land on the Virtual Memories Show

Virtual Memories – season 4 episode 2 – A Place To Rest

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“We reach for stories to be able to take risks.”

Emily Raboteau, author of Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora (Atlantic Monthly Press), joins the Virtual Memories Show to show to talk about the many notions of “home” for black people. Along the way, we talk about the many notions of what constitutes a black person. As Ms. Raboteau discovered in the travels chronicled in her book — encompassing Israel, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana and America’s deep south — there are a lot of ideas about who’s black and what blackness means.

“As my husband told me, ‘You can’t valorize the oppressed just because they were oppressed. It doesn’t make them saintly; more often than not, it makes them want to step on someone else to elevate themselves.'”

We also talk about churchgoing in New York City, what it’s like to travel to Antarctica, why the story of Exodus is so pivotal in the black American experience, why Jewish book reviewers thought she was pulling a bait-and-switch, why she chose to explore her black roots instead of her white ones for this book, what motherhood means, and what it was like to give a talk about faith on behalf of Bobby McFerrin.

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

About our Guest

Emily Raboteau is the author of a novel, The Professor’s Daughter (Henry Holt, Picador), and a work of creative nonfiction, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora (Grove/Atlantic), named one of the “Best Books of 2013” by The Huffington Post and the grand prize winner of the New York Book Festival. She recently visited Antarctica and Cuba to research her next novel, Endurance, about a shipbuilder and his autistic son. Her fiction and essays have been widely published and anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best American Non-required Reading, Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, Guernica, The Believer and elsewhere. Honors include a Pushcart Prize, The Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation and the Howard Foundation. An avid world traveler, she resides in New York City and teaches creative writing in Harlem at City College, once known as “the poor man’s Harvard.”

Credits: This episode’s music is Promised Land by Johnnie Allan. The conversation was recorded at the home of a friend of Emily’s on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H4n recorder. The intro and outro were recorded at home on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Emily Raboteau by me.

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The Pod-Kit

Someone asked me recently for a breakdown of what equipment I use to record my Virtual Memories Show podcasts. At home, I use a Blue Yeti USB microphone with a Blue Universal pop filter. It feeds into my Mac Mini and I do the audio capture in Audacity, because I had trouble the one time I tried doing audio capture in Garage Band and never went back to figure out what I was doing wrong.

The setup for recording my interviews is a little more involved. I don’t do interviews via Skype/phone, because I prefer being face to face with my conversant. Here’s what’s in my “studio in a bag:”

podkit2

My primary recorder is a Zoom H4N with a 16 gb Class 10 SD card and plug-in power. The base of the H4N has XLR connections, which allow me to hook up two Blue enCORE 200 Phantom Powered Active Dynamic microphones, via a pair of 3 ft. XLR cables. The 200s were recommended to me by my podfather, Marc Maron, via Twitter. I tried to go cheap and use Blue enCORE 100 mics, but the signal wasn’t very good (the 200s use phantom power, while the 100s are passive). At one point, an instructor at Tekserve suggested I use AT2020 Side Address Cardioid Condenser Studio mics. I did, but they picked up too much noise and I found their signal to be a little strong/fuzzy, even when I adjusted the recording levels on the H4N

After a few months using the AT2020s, I visited B&H Photo in NYC and did test recordings with the enCORE 200 alongside my 100s and AT2020s. The 200 gave a much warmer sound than the 100, while being less all-recording than the AT2020. (I should note that the AT2020 is a condenser mic and that means it’s intended to pick up a wider sound; that is, it’s a feature, not a bug, but it’s just not as good for the more intimate setting of this podcast.) B&H had the 200s on sale for $120, which was $30 cheaper than Amazon, so I bought them there. The price is back up to $149 now. B&H was so helpful that, if the prices had been the same, I would have gone through them (except on Shabbat).

I always keep a backup recorder on hand for interviews. I use a Zoom H2n with a 16 gb Class 10 SD card. The H2n has a little stand that’s pictured beside it. I can’t find the power adapter for the H2n, so I usually bring along a pair of spare AA rechargeable Eneloop batteries. I’ve never had to resort to the backup. (Actually, I did need to resort to it once, when the H4n inexplicably failed to record a podcast, but that was the one time the batteries died in the H2n. . . .)

A pair of Musician’s Gear Tripod Desk Mic Stand with Clips from Guitar Center are pretty compact and suffice to position the mics. In fact, the staff at my local Guitar Center stores — we have three pretty close to my office and home — have been pretty helpful with suggestions and advice (less for the engineering, more for the technical stuff regarding cables, stands, etc.).

The microphone clips come with the microphones, but they need a thread adaptor to connect to the tripod stands. I leave the adaptors screwed into the stands, but sometimes I connect the clips too tightly and they take the adaptors off with them. I like to leave them connected to the tripods because that way I know where they are, so I also bring along pliers, in case the clips won’t come free.

Everything (including the Canon PowerShot S95 I used to take this pic) fits in an Occidental Leather 6512 Machinist’s Bag. I usually pack some spare business cards in there, along with the aforementioned spare batteries, and maybe an SD card reader if I’m traveling and want to get the audio file transferred to my laptop right away. I could also connect the H4N to a laptop via a USB cable, but I prefer to pop the card out to get the file.

Next time: how to line up guests!

Now go listen to some of my podcasts!