Podcasts about Harold Bloom

In this deeply reflective episode of Warriors Unmasked, Chuck Thuss sits down with poet, playwright, and soon-to-be author D.C. Copeland. Known for her literary achievements and her fierce voice for mental health and self-expression, D.C. shares a candid and powerful conversation about what it means to truly find yourself—especially in a world that expects conformity at every turn. From her early days writing poems as a child to becoming a Yale-educated writer mentored by Harold Bloom, D.C. takes us on a journey through creativity, personal awakening, and deep healing. Her upcoming book Societal Dropout is more than a manifesto—it's a call for reconnection, a return to stillness, and a nudge for all of us to examine what we truly believe, beyond what we've been told. D.C. and Chuck explore the concept of living in the “third dimension”—a linear, goal-oriented society—and how dropping out of it, even for a few moments each day, can unlock healing, peace, and perspective. Whether you're familiar with meditation or just starting to question the noise around you, this conversation offers tools, insights, and encouragement to pause and listen to your inner voice. This episode is a must-listen for anyone curious about healing through writing, the connection between mental health and societal structure, and the incredible power of stillness. What's Inside… Why “dropping out” isn't giving up—it's coming home to yourself. D.C. explains how stepping away from society's expectations can lead to deeper healing and clarity. The hidden cost of living in a linear, performance-driven world. Discover how constant striving impacts our mental health and how to break free from the cycle. How stillness and meditation transformed D.C.'s understanding of herself. Learn practical ways to slow down, listen inward, and reconnect with your truth. What we're really running from—and why society doesn't want us to stop. A powerful exploration of discomfort, distraction, and the fear of facing our own thoughts. The difference between identity and performance. D.C. shares how letting go of labels helped her heal, and why so many of us feel lost in who we think we're supposed to be. You're not broken—you're waking up. Hear D.C.'s perspective on anxiety, trauma, and why your struggles might actually be signals of something beautiful unfolding.   GUEST LINKS: https://dccopeland.com LINKS: www.thecompassionateconnection.com www.warriorsunmasked.com  Join Chuck's Text Community: 251-418-7966 Episode Minute By Minute: 00:00 – Welcome to Episode 184: Introducing D.C. Copeland  02:18 – D.C.'s childhood love for writing and early poetic success  04:33 – Yale, Harold Bloom, and the journey to becoming a writer  06:00 – The power of theater and the story behind Societal Dropout  08:41 – The linear world vs. nonlinear healing: Understanding dimensions  11:00 – Misdiagnosed illness and mental health in modern society  13:30 – Why so many are struggling: trauma, anxiety, and societal disconnect  16:00 – Are people afraid to find themselves?  18:30 – What meditation and stillness revealed to D.C.  20:15 – Practical ways to “drop out” and find healing  23:30 – Challenging beliefs and choosing your own experience  26:00 – Identity, performance, and finding peace in the unknown  30:00 – Shakespeare, suicide, and the courage to question  32:00 – Meditation, quiet, and the non-linear healing process  35:00 – Rest, illness, and listening to the body's wisdom  39:00 – Meditation's role in D.C.'s recovery and resilience  42:00 – The brain on fire: Observing thought, not becoming it  45:00 – Teaching stillness to the next generation  47:00 – Chuck's closing reflections and a call to share the episode  49:00 – What to say to someone who feels misunderstood  52:00 – Say yes to your own experience—whatever it may be

As the long, exhausting march toward summer begins for many students, the wise and compassionate David Wagoner takes us to the intersection of love and weakness. Happy reading.David Wagoner was recognized as the leading poet of the Pacific Northwest, often compared to his early mentor Theodore Roethke, and highly praised for his skillful, insightful and serious body of work. He won numerous prestigious literary awards including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and was nominated twice for the National Book Award. The author of ten acclaimed novels, Wagoner's fiction has been awarded the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award. Professor emeritus at the University of Washington, Wagoner enjoyed an excellent reputation as both a writer and a teacher of writing. He was selected to serve as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978, replacing Robert Lowell, and was the editor of Poetry Northwest until 2002.Born in Ohio and raised in Indiana, Midwesterner Wagoner was initially influenced by family ties, ethnic neighborhoods, industrial production and pollution, and the urban environment. His move to the Pacific Northwest in 1954, at Roethke's urging, changed both his outlook and his poetry. Writing in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Wagoner recalls: “when I drove down out of the Cascades and saw the region that was to become my home territory for the next thirty years, my extreme uneasiness turned into awe. I had never seen or imagined such greenness, such a promise of healing growth. Everything I saw appeared to be living ancestral forms of the dead earth where I'd tried to grow up.” Wagoner's poetry often mourns the loss of a natural, fertile wilderness, though David K. Robinson, writing in Contemporary Poetry, described the themes of “survival, anger at those who violate the natural world” and “a Chaucerian delight in human oddity” at work in the poems as well. Critics have also praised Wagoner's poetry for its crisp descriptive detail and metaphorical bent. However, Paul Breslin in the New York Times Book Review pronounced David Wagoner to be “predominantly a nature poet…as Frost and Roethke were nature poets.”Wagoner's first books, including Dry Sun, Dry Wind (1953), A Place to Stand (1958), and Poems (1959), demonstrate an early mastery of his chosen subject matter and form. Often comprised of observations of nature, Wagoner links his speakers' predicaments and estrangement to the larger imperfection of the world. In Wagoner's second book, A Place to Stand,Roethke's influence is clear, and the book uses journey poems to represent the poet's own quest back to his beginnings. Wagoner's fourth book, The Nesting Ground (1963), reflects his relocation physically, aesthetically and emotionally; the Midwest is abandoned for the lush abundance of the Pacific Northwest, and Wagoner's style is less concerned with lamentation or complaint and more with cataloguing the bounty around him. James K. Robinson called the title poem from Staying Alive (1966) “one of the best American poems since World War II.” In poems like “The Words,” Wagoner discovers harmony with nature by learning to be open to all it has to offer: “I take what is: / The light beats on the stones, / the wind over water shines / Like long grass through the trees, / As I set loose, like birds / in a landscape, the old words.” Robert Cording, who called Staying Alive “the volume where Wagoner comes into his own as a poet,” believed that for Wagoner, taking what is involves “an acceptance of our fragmented selves, which through love we are always trying to patch together; an acceptance of our own darkness; and an acceptance of the world around us with which we must reacquaint ourselves.”Collected Poems 1956-1976 (1976) was nominated for the National Book Award and praised by X. J. Kennedy in Parnassus for offering poems which are “beautifully clear; not merely comprehensible, but clear in the sense that their contents are quickly visible.” Yet it was Who Shall Be the Sun? (1978),based upon Native American myth and legend, which gained critical attention. Hayden Carruth, writing in Harper's Magazine, called the book “a remarkable achievement,” not only for its presentation of “the literalness of shamanistic mysticism” but also for “its true feeling.” Hudson Review's James Finn Cotter also noted how Wagoner “has not written translations but condensed versions that avoid stereotyped language….The voice is Wagoner's own, personal, familiar, concerned. He has achieved a remarkable fusion of nature, legend and psyche in these poems.”In Broken Country (1979), also nominated for the National Book Award, shows Wagoner honing the instructional backpacking poems he had first used in Staying Alive. Leonard Neufeldt, writing in New England Review,called “the love lyrics” of the first section “among the finest since Williams' ‘Asphodel.'” Wagoner has been accused of using staid pastoral conventions in book after book, as well as writing less well about human subjects. However, his books have continued to receive critical attention, often recognized for the ways in which they use encounters with nature as metaphors for encounters with the self. First Light (1983), Wagoner's “most intense” collection, according to James K. Robinson, reflects Wagoner's third marriage to poet Robin Seyfried. And Publishers Weekly celebrated Walt Whitman Bathing (1996) for its use of “plainspoken formal virtuosity” which allows for “a pragmatic clarity of perception.” A volume of new and collected poems, Traveling Light, was released in 1999. Sampling Wagoner's work through the years, many reviewers found the strongest poems to also be the newest. Rochelle Ratner in Library Journal noted “since many of the best are in the ‘New Poems' section, it might make sense to wait for his next volume.” That next volume, The House of Song (2002) won high praise for its variety of subject matter and pitch-perfect craft. Christina Pugh in Poetry declared “The House of Song boasts a superb architecture, and each one of its rooms (or in Italian, stanzas) affords a pleasure that enhances the last.” In 2008 Wagoner published his twenty-third collection of verse, A Map of the Night. Reviewing the book for the Seattle Times, Sheila Farr found many poems shot through with nostalgia, adding “the book feels like a summing-up.” Conceding that “not all the work reaches the high plane of Wagoner's reputation,” Farr described its “finest moments” as those which “resonate with the title, venturing into darkness and helping us recognize its familiar places.”In addition to his numerous books of poetry, David Wagoner was also a successful novelist, writing both mainstream fiction and regional Western fiction. Offering a steady mix of drama seasoned with occasional comedy, Wagoner's tales often involve a naive central character's encounter with and acceptance of human failing and social corruption. In the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Wagoner described his first novel, The Man in the Middle (1954), as “a thriller with some Graham Greene overtones about a railroad crossing watchmen in violent political trouble in Chicago,” his second novel, Money, Money, Money (1955), as a story about “a young tree surgeon who can't touch, look at, or even think about money, though he has a lot of it,” his third novel, Rock (1958) as a tale of “teenage Chicago delinquents,” and his fifth novel, Baby, Come On Inside (1968) as a story “about an aging popular singer who'd lost his voice.” As a popular novelist, however, Wagoner is best known for The Escape Artist (1965), the story of an amateur magician and the unscrupulous adults who attempt to exploit him, which was adapted as a film in 1981. Wagoner produced four successful novels as a Western “regional” writer. Structurally and thematically, they bear similarities to his other novels. David W. Madden noted in Twentieth-Century Western Writers: “Central to each of these [Western] works is a young protagonist's movement from innocence to experience as he journeys across the American frontier encountering an often debased and corrupted world. However, unlike those he meets, the hero retains his fundamental optimism and incorruptibility.”Although Wagoner wrote numerous novels, his reputation rests on his numerous, exquisitely crafted poetry collections, and his dedication as a teacher. Harold Bloom said of Wagoner: “His study of American nostalgias is as eloquent as that of James Wright, and like Wright's poetry carries on some of the deepest currents in American verse.” And Leonard Neufeldt called Wagoner “simply, one of the most accomplished poets currently at work in and with America…His range and mastery of subjects, voices, and modes, his ability to work with ease in any of the modes (narrative, descriptive, dramatic, lyric, anecdotal) and with any number of species (elegy, satirical portraiture, verse editorial, apostrophe, jeremiad, and childlike song, to name a few) and his frequent combinations of a number of these into astonishingly compelling orchestrations provide us with an intelligent and convincing definition of genius.”Wagoner died in late 2021 at age 95.-bio via Poetry Foundation This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Jacke's been trying to come to grips with Portuguese modernist poet Fernando Pessoa ever since Harold Bloom named him one of the 26 most influential writers in the entire Western canon. But it's not easy! As a young man, Pessoa wanted to be, in his words, "plural like the universe," and he carried this out in his poetry: writing verse in the style of more than one hundred fictional alter-egos that he called heteronyms. In this episode, Pessoa expert Bartholomew Ryan, author of Fernando Pessoa: A Critical Life, joins Jacke for a discussion of Pessoa's profound, endlessly innovative ideas. PLUS renowned scholar Robin Waterfield (Aesop's Fables: A New Translation) joins Jacke for a discussion of the last book he will ever read. Additional listening: 643 Aesop and His Fables (with Robin Waterfield) 398 Fernando Pessoa 138 Why Poetry (with Matthew Zapruder) The music in this episode is by Gabriel Ruiz-Bernal. Learn more at gabrielruizbernal.com. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sean and Harold are joined by Will Mountain Cox, author of Roundabout (Relegation, 2023). They do a deep dive on Walt Whitman, the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Harold Bloom on Hamlet, Will's history with Giancarlo DiTrapano, and why America and podcasting is gnostic. Bonus hour and more on the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/1storypod Intro song by Thomas Thatcher.

