Out of Their Element

Selected Shorts

Symphony Space

Arts, Fiction, Books, Society & Culture

4.4 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2024

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Host Meg Wolitzer presents two works in which characters are out of their element. This is quite literally the case in Robert Coover’s witty reworking of the fable “The Frog Prince,” who finds human life exhausting despite the enthusiasm of his suburban love interest. Parker Posey reads. In Cristina Henríquez’s “Chasing Birds” a married couple share an exotic holiday locale, but not much else. It’s voiced by Maryann Plunkett, who also comments on the story at the end of her read, and introduced by novelist Amy Tan, a bird lover and illustrator.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You remember that bestseller from the 90s.
0:07.8	You remember that bestseller from the 90s.
0:09.9	Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.
0:12.4	It was supposed to solve the whole man, woman thing.
0:15.4	You know that you leave the toilet seat up
0:17.8	while I insist on talking constantly
0:19.8	about our relationship dynamic.
0:22.0	But maybe the problem isn't planets, it's habitats, water, air, earth.
0:27.0	This week on selected shorts, we consider what it means to be out of your element,
0:32.2	with help from a frog prince and the exotic
0:34.4	birds of Panama. Stay with us.
0:37.0	I'm your host Meg Walitzer and you're listening to selected shorts where our
0:47.1	greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time.
0:56.0	There's a sense in which every story is a journey of discovery. We accompany a character or characters through some action or emotion that leaves them altered.
1:01.0	In the two very different works on this show, characters
1:04.6	are taken out of their element and their essential natures are exposed. In one
1:09.2	a classic fairy tale narrative is inverted and in the second a vacationing husband and wife
1:14.3	occupy the same room but are living in two different worlds. We have big brains and
1:19.6	all the abstract thought that comes with them, but really when you think about it, what makes a human
1:24.8	a human and not an animal? We're called the human animal after all. When we get into the
1:30.6	wild, how much of us reverts to our wild past, and do we become something
1:35.1	much less civilized that operates on instinct?
	...

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