Larissa Pham’s “Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy”

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Brooklyn-based artist and writer Larissa Pham joins Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman to discuss her debut collection, Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy. Larissa contributed to the collection Kink, which was previously covered on the show, with a piece that deals with themes of violence and desire, which also inform her new collection — and which she addresses throughout the conversation. The entries in Pop Song blend memoir with commentary acutely attuned to various art objects and experiences in the present. Pop Song explores what it means to want a life and to strive for it: to navigate relationships, to build and rebuild a self, and to appreciate and even desperately rely upon the encounters with art that give such a life meaning.

Also, Nick Pinkerton, author of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, returns to recommend the late Charles Portis’s brilliant comic novel The Dog of the South.