Episode 27: The Desire for an Origin is the Origin: Susan Gevirtz on The Guide School
In episode 27, I talk with poet Susan Gevirtz about her childhood growing up in Los Angeles, within the two “religions” of Hollywood and Freudian psychoanalysis. We talk about her early experiences in the world of Hollywood films through her grandfather’s work as the musical director for Universal, and her sense, even as a young person, that the world that was presented to her was a made place, invented and therefore radically open to inquiry. We dig into her ongoing project, Guide School, a multi-faceted blended-genre manuscript that interrogates the longing for a “homeland,” and the unsatisfiable and therefore motivating desire for “origins” of all kinds - epistemological, historical, textual, and spiritual. Susan talks about her travels in Eastern Europe, the phenomenon of “the guide schools” in which tour guides are trained to present particular versions of history, and her encounters with the YIVO archive for Jewish Research (of both Vilnius Lithuania and New York City). We end by discussing our somewhat vexed curiosity about Kabbalah, and mystical traditions in general, thinking together about how reading/writing as a practice of unknowing and infinite encounter might itself be a mystical tradition.
Books and institutions mentioned
Moses Maimonides: The Guide to the Perplexed: a New Translation, Translated and with Commentary by Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip I. Lieberman
Marc-Alain Ouaknin, The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud
Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilzed Europe: The 1918-1921 Pogroms in Ukraine and the Onset of the Holocaust
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
Music by Ben Roberts: Benjamin.Roberts447@gmail.com
Comments and ideas to Juliealicecarr@gmail.com
Susan Gevirtz
Susan Gevirtz’s most recent books include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Coming Events (Collected Writings), (Nightboat), and Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang). “Sun Worship,” an excerpt from the manuscript Guide School, is a recent chapbook from YoYo Labs. “Doctor Shaman,” another excerpt from Guide School is a chapbook from above/ground Press, and “The Guides,” another excerpt, is a chapbook from Antiphony Press. She was associate editor of HOW(ever), a journal of modernist/innovative directions in women’s poetry and scholarship. In 2004, with poet and restorer of maritime antiquities, Siarita Kouka, she founded the Paros Symposium, an annual meeting of Greek and Anglophone poets. Gevirtz was Assistant Professor at Sonoma State University, California, for ten years, and subsequently taught in many MFA in poetry programs, and the Visual and Critical Studies and MFA programs at California College of the Artts. With Prison Renaissance and Operation Restoration she has worked as a writing mentor to incarcerated people. Gevirtz has collaborated with sound, visual and performance artists. She is based in San Francisco.
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