Tyler and I spoke about view quakes from fiction, Proust, Bleak House, the uses of fiction for economists, the problems with historical fiction, about about drama in interviews, which classics are less read, why Jane Austen is so interesting today, Patrick Collison, Lord of the Rings… but mostly we talked about Shakespeare. We talked about Shakespeare as a thinker, how Romeo doesn't love Juliet, Girard, the development of individualism, the importance and interest of the seventeenth century, Trump and Shakespeare's fools, why Julius Cesar is over rated, the most under rated Shakespeare play, prejudice in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare as an economic thinker. We covered a lot of ground and it was interesting for me throughout. Here are some excerpts. Full transcript below.Henry Some of the people around Trump now, they're trying to do DOGE and deregulation and other things. Are there Shakespearean lessons that they should be bearing in mind? Should we send them to see the Henriad before they get started?Tyler Send them to read the Henriad before they get started. The complicated nature of power: that the king never has the power that he needs to claim he does is quite significant. The ways in which power cannot be delegated, Shakespeare is extremely wise on. And yes, the DOGE people absolutely need to learn those lessons.Henry The other thing I'd take from the Henriad is time moves way quicker than anyone thinks it does. Even the people who are trying to move quite quickly in the play, they get taken over very rapidly by just changing-Tyler Yes. Once things start, it's like, oh my goodness, they just keep on running and no one's really in control. And that's a Shakespearean point as well.And.Henry Let's say we read Shakespeare in a modern English version, how much are we getting?Tyler It'll be terrible. It'll be a negative. It will poison your brain. So this, to me, will be highly unfortunate. Better to learn German and read the Schlegel than to read someone turning Shakespeare into current English. The only people who could do it maybe would be like the Trinidadians, who still have a marvelous English, and it would be a completely different work. But at least it might be something you could be proud of.Transcript (prepared by AI)Henry Today, I am talking to Tyler Cowen, the economist, blogger, columnist, and author. Tyler works at George Mason University. He writes Marginal Revolution. He is a columnist at Bloomberg, and he has written books like In Praise of Commercial Culture and The Age of the Infovore. We are going to talk about literature and Shakespeare. Tyler, welcome.Tyler Good to chat with you, Henry.Henry So have you ever had a view quake from reading fiction?Tyler Reading fiction has an impact on you that accumulates over time. It's not the same as reading economics or philosophy, where there's a single, discrete idea that changes how you view the world. So I think reading the great classics in its entirety has been a view quake for me. But it's not that you wake up one morning and say, oh, I turned to page 74 in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, and now I realize that, dot, dot, dot. That's a yes and a no for an answer.Henry So you've never read Bleak House and thought, actually, I do see things slightly differently about Victorian London or the history of the –?Tyler Well, that's not a view quake. Certainly, that happens all the time, right? Slightly differently how you see Victorian London. But your overall vision of the world, maybe fiction is one of the three or four most important inputs. And again, I think it's more about the entirety of it and the diversity of perspectives. I think reading Proust maybe had the single biggest impact on me of any single work of fiction if I had to select one. And then when I was younger, science fiction had a quite significant impact on me. But I don't think it was the fictional side of science fiction that mattered, if that makes sense to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was the models embodied in the stories, like, oh, the three laws of robotics. Well, I thought, well, what should those laws be like? I thought about that a good deal. So that would be another part of the qualified answer.Henry And what was it with Proust? The idea that people only care about what other people think or sexuality or consciousness?Tyler The richness of the internal life, the importance of both expectation and memory, the evanescence of actual events, a sense of humor.Henry It showed you just how significant these things are.Tyler And how deeply they can be felt and expressed. That's right. And there were specific pages early on in Swan's Way where it just hit me. So that's what I would say. Bleak House, I don't think, changed my views at all. It's one of my three or four favorite novels. I think it's one of the great, great, greats, as you have written yourself. But the notion that, well, the law is highly complex and reality is murky and there are all these deep mysteries, that all felt very familiar to me. And I had already read some number of newer sort of pseudo-Victorian novels that maybe do those themes in a more superficial way, but they introduce those themes to you. So you read Bleak House and you just say, well, I've imbibed this already, but here's the much better version of it.Henry One of the things I got from Bleak House, which it took me a couple of reads to get to, was how comfortable Dickens was with being quite a rational critic of the legal system and quite a credulous believer in spontaneous combustion and other things.Tyler Did Dickens actually believe in spontaneous combustion or is that a plot device? Like Gene Roddenberry doesn't actually believe in the transporter or didn't, as far as weHenry know. No, I think he believed. Yeah. Yeah. He defends it in the preface. Yeah.Tyler So it's not so confusing that there's not going to be a single behavioral model that captures deviations from rationality. So you end up thinking you ought to travel more, you ought to take in a lot of diverse different sources about our human beings behave, including from sociology, from anthropology. That makes it harder to be an economist, I would say it scatters your attention. You probably end up with a richer understanding of reality, but I'm not sure it's good for your research. It's probably bad for it.Henry It's not a good career move.Tyler It's not good for focus, but focus maybe can be a bit overrated.Henry Why are you more interested in fiction than other sort of people of a broadly rational disposition?Tyler Well, I might challenge the view that I'm of a broadly rational disposition. It's possible that all humans are roughly equally irrational, madmen aside, but if you mean the rationality community as one finds it in San Francisco, I think they're very mono in their approach to reasoning and that tends to limit the interests of many of them, not all, in fiction and travel. People are regional thinkers and in that region, San Francisco, there is incredible talent. It's maybe the most talented place in the world, but there's not the same kind of diversity of talents that you would find in London or New York and that somehow spreads to the broader ethos and it doesn't get people interested in fiction or for that matter, the visual arts very much.Henry But even in London, if I meet someone who's an economist or has an economics degree or whatever, the odds that they've read Bleak House or something are just so small.Tyler Bleak House is not that well read anymore, but I think an economist in London is likely to be much more well read than an economist in the Bay Area. That would be my prediction. You would know better than I would.Henry How important has imaginative literature been to you relative to other significant writers like philosophers or theoretical economists or something?Tyler Well, I'm not sure what you mean by imaginative literature. I think when I was 17, I read Olaf Stapleton, a great British author and Hegelian philosopher, and he was the first and first man and star maker, and that had a significant impact on me. Just how many visions you could put into a single book and have at least most of them cohere and make sense and inspire. That's one of the most imaginative works I've ever read, but people mean different things by that term.Henry How objectively can we talk about art?Tyler I think that becomes a discussion about words rather than about art. I would say I believe in the objective when it comes to aesthetics, but simply because we have no real choice not to. People actually, to some extent, trust their aesthetic judgments, so why not admit that you do and then fight about them? Trying to interject some form of extreme relativism, I think it's just playing a game. It's not really useful. Now, is art truly objective in the final metaphysical sense, in the final theory of the universe? I'm not sure that question has an answer or is even well-formulated, but I would just say let's just be objectivists when it comes to art. Why not?Henry What is wrong with historical fiction?Tyler Most of it bores me. For instance, I don't love Hilary Mantel and many very intelligent people think it's wonderful. I would just rather read the history. It feels like an in-between thing to me. It's not quite history. It's not quite fiction. I don't like biopics either when I go to the cinema. Yeah, I think you can build your own combination of extremes from history and fiction and get something better.Henry You don't have any historical fiction that you like, Penelope Fitzgerald, Tolstoy?Tyler Any is a strong word. I don't consider Tolstoy historical fiction. There's a historical element in it, as there is with say Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate or actually Dickens for that matter, but it's not driven by the history. I think it's driven by the characters and the story. Grossman comes somewhat closer to being historical fiction, but even there, I wouldn't say that it is.Henry It was written so close to the events though, right?Tyler Sure. It's about how people deal with things and what humanity means in extreme circumstances and the situations. I mean, while they're more than just a trapping, I never feel one is plodding through what happened in the Battle of Stalingrad when I read Grossman, say.Henry Yeah. Are there diminishing returns to reading fiction or what are the diminishing returns?Tyler It depends what you're doing in life. There's diminishing returns to most things in the sense that what you imbibe from your teen years through, say, your 30s will have a bigger impact on you than most of what you do later. I think that's very, very hard to avoid, unless you're an extreme late bloomer, to borrow a concept from you. As you get older, rereading gets better, I would say much better. You learn there are more things you want to read and you fill in the nooks and crannies of your understanding. That's highly rewarding in a way where what you read when you were 23 could not have been. I'm okay with that bargain. I wouldn't say it's diminishing returns. I would say it's altering returns. I think also when you're in very strange historical periods, reading fiction is more valuable. During the Obama years, it felt to me that reading fiction was somewhat less interesting. During what you might call the Trump years, and many other strange things are going on with AI, people trying to strive for immortality, reading fiction is much more valuable because it's more limited what nonfiction can tell you or teach you. I think right now we're in a time where the returns to reading more fiction are rapidly rising in a good way. I'm not saying it's good for the world, but it's good for reading fiction.Henry Do you cluster read your fiction?Tyler Sometimes, but not in general. If I'm cluster reading my fiction, it might be because I'm cluster reading my nonfiction and the fiction is an accompaniment to that. Say, Soviet Russia, I did some reading when I was prepping for Stephen Kotkin and for Russ Roberts and Vasili Grossman, but I don't, when it comes to fiction per se, cluster read it. No, I don't think you need to.Henry You're not going to do like, I'm reading Bleak House, so I'll do three other 1852 novels or three other Dickens novels or something like that.Tyler I don't do it, but I suspect it's counterproductive. The other Dickens novels will bore you more and they'll seem worse, is my intuition. I think the question is how you sequence works of very, very high quality. Say you just finished Bleak House, what do you pick up next? It should be a work of nonfiction, but I think you've got to wait a while or maybe something quite different, sort of in a way not different, like a detective story or something that won't challenge what has been cemented into your mind from Bleak House.Henry Has there been a decline of reading the classics?Tyler What I observe is a big superstar effect. I think a few authors, such as Jane Austen and Shakespeare, are more popular. I'm not completely sure they're more read, but they're more focal and more vivid. There are more adaptations of them. Maybe people ask GPT about them more. Really quite a few other works are much less read than would have been the case, say as recently as the 1970s or 1980s. My guess is, on the whole, the great works of fiction are much less read, but a few of them achieve this oversized reputation.Henry Why do you think that is?Tyler Attention is more scarce, perhaps, and social clustering effects are stronger through the internet. That would just be a guess.Henry It's not that we're all much more Jane Austen than we used to be?Tyler No, if anything, the contrary. Maybe because we're less Jane Austen, it's more interesting, because in, say, a Jane Austen novel, there will be sources of romantic tension not available to us through contemporary TV shows. The question, why don't they just sleep together, well, there's a potential answer in a Jane Austen story. In the Israeli TV show, Srugim, which is about modern Orthodox Jews, there's also an answer, but in most Hollywood TV, there's no answer. They're just going to sleep together, and it can become very boring quite rapidly.Henry Here's a reader question. Why is the market for classics so good, but nobody reads them? I think what they're saying is a lot of people aren't actually reading Shakespeare, but they still agree he's the best, so how can that be?Tyler A lot of that is just social conformity bias, but I see more and more people, and I mean intellectuals here, challenging the quality of Shakespeare. On the internet, every possible opinion will be expressed, is one way to put it. I think the market for classics is highly efficient in the following sense, that if you asked, say, GPT or Claude, which are the most important classics to read, that literally everything listed would be a great book. You could have it select 500 works, and every one of them would really be very good and interesting. If you look at Harold Bloom's list at the back of the Western canon, I think really just about every one of those is quite worthwhile, and that we got to that point is, to me, one of the great achievements of the contemporary world, and it's somewhat under-praised, because you go back in earlier points of time, and I think it's much less efficient, the market for criticism, if you would call it that.Henry Someone was WhatsAppping me the other day that GPT's list of 50 best English poets was just awful, and I said, well, you're using GPT4, o1 gives you the right list.Tyler Yeah, and o1 Pro may give you a slightly better list yet, or maybe the prompt has to be better, but it's interesting to me how many people, they love to attack literary criticism as the greatest of all villains, oh, they're all frustrated writers, they're all post-modernists, they're all extreme left-wingers. All those things might even be true to some extent, but the system as a whole, I would say completely has delivered, and especially people on the political and intellectual right, they often don't realize that. Just any work you want to read, if you put in a wee bit of time and go to a shelf of a good academic library, you can read fantastic criticism of it that will make your understanding of the work much better.Henry I used to believe, when I was young, I did sort of believe that the whole thing, oh, the Western canon's dying and everyone's given up on it, and I'm just so amazed now that the opposite has happened. It's very, very strong.Tyler I'm not sure how strong it is. I agree its force in discourse is strong, so something like, well, how often is it mentioned in my group chats? That's strongly rising, and that delights me, but that's a little different from it being strong, and I'm not sure how strong it is.Henry In an interview about your book Talent, you said this, “just get people talking about drama. I feel you learn a lot. It's not something they can prepare for. They can't really fake it. If they don't understand the topic, you can just switch to something else.”Tyler Yeah, that's great advice. You see how they think about how people relate to each other. It doesn't have to be fiction. I ask people a lot about Star Wars, Star Trek, whatever it is they might know that I have some familiarity with. Who makes the best decisions in Star Wars? Who gives the best advice? Yoda, Obi-Wan, Luke, Darth Vader, the Emperor?Henry It's a tough question.Tyler Yeah, yeah.Henry I don't know Star Wars, so I couldn't even answer that.Tyler You understand that you can't fake it. You can't prepare for it. It does show how the person thinks about advice and also drama.Henry Right. Now, you're a Shakespeare fan.Tyler Well, fan is maybe an understatement. He's better. He deserves better than fans.Henry How much of time, how much of your life have you spent reading and watching this work?Tyler I would say most of the plays from, say, like 1598 or 99 and after, I've read four to five times on average, some a bit more, some like maybe only three times. There's quite a few I've only read once and didn't like. Those typically are the earlier ones. When it comes to watching Shakespeare, I have to confess, I don't and can't understand it, so I'm really not able to watch it either on the stage or in a movie and profit from it. I think I partially have an auditory processing disorder that if I hear Shakespeare, you know, say at Folger in DC, I just literally cannot understand the words. It's like listening to Estonian, so I've gone some number of times. I cannot enjoy what you would call classic Shakespeare movies like Kenneth Branagh, Henry V, which gets great reviews, intelligent people love it. It doesn't click for me at all. I can't understand what's going on. The amount of time I've put into listening to it, watching it is very low and it will stay low. The only Shakespeare movies I like are the weird ones like Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight or Baz Luhrmann's Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. I think they're fantastic, but they're not obsessed with reciting the text.Henry So, you're reading with notes and you're piecing it together as you go.Tyler I feel the versions in my head are better than anything I see on the screen also, so that's another reason. I just think they're to be read. I fully understand that's not how Shakespeare seemed to view them, but that's a way in which we readers, in a funny way, can improve on Shakespeare's time.Henry No, I agree with you. The thing I get the most pushback about with Shakespeare is when I say that he was a great thinker.Tyler He's maybe the best thinker.Henry Right. But tell us what you mean by that.Tyler I don't feel I can articulate it. It's a bit like when o3 Pro gives you an answer so good you don't quite appreciate it yourself. Shakespeare is like o7 Pro or something. But the best of the plays seem to communicate the entirety of human existence in a way that I feel I can barely comprehend and I find in very, very little else. Even looking at other very great works such as Bleak House, I don't find it. Not all of the plays. There's very, very good plays that don't do that. Just say Macbeth and Othello. I don't feel do that at all. Not a complaint, but something like Hamlet or King Lear or Tempest or some of the comedies. It's just somehow all laid out there and all inside it at the same time. I don't know any other way of putting it.Henry A lot of people think that Shakespeare is overrated. We only read him because it's a status game. We've internalized these snobbish values. We see this stated a lot. What's your response to these people?Tyler Well, I feel sorry for them. But look, there's plenty of things I can't understand. I just told you if I go to see the plays, I'm completely lost. I know the fault is mine, so to speak. I don't blame Shakespeare or the production, at least not necessarily. Those are people who are in a similar position, but somehow don't have enough metarationality to realize the fault is on them. I think that's sad. But there's other great stuff they can do and probably they're doing it. That's fine.Henry Should everyone read Shakespeare at school?Tyler If you say everyone, I resist. But it certainly should be in the curriculum. But the real question is who can teach it? But yeah, it's better than not doing it. When I was in high school, we did Taming of the Shrew, which I actually don't like very much, and it put me off a bit. We did Macbeth, which is a much better play. But in a way, it's easy to teach. Macbeth, to me, is like a perfect two-minute punk rock song. It does something. It delivers. But it's not the Shakespeare that puts everything on the table, and the plot is easy to follow. You can imagine even a mediocre teacher leading students through it. It's to me still a little underwhelming if that's what we teach them. Then finally, my last year, we did Hamlet, and I'm like, whoa, okay, now I get it. Probably we do it wrong in a lot of cases, would be my guess. What's wrong with the Taming of the Shrew? It's a lot of yelling and screaming and ordinary. To me, it's not that witty. There's different views, like is it offensive to women, offensive to men? That's not my main worry. But those questions, I feel, also don't help the play, and I just don't think Shakespeare was fully mature when he wrote it. What was the year on that? Do you know offhand?Henry It's very early.Tyler It's very early. Very early, yeah. So if you look at the other plays that surround it, they're also not as top works. So why should we expect that one to be?Henry What can arts funding learn from the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres?Tyler Current arts funding? I don't think that much. I think the situation right now is so different, and what we should do so depends on the country, the state, the province, the region. Elizabethan times do show that market support at art can be truly wonderful. We have plenty of that today. But if you're just, say, appointed to be chair of the NEA and you've got to make decisions, I'm not sure how knowing about Elizabethan theatre would help you in any direct way.Henry What do you think of the idea that the long history of arts funding is a move away from a small group, an individual patronage where taste was very important, towards a kind of institutional patronage, which became much more bureaucratic? And so one reason why we keep arguing about arts funding now is that a lot of it exhibits bad taste because the committee has to sort of agree on various things. And if we could reallocate somewhat towards individual patronage, we'd do better.Tyler I would agree with the latter two-thirds of that. How you describe earlier arts funding I think is more complicated than what you said. A lot of it is just people doing things voluntarily at zero pecuniary cost, like singing songs, songs around the campfire, or hymns in church, rather than it being part of a patronage model. But I think it's way overly bureaucratized. The early National Endowment for the Arts in the 1960s just let smart people make decisions with a minimum of fuss. And of course we should go back to that. Of course we won't. We send half the money to the state's arts agencies, which can be mediocre or just interested in economic development and a new arts center, as opposed to actually stimulating creativity per se. More over time is spent on staff. There are all these pressures from Congress, things you can't fund. It's just become far less effective, even though it spends somewhat more money. So that's a problem in many, many countries.Henry What Shakespeare critics do you like reading?Tyler For all his flaws, I still think Harold Bloom is worthwhile. I know he's gotten worse and worse as a critic and as a Shakespeare critic. Especially if you're younger, you need to put aside the Harold Bloom you might think you know and just go to some earlier Bloom. Those short little books he edited, where for a given Shakespeare play he'll collect maybe a dozen essays and write eight or ten pages at the front, those are wonderful. But Bradley, William Hazlitt, the two Goddard volumes, older works, I think are excellent. But again, if you just go, if you can, to a university library, go to the part on the shelf where there's criticism on a particular play and just pull down five to ten titles and don't even select for them and just bring those home. I think you'll learn a lot.Henry So you don't like The Invention of the Human by Bloom?Tyler Its peaks are very good, but there's a lot in it that's embarrassing. I definitely recommend it, but you need to recommend it with the caveat that a lot of it is over the top or bad. It doesn't bother me. But if someone professional or academic tells me they're totally put off by the book, I don't try to talk them out of that impression. I just figure they're a bit hopelessly stuck on judging works by their worst qualities.Henry In 2018, you wrote this, “Shakespeare, by the way, is Girard's most important precursor. Also throw in the New Testament, Hobbes, Tocqueville, and maybe Montaigne.” Tell us what you mean by that.Tyler That was pretty good for me to have written that. Well, in Shakespeare, you have rivalrous behavior. You have mimetic desire. You have the importance of twinning. There's ritual sacrifice in so many of the plays, including the political ones. Girard's title, Violence and the Sacred, also comes from Shakespeare. As you well know, the best Gerard book, Theater of Envy, is fully about Shakespeare. All of Girard is drenched with Shakespeare.Henry I actually only find Girard persuasive on Shakespeare. The further I get away from that, the more I'm like, this is super overstated. I just don't think this is how humans ... I think this is too mono-explanation of humans. When I read the Shakespeare book, I think, wow, I never understood Midsummer Night's Dream until I read Girard.Tyler I think it's a bit like Harold Bloom. There's plenty in Girard you can point to as over the top. I think also for understanding Christianity, he has something quite unique and special and mostly correct. Then on other topics, it's anthropologically very questionable, but still quite stimulating. I would defend it on that basis, as I would Harold Girard.Henry No, I like Gerard, but I feel like the Shakespeare book gets less attention than the others.Tyler That's right. It's the best one and it's also the soundest one. It's the truly essential one.Henry How important was Shakespeare in the development of individualism?Tyler Probably not at all, is my sense. Others know more about the history than I do, but if I think of 17th century England, where some strands of individualist thought come from, well, part of it is coming from the French Huguenots and not from Shakespeare. A lot of it is coming from the Bible and not from Shakespeare. The levelers, John Locke, some of that is coming from English common law and not from Shakespeare. Then there's the ancient world. I don't quite see a strong connection to Shakespeare, but I'd love it if you could talk me into one.Henry My feeling is that the 1570s are the time when diaries begin to become personal records rather than professional records. What you get is a kind of Puritan self-examination. They'll write down, I said this, I did this, and then in the margin they'll put, come back and look at this and make sure you don't do this again. This new process of overhearing yourself is a central part of what Shakespeare's doing in his drawing. I think this is the thing that Bloom gets right, is that as you go through the plays in order, you see the very strong development of the idea that a stock character or someone who's drawing on a tradition of stock characters will suddenly say, oh, I just heard myself say that I'm a villain. Am I a villain? I'm sort of a villain. Maybe I'm not a villain. He develops this great art of self-referential self-development. I think that's one of the reasons why Shakespeare became so important to being a well-educated English person, is that you couldn't really get that in imaginative literature.Tyler I agree with all that, but I'm not sure the 17th century would have been all that different without Shakespeare, in literary terms, yes, but it seemed to me the currents of individualism were well underway. Other forces sweeping down from Europe, from the further north, competition across nations requiring individualism as a way of getting more wealth, the beginnings of economic thought which became individualistic and gave people a different kind of individualistic way of viewing the world. It seems so over-determined. Causally, I wouldn't ascribe much of a role to Shakespeare, but I agree with every sentence you said and what you said.Henry Sure, but you don't think the role of imaginative literature is somehow a fundamental transmission mechanism for all of this?Tyler Well, the Bible, I think, was quite fundamental as literature, not just as theology. So I would claim that, but keep in mind the publication and folio history of Shakespeare, which you probably know better than I do, it's not always well-known at every point in time by everyone.Henry I think it's always well-known by the English.Tyler I don't know, but I don't think it's dominant in the way that, say, Pilgrim's Progress was dominant for a long time.Henry Sure, sure, sure. And you wouldn't then, what would you say about later on, that modern European liberalism is basically the culture of novel reading and that we live in a society that's shaped by that? Do you have the same thing, like it's not causal?Tyler I don't know. That's a tricky question. The true 19th century novel I think of as somewhat historicist, often nationalist, slightly collectivist, certainly not Marxist, but in some ways illiberal. And so many of the truly great novel writers were not so liberal. And the real liberal novels, like Mancini's The Betrothed, which I quite enjoy, but it's somewhat of a slight work, right? And it might be a slight work because it is happy and liberal and open-minded. There's something about the greatest of creators, they tend to be pessimistic or a bit nasty or there's some John Lennon in them, there's Jonathan Swift, Swift, it's complicated. In some ways he's illiberal, but he's considered a Tory and in many ways he's quite an extreme reactionary. And the great age of the novel I don't think of is so closely tied to liberalism.Henry One of the arguments that gets made is like, you only end up with modern European liberalism through a culture where people are just spending a lot of time reading novels and imagining what it is like to be someone else, seeing from multiple different perspectives. And therefore it's less about what is the quote unquote message of the story and more about the habitual practice of thinking pluralistically.Tyler I think I would be much more inclined to ascribe that to reading newspapers and pamphlets than novels. I think of novels as modestly reactionary in their net impact, at least in the 19th century. I think another case in point, not just Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, one of the great novelists, had bad politics, right, was through Germany in the first world war. So if you look at the very greatest novels, there's something a bit problematic