Food for your mind

Here are two great podcasts I recommend to anyone interested in listening to some fresh alternatives to the usual chatter on Public Radio.

The first is a gem of a podcast called Entitled Opinions hosted by Robert Harrison, professor of Italian Literature at Stanford and a scholar on Dante. If you are familiar with Fresh Air on NPR and have a tendency toward listening to a host interviewing of bevy of personalities, this is the equivalent of Fresh Air for the literati crowd. His Q&A's with contemporary thinkers, writers and intellectuals range from energetic debates on French Existentialism to Irish Poetry, American Fiction and Historical Theology. He is completely informative, with a full depth of ideas and gravitas on most subjects that he covers. While the topics can somewhat dwell a bit too long on academic lexicon for the most part if you are interested in energetic and thoughtful conversation this is the podcast for you.

The other one, a bit more known and recently profiled on a New York newspaper is the curiously wonderful In Our Time hosted by the legendary British broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. Most programmes feature a round table of experts discussing topics in themes ranging in Science, Arts, History, Religion and Contemporary Issues. Bragg, who is an Oxford man is usually surrounded by fellow Oxford scholars who with their expertise dissect a conversation so throughly that you will learn something new in every podcast, even in topics that perhaps you knew most about. I've been a listener of this pod for about two years and in the spirit of the old cliche, it never gets old.

Here are two podcasts I recommend from each program. Click on the title of the podcasts to access their websites and of course both podcast are available on Itunes.

Entitled Opinions:

Tobias Wolff on American Fiction

A conversation on Human Rights



In Our Time:

The History of History: How the writing of history through the years

Chance and Design: Exploring questions and theories of a grand design in the Universe.


-NUTA

A bit of local genius from a great mentor

Hello everyone, after a brief interlude for some reflection and redirection to my very young blog, No U Turs Allowed is back again up and running. I've been thinking about what to write and share on this space and serendipity has put in my way it's often intruding hands. My friend Johnny Bosche (who is also a writer) has posted on his Facebook account a poem by whom until today I realized was a mutual friend of ours. Ricardo Pau-Llosa is a poet, writer, professor and an authority on Latin American art. This incredible poem that Johnny posted is a sparkle of the way in which Pau-Llosa handles imagery and context into that mysterious force called poetry. Enjoy

Nicodemus Man

Imagine you are a predator
in a nature show on TV,
and your only food is a dying breed,
one of whose members is scrounging
in the snowy earth twenty feet away,
a den of its wrinkled pups waiting nearby,
and you are too hungry to consider
any change in the millennial menu,
and it is then, six feet from your lunge,
that the growl of your empty gut
betrays your position. But the prey
mothers on softly munching,
and it is clear she is deaf
and focused only on her hope,
and cannot notice you until
your jaw clamps and your claw tears,
and it is clear that God, your God,
has answered you.

For more on the poet visit his official website