{"id":1047,"date":"2012-10-19T18:20:05","date_gmt":"2012-10-20T01:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1047"},"modified":"2012-10-19T18:20:05","modified_gmt":"2012-10-20T01:20:05","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s2e14-next-year-jerusalem-with-peter-orner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1047","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S2E14: Next Year, Jerusalem with Peter Orner"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-1048\" style=\"margin: 5px;\" title=\"orner\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/orner.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"204\" height=\"300\" \/>Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco&#8217;s Bernal Heights with <a href=\"http:\/\/peterorner.net\/\">Peter Orner<\/a>, author of the novels <em>Love and Shame and Love<\/em>\u00a0and <em>The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo<\/em>\u00a0and the short story collection <em>Esther Stories<\/em>\u00a0as well as co-editor of the nonfiction collections <em>Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives <\/em>and <em>Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives<\/em>. They discuss the heightened Americanness of Chicago and what it has offered his literary sensibility; our tendency as Americans, for good and ill, to chase stuff, whether in the city or the suburbs; his fascination with how life simply goes on amid grand (and possibly meaningless) power struggles; how, as a fresh college graduate, he found his was to Namibia; how his experience compares with the fictional Scottish doctor who falls in with Idi Amin in <em>The Last King of Scotland<\/em>, especially in the sense of the gnawing burden of non-belonging; life in a country where things slow down, and the space for thought that provides; how Namibia inspired him to write a story of a man lost in a Kafkanly inescapable shopping mall, and how he used a school&#8217;s sole typewriter to compose it; his constant aspirations to the condition of the short story collection, the &#8220;highest form,&#8221; and how even his novels secretly take that form; the experimentalism of great books that don&#8217;t seem experimental, like <em>Bleak House<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0<em>Moby Dick<\/em>; how Namibia&#8217;s situation compares to that of Zimbabwe, and how many of Zimbabwe&#8217;s problems can be laid at the feet of Robert Mugabe; how he experiences a San Francisco beyond the Fisherman&#8217;s Wharves and the Transamerica Pyramids; and his criticism of the city&#8217;s increasing pricing out of families that leads, ultimately, to a loss of stories.<\/p>\n<p>Download the interview from\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/colinmarshall.libsyn.com\/s2e14-next-year-jerusalem-with-peter-orner\">Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/a><\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/colinmarshall.libsyn.com\/s2e14-next-year-jerusalem-with-peter-orner\">\u2019s feed<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/notebook-on-cities-culture\/id266539442\">iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colin Marshall sits down in San Francisco&#8217;s Bernal Heights with Peter Orner, author of the novels Love and Shame and Love\u00a0and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo\u00a0and the short story collection Esther Stories\u00a0as well as co-editor of the nonfiction collections Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. They discuss [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1047","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1047"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1051,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1047\/revisions\/1051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1047"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1047"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1047"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}