about many of their creators. They're not Nazis, they're not Stalinists, but they're not where I'm at either.Henry Now in 2017, a lot of people were complaining about Donald Trump as Julius Caesar and there was some farce about a production, I think it was put on in New York or DC maybe. And you said, no, no, no, he's not Caesar. He's more like a Shakespearean fool because he's the truth teller. What do you think of that view now?Tyler That was a Bloomberg column I wrote, I think in 2017. And I think that's held up quite well. So there's many criticisms of Trump that he's some kind of fascist. I don't think those have held up very well. He is a remarkable orator, coiner of phrase, coiner of insults, teller of truths, combined with a lot of nonsense and just nonsense talk, like the Covfefe tweet or whatever it was. And there's something tragic about Trump that he may well fail even by his own standards. He has a phenomenal sense of humor. I think people have realized that more and more. The fact that his popularity has persisted has forced a lot of people to reexamine just Trump as an individual and to see what a truly unique talent he is, whether you like him as your president or not. And that, I think, is all Shakespearean.Henry Some of the people around Trump now, they're trying to do DOGE and deregulation and other things. Are there Shakespearean lessons that they should be bearing in mind? Should we send them to see the Henriad before they get started?Tyler Send them to read the Henriad before they get started. The complicated nature of power: that the king never has the power that he needs to claim he does is quite significant. The ways in which power cannot be delegated, Shakespeare is extremely wise on. And yes, the DOGE people absolutely need to learn those lessons.Henry The other thing I'd take from the Henriad is time moves way quicker than anyone thinks it does. Even the people who are trying to move quite quickly in the play, they get taken over very rapidly by just changing-Tyler Yes. Once things start, it's like, oh my goodness, they just keep on running and no one's really in control. And that's a Shakespearean point as well.Henry Yeah. Here's another quote from the Bloomberg column, “given Shakespeare's brilliance in dramatizing the irrational, one of my biggest fears is that Shakespeare is indeed still a thinker for our times.” Has that come more true in recent years?Tyler I think more true. So from my point of view, the world is getting weirder in some very good ways and in some very bad ways. The arbitrary exercise of power has become more thinkable. You see this from Putin. We may see it from China. In the Middle East, it's happened as well. So the notion also that rulers can be their own worst enemies or human beings can be their own worst enemies. I think we see more when the world is volatile than when the world is stable, almost definitionally.Henry You once said Julius Caesar was an overrated play. Tell us why.Tyler You know, I read it again after I wrote that and it went up in my eyes. But I suppose I still think it's a bit overrated by people who love it. It's one of these mono plays like Macbeth or Othello. It does one thing very, very well. I think the mystical elements in it I had underappreciated on earlier readings and the complexity of the characters I had underappreciated. So I feel I was a little harsh on it. But I just wouldn't put it in the underrated category. Julius Caesar is such a well-known historical figure. It's so easy for that play to become focal. And Brutus and, you know, the stabbing, the betrayal, it's a little too easy for it to become famous. And I guess that's why I think within the world of Shakespeare fans, it still might be a little overrated.Henry It's written at a similar time to Hamlet and Twelfth Night, and I think it gets caught up in the idea that this was a great pivotal moment for Shakespeare. But actually I agree, over the years I've come to think it's really just not the equal of the other plays it's surrounded by.Tyler Yeah, that's still my view. Absolutely. Not the equal of those two, certainly.Henry What is the most underrated play?Tyler I'm not sure how they're all rated. So I used to think Winter's Tale, clearly. But I've heard so many people say it's the most underrated, including you, I think. I don't know if I can believe that anymore. So I think I have to go with The Henriad, because to me that's the greatest thing Shakespeare ever did. And I don't think it's commonly recognized as such. I mean, Hamlet or King Lear would typically be nominated. And those are top, top, top, top. But I'll still go with The Henriad.Henry You are saying Henriad above Hamlet, above Lear, above Twelfth Night.Tyler Maybe it's not fair because you have multiple plays, right? What if, you know, there were three Hamlets? Maybe that would be better. But still, if I have to pick, no one of The Henriad comes close to Hamlet. But if you can consider it as a whole in the evolution of the story, for me it's a clear winner. And it's what I've learned the most from. And a problem with Hamlet, not Shakespeare's fault, but Hamlet became so popular you hear lesser versions of themes and ideas from Hamlet your whole life. It's a bit like seeing Mondrian on the shopping bag. That does not happen, really, with The Henriad. So that has hurt Hamlet, but without meaning it's, you know, a lesser play. King Lear, you have less of that. It's so bleak and tragic. It's harder to put on the shopping bag, so to speak. In that sense, King Lear has held up a bit better than Hamlet has.Henry Why do you admire The Winter's Tale so much? What do you like about it?Tyler There's some mysterious sense of beauty in it that even in other Shakespearean plays I don't feel. And a sense of miracle and wonder, also betrayal and how that is mixed in with the miracle and wonder. Somehow he makes it work. It's quite an unlikely play. And the jealousy and the charge of infidelity I take much more seriously than other readers of the play do. I don't think you can say there's a Straussian reading where she clearly fooled around on the king. But he's not just crazy, either. And there are plenty of hints that something might have happened. It's still probably better to infer it didn't happen. But it's a more ambiguous play than it is typically read as.Henry Yes, someone said to me, ask if he thinks Hermione has an affair. And you're saying maybe.Tyler Again, in a prediction market, I'll bet no, but we're supposed to wonder. We're not supposed to just think the king is crazy.Henry I know you don't like to see it, but my view is that because we believe in this sudden jealousy theory, it's often not staged very well. And that's one reason why it's less popular than it ought to be.Tyler I've only seen it once. I suspect that was true. I saw it, in fact, last year. And the second half of the play was just awful. The first half, you could question. But it was a painful experience. It was just offensively stupid. One of the great regrets of my life is I did not drive up to New York City to see Bergman present his version of Winter's Tale in Swedish. And I'm quite sure that would have been magnificent and that he would have understood it very deeply and very well. That was just stupid of me. This was, I think, in the early 90s. I forget exactly when.Henry I think that's right. And there's a theater library where if you want to go and sit in the archive, you can see it.Tyler I will do that at some point. Part of my worry is I don't believe their promise. I know you can read that promise on the internet, but when you actually try to find the person who can track it down for you and give you access, I have my doubts. If I knew I could do it, I would have done it by now.Henry I'll give you the email because I think I actually found that person. Does Romeo actually love Juliet?Tyler Of course not. It's a play about perversion and obsession and family obligation and rebellion. And there's no love between the two at all. And if you read it with that in mind, once you see that, you can't unsee it. So that's an underrated play. People think, oh, star-crossed teen romance, tragic ending, boo-hoo. That's a terrible reading. It's just a superficial work of art if that's what you think it is.Henry I agree with you, but there are eminent Shakespeare professors who take that opinion.Tyler Well maybe we're smarter than they are. Maybe we know more about other things. You shouldn't let yourself be intimidated by critics. They're highly useful. We shouldn't trash them. We shouldn't think they're all crummy left-wing post-modernists. But at the end of the day, I don't think you should defer to them that much either.Henry Sure. So you're saying Juliet doesn't love Romeo?Tyler Neither loves the other.Henry Okay. Because my reading is that Romeo has a very strong death drive or dark side or whatever.Tyler That's the strong motive in the play is the death drive, yeah.Henry And what that means is that it's not his tragedy, it's her tragedy. She actually is an innocent young girl. Okay, maybe she doesn't love him, it's a crush or it's whatever, but she actually is swept up in the idea of this handsome stranger. She can get out of her family. She's super rebellious. There's that wonderful scene where she plays all sweetness and light to her nurse and then she says, I'm just lying to you all and I'm going to get out of here. Whereas he actually is, he doesn't have any romantic feeling for her. He's really quite a sinister guy.Tyler Those are good points. I fully agree. I still would interpret that as she not loving him, but I think those are all good insights.Henry You've never seen it staged in this way? You've never seen any one?Tyler The best staging is that Baz Luhrmann movie I mentioned, which has an intense set of references to Haitian voodoo in Romeo and Juliet when you watch the movie. The death drive is quite clear. That's the best staging I know of, but I've never seen it on the stage ever. I've seen the Zeffirelli movie, I think another film instance of it, but no, it's the Haitian voodoo version that I like.Henry He makes it seem like they love each other, right?Tyler In a teenage way. I don't feel that he gets it right, but I feel he creates a convincing universe through which the play usefully can be viewed.Henry The Mercutio death, I think, is never going to be better than in that film. What do you like about Antonin Cleopatra?Tyler It's been a long time since I've read that. What a strong character she is. The sway people can exercise over each other. The lines are very good. It's not a top Shakespeare favorite of mine, but again, if anyone else had done it, you would just say this is one of the greatest plays ever, and it is.Henry I think it's going to be much more of a play for our times because many people in the Trump administration are going to have that. They're torn between Rome and Egypt, as it were, and the personal conflicts are going to start getting serious for them, if you like.Tyler There's no better writer or thinker on personal conflict than Shakespeare, right?Henry Yes. Now, you do like Measure for Measure, but you're less keen on All's Well That Ends Well. Is that right?Tyler I love Measure for Measure. To me, it's still somewhat underrated. I think it's risen in status. All's Well That Ends Well, I suspect you need to be good at listening to Shakespeare, which as I've already said, I'm not. It's probably much better than I realize it is for that reason. I'm not sure on the printed page it works all that well.Henry Yeah. That's right. I think it's one of the most important plays. Why? Because I think there are two or three basic factors about Shakespeare's drama, which is like the story could often branch off in different directions. You often get the sense that he could swerve into a different genre. The point Samuel Johnson made about whenever someone's running off to the tavern, someone else is being buried, right? And a lot of the time he comes again and again to the same types of situations, the same types of characters, the same types of family set up. And he ends the plays in different ways and he makes it fall out differently. And I think Helena is very representative of a lot of these facets. Everyone thinks she's dead, but she's not dead. Sometimes it looks like it's going badly for her when actually it's going well. No one in the play ever really has an honest insight into her motives. And there comes a point, I think, when just the overall message of Shakespeare's work collectively is things go very wrong very quickly. And if you can get to some sort of happy ending, you should take it. You should be pragmatic and say, OK, this isn't the perfect marriage. This isn't the perfect king. But you know what? We could be in a civil war. Everyone could be dead. All's well that ends well. That's good advice. Let's take it.Tyler I should reread it. Number one in my reread pile right now is Richard II, which I haven't read in a long time. And there's a new biography out about Richard II. And I'm going to read the play and the biography more or less in conjunction. And there's a filming of Richard II that I probably won't enjoy, but I'll try. And I'm just going to do that all together, probably sometime over this break. But I'll have all's well that ends well is next on my reread list. You should always have a Shakespeare to reread list, right?Henry Always. Oh, of course. Is Shakespeare a good economic thinker?Tyler Well, he's a great thinker. I would say he's better than a good economic thinker. He understands the motive of money, but it's never just the motive of money. And Shakespeare lowers the status of economic thinking, I would say, overall, in a good way. He's better than us.Henry What are your thoughts on The Merchant of Venice?Tyler Quite underrated. People have trouble with it because it is very plausibly anti-Semitic. And everyone has to preface any praise they give it with some kind of disavowal or whatever. The way I read the play, which could be wrong, but it's actually more anti-anti-Semitic than it is anti-Semitic. So the real cruel mean people are those who torment the Jew. I'm not saying Shakespeare was not in some ways prejudiced against Jews and maybe other groups, but actually reading it properly should make people more tolerant, not because they're reacting against Shakespeare's anti-Semitism, but because the proper message of the play understood at a deeper level is toleration.Henry You teach a law and literature class, I think.Tyler Well, I did for 20 years, but I don't anymore.Henry Did you teach Merchant of Venice?Tyler I taught it two or three times, yes.Henry How did your students react to it?Tyler Whenever I taught them Shakespeare, which was actually not that much, they always liked it, but they didn't love it. And there's some version of Shakespeare you see on the screen when it's a decent but not great filmed adaptation where there's the mechanics of the plot and you're held in suspense and then there's an ending. And I found many of them read Shakespeare in those terms and they quite enjoyed it, but somehow they didn't get it. And I think that was true for Merchant of Venice as well. I didn't feel people got hung up on the anti-Semitism point. They could put that aside and just treat it as a play, but still I didn't feel that people got it.Henry Should we read Shakespeare in translation?Tyler Well, many people have to. I've read some of the Schlegel translations. I think they're amazing. My wife, Natasha, who grew up in the Soviet Union, tells me there are very good Russian language translations, which I certainly believe her. The Schlegels are different works. They're more German romantic, as you might expect, but that's fine, especially if you know the original. My guess is there are some other very good translations. So in that qualified way, the translations, a few of them can be quite valuable. I worry that at some point we'll all need to read it in some sort of translation, as Chaucer is mostly already true for Chaucer. You probably don't have to read Chaucer in translation, but I do.Henry I feel like I shouldn't read it in translation, I think.Tyler But you do, right? Or you don't?Henry No, I read the original. I make myself do the original.Tyler I just can't understand the original well enough.Henry But I put the time in when I was young, and I think you retain a sense of it. Do you think, though, if we read, let's say we read Shakespeare in a modern English version, how much are we getting?Tyler It'll be terrible. It'll be a negative. It will poison your brain. So this, to me, will be highly unfortunate. Better to learn German and read the Schlegel than to read someone turning Shakespeare into current English. The only people who could do it maybe would be like the Trinidadians, who still have a marvelous English, and it would be a completely different work. But at least it might be something you could be proud of.Henry I'd like to read some of that. That would be quite an exciting project.Tyler Maybe it's been done. I don't know. But just an Americanized Hollywood version, like, no, that's just a negative. It's destructive.Henry Now, you're very interested in the 17th century, which I think is when we first get steady economic growth, East India Company, England is settling in America.Tyler Political parties. Some notion of the rule of law. A certain theory of property rights. Very explicit individualism. Social contract theories. You get Hobbes, Isaac Newton, calculus. We could go on. Some people would say, well, Westphalia, you get the modern nation state. That to me is a vaguer date to pin that on. But again, it's a claim you can make of a phenomenal century. People aren't that interested in it anymore, I think.Henry How does Shakespeare fit into this picture?Tyler Well, if you think of the years, if you think of the best ones, they start, like what, 1598, 1599. And then by 1600, they're almost all just wonderful. He's a herald. I don't think he's that causal. But he's a sign, the first totally clear sign that all the pieces have fallen into place. And we know the 17th century gave us our greatest thinker. And in terms of birth, not composition, it gave us our greatest composer, Bach.Henry So we can't have Shakespeare without all of this economic and philosophic and political activity. He's sort of, those things are necessary conditions for what he's doing.Tyler He needed the 16th century, and there's some very good recent books on how important the 16th century was for the 17th century. So I think more and more, as I read more, I'll come to see the roots of the 17th and the 16th century. And Shakespeare is reflecting that by bridging the two.Henry What are the recent books that you recommend about the 16th century?Tyler Oh, I forget the title, but there's this book about Elizabethan England, came out maybe three or four years ago, written by a woman. And it just talks about markets and commerce and creativity, surging during that time. In a way, obvious points, but she put them together better than anyone else had. And there's this other new German book about the 16th century. It's in my best of the year list that I put up on Marginal Revolution, and I forget the exact title, but I've been reading that slowly. And that's very good. So I expect to make further intellectual moves in that direction.Henry Was Shakespeare anti-woke?Tyler I don't know what that means in his context. He certainly understands the real truths are deeper, but to pin the word anti on him is to make him smaller. And like Harold Bloom, I will refuse to do that.Henry You don't see some sense in which ... A lot of people have compared wokeness to the Reformation, right? I mean, it's a kind of weak comparison.Tyler Yes, but only some strands of it. You wouldn't say Luther was woke, right?Henry But you don't see some way in which Shakespeare is, not in an anti way, in a complicated way, but like a reaction against some of these forces in the way that Swift would be a reaction against certain forces in his time.Tyler Well I'm not even sure what Shakespeare's religion was. Some people claim he was Catholic. To me that's plausible, but I don't know of any clear evidence. He does not strike me as very religious. He might be a lapsed Catholic if I had to say. I think he simply was always concerned with trying to view and present things in a deeper manner and there were so many forces he could have been reacting against with that one. I don't know exactly what it was in the England of his time that specifically he was reacting against. If someone says, oh, it was the strand of Protestant thought, I would say fine, it might have been that. A la Peter Thiel, couldn't you say it's over determined and name 47 other different things as well?Henry Now, if you were talking to rationalists, effective altruists, people from Silicon Valley, all these kinds of groups, would you say to them, you should read Shakespeare, you should read fiction, or would you just say, you're doing great, don't worry that you're missing out on this?Tyler Well, I'm a little reluctant to just tell people you should do X. I think what I've tried to do is to be an example of doing X and hope that example is somewhat contagious. Other people are contagious on me, as for instance, you have been. That's what I like to do. Now, it's a question, if someone needs a particular contagion, does that mean it's high marginal value or does it mean, in some sense, they're immue from the bug and you can't actually get them interested? It can go either way. Am I glad that Peter Singer has specialized in being Peter Singer, even though I disagree with much of it? I would say yes. Peter had his own homecoming. As far as I know, it was not Shakespearean, but when he wrote that book about the history of Vienna and his own family background, that was in a sense Peter doing his version of turning Shakespearean. It was a good book and it deepened his thought, but at the end of the day, I also see he's still Peter Singer, so I don't know. I think the Shakespearean perspective itself militates a bit against telling people they should read Shakespeare.Henry Sure. Patrick Collison today has tweeted about, I think, 10 of the great novels that he read this year. It's a big, long tweet with all of his novels.Tyler Yeah, it's wonderful.Henry Yeah, it's great. At the end, he basically says the reason to read them is just that they're great. Appreciation of excellence is a good thing for its own sake. You're not going to wrench a utilitarian benefit out of this stuff. Is that basically your view?Tyler I fully agree with that, but he might slightly be underrating the utilitarian benefits. If you read a particular thing, whatever it is, it's a good way of matching with other people who will deepen you. If it's Shakespeare, or if it's science fiction, or if it's economics, I think there's this big practical benefit from the better matching. I think, actually, Patrick himself, over time in his life, he will have a different set of friends, somewhat, because he wrote that post, and that will be good.Henry There's a utilitarian benefit that we both love Bleak House, therefore we can talk about it. This just opens up a lot of conversation and things for us that we wouldn't otherwise get.Tyler We're better friends, and we're more inclined to chat with each other, do this podcast, because we share that. That's clearly true in our case. I could name hundreds of similar cases, myself, people I know. That's important. So much of life is a matching problem, which includes matching to books, but also, most importantly, matching to people.Henry You're what? You're going to get better matching with better books, because Bleak House is such a great book. You're going to get better opportunities for matching.Tyler Of course, you'll understand other books better. There's something circular in that. I get it. A lot of value is circular, and the circle is how you cash in, not leaving the circle, so that's fine.Henry You don't think there's a ... I mean, some of the utilitarian benefits that are claimed like it gives you empathy, it improves your EQ or whatever, I think this is all complete rubbish.Tyler I'd love to see the RCTs, but in the prediction markets, I'll bet no. But again, I have an open mind. If someone had evidence, they could sway me, but I doubt it. I don't see it.Henry But I do think literature is underrated as a way of thinking.Tyler Yes, absolutely, especially by people we are likely to know.Henry Right. And that is quite a utilitarian benefit, right? If you can get yourself into that mindset, that is directly useful.Tyler I agree. The kind of career I've had, which is too complicated to describe for those of you who don't know it, but I feel I could not have had it without having read a lot of fiction.Henry Right. And I think that would be true for a lot of people, even if they don't recognize it directly in their own lives, right?Tyler Yes. In Silicon Valley, you see this huge influence of Lord of the Rings. Yes. And that's real, I think. It's not feigned, and that's also a great book.Henry One of the best of the 20th century, no doubt.Tyler Absolutely. And the impact it has had on people still has. It's an example of some classics get extremely elevated, like Shakespeare, Austen, and also Tolkien. It's one of them that just keeps on rising.Henry Ayn Rand is quite influential.Tyler Increasingly so. And that has held up better than I ever would have thought. Depends on the book. It's complicated, but yes, you have to say, held up better than one ever would have thought.Henry Are you going to go and do a reread?Tyler I don't think I can. I feel the newspaper is my reread of Atlas Shrugged, that suffices.Henry Is GPT good at Shakespeare, or LLMs generally?Tyler They're very useful for fiction, I've found. It was fantastic for reading Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate. I have never used them for Shakespeare, not once. That's an interesting challenge, because it's an earlier English. There's a depth in Shakespeare that might exceed current models. I'd love to see a project at some point in time to train AI for Shakespeare the way some people are doing it for Math Olympiads. But finding the human graders would be tough, though not impossible. You should be one of them. I would love that. I hope some philanthropist makes that happen.Henry Agreed. We're here, and we're ready.Tyler Yes, very ready.Henry What do you think about Shakespeare's women?Tyler The best women in all of fiction. They're marvelous, and they're attractive, and they're petulant, and they're romantic, and they're difficult, and they're stubborn, or whatever you want, it's in there. Just phenomenal. It's a way in which Shakespeare, again, I don't want to say anti-woke, but he just gives you a much deeper, better vision than the wokes would give you. Each one is such a distinctive voice. Yeah, fantastic. In a funny way, he embodies a lot of woke insights. The ways in which gender becomes malleable in different parts of stories is very advanced for his time.Henry It's believable also. The thing that puzzles me, so believable. What puzzles me is he's so polyphonic, and he represents that way of thinking so well, but I get the sense that John Stuart Mill, who wrote the Bentham essay and everything, just wasn't that interested in Shakespeare relative to the other things he was reading.Tyler He did write a little bit on Shakespeare, didn't he? But not much. But it wasn't wonderful. It was fine, but not like the Bentham Coleridge.Henry I think I've seen it in letters where he's like, oh, Shakespeare, pretty good. This, to me, is a really weird gap in the history of literature.Tyler But this does get to my point, where I don't think Shakespeare was that important for liberalism or individualism. The people who were obsessed with Shakespeare, as you know, were the German romantics, with variants, but were mostly illiberal or non-liberal. That also, to me, makes sense.Henry That's a good point. That's a good challenge. My last question is, you do a lot of talent spotting and talent assessing. How do you think about Shakespeare's career?Tyler I feel he is someone I would not have spotted very well. I feel bad about that. We don't know that much about him. As you well know, people still question if Shakespeare was Shakespeare. That's not my view. I'm pretty orthodox on the matter. But what the signs would have been in those early plays that he would have, say, by so far have exceeded Marlowe or even equaled Marlowe, I definitely feel I would have had a Zoom call with him and said, well, send me a draft, and read the early work, and concluded he would be like second-tier Marlowe, and maybe given him a grant for networking reasons, totally missed the boat. That's how I assess, how I would have assessed Shakespeare at the time, and that's humbling.Henry Would you have been good at assessing other writers of any period? Do you think there are other times when you would have?Tyler If I had met young Thomas Mann, I think there's a much greater chance I would have been thrilled. If I had met young Johann Sebastian Bach, I think there's a strong chance I would have been thrilled. Now, music is different. It's like chess. You can excel at quite a young age. But there's something about the development of Shakespeare where I think it is hard to see where it's headed early on. And it's the other question, how would I have perceived Shakespeare's work ethic? There's different ways you could interpret the biography here. But the biography of Bach, or like McCartney, clearly just obsessed with work ethic. You could not have missed it if you met young Bach, I strongly suspect. But Shakespeare, it's not clear to me you would see the work ethic early on or even later on.Henry No, no. I agree with that, actually.Tyler Same with Goethe. If I met early Goethe, my guess is I would have felt, well, here's the next Klopstock, which is fine, worthy of a grand. But Goethe was far more than that. And he always had these unfinished works. And you would, oh, come on, you're going to finish this one. Like you'd see Werther. OK, you made a big splash. But is your second novel just going to bomb? I think those would have been my hesitations. But I definitely would have funded Goethe as the next Klopstock, but been totally wrong and off base.Henry Right. And I think the thing I took away from the A.N. Wilson biography, which you also enjoyed recently, was I was amazed just how much time Goethe didn't spend working. Like I knew he wasn't always working, but there was so much wasted time in his life.Tyler Yes, but I do wonder with that or any biography, and I don't mean this as a criticism of Wilson, I think we know much less than we think we do about earlier times in general. So he could have been doing things that don't turn up in any paperwork. Sure, sure, sure. So I'm not sure how lazy he was, but I would just say, unlike Bach or say Paul McCartney, it's not evident that he was the world's hardest worker.Henry And Mozart, would you have? How do you feel about Mozart's early career?Tyler Well, Mozart is so exceptional, so young, it's just very easy to spot. I don't I don't even think there's a puzzle there unless you're blind. Now, I don't love Mozart before, I don't know, like the K-330s maybe, but still as a player, even just as a lower quality composer, I think you would bet the house on Mozart at any age where you could have met him and talked to him.Henry So you think K-100s, you can see the beginnings of the great symphonies, the great concertos?Tyler Well, I would just apply the Cowen test at how young in age was this person trying at all? And that would just dominate and I wouldn't worry too much about how good it was. And if I heard Piano Concerto No. 9, which is before K-330, I'm pretty sure that's phenomenal. But even if I hadn't heard that, it's like this guy's trying. He's going to be on this amazing curve. Bet the house on Mozart. It's a no-brainer. If you don't do that, you just shouldn't be doing talent at all. He's an easy case. He's one of the easiest cases you can think of.Henry Tyler Cowen, this was great. Thank you very much.Tyler Thank you very much, Henry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

Harold Bloom: Zachodni kanon. Książki i szkoła wieków. (1994; wydanie polskie Warszawa 2019). Spory wokół ustalenia kanonu literackiego (i pochodnych list lektur) niewiele mnie interesują - ale określenie motywacji doboru "kanonicznych" tekstów - już tak... Opening/ending: Johann Sebastian Bach, the Open Goldberg Variations by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kimiko Ishizaka⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kimiko_Ishizaka/The_Open_Goldberg_Variations

Harold Bloom: Zachodni kanon. Książki i szkoła wieków. (1994; wydanie polskie Warszawa 2019). Spory wokół ustalenia kanonu literackiego (i pochodnych list lektur) niewiele mnie interesują - ale określenie motywacji doboru "kanonicznych" tekstów - już tak... Opening/ending: Johann Sebastian Bach, the Open Goldberg Variations by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kimiko Ishizaka⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kimiko_Ishizaka/The_Open_Goldberg_Variations

Harold Bloom: Zachodni kanon. Książki i szkoła wieków. (1994; wydanie polskie Warszawa 2019). Spory wokół ustalenia kanonu literackiego (i pochodnych list lektur) niewiele mnie interesują - ale określenie motywacji doboru "kanonicznych" tekstów - już tak... Opening/ending: Johann Sebastian Bach, the Open Goldberg Variations by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kimiko Ishizaka⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kimiko_Ishizaka/The_Open_Goldberg_Variations

Harold Bloom: Zachodni kanon. Książki i szkoła wieków. (1994; wydanie polskie Warszawa 2019). Spory wokół ustalenia kanonu literackiego (i pochodnych list lektur) niewiele mnie interesują - ale określenie motywacji doboru "kanonicznych" tekstów - już tak... Opening/ending: Johann Sebastian Bach, the Open Goldberg Variations by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kimiko Ishizaka⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kimiko_Ishizaka/The_Open_Goldberg_Variations

Pewnie od tego należało zacząć... Harold Bloom: Jak czytać i po co? Warszawa 2019 ⁠https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom

Pewnie od tego należało zacząć... Harold Bloom: Jak czytać i po co? Warszawa 2019 ⁠https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom

Harold Bloom defined 'strangeness' as a mark of originality that is endemic and absolutely required for any work of literary art to be considered a masterpiece or a classic. Dan Simmons goes further to define it as a quality in the writing or storytelling that indicates to us, the reader (or viewer for Film/TV), are in the presence of an intelligence that is unique or different enough to be able to teach us something about ourselves. So...how does one achieve 'strangeness?' Is it something that can be taught? Practiced? Or is it something you either have or you don't? We discuss! Also, Josh recommends Men which is on HBO Max, and Ira recommends It Follows which is on Prime.

Pewnie od tego należało zacząć... Harold Bloom: Jak czytać i po co? Warszawa 2019 ⁠https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom

Pewnie od tego należało zacząć... Harold Bloom: Jak czytać i po co? Warszawa 2019 ⁠https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom

Pewnie od tego należało zacząć... Harold Bloom: Jak czytać i po co? Warszawa 2019 https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom

Today's poem demonstrates that, unlike Arnold's sideburns, loving the Bard never goes out of style. Although remembered now for his elegantly argued critical essays, Matthew Arnold, born in Laleham, Middlesex, on December 24, 1822, began his career as a poet, winning early recognition as a student at the Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, had earned national acclaim as a strict and innovative headmaster. Arnold also studied at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1844, after completing his undergraduate degree at Oxford, he returned to Rugby as a teacher of classics.After marrying in 1851, Arnold began work as a government school inspector, a grueling position which nonetheless afforded him the opportunity to travel throughout England and the Continent. Throughout his thirty-five years in this position Arnold developed an interest in education, an interest which fed into both his critical works and his poetry. Empedocles on Etna (1852) and Poems (1853) established Arnold's reputation as a poet and, in 1857, he was offered a position, which he accepted and held until 1867, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Arnold became the first professor to lecture in English rather than Latin. During this time Arnold wrote the bulk of his most famous critical works, Essays in Criticism (1865) and Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which he sets forth ideas that greatly reflect the predominant values of the Victorian era.Meditative and rhetorical, Arnold's poetry often wrestles with problems of psychological isolation. In “To Marguerite—Continued,” for example, Arnold revises John Donne's assertion that “No man is an island,” suggesting that we “mortals” are indeed “in the sea of life enisled.” Other well-known poems, such as “Dover Beach,” link the problem of isolation with what Arnold saw as the dwindling faith of his time. Despite his own religious doubts, a source of great anxiety for him, in several essays Arnold sought to establish the essential truth of Christianity. His most influential essays, however, were those on literary topics. In “The Function of Criticism” (1865) and “The Study of Poetry” (1880) Arnold called for a new epic poetry: a poetry that would address the moral needs of his readers, “to animate and ennoble them.” Arnold's arguments, for a renewed religious faith and an adoption of classical aesthetics and morals, are particularly representative of mainstream Victorian intellectual concerns. His approach—his gentlemanly and subtle style—to these issues, however, established criticism as an art form, and has influenced almost every major English critic since, including T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Harold Bloom. Though perhaps less obvious, the tremendous influence of his poetry, which addresses the poet's most innermost feelings with complete transparency, can easily be seen in writers as different from each other as W. B. Yeats, James Wright, Sylvia Plath, and Sharon Olds. Late in life, in 1883 and 1886, Arnold made two lecturing tours of the United States.Matthew Arnold died in Liverpool on April 15, 1888.-bio via Academy of American Poets Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

There's a profile about me and Second Act in the New Zealand Listener. It's very good so if you're in NZ and have a subscription (it's paywalled) do take a look. I chuckled at this line: “Speaking by Zoom from London, Oliver is a serious fellow, and has the manner of someone older.” This was nice too: “He also has a strong sense of his own mortality. For someone still in their 30s, this seems surprising until he talks about his penchant for poetry… Our interview is peppered with quotes from poems.” My thanks to Sarah Catherall for a lovely write up!When I asked to interview Nabeel, he asked to interview me. How could I refuse? Nabeel is a well-read literary enthusiast so of course we had a good time covering many topics such as favourite books, autofiction, Harold Bloom, modernism, subjectivity culture post-1945, Anthony Powell, The Englishness of Robert Frost, modern novels, George Eliot, viewquakes, novels about older people, and being self-authorised. And then I turned it round and ask Nabeel questions about tech reading lists, entertainment and learning, the utilitarian value of Shakespeare, and whether AI will be good for literature. He's a visiting fellow in AI at the Mercatus Centre, with a background in tech companies, so his answers are well-considered and interesting. And I got a book recommendation! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

AAco. La primera A por Alejandro. “Aco” es el apócope de su apellido, Acobino. Y apodo con el que lo identificaron sus amigos del colegio y colegas de teatro. Así firmaba sus cartas Alejandro Acobino, un actor, director y un dramaturgo extraordinario que dio el teatro de Buenos Aires. Cuando se fue, de forma temprana, dejó cinco obras: Enobarbo, Continente Viril, Rodando, Hernanito y Absentha. Y otras tantas inconclusas. Dejó también una poética potente, de una escritura magistral y llena de personajes que se pierden en una obsesión. Creo -lo digo humildemente después de haber visto sus obras varias veces- que aún no logramos ver del todo la dimensión de su legado. Una dimensión increíblemente lúcida de un teatro atroz, trágico y grotesco. Acobino fue, además, un gran escritor de cartas. Le encantaba escribirlas y hablar por téléfono. Esta carta fue extraída del libro “AAco. Alejandro Acobino: cartas, ensayos y homenajes”, editado por el Centro Cultural de la Cooperación Floreal Gorini. Es una cuidada y amorosa edición de su hermana Gabriela, que encontró muchísimos escritos en su computadora. Acá le escribe a una tal Sandy. No sabemos quién fue (Gabriela, su hermana, tampoco), pero importa poco. Alejandro le responde a esta mujer, quizá una periodista, que le había preguntado qué es para él el arte y por qué hace arte. Acá va entonces un pequeño homenaje de Epistolar a Alejandro Acobino por tantas horas disfrutando de su maravillosa obra. Lee el actor y amigo de Acobino, Germán Rodríguez. *** Estimada Sandy: Lamento la tardanza pero me olvidé completamente. Encontré tu mail de casualidad y te respondo. Espero que no sea tarde. No me resulta fácil contestarte lo que me pedís. La razón principal por la que hago arte es porque amo el arte. Tengo mis valores éticos y procuro ser consecuente con ellos como cualquiera que busca ser consecuente con sus valores. Tengo también mis valores ideológicos y por qué no confesarlo filosóficos… Pero a la hora de escribir y dirigir lo estético lo supedita todo... Creo en la autonomía de la estética respecto a los demás valores humanos... Acá me acerco más a Harold Bloom que a John Berger, aunque ideológicamente estoy más cerca de Berger (un progresista), filosóficamente me parezco más a Bloom (acusado de conservador). Del público: Yo vengo del público. Yo crecí en la época de la “primavera democrática” cuando salimos de la dictadura. La ciudad era un hervidero de teatritos, varietés, conciertos gratis, óperas… Yo me fui formando en ese mundo. Tras un intento frustrado de ser químico volví al teatro… Mi motor es la fascinación por el arte primero. ¿Por qué el teatro no es algo tan simple de explicar? Es decir mi mayor relación con el público es que del público vengo. Y hago teatro para que exista el teatro que querría ver... Y si no tengo mayor reflexión es porque gasto la mayor parte de mi tiempo reflexionando sobre los problemas estéticos que me planteo. AAco

En medio de una mesa de trabajo escasa, el grupo de la Mala Hora se adentra en la pregunta de ¿qué es el canon en la literatura? se habla de un canon de pocos, como el que propone Harold Bloom y se analiza las ideas de representación de un canon diferente, como lo dice  Mignolo. Los que están en el programa, proponen un canon propio de sus lecturas 

Today's poem is a shape poem dedicated to chefs, but (surprise?) it might be about more than cooking.John Hollander, one of contemporary poetry's foremost poets, editors, and anthologists, grew up in New York City. He studied at Columbia University and Indiana University, and he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. Hollander received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Levinson Prize, a MacArthur Foundation grant, and the poet laureateship of Connecticut. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and he taught at Hunter College, Connecticut College, and Yale University, where he was the Sterling Professor emeritus of English.Over the course of an astonishing career, Hollander influenced generations of poets and thinkers with his critical work, his anthologies and his poetry. In the words of J.D. McClatchy, Hollander was “a formidable presence in American literary life.” Hollander's eminence as a scholar and critic was in some ways greater than his reputation as a poet. His groundbreaking introduction to form and prosody Rhyme's Reason (1981), as well as his work as an anthologist, has ensured him a place as one of the 20th-century's great, original literary critics. Hollander's critical writing is known for its extreme erudition and graceful touch. Hollander's poetry possesses many of the same qualities, though the wide range of allusion and technical virtuosity can make it seem “difficult” to a general readership.Hollander's first poetry collection, A Crackling of Thorns (1958) won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Awards, judged by W.H. Auden. And in fact James K. Robinson in the Southern Review found that Hollander's “early poetry resembles Auden's in its wit, its learned allusiveness, its prosodic mastery.” Hollander's technique continued to develop through later books like Visions from the Ramble (1965) and The Night Mirror (1971). Broader in range and scope than his previous work, Hollander's Tales Told of the Fathers (1975) and Spectral Emanations (1978) heralded his arrival as a major force in contemporary poetry. Reviewing Spectral Emanations for the New Republic, Harold Bloom reflected on his changing impressions of the poet's work over the first 20 years of his career: “I read [A Crackling of Thorns] … soon after I first met the poet, and was rather more impressed by the man than by the book. It has taken 20 years for the emotional complexity, spiritual anguish, and intellectual and moral power of the man to become the book. The enormous mastery of verse was there from the start, and is there still … But there seemed almost always to be more knowledge and insight within Hollander than the verse could accommodate.” Bloom found in Spectral Emanations “another poet as vital and accomplished as [A.R.] Ammons, [James] Merrill, [W.S.] Merwin, [John] Ashbery, James Wright, an immense augmentation to what is clearly a group of major poets.”Shortly after Spectral Emanations, Hollander published Blue Wine and Other Poems (1979), a volume which a number of critics have identified as an important milestone in Hollander's life and career. Reviewing the work for the New Leader, Phoebe Pettingell remarked, “I would guess from the evidence of Blue Wine that John Hollander is now at the crossroads of his own midlife journey, picking out a new direction to follow.” Hollander's new direction proved to be incredibly fruitful: his next books were unqualified successes. Powers of Thirteen (1983) won the Bollingen Prize from Yale University and In Time and Place (1986) was highly praised for its blend of verse and prose. In the Times Literary Supplement, Jay Parini believed “an elegiac tone dominates this book, which begins with a sequence of 34 poems in the In Memoriam stanza. These interconnecting lyrics are exquisite and moving, superior to almost anything else Hollander has ever written.” Parini described the book as “a landmark in contemporary poetry.” McClatchy held up In Time and Place as evidence that Hollander is “part conjurer and part philosopher, one of our language's true mythographers and one of its very best poets.”Hollander continued to publish challenging, technically stunning verse throughout the 1980s and '90s. His Selected Poetry (1993) was released simultaneously with Tesserae (1993); Figurehead and Other Poems (1999) came a few years later. “The work collected in [Tesserae and Other Poems and Selected Poetry] makes clear that John Hollander is a considerable poet,” New Republic reviewer Vernon Shetley remarked, “but it may leave readers wondering still, thirty-five years after his first book … exactly what kind of poet Hollander is.” Shetley recognized the sheer variety of Hollander's work, but also noted the peculiar absence of anything like a personality, “as if the poet had taken to heart, much more fully than its author, Eliot's dictum that poetry should embody ‘emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.'” Another frequent charge leveled against Hollander's work is that it is “philosophical verse.” Reviewing A Draft of Light (2008) for Jacket Magazine, Alex Lewis argued that instead of writing “philosophizing verse,” Hollander actually “borrows from philosophy a language and a way of thought. Hollander's poems are frequently meta-poems that create further meaning out of their own self-interrogations, out of their own reflexivity.” As always, the poems are underpinned by an enormous amount of learning and incredible technical expertise and require “a good deal of time and thought to unravel,” Lewis admitted. But the rewards are great: “the book deepens every time that I read it,” Lewis wrote, adding that Hollander's later years have given his work grandeur akin to Thomas Hardy and Wallace Stevens.Hollander's work as a critic and anthologist has been widely praised from the start. As editor, he has worked on volumes of poets as diverse as Ben Jonson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; his anthologist's credentials are impeccable. He was widely praised for the expansive American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (1994), two volumes of verse including ballads, sonnets, epic poetry, and even folk songs. Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times praised the range of poets and authors included in the anthology: “Mr. Hollander has a large vision at work in these highly original volumes of verse. Without passing critical judgment, he allows the reader to savor not only the geniuses but also the second-rank writers of the era.” Hollander also worked on the companion volume, American Poetry: The Twentieth Century (2000) with fellow poets and scholars Robert Hass, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey, and Marjorie Perloff.Hollander's prose and criticism has been read and absorbed by generations of readers and writers. Perhaps his most lasting work is Rhyme's Reason. In an interview with Paul Devlin of St. John's University, Hollander described the impetus behind the volume: “Thinking of my own students, and of how there was no such guide to the varieties of verse in English to which I could send them and that would help teach them to notice things about the examples presented—to see how the particular stanza or rhythmic scheme or whatever was being used by the particular words of the particular poem, for example—I got to work and with a speed which now alarms me produced a manuscript for the first edition of the book. I've never had more immediate fun writing a book.” Hollander's other works of criticism include The Work of Poetry (1993), The Poetry of Everyday Life (1997), and Poetry and Music (2003).Hollander died on August 17, 2013 in Branford, Connecticut.-bio via Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

On a special episode of The Culture Matters Podcast, our very own Jay Doran discusses the book How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom.  A voracious reader in his own right, Jay uses Bloom's book as a catalyst to discuss the importance of reading and how it is perhaps the only medium that can promote solitude and peace while learning or enriching one's knowledge.  Jay's passion for reading really comes through in this episode and we hope that some of it will rub off on you.

What do the French Horn, Led Zepplin, and C.S. Lewis have in common? They are all part of the Great Conversation. Dr. Junius Johnson joins the Forgotten America podcast to discuss classical education and the literary life. Dr. Johnson grew up in Louisville, KY, and shares his story of discovering the Western Canon, classical music, and Latin. This episode is a great introduction to the classical education movement taking the country by storm. If you'd like to see a little more truth, goodness, and beauty reflected in the world around you, you'll want to listen to this episode and hear the wisdom Dr. Johnson has to share with us. And if you're looking for a new book to add to your booklist, make sure you take notes while listening.   Follow Dr. Junius Johnson's work: https://www.juniusjohnson.com/ OR https://academics.juniusjohnson.com/   Further Reference: The Western Cannon by Harold Bloom https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Western-Canon-Book-School-Ages-BLOOM/31214804233/bd C.S. Lewis https://www.christianbook.com/page/christian-authors/cs-lewis Mimesis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis Resource for scanning Latin poetry https://www.thoughtco.com/scan-a-line-of-latin-poetry-118819 John Dewey: https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Dewey William James: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james/ Children of Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel) Dune https://www.thriftbooks.com/series/dune-chronicles/37695/ Garth Nix https://garthnix.com/books/the-seventh-tower/ https://garthnix.com/books/the-keys-to-the-kingdom/ https://garthnix.com/books/the-old-kingdom/ Timothy Zahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrail_series Writing history textbooks for highschoolers with Classical Academic Press: Humanitas https://classicalacademicpress.com/ https://classicalacademicpress.com/collections/humanitas     Garrett Ballengee, Host President & CEO - @gballeng Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy   Amanda Kieffer, Executive Producer Vice President of Communications & Strategy - @akieffer13  Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy   Nate Phipps, Editor & Producer - @Aviv5753   Follow: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram Support: Patreon, Donate, Newsletter

There's nothing we can do...except hit you with another episode of Know Your Writes!  For their 1-year pod-iversary, Robb and Colton go back to where it all started (sort of) with Ozma. Our hosts will dive into this Pasadena band's entire discography to see what makes them more than a Weezer clone.  Other topics include: - the one opinion our hosts would change from the last year - just how can a band sound like Weezer without it being weird - Colton talking about Harold Bloom for some reason Bands mentioned in this episode: - Weezer - The Hives 

Covering Part 4: Chapters 1-6. We enter the fourth--and final!--part of the novel. We discuss the formation of the "Counterforce," Slothrop's dispersal, and a fan-favorite episode about a sentient lightbulb that goes nuts. In this episode, we embrace the threat of sentient technology by speaking with an A.I. generated spectre of the late literary critic Harold Bloom. We chat with "Harold" about the novel, Byron the Bulb, gnosticism, and the prospects of us all being killed by computers. Other topics include: Keying waves, Mandrakes, some characteristics of Imipolex-G, dualistic ontologies, the CIA, gnosis (in a gnostic way), Robin Wood, psychosis, believing two (or 45) things at once, whips, chains, and leather, bundle of cognition. Read ⁠⁠⁠⁠Proverbs For Paranoids,⁠⁠⁠⁠ John's guide to Gravity's Rainbow. E-mail us your questions, queries, and crackpot theories: slowlearnerspod@gmail.com

I speak with James "Jimmy" Hatch, Navy SEAL, father, husband and author about his combat deployments, life threatening injury, and struggles with severe depression. He recounts a harrowing journey as the cummulative weight of combat deployments, the death of SEAL team members and K9 combat partners, his injury, multiple surgeries, and loss of identity overwhelmed him and he became suicidal.  During his hospitalization, Jimmy slowly learned to love and forgive himself and begin a new healing arc.  Recognizing his debt to the K9 dogs that saved his life on multiple combat missions, Jimmy started a national foundation for the care and preservation of service dogs called the Spike K9 Fund.  He also wrote a book called Touching the Dragon about his journey and enrolled as an undergraduate student at Yale in the Eli Whitney Students program.  We discuss how the concept of deconstruction in literature can mirror life- when we can redefine meaning, we discover a new language and a pathway for change. You can find Jiimmy's incredible book Touching the Dragon here and on Amazon: https://spikesk9fund.org/products/touching-the-dragon-and-other-techniques-for-surviving-lifes-wars https://www.amazon.com/Touching-Dragon-Other-Techniques-Surviving-ebook/dp/B0755ZYGRK   Please support Spike's K9 Fund helping the training, care and preservation of working dogs: https://spikesk9fund.org/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAo7KqBhDhARIsAKhZ4uji-HOepJMLAJF8H96Ncth_rySZeZXBt7bc1TtS2czEo_vOwpba9acaAv81EALw_wcB   Amazon link to the book Genius, by Harold Bloom  https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Mosaic-Hundred-Exemplary-Creative/dp/0446691291    

The words for today are: Repast, Desultory, Languid, Exponent Featuring a quote from Harold Bloom from "How to Read and Why" VictorPrep's vocab podcast is for improving for English vocabulary skills while helping you prepare for your standardized tests! This podcast isn't only intended for those studying for the GRE or SAT, but also for people who enjoy learning, and especially those who want to improve their English skills. I run the podcast for fun and because I want to help people out there studying for tests or simply learning English. The podcast covers a variety of words and sometimes additionally covers word roots. Using a podcast to prep for the verbal test lets you study while on the go, or even while working out!  If you have comments or questions and suggestions, please send me an email at sam.fold@gmail.com

In this episode J.J. and Peter Cole discuss Jewish poetry, aesthetics, and why Samuel ibn Naghrillah would probably make an excellent rapper.For more information visit our website, and to support more thoughtful Jewish content like this, donate here. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1957, Peter Cole is the author of six books of poems—most recently Draw Me After (FSG, November 2022) and Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations (FSG, 2017)—as well as many volumes of translation from Hebrew and Arabic, medieval and modern. Praised for his “prosodic mastery” and “keen moral intelligence” (The American Poet), and for the “rigor, vigor, joy, and wit” of his poetry (The Paris Review), Cole has created a body of work that defies traditional distinctions between old and new, foreign and familiar, translation and original. He is, Harold Bloom writes, “a matchless translator and one of the handful of authentic poets in his own American generation.” Among his many honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Jewish National Book Award, the PEN Prize in Translation, and, in 2007, a MacArthur Fellowship. He divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven.

Seriah is joined by writer, researcher, musician, and experiencer Ronnie Pontiac, author of "American Metaphysical Religion: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World", Topics include Manly P. Hall, "The Platonist" magazine, the influence of Platonism and Neo-Platonism in the American West, Abner Doubleday, esotericism, U.S. religious history, transcendentalism, alchemy, astrology, Rosicrucianism, John Winthrop the elder and younger, John Dee, Puritanism and fear of the wilderness, herbal medicine, The Intelligencers, the College of Light, the Royal Society, Cotton Mather, Hermetic philosophy, Oliver Cromwell, the Cavaliers, Tom Morton, a fascinating trading post, wenching, abuses by the Pilgrims, origins of the slave trade, America's occult history vs Fundamentalist Christian propaganda, hybrid belief systems, Harold Bloom, American Orphism, changes in academia regarding the study of esotericism, Kabbalah, alchemy at Ivy League schools, Catherine L. Albanese, "A Republic of Mind and Spirit", alternative spirituality and the cross-over of beliefs and practices, early Christianity vs the prosperity gospel, the Rosicrucian manifestos of the 1600's, the Holy Roman Empire, Giordano Bruno, universal reformation, the Invisible College, Frances Yates and esoteric history, astronomical events and multiple interpretations thereof, the 30 years war, religious freedom in Bohemia, political and religious intrigues between Catholics and Protestants, phases and changes in American Spiritualism, Edgar Cayce, "The Unobstructed Universe", Stuart and Betty White, Carl Jung, the podcast “Tanis”, the belief system of the obstructed vs unobstructed universe, consciousness and reincarnation, the meaning of life, immortal individualism, entities called the Invisibles, incredible experiences between Betty and Stuart White, the Seer of the Sunbelt Reverend Edward A. Monroe, a talkative Scottish spirit, and much more! This is an exceptional conversation jam-packed with ideas and references!This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4656375/advertisement

n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel's past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion… Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us." Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book." Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics. Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business") Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat. Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La'or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel's past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion… Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us." Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book." Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics. Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business") Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat. Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La'or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel's past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion… Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us." Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book." Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics. Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business") Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat. Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La'or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel's past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion… Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us." Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book." Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics. Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business") Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat. Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La'or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel's past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion… Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us." Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book." Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics. Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business") Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat. Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La'or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel's past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion… Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us." Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book." Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics. Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business") Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat. Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La'or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel's past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion… Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us." Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book." Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics. Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business") Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat. Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La'or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/israel-studies

n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel's past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion… Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us." Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book." Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics. Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business") Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat. Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La'or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Seriah is joined by writer, researcher, musician, and experiencer Ronnie Pontiac, author of "American Metaphysical Religion: Esoteric and Mystical Traditions of the New World", Topics include Manly P. Hall, "The Platonist" magazine, the influence of Platonism and Neo-Platonism in the American West, Abner Doubleday, esotericism, U.S. religious history, transcendentalism, alchemy, astrology, Rosicrucianism, John Winthrop the elder and younger, John Dee, Puritanism and fear of the wilderness, herbal medicine, The Intelligencers, the College of Light, the Royal Society, Cotton Mather, Hermetic philosophy, Oliver Cromwell, the Cavaliers, Tom Morton, a fascinating trading post, wenching, abuses by the Pilgrims, origins of the slave trade, America's occult history vs Fundamentalist Christian propaganda, hybrid belief systems, Harold Bloom, American Orphism, changes in academia regarding the study of esotericism, Kabbalah, alchemy at Ivy League schools, Catherine L. Albanese, "A Republic of Mind and Spirit", alternative spirituality and the cross-over of beliefs and practices, early Christianity vs the prosperity gospel, the Rosicrucian manifestos of the 1600's, the Holy Roman Empire, Giordano Bruno, universal reformation, the Invisible College, Frances Yates and esoteric history, astronomical events and multiple interpretations thereof, the 30 years war, religious freedom in Bohemia, political and religious intrigues between Catholics and Protestants, phases and changes in American Spiritualism, Edgar Cayce, "The Unobstructed Universe", Stuart and Betty White, Carl Jung, the podcast “Tanis”, the belief system of the obstructed vs unobstructed universe, consciousness and reincarnation, the meaning of life, immortal individualism, entities called the Invisibles, incredible experiences between Betty and Stuart White, the Seer of the Sunbelt Reverend Edward A. Monroe, a talkative Scottish spirit, and much more! This is an exceptional conversation jam-packed with ideas and references! - Recap by Vincent Treewell of The Weird Part Podcast Outro Music is Lucid Nation with Food Chain Download

It's not our hundredth episode (been there, done that), but it is the mega-sized hundredth episode of the comic book we decided to dedicate 126+ weeks of our lives to discussing, which warrants a mega-sized ep! That can only mean we're talking Excalibur #100, “London's Burning,” with returning guest Dr. Andrew Kunka, who comes bearing tales of Warren Ellis slamming Harold Bloom while hopped up on too many Red Bulls. Plus! An update on the saga of Mav's garage and maybe a special secret sleepy guest star.

In today's episode of Welcome to Cloundlandia, we explore the concept of existing in multiple zones simultaneously, moving beyond the binary and discovering a third space - the Free Zone.   SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Discover the power of existing in multiple zones simultaneously, such as the Free Zone, where you can mine your thoughts and experiences for the most fulfilling outcomes. Embrace your inner world and learn how dedicating time to your internal realms, like "Deanlandia," can shape and enhance your external experiences. Pursue the perfect life by focusing on your unique abilities and playing life like a game, constantly adapting and exploring new opportunities. Consider the changing ideas of success over the last 28 years and how the most successful individuals have achieved their goals. Explore the fascinating connections between technology and dog ownership, as well as the potential for collaboration between humans and animals. Apply the principles of playing life like a game to create even more collaborations between humans and animals. Claim your internal realms to open up new territories of collaboration, using tools like the 'who finder' and vision capability to reach assets. Reclaim your internal world and use it as a new territory to be explored and mined for the best resources and outcomes, without others having to know. Take inspiration from Shakespeare in creating your own projects and claiming your 'andia' to open up new opportunities and experiences. Remember the importance of taking action to achieve success, rather than just believing in it, and use that mindset to pursue your perfect life. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT Dean Jackson Mr Sullivan. Dan Sullivan Ah, mr Jackson, Welcome to the Cloudlandia. Yes yes, But actually we're movable folks, you and I. Dean Jackson We really are. Dan Sullivan And sometimes we operate focused on the mainland, that's true, and then other times we are involved in and focused on called landia, that's true. But I've discovered a third zone, me too. Yes, it's not binary, it's try bin, try, try bear. Dean Jackson Try banger. Dan Sullivan It's try, try, nery. You know, try, nery, and what's? yeah, because my feeling, feeling is that the that most folks are operating simultaneously, trying to integrate their mainland activities And, at the same time, taking advantage of Cloudlandia capabilities, that's true, and they don't have any space in between, which I call the, which, using coach language, i call the free zone. Dean Jackson Okay, i like this. I like where this is going, because it's very familiar with the stock life and having. Dan Sullivan Isn't that strange. Isn't that strange that we should be thinking along the same lines. Dean Jackson Yeah. Dan Sullivan But not really. No, my, you know. Dean Jackson I've been and I mentioned to the couple of times ago this idea of discovering Deanlandia Thinking about my thinking and that I realized I spend a disproportionate amount of time in Cloudlandia. If you think about the, if you include, like consuming content and watching, you know, netflix, or watching all those things as Cloudlandia activity, right, like taking in digital form, consuming something else, seeking dopamine from external sources, that that I'm lumping under the whole you know Cloudlandia thing, screen sucking, as our friend Ned Hololow would call it, and what I've realized. I've made a conscious effort and shifted the balance over the last couple of weeks here on my. my mantra has been less screen time, more Dean time. And I've been taking time to really think about my thinking And you know I've mentioned it to you Last time we spoke that you, you know, i was all stuck in my mind that when you mentioned, when you turned off, you know, tv and Netflix and all that stuff you, you made, you came to the realization that what's going on in your mind is better than what's coming out of the screen, right, basically? That there's a more fulfilling, enriching game going on inside your head than coming out of the screen right, and that was something that's always stuck with me. But I really get it now kind of on a different level, having really dedicated the last couple of weeks to shifting that balance. Dean Jackson Yeah. Dan Sullivan Well, dean, i'll use your term, dean Landia has some advantages. One is that it's a complete prezone, because no one else knows what's going on? Nobody else knows what's going on, And Dean said until he tells you. Dean Jackson Likewise for Dan Landia. I mean, that's really the great thing, right, Everybody has their own. You've got Dan Landia And that's the inner world that we. I mean it's the dominant thing. When you really think about how much time and how much of our external experience is dependent on what we're you know, what we're doing in in Deanlandia or Danlandia, that's shaping everything. Dan Sullivan Yeah, and one of the things that's really interesting about that, because you're you're the only one who has a unique ability of being Dean in Deanlandia. You know it's pretty. Yeah, it's a complete. We just auditioned and accepted another associate coach, and just last last, this past week in Chicago, and and and Ben Laws, who's a member of the Free Zone. He came up about six, seven months ago and, and you know, usually more because they have to go through an audition. And the way it works is, you know, there's a conversation that develops with someone who indicates that they might be interested in being one of our associate coaches, so he makes number 16 that we have and and we don't. You know, we don't add them at a fast pace, you know, i think the last right maybe three or four years, because we really want to check out first of all. You know we do some due diligence and we talk to referrals that the person gets to us and I said you know and and you know, is this person someone who actually enjoys coaching? you know, seems to be coach, like in their way of operating and you know so we check that out and then we check out you know how the family situation is, the home situation, because it's gonna require, you know, more travel and it's commitment. You know we we're not looking for a one-year associate coach, where I mean, are you know the, the average length of the? if we add the previous the, you know the existing 16 coaches, on average they've got 16 years, 16, 17 years coaching you know and you know some of them are year 28 27 and so you know we wanted to. You know we want it to be timeless, we wanted you know, and and because the program is always developing so there's always new things and they can. You know, with skill and with achievement they can jump from one level you know we just brought up five to the ten times level and, and it's our biggest place yours yeah, yeah, and it's our biggest multiplier in the coach. When you think about it, you know, you know. I mean I coach right now. I coach maybe you know 15% of the clients. The other 85% are coached by the other coaches you know, and they're, they're all coaching. People have written checks to strategic coach right yeah and and the other thing is, i've never seen one of them coach you've never sat in on. Dean Jackson I remember you saying that you don't sit in on the session or you're not and you know I've actually never been. Dan Sullivan I've never been you know I've never been in the room or on a zoom call when they're, when they're coaching, and so what happens? they get to the ultimate moment before you know, before it's yes or no, and and that we have an audition panel of coach, coach clients, who have all trained in the role of being a difficult client, workshop client ah after observation many expert oh no, we're. We're completely familiar with the subject of difficult yeah that's what. I mean after observation yeah, workshop, and each of them sort of masters the role, and they have a series. Usually there are a series of questions or there are series of challenges, and the best way to get them difficult is to turn everybody into an extreme fact finder. I don't, i don't understand what you're saying there. You know? could you, you know? could you give you know? can you, you know? can you explain that a little bit more? I'm not quite getting that chip now and so anyway, and launch ratio, he passed with playing colors, you know, and he's, he's in, but he had auditioned three years ago and we've been turning down we just said, we don't think you're ready yet, okay, we just oh wow yeah, he was only three years, and he was only three years in the program, so right, you know he, you know, i mean he, he just had basic toilet training down, but he didn't have it advanced right now we're now. We're looking for volume and velocity yeah, right, exactly and accuracy well, that's exciting. Dean Jackson I mean, that's a good insight into you know how that that process works. Dan Sullivan But the thing and I want to bring it back to your comment of Dean Landia and because usually you know my role is to go in and say good luck, you know, and everything like- that but. I said that that's stupid. We're not looking for luck, right, right right. We're looking for confidence and capability, you know. And so I went in and I said, ben, be yourself. And I had a huge impact on me afterwards, you know, when the verdict was in and there was a pizza and champagne celebration in the cafe. I went up to him and he said that had a huge impact on me and I said, yeah, but being yourself is is the first free zone, hmm. I like that thought that it's true. There's no competition, no one who can possibly compete at being you yeah, yeah you know, and so, anyway, he and then we, he brought it up, i brought it up and we were in the free zone workshop the next day. This is Wednesday, the free zone was on Thursday. Live, you know, we had actual, live human beings in a physical room and it came up as a topic and it went on for about 45 minutes and you know, and people said, yeah, yeah, be yourself. You know, be yourself. You know Oscar Wilde, you know the sort of the outrageous English British, you know, writer, you know he was a novelist and wrote plays and commentator. Yeah, he had a line which I thought was halfway there. He said be yourself, everyone's taken that's the make of yeah, but that seems like a kind of negative approach to it. My, you know my, my approach, and I'm coming back to the Dean Landia idea and the Dan Landia idea. I'm coming back and I'm saying be yourself, because the territory is entirely you. Dean Jackson You just have to take ownership yes, it's pretty exciting when you start thinking like that, like when I love and then embracing, you know your I'm just thinking this morning in my journal about the, you know the uniqueness of our, both the internal things and the external advantages that we have. Like I was thinking about the element of a perfect life. That was a concept that I've been. You know, 25 years ago we did this exercise of. I know I'm being successful when, when I created this program with Thomas Leonard and you know the, i've been really thinking about these, the elements here of a perfect life, and you know it comes down to, i love, like bedrock things, things that are, you know, universal, contextual rocks that, if you look at, we're all, all the elements that go into creating a perfect life. Our time, where it's, you know that's we're all born into, that it's here, whether we before we were here, it's gonna be here after, but it's one element that we're all working within the construct of the speed of reality 60 minutes we're born and the game is already going you think about it as a? video game. Is we're joining the game in process, right, it's already been yeah going on. Then the next level is what I encompass as me or you. You know you've got everything that is distinctly weird. It's strip you naked, put you on a deserted island. That's the everything that you have right now. Is you so that's? and some of those things are factory settings that you can't really change like your. You're a male. Your IQ, your, your genetic health, your situation, you know all of those you're, you know your brain power, you know, yeah, your brain power, and I think that there is an advantage you can't deny. You say yourself life's not fair. It's not fair that some people are born with super high IQs, super physical strength, super genetic, you know health, makeup, and others are born with, you know, other with challenges, in that sometimes people are born with mental disabilities or physical disabilities or all of the things. But when you do an assessment, if you're kind of pushing the reset button on the game and I love your idea of 25 year framework, so I 25 year terms yeah, that you end up with a you know every thing, if we're joining the game in progress, if you're kind of pushing the reset button now you just turned 79 years old, you had a reset in, you know 75 and you kind of make the, the rules up as you go, because that's the great thing about it everything is made up, like you say, and the. But if you do an assessment at any point, if we just kind of do an inventory of what are my you know me advantages that I have right now, if I were just to say, and I think that's all of your, all of the knowledge, all of your physical situation right now, all of those things are what you're left with. And then the next is the environment, which is all of the settings, all of the external things. Like an environment is where you are in the game. If you're born into rural China, that's a different environment than being born in North America or being born in Canada. You've got a moving sidewalk advantage that you're in the mix. You've got geography on your side, you've got the economy. So all of that stuff is an environmental thing that you can change. This is part of the thing is that anytime we could up and move to rural China if you wanted to or change your environment that's where you are thinking comes in with the immigrant thinking. You're thinking where you're leaving everything behind, and that's kind of this thought is where would be the best environment for what you want for this next 25 years? if you're going to set up the plan there, then the next is people. that there's all the people that are involved and that's distinct from your environment, and who you choose to collaborate with. cooperate with, you know, co-habitate with. Some of them are your family, that you're assigned when you come into the game. Dan Sullivan But then there are other Already pre-assigned. Dean Jackson Actually, that's exactly right, pre-assigned, that's exactly right. And then money is the final element, and I think that the thing becomes taking your imagine. My visual metaphor for it is this continuous runway game like Guitar Hero or something, where it's just constantly coming at you at the speed of 60 minutes per hour and you get to move the joystick into whatever environment where you're going to allocate that time and in what environment, with what people, and those environments are either contributing to money or taking away from you or using money to participate in that part of the environment, or you're in an environment that's making money, and so those five elements of the game are a really fun thing. Dan Sullivan And what you just said is true for everyone. Dean Jackson Yes, that's exact, and that's why the framework. Dan Sullivan The truth. the whole thing is how you play the game. And let's take poker, for example. The best poker players aren't the ones who get an unusual run of good cards. Right, I mean, over the course of, let's say, 50 games, they didn't get any better cards than anybody else did. Dean Jackson No, you're absolutely right. It's so funny. That's really the And those are situations. That's a perfect example that this really is. You're playing it like a game and I wanted to, and that was made the distinction of A perfect life, not D perfect life, because A perfect life acknowledges that there are 8 billion versions of it. Everybody is in possession of one life, that they get to play the game and pursue a perfect for them life. Dean Jackson Yeah. Dean Jackson That's a fun game. Dan Sullivan Yeah, someone one of the FreeZone participants on Thursday just casually was talking, then dropped the line. perfect, i said whoa, whoa whoa, whoa, whoa, perfect, perfect, So right, okay, so I'm going to give you an easy approach to perfection, okay, and this is what I've done. Just declare yourself perfect. Yeah, just say I'm perfect. Now, how am I going to expand that over the next 90 days? Right, yeah. And it takes them right back to unique ability, because that's the only dynamic capability that we have is that we have a unique ability that nobody has, which is a more. Which is a more coach, which is a more coachified way of talking about. You have a unique ability. That's where the perfection is, but you haven't fully explored all the different ways that you can be more conscious of that, and you haven't explored all the ways in which it can move into greater capabilities and impact in the world. Dean Jackson Yeah, and I guess, that's a guess. Dan Sullivan So that's what Dean Landy is. Dean has a unique ability, unique to him, and I think I passed on to you a comment that says a psychologist is doing a study on the ultimate paper on outliers And he was very, very keenly interested in talking to me, because the words gone around about strategic coach and the whole philosophy of strategic coach is based, and the practice of strategic coach is based on a concept called unique ability. And the question to me was what do unique people have in common? And I said, well, nothing, yeah. Dean Jackson What do unique people have in common? Dan Sullivan Nothing. Dean Jackson That's the absolute truth, isn't it? Yeah? Dan Sullivan I mean I said I've looked the term up in the dictionary and it's a thing unto itself and there's no similarity to it with anything else. I mean unique either means what it means or it doesn't mean anything. But you can't have a unique ability cult. Dean Jackson I think you're right. The interesting thing is, there's always this room for improvement. There's always room for progress And I think that if I think about perfection as something being perfect, as an asymptotic curve that continues to prove I never levels out, is I like some of these definitions, like I'm a big entomologist too similar to you in looking at? I look at the definitions of things right, and I think that what's perfect is, as an adjective, having all the required or desirable elements, qualities or characteristics, as good as it is possible to be. My favorite one is highly suitable for someone or something Exactly right. There's always this thing that we always have just like a horizon, we always have an opportunity to move forward, and I think that that, but it's nice to be able to think that. Dan Sullivan Yeah, well, i think, the wildcard. There's a couple of wildcard factors here. One wildcard factor is that we live in the realm of time. Okay, Yeah. And time's always moving on? Yeah, and as it moves on, things change You know, Yeah, at least they change in terms of our awareness. you know that we're aware of. Gee, that's something new, you know and everything. And the thing is that there's a high premium here on adaptability, of saying, well, this is the perfect approach here, but you know, next week it might not be. Dean Jackson And being. This is where being alert, curious, all of those things are. Yeah, i was looking back at the last 25 years and I was actually thinking like I'd like round things. I'm moving to where, you know, i'm three years away from being 60, and that will be a 25-year. You know, from 2000 was when I kind of started that 25-year vision, you know, and I would tell it now that I've got three years to get to 60, and then 25 years from there will take me to 85, right, and But I look at what's happened. You know that's 28 years right now, kind of looking forward there, and I think of them as academic years. So you know, 28 seasons kind of thing or whatever. I think about them starting in September. But the I think I was really thinking this morning, think about all the things that have changed in that 28 years from 1996 to, you know, to now, and the richest people in the world right now none of them were even doing what they're doing to get to that point 28 years ago. Dan Sullivan Yeah, and that wouldn't, there was no. Dean Jackson There was no Google, there was no Facebook there was no YouTube. Dan Sullivan But even if you take Berkshire Hathaway, which is outside of its technological realm, i mean Warren Buffett will tell you that all of his money, you know he's in his, approaching his mid-90s now and all of his money's really been made, you know, recently. Dean Jackson Yeah. Dean Jackson Yeah, and isn't that? I mean you think about that Warren Buffett was? He was the richest guy in the world or among them. Then, you know, 28 years ago, that's just So, it was Bill Gates, and you know, you think about some of those, the OG ones, but you think about how much, like the internet was just a baby in the United States And brand new. Yeah, You know, you see that My favorite is seeing that. You know Brian Gumbel and Katie Couric clip of them discussing what is the internet. Dan Sullivan You know, yeah well, and what's this thing dot com? you know? right, exactly. Yeah, what's a, what's hello, What Yeah well, i mean, do you have a clue? and these are, you know, these are people in the middle of the news media, you know. I mean yeah and yeah I mean and, and you know they're at and they're in New York City. You know they're right in the Center of one of the world's great plugged in cities. You know, and they're wondering there was. So, you know, i mean, it's really interesting. Just a little point about that. I had just been, you know, you know, doing podcasts with Mike Kenix and Peter Diamadas and Both of them said they made a statement similar to Everybody now is paying attention to AI. Okay, yeah, that's the first part. The second part was I was in London for a whole week and I had a whole event all day with, you know, 100 strategic coach clients, and The only reason anybody was talking about the AI was that Evan Ryan happened to be in UK at that time and I invited to come for the day and I had him come in and And everybody wanted to know what this was. You know, and, and I was reading the. You know London is very rich with newspapers and, yeah, i, you know I was reading the tele every day, the telegraph and. Nobody, nobody was talking about AI. And I, you know, and I said, and I said this is London, another globally plugged in city. You know, you know. I mean you know on a par with New York. And I said, you know, i bet, if I, if, if I go to Africa and visit all the capital cities of Africa, i bet they're not talking about AI, you know right and yeah, yeah. So you know, I mean we're very, very biased towards what, what we're involved in. We're very, very biased towards what we're excited about you know, and everything like that, but that's Not being in your own India, you know. Dean Jackson I mean, i find your own private India Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, have you taken ownership of your India yet? Dan Sullivan Yeah, you know you gotta, you gotta register it. There's like the land rush, you know you got. Dean Jackson Your grandfather, did you? nobody's Just got a claim. Dan Sullivan I think I think you're hitting on something very, very fundamental Which I'm suspecting is very Recent in human history. Okay, and by recent I don't mean, you know, the last 10 years, i mean the last 400 years, and the reason I say 400 Is because I was watching a YouTube video. There's a author who's dead now I think he died last year, in his 90s by the name of Harold Bloom, a professor at Yale, and His specialty was Shakespeare. I mean, he was considered the Foremost expert and commentator on Shakespeare in history. No one, no one, has written about, spoken about Shakespeare more. And Shakespeare, for Harold boom, shakespeare is the. He has a book, is a huge book. You know, it's a big, thick book and It's called Shakespeare, the invention, the invention of human. And He, you know he makes his case. He's, you know he's got all sorts of convincing arguments and everything like that. But he said Shakespeare was the first writer of any kind, the first dramatist of any kind Who, on stage and of course in the writing, but on stage has characters talking to themselves. And He said it's the first one. Yeah, we've never seen. He said I've. You know, i've explored all the stories and all the you know The religions and everything, and he's the first. He's the first character, but it's not just one character. He created about 25 different characters who do this and And they talk to themselves, they have conversations with themselves, and he said there's a crossover and That the modern world really exists when people started talking to themselves in the ancient world before they did. Because now you're thinking about your thinking and You're now reflecting on it and sharing it with the audience. Who the character doesn't know is there. You know he thinks he's alone, but there's, yeah you know, there's a thousand people watching this take place, but he says it's also the birth of personality and he says you Prior, prior to Shakespeare. You don't get these really incredible personalities, you know, like Macbeth, hamlet and Yeah yeah, you know, shia I like, and Iago and all these amazing, and they're complete universes in themselves. I mean, there, there, they're not. They're not even in service of the pot. They just have this complete, almost endless depth to them. And And I Was pod raid that. And Freud, the you know, the famous psychiatrist rain around the 1900 was asked Who he thought was the greatest expert on human psychology, thinking that he would talk about someone in his field or someone he you know, and that he was going to be humble and Give credit to some other person. and he said well, you know, every time I think I'm on a completely new insight And it's like walking down a new road. About halfway down the road I see somebody walking back the other way and and And it's Shakespeare, and Shakespeare. Shakespeare says I thought it was promising, but not really. You know, i mean, take it for me. And I found that a very striking comment on Freud's perch. You know, i mean he was, he was, i mean he was totally into himself, i mean he was a character himself and he was a personality. But if you put bloom and Freud together, what he's saying is that this is very, very recent And it actually has to beginning with one thinker, and you know it has that has to begin in. So I think we're living in that That world and what you and I are doing today, we're saying, yeah, we didn't come up with the notion that there's a mainland and a cloud land via. You know, we, we simply put names to something that people were already dealing with. Yeah, but it's like it's binary, you know, it's like when you, when you, you know, reach the border for this border of the mainland, then you're in cloudlandia. Dean Jackson But what you're. Dan Sullivan What you're suggesting is Well. That may be true for most people, But in fact it's possible to create a third zone that lies between Mainland the mainland and cloudlandia. Dean Jackson That's the truth. I look at them as the layers there. You're absolutely right. Yeah, it's the one that. Yeah, it's the thing that puts it all together. Dan Sullivan Yeah, It's interesting, this thing of technology and the book, the quarterly book I'm writing. This is quarter 35, so this is book 35. And it's called Training Technology Like a Good Dog. Dean Jackson Okay. Dan Sullivan And it's really getting interesting and I'm doing some reading on the topic of. has anyone else made this connection between technology and dogs? And a really nice piece, an academic piece, pretty recent, it just sort of came out And it makes the claim that dogs are in fact humanity's first technology. And this is the thinking this is the thinking that it's the first time humans have taken another species. You know, have taken wolves and done a deal with them, you know. Basically, but there was no such thing as a dog until there was a collaboration between some canny wolf and some you know response of human being And together they created a new creature on the planet called dog you know, And so so when you look at, you know all the various shapes and sizes of, you know of dogs. I live in the beaches area of Toronto and there's a boardwalk about a two minutes away from our front door. And I go down and walk and boy, they sure come in a lot of different varieties but it's all a creative, but it's all a created species and did not pre exist before humans and another species did a collaboration And I says therefore how have we done with the technology called dogs? And we've done, we've been very creative. You know, we've been very creative. You know I mean it's, it's hard to you. Don't see them often, but sometimes you see a chihuahua down there. You know which are, you can hold in your hand. And I ran into one I had never seen two weeks ago, called a Leon burger. Okay, never heard of it And it's a German dog. Dean Jackson It's a St. Dan Sullivan Bernardish As a matter of fact, I think it's a it's bred from. it's a combination of putting the St Bernard and several other mountain work dogs together called. Leon burger, and it's arguably the biggest, the biggest of the breeds, and they weigh in at about a hundred and forty, five hundred and fifty pounds. They're a big, big dog and very, very tranquil, you know very tranquil, very, you know, very easy to get along with. And I said well, somebody you know, some back there, series of people says let's get a really, really little dog. You know one you can hold in your hand And you know. And and somebody else said you know what we do, we need a bigger dog. We need a bigger dog. But you have to realize, is you're, you're dealing with a technology that was actually created by human beings in the first place. That's amazing. Dean Jackson It was made. Dan Sullivan they're made up, Dogs are made up. Dean Jackson Yeah, i think you say. then what would be the next collaboration? that paved the way for us to collaborate with donkey and oxen. Dan Sullivan Yeah, Pigs cows, you know yeah yeah, but my feeling is the knowledge of developing dogs then led to you know, led to you know all sorts of you know domestication of animals, just spread very quickly after they cracked the code, after they cracked the code on dogs. Dean Jackson Think about that All the yeah, the golden age of carrier pigeons and falconry, and yeah, parrot, we opened up a whole new yeah. Dean Jackson Yeah, a whole new world. Yeah, yeah, i think you're on the front. Dan Sullivan There's a, there's a, there's a parallel weapon. Well, this is the only topic that Peter Diamandis has ever asked me to share at A360. Dean Jackson And. Dan Sullivan I wasn't asked to come on stage, i just did a little 10 minute riff. Dean Jackson Yeah. Dan Sullivan But I said, you know, i had 10 minute riff there And that was, you know, six, seven years ago And but it's, it's been one of those. It's been like a piece of food that gets caught in your teeth. You know, my tongue's been working away for the last five or six years And I've been saying, you know, i think there was something in that little riff I did there. Dean Jackson Yeah. Dan Sullivan That will be useful now when we talk about the technologies that we have right now, and what I've established in the book is that you don't get a good dog unless you establish completely and take responsibility that you're the owner. Okay, and my sense is the same thing with any technology, but especially the ones that were are you know are the hot numbers in Cloudlandia. Dean Jackson I love it. Dean Jackson I mean this is such great. I can't wait for that one to come out. Dan Sullivan Yeah, and you know the book. The book surprises you, i mean, as you go along. And. but the central thing is, i mean it's it's a bit of a diversion, because I'm talking about dogs and I'm really talking about you know, and I'm talking about technology, but it's actually a diversion. What I'm trying to emphasis is what does ownership mean? Are you a human being who's actually taken ownership of yourself, because it makes a lot easier than to be the owner of a dog and the owner of technology? if you've actually taken ownership of yourself And I think that Dean Lambea is a statement I've taken ownership of this territory. Dean Jackson I think that's right And all that that entails And that's the part of the best thing. If you did inherit a land or took ownership of it, part of the great joy is exploring the territory. That's really what Well, i'm putting yeah. Dan Sullivan And the other thing is putting your mark on it you know, Yeah. I think, that's amazing, Yeah, And the land rush. You know they had the homesteading act. It's an act of Congress. And then the various states would have land rushes, They would be territories and they had goal to be a state. Oklahoma is the very famous, you know the very famous example. And so it didn't have Oklahoma, the Oklahoma territory, which was borrowed from the Native Indians who were there. But they were Yeah, but they were very deficient on property lines, they were. They were very deficient on surveys, you know, and they said it was their land, but there was. They didn't register it, you know they didn't you know they didn't go to the, you know to the Native Territory Registry Office and register it And so got a certain date. You know the financial interests and the political interests in Oklahoma set that up And you have to get in agreement with the federal government that you're doing this. You know it's a teamwork thing but on a particular day you could line up at one border of Oklahoma. You couldn't do it from all four borders. You could do it And there was a gunshot or a cannon was off, and then you would go to claim a hundred, a hundred, i think it was a hundred acres hundred acres And you know, and you had to survey it in, you had to put the survey lines in and you had to put stakes, stakes along the way, and you, they had surveyors who were helpers and they would, you know, give the, you know from their understanding, the, you know the specific latitude and longitude. And then they had a registry office and these were movable registry offices because it was dynamic action for like a six month period And by the end of six months all the land was registered, all the land in the state was registered, and then you know, and then they invited people to move in to the potential new state of Oklahoma and once they got a population that was equal to the state of Rhode Island, they could petition for statehood, and that's how the state got created. Dean Jackson Isn't that interesting? I there was a great movie. There was a great movie called Far and Away and it was Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and it told the story of them coming from Ireland to Oklahoma, to America, where they're giving away land. They saw flyers in the, you know, in England or in Ireland and decided that they would make the track over and start a new life in America. Yeah, it was a very fascinating thing And it's interesting how the Oklahoma Sooners the Sooners got their name because some of them, as you said, before the gun went off, they went in. Dean Jackson Sooner and already, already. Dan Sullivan Yeah, they yeah, that's why. Yeah, that's why the The name has stuck, you know and I'll go home, Yeah and because they were Too soon. they were too soon, Yeah that's right, Yeah that's they had already. They were already there and then they hit, but and then, if anybody else came, they Suddenly emerged and said no, no, we've staked up this territory, we've already done it, you know, and and Everything else you know, like Italy, i was on a bus in Italy and it was on the Amalfi coast, which is a spectacular, you know, spectacularly beautiful part. But we weren't on the coast, we were in a town and I was sitting the closest a passenger could be to the bus driver, so he was on Left, because they, they, they, they drive on the same way we do in the states, you know, on the same side of the road. And we came in a village where we came down, and then there was a perpendicular road, road we around didn't go through. You had to turn, and, and these client and the sign at the end clearly said Turn right the arrow was pointing right and the bus driver turned left and I said I think that's one way. The other way isn't? he says, mere suggestion. Dean Jackson I'm mere suggestion. That's funny. I love it. Dan Sullivan I love it and that that explains that. That explains Italians approach to all laws merely Yeah. Dean Jackson I thought, by the way, your Go ahead, you're about to talk about you're. Dan Sullivan You're about to talk about me, so I want to hear it fully, of course. Dean Jackson I saw your working genius. Dean Jackson Oh yeah through before. Dean Jackson That'd be a good No surprise, but no is identical. Dean Jackson Yes, we have identical working geniuses. Dean Jackson It's funny, yeah, but Useful. I mean, i've got a. 0:54:16 - Dan Sullivan I found it very useful and we're going to give it to all the free zoners You know we're going to give it you know like we do. We did that with the print, which I find useful in its own way and you know. So you know Strength finder. I find that useful. Cold be very useful. Dean Jackson And you know so. I mean they're like interesting. It would be, or be fascinating For, if everybody in free zone did the working genius and they got a way to combine, to show Like we could show the free zone environment with everybody's strength lit up. As You know, if you need Some particular working genius, these are all the free zone people that are. Dan Sullivan Well, it's really interesting because we just created a tool. Our tech team did the Website on the coach website that's called the who finder, and I like you and you go in and just list who you are. In terms of the kind of kinds of projects you like to work on and where your best abilities are And what your best solutions are and you just listed and anybody else can look at that and contact you. Dean Jackson I like that. I'm just good thinking. Something similar among Looking at the, the VCR assets as well vision capability and reach Assets to be able to be where people have Access, capacity or have need. Yeah, as a framework for collaboration, oh yeah. Dan Sullivan So I mean you could, you could just take the who finder and just expand it to include those categories with credit, with credit given to the originator. Dean Jackson But I think those that would really open up a lot of collaboration. Dean Jackson Yeah. Dan Sullivan Yeah, there's one. I don't know if you've met him because he's a Year into free zone. His name is Chad Jenkins. Have you met Chad Jenkins? I have met Chad. Dean Jackson Yeah, i met Chad and he was in Palm Beach, right. Dan Sullivan Yeah, yeah, and he's a multi-company man and in North Carolina. But he in one year has stripped out all of his Activities except collaborating with other people, mainly in free zone, mainly in free zone And then adding their capabilities to the companies that he owns. I like that. Dean Jackson Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let's come up. Dan Sullivan Let's just sum up a little bit, three things that emerged and you're thinking, since we started at the Top of the previous hour, what let's come through? that Takes what you were already working on further Well. Dean Jackson I like this idea of You know, claiming your and via. I think It's a really interesting concept, but if you take it like a, a new territory to be explored and mined for all the best resources and outcomes, and I Think there's, i think there's really something to that of thinking of it as Property, you know well, I think the the interesting thing about it It isn't that other people have to know That have to know because they can't They can't right the whole point is do you claim it for yourself? Yeah, I Think that's amazing, like I think there's so much of our. That's really where we spend the most time, you know. I mean, it's there, the It's what shapes everything. You know so much of our life experience is our internal, whether we recognize it as that or not, but where our attention goes well, and I think the other thing that is very crucial about this, and And we didn't really get into that, but since That, i'll just use my own example. Dan Sullivan For a long time in my life I didn't claim my India. I didn't and, but I beat myself up For being there rather than being either in the mainland or in clockland. Dean Jackson Yeah right. Dan Sullivan The meantime I was in Dan Dan landia. I thought it was a waste of time that I you know why are you doing this? Dean Jackson I mean, this is wasted time, this is wasted effort you know why you, why What teachers and authorities kind of beat it out of you. He's always yeah, he's always got his head in the cloud. He's always down. Often, if he's often his own world. It's always beaten out of us as a negative thing. Dan Sullivan Well yeah, or or we tell other, we give other people permission to beat us up Yeah. Dean Jackson Well it's true, right, yeah, i mean. Dan Sullivan I mean it's interesting, I think that It's. It's a new world that we're in, but my, my sense is that it really starts, and I'm I feel good about description. You know that Professor Bloom gives that this really really started with Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the first human being to Open the door That this is available to you know, he's, he's available to you. What's really, really interesting, he comes across as a very tortured soul. So I think he only went halfway with this idea. And that is he says we, we need to worship Shakespeare by this. And I said, no, you got to use Shakespeare as a working example and then, in your own realm, do What he suggested you can do and I get the sense that that he didn't do that. He didn't do that. You know he, you know he turned it, you know he talks about it in almost like religious terms and I said, right, yeah, it's like. It's kind of like you have a retrieval dog and You shoot and you kill the duck. You know the duck fall and then you then you point to the pointer. You know you point to that, and instead of going and getting the duck, he looks your finger. Dean Jackson Oh, right Oh. Dan Sullivan Mighty one, Oh mighty one. I love it when you point you know yeah no, no, there's. There's a project here, You know. Go do what, go do what you're supposed to be doing. Dean Jackson Yeah, and I get it. Dan Sullivan Yeah, i got it feeling with I got a gold mine out of this and Yeah, claiming your andia that's the exactly right. Dean Jackson I got a gold mine out of this, and I got a gold mine out of this, and I did, yeah, claiming your andia. Dan Sullivan That's the exactly right. That's just the t-shirt that we're going to, that's right. I mean coffee cops bumper sticker soon. I mean there's the universe Emerging anyway, Same same time next week. Absolutely, i wouldn't miss it. Dean Jackson Alrighty, thanks, dan, okay. Okay, okay, dean.

Rick and Forrest are joined by award-winning journalist Michael Krasny for an episode focused on how to stay curious, navigate times of transition, and relate to the modern media landscape in healthy ways. They use Michael's recent experience with “retirement” as a jumping off point to explore how we can embrace change and stay curious before diving into a conversation focused on the modern media landscape. Topics include bothsides-ism, navigating challenging conversations, and finding the balance between what “knowing mind” and “don't know mind.”About our Guest: Michael Krasny is the long-time host of the KQED Forum, and has interviewed some of the most prominent figures of the past 50 years, including Maya Angelou, Caesar Chavez, President Jimmy Carter, Carl Sagan, and President Barack Obama. Since retiring from the Forum, Michael has started his own podcast: Grey Matter with Michael Krasny. Watch the Episode: Prefer watching video? You can watch this episode on YouTube.Key Topics:0:00: Introduction1:45: What's helped Michael navigate the transition to a new phase of life3:45: Michael's shift in identity post-KQED Forum5:45: Curiosity and ‘usefulness'8:10: Preparing for interviews11:10: How Michael became an interviewer14:10: Shakespeare characters, the anxiety of influence, and corporal punishment23:10: How the function of media has changed over time26:05: Bothsidesism and offering balanced viewpoints30:40: ‘Always don't know', and not being captured by our strengths33:45: Overpreparation, anxiety, and the role of an interviewer38:20: The value of spacious conversation vs. discourse through sound bytes40:30: Recap Support the Podcast: We're now on Patreon! If you'd like to support the podcast, follow this link.Sponsors:Get 15% off OneSkin with the code BEINGWELL at https://www.oneskin.co/  Go to BrioAirPurifier.com and use code BEINGWELL to save $100 on a Brio Air Purifier.Finally get that project off the ground with Squarespace! Head to squarespace.com/beingwell for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch use coupon code BEINGWELL to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.Join over a million people using BetterHelp, the world's largest online counseling platform. Visit betterhelp.com/beingwell for 10% off your first month!Want to sleep better? Try the Calm app! Visit calm.com/beingwell for 40% off a premium subscription.Connect with the show:Subscribe on iTunesFollow Forrest on YouTubeFollow us on InstagramFollow Forrest on InstagramFollow Rick on FacebookFollow Forrest on FacebookVisit Forrest's website

If you're enjoying the Hardcore Literature Show, there are two ways you can show your support and ensure it continues: 1. Please leave a quick review on iTunes. 2. Join in the fun over at the Hardcore Literature Book Club: patreon.com/hardcoreliterature Thank you so much. Happy listening and reading! - Benjamin

Eugene Sheppard joins his Brandeis colleague John Plotz to speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism--and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel's past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy's bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion.... Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us."  Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book."  Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics.  Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business")  Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat.  Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La'or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Eugene Sheppard joins his Brandeis colleague John Plotz to speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism--and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel's past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy's bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion.... Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us."  Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book."  Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics.  Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business")  Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat.  Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La'or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Eugene Sheppard joins his Brandeis colleague John Plotz to speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism--and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel's past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy's bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion.... Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us."  Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book."  Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics.  Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business")  Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat.  Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La'or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Eugene Sheppard joins his Brandeis colleague John Plotz to speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world's worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism--and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn't concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel's past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze'ev Jabotinksy's bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion.... Mentioned in this episode: Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us."  Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book."  Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics.  Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt. "Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business")  Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat.  Leon Feuchtwanger "There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.") Yitzhak La'or "you ever want a poem to become real" Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Remembering the late Harold Bloom who was once called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world."

Harold Bloom called Persuasion "the perfect novel." Virginia Woolf said "In Persuasion, Jane Austen is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she supposed." In this episode, the first of three parts, Jacke takes a look at Jane Austen's novel of missed opportunities and second chances. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sources/Recomended Reading:Asgeirsson, Jon (2005). "Thomasine Traditions in Antiquity The Social and Cultural World of the Gospel of Thomas". Brill.Brakke, David (2012). "Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity". Harvard University Press.Carlson, Stephen C. (2014). "Origen's use of the Gospel of Thomas". Uppsala University.King, Karen (2003). "What is Gnosticism?". Harvard University Press.Van den Broek, Roelof (2013). "Gnostic Religion in Antiquity". Cambridge University Press.Meyer, Marvin (ed.) (2009). "The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The Revised and Updated Translation of Sacred Gnostic Texts Complete in One Volume ". HarperOne.Meyer, Marvin & Harold Bloom (1993). "The Gospel of St Thomas: The hidden sayings of Jesus". Bravo Ltd.#gospelofjudas #gnosticism #christianity Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sources/Recomended Reading:Asgeirsson, Jon (2005). "Thomasine Traditions in Antiquity The Social and Cultural World of the Gospel of Thomas". Brill.Brakke, David (2012). "Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity". Harvard University Press.Carlson, Stephen C. (2014). "Origen's use of the Gospel of Thomas". Uppsala University.King, Karen (2003). "What is Gnosticism?". Harvard University Press.Van den Broek, Roelof (2013). "Gnostic Religion in Antiquity". Cambridge University Press.Meyer, Marvin (ed.) (2009). "The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The Revised and Updated Translation of Sacred Gnostic Texts Complete in One Volume ". HarperOne.Meyer, Marvin & Harold Bloom (1993). "The Gospel of St Thomas: The hidden sayings of Jesus". Bravo Ltd.#gospelofthomas #gnosticism #christianity Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1994, Harold Bloom's magnum opus The Western Canon took up the critical cudgels on behalf of 26 writers declared by Bloom to be essential. In this episode, Bethanne Patrick (aka the Book Maven), literary critic and host of the new podcast Missing Pages, joins Jacke to propose some additions to Bloom's narrow list. Additional Listening Suggestions: 83 Overrated! The Top 10 Books You Don't Need to Read 52 Recommend This! The Best 101 Books for College-Bound Readers 54 The Greatest Books Ever (More on the Best 101 Books for College-Bound Readers) Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/shop. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices