Podcasts about henry is

The Shakespeare Book Club meets tonight to talk about A Midsummer Night's Dream. Zoom link here for paid subscribers. Paid subscribers can also join this chat thread and ask me (or other subscribers) whatever they want. Tell us what you are reading, what you disagreed with me about this month. Ask niche questions someone here might be able to answer. Ask me anything you like (I might not answer!) This is an experiment... let's see where it goes... Join the chat.Katherine Dee InterviewWhen we have strong feelings about literary characters, isn't that somewhat the same as ficto-romantics—people who fall in love with fictional people and create part of the identity around that relationship? This is the sort of question you can talk about with Katherine Dee. I am a long-time fan so I was delighted to be able to ask her about the way AI is changing writing, fandom in culture, role play writing, fan fiction, ficto-romance, internet culture, and the way technology is changing what we read, how AI is changing Katherine's writing, and how she uses ChatGPT to discuss her emotional life (she says it is pretty good!). Katherine is one of the most interesting Substackers, writing at default.blog, as well as writing for other publications. You might remember her piece called “No. Culture isn't stuck”. I find her case-studies especially interesting (this is the one we talked about in the interview). Katherine is not judgemental: she simply tires to understand. Here is her Twitter. Here's what Katherine told me about fandom in modern culture.Henry: Why is there so much fandom in modern culture? We've got LARPing, people having AI boyfriends and girlfriends, fictoromance. You're writing about all these things all the time. Why is this such a big part of culture?Katherine: That's a great question. I think that the foundational reason is our culture is oriented around consuming media. And this is, you know, like, the subculture of media consumption is always going to be a fandom. But also, like, other things have eroded, right? Like, you know, it almost feels cliche to bring up, but everything from, like, third places to organized religion, you know, to national identity, you know, all of these things, right? What remains in its status is fandom. And so, you know, the marriage of the erosion of these other sort of cultural cornerstones, plus the importance of consuming media and the way we communicate, it creates this perfect storm. And I've even argued that, like, fandom is, in a way, like, you know, the main way that we know how to organize at this point. It's the chief way we express ourselves. You know, politics tend to, like, devolve into fandom. But the question is, like, well, what else do we have, really?And here's part of our discussion about ficto-romance.Henry: Now, about ficto romance. I find this, like, really fascinating and I've been reading your case studies avidly. But I also am confused, like, people have always had strong feelings for characters in novels, right? So I read an essay, a 19th century essay about Pride and Prejudice recently. And I mean, this made me laugh. Some people don't like it. But the critic was like, these are the five most attractive heroines in 19th century English fiction and had, like, robust views about what made these fictional women attractive. What is different or what feels different about ficto romance today?Katherine: You know, I don't think it is that different is the thing. I think a lot of stuff maybe feels different because it's somehow like more lowbrow or we don't respect the expression as much. I also think the role of art has changed. Like, we don't see, you know, like I talk to a lot of I actually posted an interview today with a guy who identifies as fictoromantic and his fictive other, which is the term they use instead of like significant other, is from Homestuck, which is a web comic that was really popular on Tumblr and is still very popular on Tumblr. And I think, like, ordinary people don't consider that art. Right. And so, like, it's difficult. Like, you see someone who maybe has this, like, devotion to, you know, someone in a great novel or maybe to, like, you know, Aphrodite or Venus or something like that. And they're producing what we're already primed to think of as great art in service of this love. And because the media properties that many of these people are emotionally attached to feel lowbrow, we take it less seriously and we think they're crazy. But if you actually talk to them, they're not crazy at all. I mean, it's a spectrum of expression. But I've never spoken to someone who feels like they're in active psychosis or something. It feels very familiar. Like I brought up in this interview that I posted today, you know, the way this young man was talking about this Homestuck character. And this is going to sound, I mean, this is going to sound crazy, maybe, but it reminded me of Mirabai, who I don't know if I'm pronouncing her name correctly, but she is this Hindu poet who had this great devotion for Krishna. And it was it felt very similar to me. It's just that it's reskinned in this way that is there's some dissonance.There's a complete transcript of the interview below. Transcript (AI generated so there may be errors)[00:00:00] Henry Today, I'm talking with Katherine Dee, the internet culture writer and the author of the default friend, Substack. Katherine, welcome.[00:00:11] Katherine: Hey, thanks for having me.[00:00:15] Henry: So how is AI changing writing right now and how is it going to change it in the next, say, couple of years?[00:00:22] Katherine: In the next couple of years, I'm not sure. But right now, I've noticed a lot of people who write news are using AI. AI is interesting because it's like, you know, if you read a lot of fan fiction, for example, there's like a fan fiction register. And so if you then go and read like a mass market paperback, you know, a lot of these people start off in fan fiction, you can kind of tell like who's who, right, because there's certain phrases that are common, certain slang. And the same is similar with AI, right? And so I can, I've, I use AI so much as like a chat companion, that there's like certain phrases that I know, are very specific to AI. So I've picked up from like, talking to it and, you know, it being sort of like a friend of mine, for lack of a better word, that people who write news and write digests, use AI a lot. And I've also noticed that people do like, polish on their writing, like they will fix the grammar, or what have you, which I think is less, less scandalous. But I do think that there's also a backlash, right? There is this, people want to sound human. And it's, it's opening up like, more space somehow, right, somehow, more, even more space for like, messy confessional writing. And maybe just, you know, validating that our, our, our long love for it, is never, is never going away.[00:02:03] Henry: Yeah, just when you thought there couldn't be any more personal essays, right, here they come.[00:02:07] Katherine: There's even, Substack really like, created an explosion of them. I thought, I thought it was over, but it absolutely is not.[00:02:17] Henry: I was amazed the other day, because I've been writing like, I would say quite a balanced view of AI, but people take it to be highly positive. And someone who was writing against it, actually said in their piece, oh, that last sentence was written by AI, by the way. And I was like, it's insane to me that that would happen. If you're so against it, but also that people don't realize that if he hadn't mentioned that, you wouldn't have said, oh, that was an AI sentence.[00:02:46] Katherine: Well, you don't know that it, I do think, and I went, I can't quite figure out what, what is the tell for AI writing when there's certain words that I could list, but there is a register, right? So if you're using it a lot, like, I use, I use like deep research all the time to find like, contact information for people. If I have a problem in my life, it's like, I asked chat GPT first, right? So there's like words like, you know, people have pointed out that it uses an em dash a lot. It uses the word crucial a lot. The word realm, weirdly, I've noticed, right? So you kind of internalize it, right? But there's also a register that is very like, AI specific. And I think, all this to say, I think people can tell.[00:03:38] Henry: You said you're talking to it a lot, like every day. What are you talking to it about?[00:03:45] Katherine: Like, you know, if I get anxiety about something that feels silly, or like, if I get upset about something, sometimes, like, I can't, because I'm online so much, like, very susceptible to getting this sort of, like, internet tunnel vision, where I don't know if I'm like, if my reaction is really to scale, I try not to get into, like, fights on the timeline or anything. But it doesn't mean I don't have the reaction, right? So I'll ask AI, like, I had, you know, this back and forth with someone on Twitter, and I feel like, pretty upset about it, am I overreacting? And it's not always actually, like, a good tool for that. But even just the process of me, like slowing down to ask, has made me, I think, a little bit more rational.[00:04:35] Henry: Do you think you're better at seeing when something's written with AI, because you've got this background in fan fiction and online writing, so you're, like, in a way, very highly trained on different internet registers? Whereas to some of us, it's like, people are just doing internet speak, and we don't have that kind of discrimination between the types?[00:04:55] Katherine: No, I think that if you read a lot of anything, you sort of, you pick up, you become fluent in the tone. People who, you know, there's an academic register, right? Like people who are in STEM speak in a particular way and write in a particular way. And it's not necessarily that the topics that they're talking about, it's certain phrases. People who are the humanities, there's similar things. And I think we're not conscious of being able to detect these different tones or registers, but everyone is capable of doing this.[00:05:34] Henry: How many people, how many, like, prominent people or people who are known for their voice do you think are using AI without telling us?[00:05:43] Katherine: I can only think of one who I would bet money that they're doing it. They mostly send out, like, a news digest. So it might be, you know, I haven't noticed it in their, like, opinion pieces. But in, like, their news digests, definitely, right? There's all sorts of tells. But there's, I mean, there has to be more, right? Because there's so many people who have interesting ideas, but aren't necessarily articulate. And there's probably a lot of people who collaborate with AI, right? So it's, they will have the, you know, Chachapiti or Claude or whatever, structure their piece. And then they will go in and edit it and put it in their voice. Or even the reverse, like, they'll structure it, and then they'll have it be polished or fix the grammar or put it in the tone that they want, and then they'll do minor tweaks. I think that is probably super common. But, like, wholesale, yeah, I've only picked up on this one person.[00:06:48] Henry: How close are we to a time when writers are going to feel obliged to put a little disclaimer saying this is what I do and don't use AI for in my writing? Or will that not come?[00:06:59] Katherine: Some people already do that. I don't want to skip ahead to mention our conversation, but I know we're going to be talking a little bit about fan fiction. And on fan fiction sites, there is, like, an AI-generated tag. And then in some digital magazines, they'll be like, this piece was generated with AI or, you know, was edited with AI or something like that. But I think there's probably a lot of shame around it. And people don't want to feel like they're not a real writer. We don't really know where to place or how to conceive of these tools. And it's complicated, right? And you see these conversations playing out in fandom quite a bit. And you see just how complex it is. I don't think there are easy answers.[00:07:53] Henry: Why is there so much fandom in modern culture? We've got LARPing, people having AI boyfriends and girlfriends, fictoromance. You're writing about all these things all the time. Why is this such a big part of culture?[00:08:06] Katherine: That's a great question. I think that the foundational reason is our culture is oriented around consuming media. And this is, you know, like, the subculture of media consumption is always going to be a fandom. But also, like, other things have eroded, right? Like, you know, it almost feels cliche to bring up, but everything from, like, third places to organized religion, you know, to national identity, you know, all of these things, right? What remains in its status is fandom. And so, you know, the marriage of the erosion of these other sort of cultural cornerstones, plus the importance of consuming media and the way we communicate, it creates this perfect storm. And I've even argued that, like, fandom is, in a way, like, you know, the main way that we know how to organize at this point. It's the chief way we express ourselves. You know, politics tend to, like, devolve into fandom. But the question is, like, well, what else do we have, really?[00:09:22] Henry: Right. Fandom, but also anti-fandom, right? I think that's a big part of culture.[00:09:25] Speaker 3: It's like. Yeah, absolutely.[00:09:28] Henry: Now, about ficto romance. I find this, like, really fascinating and I've been reading your case studies avidly. But I also am confused, like, people have always had strong feelings for characters in novels, right? So I read an essay, a 19th century essay about Pride and Prejudice recently. And I mean, this made me laugh. Some people don't like it. But the critic was like, these are the five most attractive heroines in 19th century English fiction and had, like, robust views about what made these fictional women attractive. What is different or what feels different about ficto romance today?[00:10:14] Katherine: You know, I don't think it is that different is the thing. I think a lot of stuff maybe feels different because it's somehow like more lowbrow or we don't respect the expression as much. I also think the role of art has changed. Like, we don't see, you know, like I talk to a lot of I actually posted an interview today with a guy who identifies as fictoromantic and his fictive other, which is the term they use instead of like significant other, is from Homestuck, which is a web comic that was really popular on Tumblr and is still very popular on Tumblr. And I think, like, ordinary people don't consider that art. Right. And so, like, it's difficult. Like, you see someone who maybe has this, like, devotion to, you know, someone in a great novel or maybe to, like, you know, Aphrodite or Venus or something like that. And they're producing what we're already primed to think of as great art in service of this love. And because the media properties that many of these people are emotionally attached to feel lowbrow, we take it less seriously and we think they're crazy. But if you actually talk to them, they're not crazy at all. I mean, it's a spectrum of expression. But I've never spoken to someone who feels like they're in active psychosis or something. It feels very familiar. Like I brought up in this interview that I posted today, you know, the way this young man was talking about this Homestuck character. And this is going to sound, I mean, this is going to sound crazy, maybe, but it reminded me of Mirabai, who I don't know if I'm pronouncing her name correctly, but she is this Hindu poet who had this great devotion for Krishna. And it was it felt very similar to me. It's just that it's reskinned in this way that is there's some dissonance.[00:12:35] Henry: So you don't think, because I read that interview and I thought it was great. Do you don't think like the behavior that the person you interviewed, like it's actively living with this fictoromantic partner and there's lots of like daily behavior involved. Right. And it's part of the structure of this person's life. Whereas, you know, in the past, like Diana Wynne-Jones used to say that she got a lot of letters about Hal's moving castle from, I think, basically teenage girls who fell in love with Hal. But that would be like. Almost entirely in their imagination, maybe if they wouldn't structure their life around it, is there some kind of difference there?[00:13:18] Katherine: What is different is I feel like because everything's commercialized, there's maybe more of an opportunity to buy products associated with the character that they're attached to. But if you look at the way people, most people, not all of them are expressing these relationships, like I ask these people, what does your relationship look like? It looks like creating art. And, you know, in another time, maybe they wouldn't have become a famous artist or whatever. But like I think it would have been more socially acceptable somehow. The student we used was Puppet, which is sort of maybe a little silly. But Puppet, who's the young man I interviewed, when I asked him, what does your relationship with Ro Strider look like? He said that he writes, he draws, he fantasizes. There is also, you know, there was also like a commercial component, like buying the body pillow. And that's maybe a little different. But to me, it reminds me of just any sort of creative expression. It's just phrased in a slightly different way.[00:14:36] Henry: Right, right. And one thing I liked about that interview was that I don't do the creative activities that this person does, but I was like, well, I speak pretty intensely about fictional characters. It made me sort of I was sort of forced to think, like, how different am I from this guy? Like I'm I have very strong feelings about people in books.[00:14:59] Katherine: I think a lot of us do.[00:15:02] Henry: Or movies, right? For a lot of people, it's movie characters, right?[00:15:04] Katherine: Yeah. I mean, that's that's the beauty of like dramatic structure, right? Like it you it allows us to suspend our disbelief and we feel like we're within the world of the narrative. And if you really like it, you want to take that feeling with you after the show has ended or the book has ended.[00:15:23] Henry: So I guess you're saying that this what it looks very weird to a lot of people, but it's not really so different from the way people grieve about like when Matthew Perry died and people were just completely distraught. It's kind of a similar thing because they had this strong identification with his character.[00:15:42] Katherine: Yeah, I mean, it's more intense, but like there were probably people who felt a really strong connection to Matthew Perry or to any celebrity. And again, it applies also to fictional characters, of course.[00:16:03] Henry: So what are people getting from fan fiction that they're not getting from other sorts of art? Like why is fan fiction so big now?[00:16:13] Katherine: It's playing in the space of a media property and an established world that you already have an attachment to. You know, people bring up a lot like there's, you know, there's certain stories that are like retold over and over and over again. Right. There's certain characters that reappear throughout novels through centuries. Right. And it's a similar idea. Right. It's like you enjoy the world of the story and you want to make it your own. Fan fiction is incredibly diverse. Right. There's some fan fiction that is that moves away from the canon so much you almost wonder, like, why, you know, why aren't you just creating an original work? But there's something that lies in there. And I also think part of it is the types of media that people are consuming are they already have these fandoms set up. Right. So it's it's it's it almost invites that form of expression.[00:17:21] Henry: Do you mean like you read Harry Potter and then you realize that there's already a massive Harry Potter fan fiction ecosystem so you can… it is to us what a theme park was to the 80s or whatever.[00:17:35] Katherine: Yeah, there's there's already this there's already somewhere to go and to meet people.[00:17:41] Henry: I was researching it earlier because I like I know nothing about it. And obviously I was asking deep research. And as I was reading all the stuff it gave me, I was like, people are trying to create almost like folktales based on this, you know, whatever the the original sources in this collectivizing impulse, whereas you say like it diverges, it has these repetitive tropes that they almost want to turn it into these kind of fairy tales or a collection of stories like that. So it seemed it seemed quite interesting to me. Now, you personally, you wrote on your sub stack, you said my lineage isn't literature, it's text based online role playing. Yes. Tell me what that what is that?[00:18:28] Katherine: So I so I always wanted to be a writer, but I wanted to be a writer because I would role play and role play, role playing the way I did it is is like playing, you know, it's like imaginative play that children do, like with Barbies or, you know, even just themselves. But it's it's translated to text because it's it's mediated. And so I would do, you know, I would role play all the time. And it wasn't like I was a voracious reader. I never was. And I don't think I am now. And I think it's it's actually reflected in my writing, actually, but it was because I was like role playing all the time. And I think a lot of people are like this, right? Like I didn't even really write fan fiction. I preferred role playing, which is a little bit more dramatic than than just than just writing. But I but at the time I thought, oh, because I'm I am literally writing something down that I am a writer. But really, it's more like theater, if anything.[00:19:28] Henry: So tell me what's happening, like you would be logging on to some kind of forum and you would be writing as if you were a particular person or character in this in the scenario and other people would be responding.[00:19:43] Katherine: Yeah, it's it's like acting, but through text, so you could do when I started, you could either do it in a chat room, there is text based role playing games, which I didn't actually participate in, like mod some multi user dungeons. I didn't I didn't even know those existed at the time. And then there was forums where and so there would be a theme and the theme could either be from a fandom like Harry Potter, for example, or it could just be a setting. So like high school or the beach or, you know, like an apartment complex and you would design a character and then you would it was it sort of looked like a collaborative story. But really, it was like you were you were just you could only control your own character. So you would just write a description of like, you know, someone says the setting is the beach and then character one comes in and describes what character one is doing and then character two comes in. And, you know, sometimes you would be ignored. Sometimes people would start a fight with you. All sorts of things could happen. And I it's I spent most of my time doing this for like over a decade.[00:20:53] Henry: So are there certain areas where this doesn't does not happen? Like, is there Jane Austen role playing or is it is that not the sort of premise?[00:21:02] Katherine: No, there's role playing for everything. There's like historical role plays. There's, you know, any novel under the sun. You could probably find someone, you know, more like Jane Austen. There's like a there's a rich role playing tradition. People love Jane Austen novels. Something I would do very often is if I was learning about a particular historical period in school, I would get like I would have I would develop these sort of like parasocial attachments with certain historical figures or even settings very similar to the way people feel about fandom. And then I would go home and role play the historical setting and I would read a lot about, you know, whatever it was, ancient Rome or whatever. And it would help me in school because I would be like acting it out online.[00:21:49] Henry: Yeah. You're working on fan fiction and A.I. at the moment. And I'm interested in this because I have this feeling everyone's like A.I. is only going to produce slop. It's not going to do anything new. But I've seen people. I've saw an interesting essay on Substack about someone writing their own fan fiction with A.I. And I sort of I wonder if the confluence of these two things is going to start leading to lots of very new types of fiction and potentially even I don't I mean, this is like a long term speculation, but even some kind of new type of literature. Tell us what you're working on with that.[00:22:32] Katherine: So I was curious the way I was curious, like how people were using A.I. in fandom spaces. And right now it looks it looks like there's this prohibition against using A.I. like people do you do create A.I. generated fan fics, but there's something about like the process and the love that you put into writing your fan fiction that people are very precious about. And they feel that A.I. infringes on this. And part of it is they're very concerned about like, where is the data coming from? Right. Is it somehow unethical because of the data that these LLMs are trained on? But where you see a real difference is people who use A.I. to role play. And that's where it's it seems like people are more open to it. It the feeling the feelings and reactions are a bit more mixed, but there does seem to be like a debate in different fandom spaces. Like some people argue like A.I. is an accessibility issue, like some people aren't good at writing. Maybe English isn't their first language. And this opens up a lot of space for them. And they feel like they're they're collaborating with this tool. Other people say that it's it's unethical and that since they're taking away the process, it is it's harming the work.[00:24:04] Henry: If they could be convinced or, you know, to their own satisfaction that it's not unethical, the data, the data sets and everything like it would be fine. Would they still just not want to do it? It would be fine. Would they still just not want to do it? Because this is the wrong phrase, but like it ruins the game. It's not the point.[00:24:25] Katherine: I think for some people. Yeah, I think the the ethical dimension is is extremely significant for a lot of people. But but for some, it's like, you know, they're not doing it to produce work for its own sake. Right. To go back to the example I gave about the writer who I suspect is using AI to create these news digests, like that person has committed to producing these digests, you know, X number of times a month as part of their livelihood. And so you can sort of see like, well, them using AI is a little bit more sympathetic. But if it's something you're doing for free, for fun, as an expression of love, I can I can see where people are like, well, you're farming it out. But I also am very sympathetic to the other side of that, where it's like maybe, you know, your writing skills aren't as strong and it does open doors and they are your ideas. And it's helping you speak more clearly in a situation where you couldn't otherwise.[00:25:32] Henry: Is it because the way people do this online together, it's a form of communicating, like it's all very oblique and indirect, but it's really just a form of people socializing and they feel like if the AI is there, then they're not getting what they need from it in that sense.[00:25:49] Katherine: Um, it is a form of communication. But I also think there is really a value placed on the like the personal dimension of it. Like, um, like bad fan art, right? Like if you know someone, someone's really trying their best, they really are committed to a fandom. They really love it. But their drawing isn't great and they share it. Of course, there will be people who are mean and who shame them. And there's all sorts of weird, like, you know, labyrinthine dramas that occur in these spaces. But there will also be people who are like, this is beautiful because you tried, because it was coming from a real place of love. And that that that devotion is a very important piece of the puzzle. Again, there there are gatekeepers, there is shaming that occurs. And you know, there's a lot of people who feel like they're not good enough. Like you constantly see this in forums on Reddit, on Wattpad, on AO3, like on all these spaces, people who are like self deprecating, they feel like their work isn't good enough. But there's again, like this, this sense of like, I did it because I love the property. I love the character. Which I guess sort of ties back to the thing about ficto romance, where it's just this extreme expression of, you know, a pulse that's already moving through the space.[00:27:12] Henry: The piece I read on Substack, it wasn't written by the person writing the book. It was written by her roommate. And she was saying, you know, to begin with, like, oh my God, I thought this was dreadful. But actually, the more I saw what was going on, she was like, I can see my roommate has written like 20,000 words in a week. And she's working really hard at it. And she's, you know, prompting and reprompting. And she knows what she likes. She really knows what she's doing and what she wants and how to get it to change its output. And she kind of, she didn't come around to saying, oh, this is a good thing. But I think she mellowed on the idea. And she could see that there was a certain amount of, there's something new happening, right? Some new kind of fiction is coming out of it.[00:27:55] Katherine: I totally agree too, that like, prompting and reprompting is in itself a creative expression. And this is something I tried to argue about AI art, where there is like, you know, not everyone is going to be able to produce the same thing. Like the writing the prompt is in it of itself a skill. And also there's your own taste, which informs the prompt and informs what you include. Like, I'm very proud of the images that I've produced with Mid Journey. Not, you know, not the same way I would be if I had, you know, painted it myself. But like, I do feel like it's informed by my unique experience and taste. And this particular combination of things is unique to me. And that's a type of art, even if it's involves different things than, you know, again, if I were myself painting it. And I think that applies to fan fiction as well. What I have been worried about, I mean, this is a tangent, is like, what happens to the generation that is like, all they know is prompting and AI, and they don't have that space to develop their own taste and their own perception. Like, I think that like, if you start out too fresh, if you started too green, and you haven't had time to develop taste, and that's where I see these platforms being a little bit more dangerous.[00:29:23] Henry: But couldn't we say that about you in the role-playing forums? Like, when they develop taste through like, deep immersive experiences with the AI?[00:29:36] Katherine: Well, no, because with the role-playing, it has to come from myself and from other people, right? And there's nothing like limiting it, right? Like, it's purely through my eyes. Like, maybe there's an issue here where like, the actual writing product would have been better if I was, you know, if I read more, right? Or if I watched different films, but it's only filtered through myself and through other people. Whereas, you don't know how you're gonna get walled in with the AI, especially if you go in too fresh, and you don't know how to prompt it.[00:30:17] Henry: Weren't those people more likely to be, aren't they more likely to get bored?[00:30:24] Katherine: I don't know. I don't know if they're more likely to get bored. I think they might get stuck. I mean, the flip side is maybe they'll innovate more because they're coming from a completely different perspective.[00:30:37] Henry: Right, that's true. I had this interesting experience recently where I saw a whole load of young people that I'm related to. They range from like eight to 16 or something. And some of them just could, they could not not be holding their phone. And some of them, they're like, they don't like the phone. They're reading Jane Austen. So there's a diversity in that sense. But they were all just against AI. Like it's a bad thing. People use it to cheat, all the usual stuff. And I was fascinated. I was like, guys, you should all be using AI. Let me tell you what the good models are. So I wonder if we'll see this bigger diversity within that generation where some of them, a bit like in our generation, right? Some people were online a lot. Some people weren't. And some people are still.[00:31:24] Katherine: I've noticed that there's a very strong anti-tech sentiment among younger generation. And it seems like bifurcated. In the same way you described, people who are so online that they're just like these internet creatures, right? Like if the internet is a forest, like they're like natives of it. And then the other side of it is people who feel like it stole a lot from them. It took a lot from their childhoods. And they're moving away from it. And as a statement, they're either getting like dumb phones or they don't have social media. Or if they do have social media, it's like very sparse. And they tend to have like two very different outlooks. The ones who are more online seem to be more chaotic, a little more nihilistic. And the ones who are more offline, like they seem to be like looking for something more. Like they're more obviously searching for meaning.[00:32:24] Henry: Are we gonna see more like book reading among the offline people?[00:32:30] Katherine: I mean, I would hope so. Who knows, right? Like who knows how much of it is a performance and how much of it is really happening. But I mean, I would imagine so. It does seem also that like a lot of digital outlets feel like something is changing. And I've noticed a lot more like physical media seems to be coming back. I'm interested in seeing how this develops in fan spaces. Early in fandom, like in the... And I guess like early is like right when it was like really starting to grow. So not at the origins, but it's sort of this like... Fandom exponentially grew in the late 70s. And the way people communicated with each other and like a very important mode of expression was a physical fanzine. And this was because first there was no internet and then the internet was confined to certain populations and not everyone had it. And I wonder if fanzines will come back or like handwritten letters. Even I have a couple of books that are collections of letters that these sisters wrote to a particular fandom. And it was just like, it was just a huge part of that particular world. And I thought that was really interesting as a way to keep in touch with people and to keep the community together.[00:34:01] Henry: Yeah, that sounds like a fascinating book.[00:34:05] Katherine: Yeah, it's a collection of... It's called like elf magic letters or something. It's really interesting. And it's also interesting because it's like not something that you can easily read because it's so specific to the time and the place. Like it really was for the people it was for, right? It's not, it doesn't stand the test of time in the same way.[00:34:28] Henry: So is there not much sense of tradition in fandom? Like are people going back to read the fanzines and stuff?[00:34:37] Katherine: There is a sense of tradition for sure. Some of these fanzines are hard to find. It depends on which fandom you're in. Fans love whatever property it is they're fans of. So there's always archivists and people who are curating these things and making these things available. I just wonder if it'll become more popular to return to physical media. And it probably is in certain spaces. I'm just not personally aware of them. Okay.[00:35:09] Henry: Do you think, like, how do you think fan fiction is going to change significantly with AI? Beyond questions of like register and stuff that you were talking about before. Are we going to see, is this going to be like a significant step change in the evolution of the form? Or is it just going to be what people are saying? Like lots of slots in the form of slot content, nothing new as it were.[00:35:33] Katherine: I'm not sure. There's a lot of fan art that's generated with AI that I feel like at first people were really skeptical of. And now they really like it. And it's sort of proven itself. I mean, there's still people who are fiercely against it. But with writing, it's a little bit trickier. And again, the reactions are like very mixed, mostly negative. Again, where I think you will see the most change is with role-playing. You know, AI is always on. You can say whatever you like without feeling embarrassed. Something that I've noticed in reading transcripts of people who, like, on some of these sites where people role-play with bots, you could publish the role-play. You could publish the transcript. And there's just completely disinhibited. Like, they're just really just saying whatever, right? Not in a way that they're trolling or trying to break the bot. But it's like, you know, there's a certain etiquette when you role-play. And they're really just going for it. And I'll just be honest. This is particularly obvious with sexual role-plays, right? They'll just get straight to it. If the person is there to role-play sex, they'll just jump straight to the point. And you don't have to worry about that. You don't have to worry about being embarrassed. If it doesn't work out or, you know, you don't get the response you want, you start it over, you reprompt it, or you go to another bot. So I think it might take away from that social aspect. Not everybody likes role-playing with bots, but I think a lot of people do.[00:37:21] Henry: To me, this is like prime material for people to write novels about. But I don't see, I don't yet see a lot of people taking that up. Do you think, like, how likely is it, do you think, that some people from within this space will end up, in whatever way this looks like in the future, writing and publishing something like, you know, a straightforward literary, whatever the word is, novel, about this subculture and about these ways of existing? Do you think some people will, like, prompt themselves into being novelists, as it were?[00:38:00] Katherine: I mean, I definitely think that people will write about AI companions and chat bots. I think we're already seeing that to some degree. I think, you know, it seems that everyone is fascinated by emotional attachment to chat bots. And there's, like, just explosions of big pieces about this, because it's so new. And what's surprising to me is, like, there's very little judgment. You know, there's very few people who are like, this is dystopian, right? You see some of that, but most of it is like, well, it is real love, you know? That's been very surprising to me. Something that I could foresee is, and I think would be very ethically tricky and might cause some controversies, people trying to publish their role-playing transcripts. Which, you know, some fan fiction is, like, downstream of role-playing transcripts, and it'll be, like, a collaborative work, right? But it would be, like, very controversial if, you know, like, you and I had a Pride and Prejudice roleplay. And, you know, so we were sending emails back and forth or something, and then I collated all of that and published it as my own story, like, you know, with some edits or whatever. Like, that would be stealing your work. What I could see happening is someone having, like, a really good roleplay and wanting to save the transcript and then, you know, cleaning it up, maybe running it through AI, and the prompt is, you know, turn this into a story and, like, remove redundancies or, you know, whatever. And then it'd be, like, is that their work, right? Like, how much of that belongs to them?[00:39:38] Henry: But I can see something happening where it's, like, you know, in the 19th century, things that were supposed to be cheap and lowbrow, like crime stories and things like that, became a whole new genre of literature, right? And by the end of the 19th century, you've got detective fiction, science fiction, fantasy fiction. They're all flourishing. They've all had decades of really interesting work, and it becomes, like, maybe even the dominant form of fiction in the 20th century. Do you think there's scope for, like, you know, a weird novelist like Muriel Spark, a new one of her to come along and, like, turn this, whatever this is happening with these role plays and everything, turn that into some kind of new kind of fiction, whether it's created with the AI or not with the AI, like, you'll get both, right? Is this, like, everyone thinks the literary novel is exhausted, is this the way out? I don't know.[00:40:37] Katherine: I think that they, like, maybe, maybe, like, a new type of, like, pulp novel or something, you know, something that's, like, considered, like, something that's considered lowbrow, right, and maybe isn't always treated that way. But I'm curious, like, how, like, I'm imagining, you know, people printing, like, paper books or creating EPUBs, but do you mean, like, an interactive form of a novel, maybe, or, like, are you talking about people, like, I mean, what are you imagining, I guess, is my question? I think, so I think it could be, I think in terms of format, it could be all of those.[00:41:25] Henry: What I really want to see is how this interacts with audiobooks, because I think audiobooks have become, like, quietly very dominant in the reading habits of people who are typically reading, like, highbrow nonfiction, literary fiction, whatever. And I can sort of imagine a scenario where, I don't know how long this takes, but, like, a new kind of pulp fiction has been created, it's drawing on fandom, roleplay, AI, so we've got this new kind of sub-genre, and then that gets morphed, a bit like genre fiction in the 19th century, into something much more, quote-unquote, literary, and that could be, like, a boring, typical old book, or it could be some kind of audio thing where, like, you're interacting with it, and you're picking the route and whatever, or you could interact with it through your LLM. You see what I mean?There's all these different ways, right?[00:42:26] Katherine: So I think this stuff already exists. Oh, okay. Oh, so that, I think that maybe what I was confusing was, you know, like, imagining, like, a new style, or, you know?[00:42:37] Katherine: But all of these, so all of these things, so I don't know if they're books, I mean, that's actually a good question, like, is it a form of literature? Like, are these bots that people are roleplaying with, is that literature, right? Because there's set parameters, and when you create these characters, you can, you have a lot of control over designing them, what their world is, what the person talking to them will receive back, right? And there's audio versions of that. So it is, like, stepping into a pre-created world where there's, like, some kind of collaboration. And then on the other hand, there's been lots of novels that started off as fan fiction, and this is actually pretty common, a lot of these, you know, like, teen romances or whatever that get popular on TikTok, a lot of those come from people who had been writing fan fiction smut, right? And turned it into original work. And you can see the traces of whatever fandom they were operating in, in the work, whether it's, like, an allusion to a pre-existing character in another property, or it's just the style of writing, or, like, the way they express romantic intimacy. So both things exist in different forms. I wish I had asked a clarified question earlier, because I feel like we were talking in circles a little bit, so I wasn't quite sure what you were envisioning. But yeah, there's a lot of, I wondered also, like, how will reading change as these bots become more sophisticated? Right now, it's a lot of, like, it's a lot of, like, just, you know, like, teenagers messing around in their fandoms, or people doing erotic role-playing, right? But what is the literary version of that? And that's a very exciting question, and, like, interesting realm of inquiry.[00:44:38] Henry: It's a good, it's currently a very good, like, footnotes-on-demand service, right?[00:44:44] Katherine: Yeah.[00:44:45] Henry: Yeah, like, what the hell is this kind of carriage that they're talking about, or whatever? Do you think it'll, you think it's going to develop beyond that kind of thing?[00:44:53] Katherine: Um, yeah, I do. I mean, something really interesting, I don't know if you've heard about this, it's not literature, but the website Every, so they have, like, several different tech newsletters, and they have a service where they'll take all the research for a given article, and you can talk to an LLM about the stuff they didn't include in the piece. But, so, here's even another idea, like, let's say, you know, you take, like, Harry Potter or something, and then there's, like, a Harry Potter LLM, and you can ask questions about the book, or, like, you know, what's in the store that didn't, you know, that we didn't open, right? Metaphorically, you know, what's behind the scenes and all this stuff we don't see in the actual text? And ordinarily, that's where fandom steps in, and fans will fill in that white space for themselves with their headcanon, so the decisions they make about the whatever narrative universe they're choosing to step into. But maybe in AI, you know, the author can say, all right, these are all my notes, and this is all the, this is the whole world that I couldn't fit into the actual story.[00:46:07] Henry: How is AI changing the way you write?[00:46:12] Katherine: All right, so I correct my grammar a lot. My grammar is, like, atrocious, or at least it is in my own opinion. Maybe it's actually not, but so I'll check for grammatical errors, and then I use it all the time as, like, a search engine. So I love, like, the deep research function on chat GPT. It's, like, I never use Google anymore. So if I have, like, questions about something, or if I'm not sure that an argument makes sense, either I'll, like, run it by, you're like, all right, I'm arguing, you know, like, this, this, and this. Like, does this make sense in my own head, or does this actually make sense? So that's a common DF question to chat GPT.[00:47:05] Henry: But, like, are you thinking about, you know, are you going to be a different sort of writer? Are you going to write more or less of certain things? Are you thinking about how people will be reading less? You know, you're competing with the AIs, you've got to write for the AIs. Is it affecting you like that, or do you feel like what you do is reasonably immune?[00:47:26] Katherine: Um, no, you know, I don't feel like I'm competing with AI. I feel like I'm competing with other people, but I'm not competing with AI. And I'm not, I'm not writing for it. I, you know, I remember that, that Tyler Cowen quote, and I wasn't totally sure what he meant by that. I mean, like, I don't know. I'm definitely not writing, writing for it. I mean, does he mean, like, as the AI, like, learns about each person and learns that, you know, each, each writer is contributing to the conversation, you want to make sure it's easily parsable. So you could, you could be included in history or something as AI starts to write our history. Actually, I guess that's a good point, if that doesn't end up happening. But no, I don't, I don't consider either of those things.[00:48:17] Henry: Um, you wrote about, you wrote a short response to the Machine in the Garden essay that was famous on Substack a few months ago. You said, if you don't have copycats, then you're doing something wrong. Just make sure people don't forget you're the original article. How, how do you do that? How do you, how does that affect the way you organize your writing?[00:48:43] Katherine: Oh, man, I publish a lot. If I feel like something is my unique idea, I repeat it over and over and over again. Yeah, I mean, that's, I guess it also, I mean, a question I don't have the answer to is like, you know, people worry about being plagiarized from or copycats, but what happens, you know, what happens with AI, right? Like, how does AI change that equation? I don't know. But, you know, you just hope for the best, you know, that humanity, you know, just the fact of being human is enough.[00:49:26] Henry: Do you think that the internet and social media are making things worse in the culture generally, the way that people like Ted Gioia argue, or are you more optimistic?[00:49:39] Katherine: Um, I'm slightly more optimistic. I think Ted Gioia is as much too dismissive of technology to the extent that I feel like I've, I've almost like taken a contrarian position, you know, and I, I've been a little bit I've been a little bit more techno-optimist than I would have been normally, because I just like, can't all be bad, right? There's a lot of really good things about the internet and about social media. I think that we really undervalue the friendships people make. And then people will say, well, like, well, look at, you know, how so-and-so got screwed over, you know, whatever famous drama. It's like, those people will f**k you over in real life, you know, in the physical world, right? That's a human problem. That's not a technology problem. I think we also, I, particularly people like Ted Gioia and John Height and Freya India, I mean, and I like all these people. I'm not, you know, but I think they also are, like, I don't know where Ted Gioia lives, but John Height's in New York and Freya is in London, as far as I know. When they talk about going like phone-free or like using the internet less or screen-based childhoods, you know, I, like, I agree. Like, look, like, I don't want my son attached to a phone or something. But I also live in Chicago. There's like a ton of stuff going on. And every single day, no matter what the weather is, he can go, one, see other children and two, go do something really fun. And so can I, right? And that's because I live in Chicago. But if I lived in a small town in Texas, like I did, you know, 10 years ago, like I need the, I, like the internet was my lifeline. Then it's how I made friends. It's how I entertain myself. And it sucks that it was like that. But like, not everyone has the privilege of a rich culture in their immediate environment. You don't have, you know, like, it doesn't mean you have to be online 24 seven, but for social media is like very important for people in those situations. And it's, I think there's this weird binary in the discourse where it's like, you're either online all the time, you know, rotting your brain with just like, you know, nonstop live leak videos, right? Or you have no phone at all, right? But I think there's even like high volume usage that isn't, you know, what I just described, that it's beneficial for certain people in certain situations.[00:52:12] Henry: What is it that you like about Mirabi's poetry? You mentioned this earlier, but I wanted to ask you specifically.[00:52:18] Katherine: Yeah, so I discovered her in my senior year of college. And I didn't know what ecstatic love was. Like I had never, I was completely unfamiliar with that concept. So even on the conceptual level, I was like, so struck by this ability to feel love for a deity, feel love for something non-physical.[00:52:54] Henry: Do you admire other poets in that tradition like Rumi?[00:52:59] Katherine: I'm not as familiar with other poets in that tradition.[00:53:02] Henry: Okay. After fan fiction and AI, what will you do next?[00:53:08] Katherine: I'm working on a whole bunch of stuff. Another piece I'm working on is about techno-animism. So this idea of like, I don't believe that technology is literally insoled, but I think that it's maybe not a bad thing to treat it as if it was. And if we're going to be in such like a technologically rich environment, like maybe if we did see a little bit of life in it, it would be better for us psychologically, which is like kind of a hard thing to argue because I think it turns people off like immediately. And I think there's like a lot of fear around it, but it's a very sad and sterile world, right? If we think that we're around all this lifelessness. And I think that's why I'm so attracted to writing about ficto-sexuals and ficto-romance because I love this idea of being able to see life in something where other people don't see it.[00:54:15] Henry: Katherine Dee, thank you very much.[00:54:18] Katherine: Thank you for having me. 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

After enjoying her new book Open Socrates so much (and having written about her previous book Aspiration in Second Act), I was delighted to talk to Agnes Callard, not least because, as she discusses in Open Socrates, she is a big Tolstoy admirer. We talked about Master and Man, one of my favourite Tolstoy stories, but also about the value of reading fiction, the relationship between fiction and a thought experiment, and other topics of related interest. George Eliot makes an appearance too. In the discussion about the use of fiction in philosophy classes, I was slightly shocked to hear about how much (or how little) reading her undergraduates are prepared to do, but I was interested that they love Pessoa. Agnes has previously written that the purpose of art is to show us evil. Here is Agnes on Twitter. Transcript below, may contain errors!I found this especially interesting.Exactly, and I mean, 10 seconds, that's a wild exaggeration. So do you know what the actual number is? No. On average. Okay, the average amount of time that you're allowed to wait before responding to something I say is two tenths of a second, which, it's crazy, isn't it? Which, that amount of time is not enough time for, that is a one second pause is an awkward pause, okay? So two tenths of a second is not long enough time for the signal that comes at the end of my talking, so the last sound I make, let's say, to reach your ears and then get into your brain and be processed, and then you figure out what you want to say. It's not enough time, which means you're making a prediction. That's what you're doing when I'm talking. You're making a prediction about when I'm going to stop talking, and you're so good at it that you're on almost every time. You're a little worse over Zoom. Zoom screws us up a little bit, right? But this is like what our brains are built to do. This is what we're super good at, is kind of like interacting, and I think it's really important that it be a genuine interaction. That's what I'm coming to see, is that we learn best from each other when we can interact, and it's not obvious that there are those same interaction possibilities by way of text at the moment, right? I'm not saying there couldn't be, but at the moment, we rely on the fact that we have all these channels open to us. Interestingly, it's the lag time on the phone, like if we were talking just by phone, is about the same. So we're so good at this, we don't need the visual information. That's why I said phone is also face-to-face. I think phone's okay, even though a lot of our informational stream is being cut. We're on target in terms of the quick responses, and there's some way in which what happens in that circumstance is we become a unit. We become a unit of thinking together, and if we're texting each other and each of us gets to ponder our response and all that, it becomes dissociated.Transcript (AI generated)Henry: Today, I am talking to Agnes Callard, professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, author of Aspiration, and now most recently, Open Socrates. But to begin with, we are going to talk about Tolstoy. Hello, Agnes: .Agnes: Hello.Henry: Shall we talk about Master of Man first?Agnes: Yeah, absolutely.Henry: So this is one of Tolstoy's late stories. I think it's from 1895. So he's quite old. He's working on What is Art? He's in what some people think is his crazy period. And I thought it would be interesting to talk about because you write a lot in Open Socrates about Tolstoy's midlife crisis, for want of a better word. Yeah. So what did you think?Agnes: So I think it's sort of a novel, a story about almost like a kind of fantasy of how a midlife crisis could go if it all went perfectly. Namely, there's this guy, Brekhunov, is that his name? And he is, you know, a landowner and he's well off and aristocratic. And he is selfish and only cares about his money. And the story is just, he takes this, you know, servant of his out to, he wants to go buy a forest and he wants to get there first before anyone else. And so he insists on going into this blizzard and he gets these opportunities to opt out of this plan. And he keeps turning them down. And eventually, you know, they end up kind of in the middle of the blizzard. And at kind of the last moment, when his servant is about to freeze to death, he throws himself on top of the servant and sacrifices himself for the servant. And the reason why it seems like a fantasy is it's like, it's like a guy whose life has a lacuna in it where, you know, where meaning is supposed to be. And he starts to get an inkling of the sort of terror of that as they're spending more and more time in the storm. And his initial response is like to try to basically abandon the servant and go out and continue to get to this forest. But eventually he like, it's like he achieves, he achieves the conquest of meaning through this heroic act of self-sacrifice that is itself kind of like an epiphany, like a fully fulfilling epiphany. He's like in tears and he's happy. He dies happy in this act of self-sacrifice. And the fantasy part of it is like, none of it ever has to get examined too carefully. It doesn't like, his thought doesn't need to be subjected to philosophical scrutiny because it's just this, this one momentary glorious kind of profusion of love. And then it all ends.Henry: So the difficult question is answered the moment it is asked. Exactly, exactly, right?Agnes: It's sort of, it's, I see it as like a counterpart to the death of Ivan Ilyich.Henry: Tell me, tell me more.Agnes: Well, in the death of Ivan Ilyich, the questions surface for even, you know, when death shows up for him. And he suddenly starts to realize, wait a minute, I've lived my whole life basically in the way that Brekhunov did. Basically in the way that Brekhunov does as, you know, pursuing money, trying to be a socially successful person. What was the point of all that? And he finds himself unable to answer it. And he finds himself, it's the exact opposite. He becomes very alienated from his wife and his daughter, I think.Henry: Yeah.Agnes: And the absence of an answer manifests as this absence of connection to anyone, except an old manservant who like lifts up his legs and that's the one relief that he gets. And, you know, it's mostly in the gesture of like someone who will sacrifice themselves for another. Right, that's once again where sort of meaning will show up for a Tolstoy, if it ever will show up in a kind of direct and unashamed way.Henry: Right, the exercise of human compassion is like a running theme for him. Like if you can get to that, things are going great. Otherwise you've really screwed up.Agnes: Yeah, that's like Tolstoy's deus ex machina is the sudden act of compassion.Henry: Right, right. But you think this is unphilosophical?Agnes: I think it's got its toe in philosophical waters and sort of not much more than that. And it's in a way that makes it quite philosophical in the sense that there's a kind of awareness of like a deep puzzle that is kind of like at the heart of existence. Like there's a sensitivity to that in Tolstoy that's part of what makes him a great writer. But there's not much faith in the prospect of sort of working that through rationally. It's mostly something we just got a gesture at.Henry: But he does think the question can be answered. Like this is what he shares with you, right? He does think that when you're confronted with the question, he's like, it's okay. There is an answer and it is a true answer. We don't just have to make some, he's like, I've had the truth for you.Agnes: Yes, I think that that's right. But I think that like the true answer that he comes to is it's compassion and it's sort of religiously flavored compassion, right? I mean, that it's important. It's not just. Yeah, it's a very Christian conclusion. Right, but the part that's important there in a way, even if it's not being Christian, but that it's being religious in the sense of, yes, this is the answer. But if you ask for too much explanation as to what the answer is, it's not going to be the right answer. But if you ask for too much explanation as to why it's the answer, you're going the wrong way. That is, it's gotta, part of the way in which it's the answer is by faith.Henry: Or revelation.Agnes: Or, right, faith, exactly. But like, but it's not your task to search and use your rational faculties to find the answer.Henry: I wonder though, because one of the things Tolstoy is doing is he's putting us in the position of the searcher. So I read this, I'm trying to go through like all of Tolstoy at the moment, which is obviously not, it's not currently happening, but I'm doing a lot of it. And I think basically everything in Tolstoy is the quest for death, right? Literature is always about quests. And he's saying these characters are all on a quest to have a good death. And they come very early or very late to this. So Pierre comes very early to this realization, right? Which is why he's like the great Tolstoy hero, master of man, Ivan Ilyich, they come very, and Tolstoy is like, wow, they really get in under the wire. They nearly missed, this is terrible. And all the way through this story, Tolstoy is giving us the means to see what's really going on in the symbolism and in all the biblical references, which maybe is harder for us because we don't know our Bible, like we're not all hearing our Bible every week, whereas for Tolstoy's readers, it's different. But I think he's putting us in the position of the searcher all the time. And he is staging two sides of the argument through these two characters. And when they get to the village and Vasily, he meets the horse thief and the horse thief's like, oh, my friend. And then they go and see the family and the family mirrors them. And Tolstoy's like, he's like, as soon as you can see this, as soon as you can work this out, you can find the truth. But if you're just reading the story for a story, I'm going to have to catch you at the end. And you're going to have to have the revelation and be like, oh my God, it's a whole, oh, it's a whole thing. Okay, I thought they were just having a journey in the snow. And I think he does that a lot, right? That's, I think that's why people love War and Peace because we go on Pierre's journey so much. And we can recognize that like, people's lives have, a lot of people's lives happen like that. Like Pierre's always like half thinking the question through and then half like, oh, there's another question. And then thinking that one through and then, oh, no, wait, there's another question. And I think maybe Tolstoy is very pragmatic. Like that's as philosophical as most people are going to get. Pierre is in some ways the realistic ideal.Agnes: I mean, Pierre is very similar to Tolstoy just in this respect that there's a specific like moment or two in his life where, he basically has Tolstoy's crisis. That is he confronts these big questions and Tolstoy describes it as like, there was a screw in his head that had got loose and he kept turning it, but it kept, it was like stripped. And so no matter when you turned it, it didn't go. It didn't grab into anything. And what happens eventually is like, oh, he learns to have a good conventional home life. Like, and like not, don't ask yourself these hard questions. They'll screw you up. And I mean, it's not exactly compassion, but it's something close to that. The way things sort of work out in War and Peace. And I guess I think that you're sort of right that Tolstoy is having us figure something out for ourselves. And in that way, you could say we're on a journey. There's a question, why? Why does he have us do that? Why not just tell us? Why have it figured out for ourselves? And one reason might be because he doesn't know, that he doesn't know what he wants to tell us. And so you got to have them figure out for themselves. And I think that that is actually part of the answer here. And it's even maybe part of what it is to be a genius as a writer is to be able to write from this place of not really having the answers, but still be able to help other people find them.Henry: You don't think it's, he wants to tell us to be Christians and to believe in God and to take this like.Agnes: Absolutely, he wants to tell us that. And in spite of that, he's a great writer. If that were all he was achieving, he'd be boring like other writers who just want to do that and just do that.Henry: But you're saying there's something additional than that, that is even mysterious to Tolstoy maybe.Agnes: Yeah.Henry: Did you find that additional mystery in Master in Man or do you see that more in the big novels?Agnes: I see it the most in Death of Ivan Ilyich. But I think it's true, like in Anna Karenina, I can feel Tolstoy being pulled back and forth between on the one hand, just a straight out moralistic condemnation of Anna. And of, there are the good guys in this story, Levine and Kitty, and then there's this like evil woman. And then actually being seduced by her charms at certain moments. And it's the fact that he is still susceptible to her and to the seductions of her charms, even though that's not the moral of the story, it's not the official lesson. There's like, he can't help but say more than what the official lesson is supposed to be. And yeah, I think if he were just, I think he makes the same estimation of himself that I am making in terms of saying, look, he finds most of his own art wanting, right? In what is art? Because it's insufficiently moralistic basically, or it's doing too much else besides being, he's still pretty moralistic. I mean, even War and Peace, even Anna Karenina, he's moralistic even in those texts, but his artistry outstrips his moralism. And that's why we're attracted to him, I think. If he were able to control himself as a writer and to be the novelist that he describes as his ideal in what is art, I don't think we would be so interested in reading it.Henry: And where do you see, you said you saw it in Ivan Ilyich as well.Agnes: Yes, so I think in Ivan Ilyich, it is in the fact that there actually is no deus ex machina in Ivan Ilyich. It's not resolved. I mean, you get this little bit of relation to the servant, but basically Ivan Ilyich is like the closest that Tolstoy comes to just like full confrontation with the potential meaninglessness of human existence. There's something incredibly courageous about it as a text.Henry: So what do you think about the bit at the end where he says he was looking for his earlier accustomed fear of death, but he couldn't find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear whatsoever because there was no death. Instead of death, there was light. Suddenly he said, oh, that's it, oh bliss.Agnes: Okay, fair enough. I'd like forgotten that.Henry: Oh, okay. Well, so my feeling is that like you're more right. So my official thing is like, I don't agree with that, but I actually think you're more right than I think because to me that feels a bit at the end like he saw the light and he, okay, we got him right under the line, it's fine. And actually the bulk of the story just isn't, it's leading up to that. And it's the very Christian in all its imagery and symbolism, but it's interesting that this, when it's, this is adapted into films like Ikiru and there was a British one recently, there's just nothing about God. There's nothing about seeing the light. They're just very, very secular. They strip this into something totally different. And I'm a little bit of a grumpy. I'm like, well, that's not what Tolstoy was doing, but also it is what he was doing. I mean, you can't deny it, right? The interpreters are, they're seeing something and maybe he was so uncomfortable with that. That's why he wrote what is art.Agnes: Yeah, and that's the, I like that. I like that hypothesis. And right, I think it's like, I sort of ignore those last few lines because I'm like, ah, he copped out at the very end, but he's done the important, he's done the important, the important work, I think, is for instance, the scene with, even on his wife, where they part on the worst possible terms with just hatred, you know, like just pure hatred for the fact that she's forcing him to pretend that he isn't dying. Like that is like the profound moment.Henry: What I always remember is they're playing cards in the other room. And he's sitting there, he's lying there thinking about like the office politics and curtain, like what curtain fabrics we have to pick out and the like, his intense hatred of the triviality of life. And I love this because I think there's something, like a midlife crisis is a bit like being an adolescent in that you go through all these weird changes and you start to wonder like, who am I? What is my life? When you're an adolescent, you're told that's great. You should go ahead and you should, yes, lean into that. And when you're like in your forties, people are going, well, try and just put a lid on that. That's not a good idea. Whereas Tolstoy has the adolescent fury of like curtains and cards. Oh my, you know, you can feel the rage of his midlife crisis in some of that seemingly mundane description. Yeah. I think that's what we respond to, right? That like his hatred in a way.Agnes: Yeah. I mean, maybe we, many of us just have trouble taking ourselves as seriously as Tolstoy was able to, you know? And that's something, there's something glorious about that, that anyone else would listen to the people around them telling him, hey, don't worry, you're a great guy. Look, you wrote these important novels. You're a hero of the Russian people. You've got this wife, you're an aristocrat. You've got this family, you've got your affairs. I mean, come on, you've got everything a man could want. Just be happy with it all, you know? Many of us might be like, yeah, okay, I'm being silly. And Tolstoy is like, no one's going to tell me that I'm silly. Like I'm the one who's going to tell myself, if anything. And that kind of confidence is, you know, why he's sort of not willing to dismiss this thought.Henry: Yeah, yeah, interesting. So how do you think of Master and Man in relation to all the others? Because you know Tolstoy pretty well. You teach him a lot. How do you place it? Like how good do you think it is?Agnes: I don't teach him a lot. I'm trying to think if I ever taught Tolstoy.Henry: Oh, I'm sorry. I thought I read that you had.Agnes: I've taught The Death of Ivan Ilyich. That's the one, I have taught that one. I wish, I mean, I would love to teach. I just can't imagine assigning any of these novels in a philosophy, my students wouldn't read it.Henry: They wouldn't read it?Agnes: No.Henry: Why?Agnes: It's pretty hard to get people to read long texts. And I mean, some of them certainly would, okay, for sure. But if I'm, you know, in a philosophy class where you'd have to kind of have pretty high numbers of page assignments per class, if we're going to, I mean, you know, forget War and Peace. I mean, even like Ivan Ilyich is going to be pushing it to assign it for one class. I've learned to shorten my reading assignments because students more and more, they're not in the habit of reading. And so I got to think, okay, what is the minimum that I can assign them that where I can predict that they will do it? Anyway, I'm going to be pushing that next year in a class I'm teaching. I normally, you know, I assign fiction in some of my classes but that's very much not a thing that most philosophers do. And I have to sign it alongside, you know, but so it's not only the fiction they're reading, they're also reading philosophical texts. And anyway, yeah, no, so I have not done much, but I have done in a class on death, I did assign Ivan Ilyich. I don't tend to think very much about the question, what is the level of quality of a work of art?Henry: Well, as in, all I mean is like, how does it compare for you to the other Tolstoy you've read?Agnes: I, so the question that I tend to ask myself is like, what can I learn from it or how much can I learn? Not, it's not because I don't think the question of, the other one is a good one. I just think I trust other people's judgment more than mine unlike artistic quality. And I guess I think it's not as good as Death of Ivan Ilyich and I kind of can't see, like, it's like, what do I learn from it that I don't learn from Death of Ivan Ilyich? Which is like a question that I ask myself. And, there's a way in which that like that little final move, maybe when I'm reading Death of Ivan Ilyich, I can ignore that little final bit and here I can't ignore it. Tolstoy made it impossible for me to ignore in this story. So that's maybe the advantage of this story. Tolstoy makes his move more overt and more dominating of the narrative.Henry: Yeah, I think also, I've known people who read Ivan Ilyich and not really see that it's very Christian. Yeah, oh yeah.Agnes: I don't think I- Much less.Henry: Yeah.Agnes: That's what I'm doing. I'm erasing that from the story.Henry: But that's like much less possible with this one. I agree.Agnes: Right, exactly. That's sort of what I mean is that- Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, here the message is more overt. And so therefore I think it's actually a pretty important story in that way. Like, let's say for understanding Tolstoy. That is, if you were to try to take your view of Tolstoy and base it on Death of Ivan Ilyich, which sometimes I do in my own head, because it's occupied such an important place for me, then this is a good way to temper that.Henry: Yeah, they make a nice pairing. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Let's pick up on this question about philosophers and fiction because you write about that in Open Socrates. You say, great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from. So it makes questions askable, but then you say only in relation to fictional characters, which you think is a limitation. Are you drawing too hard of a line between fictional characters and real people? Like if someone said, oh, we found out, we were in the archives, Ivan Ilyich, he didn't, it's not fiction. He was just a friend, just happened to a friend, basically word for word. He just did the work to make it kind of look okay for a novel, but basically it's just real. Would that really change very much?Agnes: I think it wouldn't, no. So it might change a little bit, but not that much. So maybe the point, maybe a better thing I could have said there is other people. That is one thing that fictional people are is resolutely other. There's no chance you're going to meet them. And like they are, part of what it is for them to be fictional is that, there isn't even a possible world in which you meet them because metaphysically what they are is the kind of thing that can't ever interact with you. And, like the possible world in which I run into Ivan and Ivan Ilyich is the world in which he's not a Tolstoy character anymore. He's not a character in a novel, obviously, because we're both real people. So I think it's that there's a kind of safety in proving the life of somebody who is not in any way a part of your life.Henry: The counter argument, which novelists would make is that if you gave some kind of philosophical propositional argument about death, about what it means to die, a lot of people just wouldn't, they'd like, maybe they'd understand what you're saying, but it just wouldn't affect them very much. Whereas if they've read Ivan Ilyich, this will actually affect them. I don't want to say it'll resonate with them, but you know what I mean. It will catch them in some way and they're more likely then to see something in their own life and be like, oh my God, I'm appreciating what Ivan Ilyich was telling me. Whereas, this is the argument, right? The statistics of social science, the propositions of philosophy, this just never gets through to people.Agnes: Yeah, so one way to put this is, novelists are fans of epiphanies. I mean, some novelists, like Tolstoy, it's quite explicit. You just get these epiphanies, right? Like in this story, epiphany. James Joyce, I mean, he's like master of every story in Dubliners, epiphany. Novelists have this fantasy that people's lives are changed in a sudden moment when they have a passionate, oh, I just read this story and I'm so happy about it. And I don't actually doubt that these things happen, these epiphanies, that is people have these passionate realizations. I don't know how stable they are. Like they may have a passionate realization and then, maybe it's a little bit the novelist's fantasy to say you have the passionate realization and everything is changed. In this story, we get around that problem because he dies, right? So, that, I don't know. I somehow am now James Joyce. I don't know. I somehow am now James Joyce is in my head. The final story in Dubliners is the dead. And there's this like, amazing, I don't know who read the story.Henry: Yeah, yeah. Also with snow, right?Agnes: Yeah, exactly.You know, and it's this amazing where this guy is realizing his wife, their relationship is not what he thought it was, whatever. But then the story ends, does he really change? Like, do they just go on and have the same marriage after that point? We don't know. I mean, Joyce avoids that question by having the story end. But, so you might say, you know, novelists like epiphanies and they're good at writing epiphanies and producing epiphanies and imagining that their readers will have epiphanies. And then there's a question, okay, how valuable is the epiphany? And I think, not nothing. I wouldn't put it at zero, but you might say, okay, but let's compare the epiphany and the argument, right? So, what philosophers and the social scientists have, what we have is arguments. And who's ever been changed by an argument? And I think I would say all of human history has been changed by arguments and it's pretty much the only thing that's ever done anything to stably change us is arguments. If you think about, like, what are the things we've moved on? What are the things we've come around on? You know, human rights, there's a big one. That's not a thing in antiquity. And it's a thing now. And I think it's a thing because of arguments. Some of those arguments, you know, are starting to come in their own in religious authors, but then really come in, the flourishing is really the enlightenment. And so you might think, well, maybe an argument is not the kind of thing that can change very easily an adult who was already pretty set in their ways and who is not going to devote much of their time to philosophizing. It isn't going to give them the kind of passionate feeling of your life has suddenly been turned around by an epiphany, but it might well be that if we keep arguing with each other, that is how humanity changes.Henry: I think a lot of the arguments were put into story form. So like the thing that changed things the most before the enlightenment maybe was the gospels. Which is just lots of stories. I know there are arguments in there, but basically everything is done through stories. Or metaphor, there's a lot of metaphor. I also think philosophers are curiously good at telling stories. So like some of the best, you know, there's this thing of micro fiction, which is like very, very short story. I think some of the best micro fiction is short stories. Is a thought experiment, sorry. Yeah. So people like Judith Jarvis Thompson, or well, his name has escaped my head, Reasons and Persons, you know who I mean? Derek Parfit, right. They write great short stories. Like you can sit around and argue about long-termism with just propositions, and people are going to be either like, this makes total sense or this is weird. And you see this when you try and do this with people. If you tell them Parfit's thought experiment that you drop a piece of glass in the woods, and a hundred years later, a little girl comes in and she cuts up. Okay, everyone's a long-termist in some way now. To some extent, everyone is just like, of course. Okay, fine. The story is good. The famous thought experiment about the child drowning in the pond. And then, okay, the pond is like 3000. Again, everyone's like, okay, I get it. I'm with you. Philosophers constantly resort to stories because they know that the argument is, you have to have to agree with you. You've got to have the argument. The argument's the fundamental thing. But when you put it in a story, it will actually, somehow it will then do its work.Agnes: I think it's really interesting to ask, and I never asked myself this question, like what is the relationship between a thought experiment and a story? And I think that, I'm fine with a thought experiment with saying it's a kind of story, but I think that, so one feature of a thought experiment is that the person who is listening to it is given often a kind of agency. Like, which way do you push the trolley? Or do you care that you left this piece of glass there? Or are you, suppose that the pond was so many miles away but there was a very long hand that reached from here and you put a coin in the machine and at the other end, the hand will pull the child out of the water. Do you put the coin in, right? So like you're given these choices. It's like a choose your own adventure story, right? And that's really not what Tolstoy wrote. He really did not write choose your own adventure stories. There's a, I think he is-Henry: But the philosopher always comes in at the end and says, by the way, this is the correct answer. I'm giving you this experiment so that you can see that, like, I'm proving my point. Peter Singer is not like, it's okay if you don't want to jump into the pond. This is your story, you can pick. He's like, no, you have to jump in. This is why I'm telling you the story.Agnes: That's right, but I can't tell it to you without, in effect, your participation in the story, without you seeing yourself as part of the story and as having like agency in the story. It's by way of your agency that I'm making your point. Part of why this is important is that otherwise philosophers become preachers, which is what Tolstoy is when he's kind of at his worst. That is, you know, the philosopher doesn't just want to like tell you what to think. The philosopher wants to show you that you're already committed to certain conclusions and he's just showing you the way between the premises you already accept and the conclusion that follows from your premises. And that's quite-Henry: No, philosophers want to tell you the particular, most philosophers create a thought experiment to be like, you should be a virtue ethicist or you should give money away. Like they're preaching.Agnes: I don't think that is preaching. So I think that, and like, I think that this is why so many philosophical thought experiments are sort of meant to rely on what people call intuitions. Like, oh, but don't you have the intuition that? What is the intuition? The intuition is supposed to be somehow the kind of visceral and inchoate grasp that you already have of the thing I am trying to teach you. You already think the thing I'm telling you. I'm just making it clear to you what you think. And, you know, like there's like, I want to go back to the gospels. Like, I think it's a real question I have. I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but I feel like something I sometimes think about Jesus and I say this as a non-Christian, is that Jesus was clearly a really exceptional, really extraordinary human being. And maybe he just never met his Plato. You know, he got these guys who are like telling stories about him. But like, I feel like he had some really interesting thoughts that we haven't accessed. Imagine, imagine if Socrates only ever had Xenophon. You know, if Socrates had never met Plato. We might just have this story about Socrates. Oh, he's kind of like a hero. He was very self-sacrificing. He asked everyone to care about everybody else. And he might like actually look quite a bit like Jesus on a sort of like, let's say simplistic picture of him. And it's like, maybe it's a real shame that Jesus didn't have a philosopher as one of the people who would tell a story about him. And that if we had that, there would be some amazing arguments that we've missed out on.Henry: Is Paul not the closest thing to that?Agnes: What does he give us?Henry: What are the arguments? Well, all the, you know, Paulian theology is huge. I mean, all the epistles, they're full of, maybe, I don't know if they're arguments more than declarations, but he's a great expounder of this is what Jesus meant, you should do this, right? And it's not quite what you're saying.Agnes: It's conclusions, right?Henry: Yes, yes.Agnes: So I think it's like, you could sort of imagine if we only had the end of the Gorgias, where Socrates lists some of his sayings, right? Yes, exactly, yes. You know, it's better to have injustice done to you than to do injustice. It's better to be just than to appear just. Oratories should, you should never flatter anyone under any circumstances. Like, you know, there's others in other dialogues. Everyone desires the good. There's no such thing as weakness of will, et cetera. There are these sort of sayings, right? And you could sort of imagine a version of someone who's telling the story of Socrates who gives you those sayings. And yeah, I just think, well, we'd be missing a lot if we didn't hear the arguments for the sayings.Henry: Yeah, I feel stumped. So the next thing you say about novelists, novelists give us a view onto the promised land, but not more. And this relates to what you're saying, everything you've just been saying. I want to bring in a George Eliot argument where she says, she kind of says, that's the point. She says, I'm not a teacher, I'm a companion in the struggle of thought. So I think a lot of the time, some of the differences we're discussing here are to do with the readers more than the authors. So Tolstoy and George Eliot, Jane Austen, novelists of their type and their caliber. It's like, if you're coming to think, if you're involved in the struggle of thought, I'm putting these ideas in and I'm going to really shake you up with what's happening to these people and you're going to go away and think about it and Pierre's going to stay with you and it's really going to open things up. If you're just going to read the story, sure, yeah, sure. And at the end, we'll have the big revelation and that's whoopee. And that's the same as just having the sayings from Socrates and whatever. But if you really read Middlemarch, one piece, whatever, Adam Bede is always the one that stays with me. Like you will have to think about it. Like if you've read Adam Bede and you know what happens to Hetty at the end, this has the, oh, well, I'm not going to spoil it because you have to read it because it's insane. It's really an exceptional book, but it has some of those qualities of the thought experiment. She really does put you, George Eliot's very good at this. She does put you in the position of saying like, what actually went right and wrong here? Like she's really going to confront you with the situation but with the difficulty of just saying, oh, you know, that's easy. This is what happened. This is the bad thing. Well, there were several different things and she's really putting it up close to you and saying, well, this is how life is. You need to think about that.Agnes: So that last bit, I mean, I think that this is how life is part. Yeah. Really do think that that's something you get out of novels. It's not, so here's how you should live it or so here's why it makes sense, or here are the answers. It's none of the answers, I think. It's just that there's a kind of, it's like, you might've thought that given that we all live lives, we live in a constant contact with reality but I think we don't. We live in a bubble of what it's, the information that's useful to me to take in at any given moment and what do I need in order to make it to the next step? And there's a way in which the novel like confronts you with like the whole of life as like a spectacle or something like that, as something to be examined and understood. But typically I think without much guidance as to how you should examine or understand it, at least that's my own experience of it is that often it's like posing a problem to me and not really telling me how to solve it. But the problem is one that I often, under other circumstances, I'm inclined to look away from and the novelist sort of forces me to look at it.Henry: Does that mean philosophers should be assigning more fiction?Agnes: I, you know, I am in general pretty wary of judgments of that kind just because I find it hard to know what anyone should do. I mean, even myself, let alone all other philosophers.Henry: But you're the philosopher. You should be telling us.Agnes: No, I actually just don't think that is what philosophers do. So like, it was like a clear disagreement about, you know, is the, like George Eliot's like, I'm not a teacher, but the philosopher also says I'm not a teacher. I mean, Tolstoy was like, I am a teacher.Henry: Yeah, I'm a teacher.Agnes: I'm ready to guide you all.Henry: You should take notes.Agnes: But I think it's right that, yeah. So I think it's like, you know, maybe they have some other way of forcing that confrontation with reality. But I, my own feeling is that philosophers, when they use examples, including some of the thought experiments, it's sort of the opposite of what you said. It's kind of like they're writing very bad fiction. And so they'll come up with these, like I am philosophy. We have to, we're forced to sort of come up with examples. And, you know, I discuss one in my aspiration book of, oh, once upon a time, there was a guy. And when he was young, he wanted to be a clown, but his family convinced him that he should be an investment banker and make money. And so he did that. But then when he was older, he finally recovered this long lost desire. And then he became a clown and then he was happy. It's a story in an article by a philosopher I respect. Okay, I like her very much. And I haven't read it in a long time. So I'm hoping I'm summarizing it correctly. But my point is like, and this is supposed to be a story about how sort of self-creation and self-realization and how you can discover your authentic self by contrast with like the social forces that are trying to make you into a certain kind of person. But it's also, it's just a very bad piece of fiction. And I'm like, well, you know, if I'm say teaching a class on self-creation as I do sometimes, I'm like, well, we can read some novelists who write about this process and they write about it in a way that really shows it to us, that really forces us to confront the reality of it. And that story was not the reality. So if you have some other way to do that as a philosopher, then great. I'm very instrumental about my use of fiction, but I haven't found another way.Henry: Which other fiction do you use in the self-creation class?Agnes: So in that class, we read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend. And we also read some Fernando Pessoa.Henry: Pessoa, what do your students think of Pessoa?Agnes: They love it. So when I first assigned it, I'm like, I don't know what you guys are going to make of this. It's kind of weird. We're reading like just, you know, 20 pages of excerpts I like from the Book of Disquiet. I mean, it's like my own text I'm creating, basically. I figure with that text, you can do a choose your own adventure. And they like it a lot. And I think that it really, that, you know, the thing that really resonates with them is this stuff where he talks. So there are two passages in particular. So one of them is, one where he talks about how he's like, yeah, he meets his friend. And he can't really listen to what his friend is saying, but he can remember with photographic precision the lines on the face when he's smiling, or like, it's like what he's saying is, I'm paying attention to the wrong thing. Like I'm paying attention to the facial expressions and not to the content. And that I'm somebody who's in a world where my organization of my own experience is not following the rules that are sort of being dictated to me about how my experience is supposed to be organized. And that's sort of his predicament. So that's a thing that they like. And then there's a wonderful passage about how I keep trying to free myself from the social forces oppressing me. And I take away this noose that's around my neck. And as I'm doing it, I realize my hand is attached to a noose and it's pulling me. Like I'm the one who's doing, I'm the one who's suffocating myself all along when I'm trying to free myself from social forces, it's me who's doing the oppressing. Anyway, so those are some passages that we talk about that they like. They like it a lot. They have a lot less trouble making something of it than I had expected that they would.Henry: Is this because he, is he well-suited to the age of social media and phones and fragmented personalities and you're always 16 different people? Is it that kind of thing?Agnes: Partly it's the short texts. I mean, as I said, meeting a problem, right? And so, yeah. So like they like Nietzsche too, probably for the same reason, right? I mean, anything where the-Henry: The aphorism.Agnes: Yeah, exactly. Like no joke. You know, it's not the era for War and Peace. It's the era for the Nietzschean aphorism.Henry: This is so depressing. I thought this wasn't true.Agnes: Yeah, I think it's true. I like, I had a conversation with a student in my office yesterday about this and about how like just his own struggles with reading and how all his friends have the same problem. And, you know, I have made some suggestions and I think maybe I need to push them harder in terms of, you know, just university creating device-free spaces and then people having like, I think we have to view it the way we view exercise. Like none of us would exercise if we didn't force ourselves to exercise. And we use strategies to do it. Like, you know, you have a friend and you're going to go together or, you know, you make a habit of it or whatever. I mean, like, I think we just have to approach reading the same way. Just let's accept that we're in an environment that's hostile to reading and make it a priority and organize things to make it possible rather than just like pretending that there isn't a problem. But yeah, there is. And it's hard for us to see. So you're not as old as me, but I'm old enough that all of my reading habits were formed in a world without all of this, right? So of course it's way easier for me. Even I get distracted, but, you know, for me spending a couple of hours in the evening reading, that's like a thing I can do. But like a lot of people, okay, I was at a like tech, in a little tech world conference in California. And it was early in the morning and my husband wasn't awake yet. So I was just, and it was one of these conferences where there's like a little group room and then you have your own, like we had like a hotel room type room, but like then I would had to be in the room with my husband who was sleeping. I couldn't turn the light on. So it was early. I woke up at four. So I went to the group room just to read. And I'm sitting there reading and someone came up to me and they were like, I can't believe you're just sitting there like reading. I don't think I've seen someone read a book in, you know, he's like ever or something, maybe. I mean, he's a half my age. Like he's like, that's just not a thing that people do. And it was like, he's like, it's so on brand that you're reading, you know? But it's like, it's, I think it's just, it's much harder for people who have grown up with all of this stuff that is in some way hostile to the world of reading. Yeah, it's much harder for them than for us. And we should be reorganizing things to make it easier.Henry: Yeah, I get that. I'm just, I'm alarmed that they can't read, like the depth of Ivan Ilyich. It's like, I don't know, it's like 50 pages or.Agnes: Yeah, for one class, no.Henry: It's very short. It's very short.Agnes: That's not short. 50 pages is not short.Henry: It's an hour or two hours of reading.Agnes: It's like, yeah, between two and three. They also read slower because they don't read as much.Henry: Okay, but you know what I'm like…Agnes: Yeah, right, three hours of reading is a lot to assign for a class. Especially if, in my case, I always also assign philosophy. So it's not the only thing I'm assigning.Henry: Sure, sure, but they read the philosophy.Agnes: Same problem. I mean, it's not like some different problem, right? Same problem, and in fact, they are a little bit more inclined to read the fiction than the philosophy, but the point is the total number of pages is kind of what matters. And from that point of view, philosophy is at an advantage because we compress a lot into very few pages. So, but you know, and again, it's like, it's a matter of like, it's probably not of the level. So I can, you know, I can be more sure that in an upper level class, students will do the reading, but I'm also a little bit more inclined to assign literature in the lower level classes because I'm warming people up to philosophy. So, yeah, I mean, but I think it is alarming, like it should be alarming.Henry: Now, one of the exciting things about Open Socrates, which most people listening to this would have read my review, so you know that I strongly recommend that you all read it now, but it is all about dialogue, like real dialogue. And can we find some, you know, I don't want to say like, oh, can we find some optimism? But like, people are just going to be reading less, more phones, all this talk about we're going back to an oral culture. I don't think that's the right way to phrase it or frame it or whatever, but there's much more opportunity for dialogue these days like this than there used to be. How can Open Socrates, how can people use that book as a way of saying, I want more, you know, intellectual life, but I don't want to read long books? I don't want to turn this into like, give us your five bullet points, self-help Socrates summary, but what can we, this is a very timely book in that sense.Agnes: Yeah, I kind of had thought about it that way, but yeah, I mean, it's a book that says, intellectual life in its sort of most foundational and fundamental form is social, it's a social life, because the kinds of intellectual inquiries that are the most important to us are ones that we can't really conduct on our own. I do think that, I think that some, there is some way in which, like as you're saying, novels can help us a little bit sort of simulate that kind of interaction, at least some of the time, or at least put a question on the table. I sort of agree that that's possible. I think that in terms of social encounters doing it, there are also other difficulties though. Like, so it's, we're not that close to a Socratic world, just giving up on reading doesn't immediately put us into a Socratic world, let's put it that way. And for one thing, I think that there really is a difference between face-to-face interaction, on the one hand, where let's even include Zoom, okay, or phone as face-to-face in an extended sense, and then texting, on the other hand, where text interaction, where like texting back and forth would be, fall under texting, so would social media, Twitter, et cetera, that's sort of- Email. Email, exactly. And I'm becoming more, when I first started working on this book, I thought, well, look, the thing that Socrates cares about is like, when he says that philosophy is like, you know, when he rejects written texts, and he's like, no, what I want to talk back, I'm like, well, the crucial thing is that they can respond, whether they respond by writing you something down or whether they respond by making a sound doesn't matter. And I agree that it doesn't matter whether they make a sound, like for instance, if they respond in sign language, that would be fine. But I think it matters that there is very little lag time between the responses, and you never get really short lag time in anything but what I'm calling face-to-face interaction.Henry: Right, there's always the possibility of what to forestall on text. Yeah. Whereas I can only sit here for like 10 seconds before I just have to like speak.Agnes: Exactly, and I mean, 10 seconds, that's a wild exaggeration. So do you know what the actual number is? No. On average. Okay, the average amount of time that you're allowed to wait before responding to something I say is two tenths of a second, which, it's crazy, isn't it? Which, that amount of time is not enough time for, that is a one second pause is an awkward pause, okay? So two tenths of a second is not long enough time for the signal that comes at the end of my talking, so the last sound I make, let's say, to reach your ears and then get into your brain and be processed, and then you figure out what you want to say. It's not enough time, which means you're making a prediction. That's what you're doing when I'm talking. You're making a prediction about when I'm going to stop talking, and you're so good at it that you're on almost every time. You're a little worse over Zoom. Zoom screws us up a little bit, right? But this is like what our brains are built to do. This is what we're super good at, is kind of like interacting, and I think it's really important that it be a genuine interaction. That's what I'm coming to see, is that we learn best from each other when we can interact, and it's not obvious that there are those same interaction possibilities by way of text at the moment, right? I'm not saying there couldn't be, but at the moment, we rely on the fact that we have all these channels open to us. Interestingly, it's the lag time on the phone, like if we were talking just by phone, is about the same. So we're so good at this, we don't need the visual information. That's why I said phone is also face-to-face. I think phone's okay, even though a lot of our informational stream is being cut. We're on target in terms of the quick responses, and there's some way in which what happens in that circumstance is we become a unit. We become a unit of thinking together, and if we're texting each other and each of us gets to ponder our response and all that, it becomes dissociated.Henry: So this, I do have a really, I'm really interested in this point. Your book doesn't contain scientific information, sociological studies. It's good old-fashioned philosophy, which I loved, but if you had turned it into more of a, this is the things you're telling me now, right? Oh, scientists have said this, and sociologists have said that. It could have been a different sort of book and maybe been, in some shallow way, more persuasive to more people, right? So you clearly made a choice about what you wanted to do. Talk me through why.Agnes: I think that it's maybe the answer here is less deep than you would want. I think that my book was based on the reading I was doing in order to write it, and I wasn't, at the time, asking myself the kinds of questions that scientists could answer. Coming off of the writing of it, I started to ask myself this question. So for instance, that's why I did all this reading in sociology, psychology, that's what I'm doing now is trying to learn. Why is it that we're not having philosophical conversations all the time? It's a real question for me. Why are we not having the conversations that I want us to be having? That's an empirical question, at least in part, because it's like, well, what kinds of conversations are we having? And then I have to sort of read up on that and learn about how conversation works. And it's surprising to me, like the amount of stuff we know, and that it's not what I thought. And so I'm not, maybe I'm a little bit less hostile than most philosophers, just as I'm less hostile to fiction, but I'm also less hostile to sort of empirical work. I mean, there's plenty of philosophers who are very open to the very specific kind of empirical work that is the overlap with their specialization. But for me, it's more like, well, depending on what question I ask, there's just like, who is ready with answers to the question? And I will like, you know, kind of like a mercenary, I will go to those people. And I mean, one thing I was surprised to learn, I'm very interested in conversation and in how it works and in what are the goals of conversation. And of course I started with philosophical stuff on it, you know, Grice and Searle, speech act theory, et cetera. And what I found is that that literature does not even realize that it's not about conversation. I mean, Grice, like the theory of conversational implicature and you know, Grice's logic on conversation, it's like if you thought that making a public service announcement was a kind of conversation, then it would be a theory of conversation. But the way that philosophers fundamentally understand speech is that like, you know, speakers issue utterances and then somebody has to interpret that utterance. The fact that that second person gets to talk too is not like part of the picture. It's not essential to the picture. But if you ask a sociologist, what is the smallest unit of conversation? They are not going to say an assertion. They're going to say something like greeting, greeting or question answer or command obeying or, right? Conversation is like, there's two people who get to talk, not just one person. That seems like the most obvious thing, but it's not really represented in the philosophical literature. So I'm like, okay, I guess I got to say goodbye philosophers. Let me go to the people who are actually talking about conversation. You know, I of course then read, my immediate thought was to read in psychology, which I did. Psychology is a bit shallow. They just don't get to theorize. It's very accessible. It's got lots of data, but it's kind of shallow. And then I'm like, okay, the people who really are grappling with the kind of deep structure of conversation are sociologists. And so that's what I've been reading a lot of in the past, like whatever, two months or so. But I just wasn't asking myself these questions when I wrote the book. And I think the kinds of questions that I was asking were in fact, the kinds of questions that get answered or at least get addressed in philosophical texts. And so those were the texts that I refer to.Henry: So all the sociology you've read, is it, how is it changing what you think about this? Is it giving you some kind of answer?Agnes: It's not changing any, my view, but any of the claims in the book, that is the exact reason that you brought out. But it is making me, it's making me realize how little I understand in a sort of concrete way, what like our modern predicament is. That is, where are we right now? Like what's happening right now? Is the question I ask myself. And I get a lot of, especially in interviews about this book, I get a lot of like, well, given where things are right now, is Socrates very timely? Or how can Socrates help or whatever? And I'm like, I don't think we know where things are right now. That is that given that, where is it? Where is it that we are? And so part of what this kind of sociology stuff is making me realize is like, that's a much harder question than it appears. And even where do we draw the lines? Like, when did now start happening? Like my instinct is like, one answer is like around 1900 is when now started happening. And, and so like, so I guess I'm interested both at the very micro level, how does the conversational interaction work? What are the ways in which I am deciding in this very conversation, I'm deciding what's allowed to be in and what's not allowed to be in the conversation, right? By the moves I'm making, and you're doing the same. How are we doing that? How are we orchestrating, manipulating this conversation so as to dictate what's in it and what's out of it in ways that are like below the surface that we're not noticing, that we either that we are doing it or that we're doing it ourselves. Neither of us is noticing, but we're doing that. So that's at the micro level. And then at the macro level is the question about when did now start happening? And what are the big shifts in like the human experience? And, are we at a point somehow in human history where culture like as a mechanism of coordination is a little bit falling apart and then what's going to come next? That's like a kind of question that I have to put in that kind of vague way. So maybe the right thing to say is that reading all these sociology texts has like, has given me a sets of questions to ask. And maybe what I'm trying to do is, it's like, what my book does is it describes a kind of ideal. And it describes that ideal, you know, using the power of reason to see what would it take to sort of set us straight? What is the straightened version of the crooked thing that we're already doing? And I think that that's right, but that's not at all the same thing as asking the question like, what's our next step? How do we get there from here? That's the question I'm asking now. But part of trying to answer the question, how do we get there from here is like, where are we now? And where are we both very, very locally in an interaction, what are we doing? And then in a big picture way, where are we? What is the big, what is like, you know, in the Taylor Swift sense, what era are we in? And, you know, I guess I still feel like we are, we are living in the world of Fernando Pessoa, Robert Musso, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Hermann Bruch, Franz Kafka, like that set of writers, like around 1900-ish set of writers who didn't all know each other or anything, didn't coordinate, but they all, there was this like primal scream moment where they were like, what the hell is going on? What has happened to humanity? Where are the rules? Like, who are we supposed to be? I mean, of all of those, I would pull out Musso as like the paradigm example. So this is me, I guess, taking inspiration from literature again, where I feel like, okay, there's something there about we're lost. There's an expression of, there's a thought we're lost. And I'm trying to understand, okay, how did we get lost? And are we still in that state of being lost? I think yes. And let's get a clear, once we get very clear on how lost we are, we'll already start to be found. Cause that's sort of what it is to, you know, once you understand why you're lost, like that's situating yourself.Henry: Those writers are a long time ago.Agnes: Yeah, I said around 1900.Henry: Yeah, but you don't, you don't, but there's nothing more recent that like expresses, like that's a very long now.Agnes: Yeah. Well, yes, I agree. So I say, when did now start happening? I think it started happening around 1900. So I think-Henry: So are we stuck?Agnes: Yeah, kind of. I think, so here's like a very, he's like a very simple part of history that must be too simple because history is not, is like, it's very mildly not my strong suit. I can't really understand history. But it's like, there is this set of writers and they don't really tell stories. It's not their thing, right? They're not into plot, but they are issuing this warning or proclamation or crisis, like flashing thing. And then what happens? What happens after that? Well, World War I happens, right? And then, you know, not very long after that, we got World War II and especially World War II, the result of that is kind of, oh no, actually we know what good and bad are. It's like fighting Nazis, that's bad. And, you know, so we got it all settled. And, but it's like, it's like we push something under the rug, I guess. And I think we haven't dealt with it. We haven't dealt with this crisis moment. And so, you know, I think I could say something very similar about Knausgaard or something that is, I think he's kind of saying the same thing and his novel has a novel, whatever you want to call it, the, you know, I'm talking about the later one. That's the kind of weird sort of horror quadrilogy or something. It has this feeling of like trying to express a sense of being lost. So there's more recent stuff that, a lot of it's autofiction, the genre of autofiction has that same character. So yeah, like maybe there is some big progress that's been made since then, but if there is, then it has passed me by.Henry: Agnes: Callard, thank you very much. 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

In this episode, James Marriott and I discuss who we think are the best twenty English poets. This is not the best poets who wrote in English, but the best British poets (though James snuck Sylvia Plath onto his list…). We did it like that to make it easier, not least so we could base a lot of our discussion on extracts in The Oxford Book of English Verse (Ricks edition). Most of what we read out is from there. We read Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, Milton, and Pope. We both love Pope! (He should be regarded as one of the very best English poets, like Milton.) There are also readings of Herrick, Bronte, Cowper, and MacNiece. I plan to record the whole of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes' at some point soon.Here are our lists and below is the transcript (which may have more errors than usual, sorry!)HOGod Tier* Shakespeare“if not first, in the very first line”* Chaucer* Spenser* Milton* Wordsworth* Eliot—argue for Pope here, not usually includedSecond Tier* Donne* Herbert* Keats* Dryden* Gawain poet* Tom O'Bedlam poetThird Tier* Yeats* Tennyson* Hopkins* Coleridge* Auden* Shelley* MarvellJMShakespeareTier* ShakespeareTier 1* Chaucer* Milton* WordsworthTier 2* Donne* Eliot* Keats* Tennyson* Spencer* Marvell* PopeTier 3* Yeats* Hopkins* Blake* Coleridge* Auden* Shelley* Thomas Hardy* Larkin* PlathHenry: Today I'm talking to James Marriott, Times columnist, and more importantly, the writer of the Substack Cultural Capital. And we are going to argue about who are the best poets in the English language. James, welcome.James: Thanks very much for having me. I feel I should preface my appearance so that I don't bring your podcast and disrepute saying that I'm maybe here less as an expert of poetry and more as somebody who's willing to have strong and potentially species opinions. I'm more of a lover of poetry than I would claim to be any kind of academic expert, just in case anybody thinks that I'm trying to produce any definitive answer to the question that we're tackling.Henry: Yeah, no, I mean that's the same for me. We're not professors, we're just very opinionated boys. So we have lists.James: We do.Henry: And we're going to debate our lists, but what we do agree is that if we're having a top 20 English poets, Shakespeare is automatically in the God Tier and there's nothing to discuss.James: Yeah, he's in a category of his own. I think the way of, because I guess the plan we've gone for is to rather than to rank them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 into sort of, what is it, three or four broad categories that we're competing over.Henry: Yes, yes. TiersJames: I think is a more kind of reasonable way to approach it rather than trying to argue exactly why it should be one place above Shelly or I don't know, whatever.Henry: It's also just an excuse to talk about poets.James: Yes.Henry: Good. So then we have a sort of top tier, if not the first, in the very first line as it were, and you've got different people. To me, you've got Chaucer, Milton, and Wordsworth. I would also add Spenser and T.S. Eliot. So what's your problem with Spenser?James: Well, my problem is ignorance in that it's a while since I've read the Fairy Queen, which I did at university. Partly is just that looking back through it now and from what I remember of university, I mean it is not so much that I have anything against Spenser. It's quite how much I have in favour of Milton and Wordsworth and Chaucer, and I'm totally willing to be argued against on this, but I just can't think that Spenser is in quite the same league as lovely as many passages of the Fairy Queen are.Henry: So my case for Spenser is firstly, if you go through something like the Oxford Book of English Verse or some other comparable anthology, he's getting a similar page count to Shakespeare and Milton, he is important in that way. Second, it's not just the fairy queen, there's the Shepherd's Calendar, the sonnets, the wedding poems, and they're all highly accomplished. The Shepherd's Calendar particularly is really, really brilliant work. I think I enjoyed that more as an undergraduate, actually, much as I love the Fairy Queen. And the third thing is that the Fairy Queen is a very, very great epic. I mean, it's a tremendous accomplishment. There were lots of other epics knocking around in the 16th century that nobody wants to read now or I mean, obviously specialists want to read, but if we could persuade a few more people, a few more ordinary readers to pick up the fairy queen, they would love it.James: Yes, and I was rereading before he came on air, the Bower of Bliss episode, which I think is from the second book, which is just a beautifully lush passage, passage of writing. It was really, I mean, you can see why Keats was so much influenced by it. The point about Spenser's breadth is an interesting one because Milton is in my top category below Shakespeare, but I think I'm placing him there pretty much only on the basis of Paradise Lost. I think if we didn't have Paradise Lost, Milton may not even be in this competition at all for me, very little. I know. I don't know if this is a heresy, I've got much less time for Milton's minor works. There's Samuel Johnson pretty much summed up my feelings on Lycidas when he said there was nothing new. Whatever images it can supply are long ago, exhausted, and I do feel there's a certain sort of dryness to Milton's minor stuff. I mean, I can find things like Il Penseroso and L'Allegro pretty enough, but I mean, I think really the central achievement is Paradise Lost, whereas Spenser might be in contention, as you say, from if you didn't have the Fairy Queen, you've got Shepherd's Calendar, and all this other sort of other stuff, but Paradise Lost is just so massive for me.Henry: But if someone just tomorrow came out and said, oh, we found a whole book of minor poetry by Virgil and it's all pretty average, you wouldn't say, oh, well Virgil's less of a great poet.James: No, absolutely, and that's why I've stuck Milton right at the top. It's just sort of interesting how unbelievably good Paradise Lost is and how, in my opinion, how much less inspiring the stuff that comes after it is Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained I really much pleasure out of at all and how, I mean the early I think slightly dry Milton is unbelievably accomplished, but Samuel Johnson seems to say in that quote is a very accomplished use of ancient slightly worn out tropes, and he's of putting together these old ideas in a brilliant manner and he has this sort of, I mean I guess he's one of your late bloomers. I can't quite remember how old he is when he publishes Paradise Lost.Henry: Oh, he is. Oh, writing it in his fifties. Yeah.James: Yeah, this just extraordinary thing that's totally unlike anything else in English literature and of all the poems that we're going to talk about, I think is the one that has probably given me most pleasure in my life and the one that I probably return to most often if not to read all the way through then to just go over my favourite bits and pieces of it.Henry: A lot of people will think Milton is heavy and full of weird references to the ancient world and learned and biblical and not very readable for want of a better word. Can you talk us out of that? To be one of the great poets, they do have to have some readability, right?James: Yeah, I think so, and it's certainly how I felt. I mean I think it's not a trivial objection to have to Milton. It's certainly how I found him. He was my special author paper at university and I totally didn't get on with him. There was something about his massive brilliance that I felt. I remember feeling like trying to write about Paradise Lost was trying to kind of scratch a huge block of marble with your nails. There's no way to get a handle on it. I just couldn't work out what to get ahold of, and it's only I think later in adulthood maybe reading him under a little less pressure that I've come to really love him. I mean, the thing I would always say to people to look out for in Milton, but it's his most immediate pleasure and the thing that still is what sends shivers done my spine about him is the kind of cosmic scale of Paradise Lost, and it's almost got this sort of sci-fi massiveness to it. One of my very favourite passages, which I may inflict on you, we did agree that we could inflict poetry on one another.Henry: Please, pleaseJames: It's a detail from the first book of Paradise Lost. Milton's talking about Satan's architect in hell Mulciber, and this is a little explanation of who or part of his explanation of who Mulciber is, and he says, Nor was his name unheard or unadoredIn ancient Greece; and in Ausonian landMen called him Mulciber; and how he fellFrom Heaven they fabled, thrown by angry JoveSheer o'er the crystal battlements: from mornTo noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve,A summer's day, and with the setting sunDropt from the zenith, like a falling star,On Lemnos, th' Aegaean isle. Thus they relate,ErringI just think it's the sort of total massiveness of that universe that “from the zenith to like a falling star”. I just can't think of any other poet in English or that I've ever read in any language, frankly, even in translation, who has that sort of scale about it, and I think that's what can most give immediate pleasure. The other thing I love about that passage is this is part of the kind of grandeur of Milton is that you get this extraordinary passage about an angel falling from heaven down to th' Aegean Isle who's then going to go to hell and the little parenthetic remark at the end, the perm just rolls on, thus they relate erring and paradise lost is such this massive grand thing that it can contain this enormous cosmic tragedy as a kind of little parenthetical thing. I also think the crystal battlements are lovely, so wonderful kind of sci-fi detail.Henry: Yes, I think that's right, and I think it's under appreciated that Milton was a hugely important influence on Charles Darwin who was a bit like you always rereading it when he was young, especially on the beagle voyage. He took it with him and quotes it in his letters sometimes, and it is not insignificant the way that paradise loss affects him in terms of when he writes his own epic thinking at this level, thinking at this scale, thinking at the level of the whole universe, how does the whole thing fit together? What's the order behind the little movements of everything? So Milton's reach I think is actually quite far into the culture even beyond the poets.James: That's fascinating. Do you have a particular favourite bit of Paradise Lost?Henry: I do, but I don't have it with me because I disorganised and couldn't find my copy.James: That's fair.Henry: What I want to do is to read one of the sonnets because I do think he's a very, very good sonnet writer, even if I'm going to let the Lycidas thing go, because I'm not going to publicly argue against Samuel Johnson.When I consider how my light is spent,Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,And that one Talent which is death to hideLodged with me useless, though my Soul more bentTo serve therewith my Maker, and presentMy true account, lest he returning chide;“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”I fondly ask. But patience, to preventThat murmur, soon replies, “God doth not needEither man's work or his own gifts; who bestBear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His stateIs Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speedAnd post o'er Land and Ocean without rest:They also serve who only stand and wait.”I think that's great.James: Yeah. Okay. It is good.Henry: Yeah. I think the minor poems are very uneven, but there are lots of gems.James: Yeah, I mean he is a genius. It would be very weird if all the minor poems were s**t, which is not really what I'm trying… I guess I have a sort of slightly austere category too. I just do Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth, but we are agreed on Wordsworth, aren't we? That he belongs here.Henry: So my feeling is that the story of English poetry is something like Chaucer Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot create a kind of spine. These are the great innovators. They're writing the major works, they're the most influential. All the cliches are true. Chaucer invented iambic pentameter. Shakespeare didn't single handedly invent modern English, but he did more than all the rest of them put together. Milton is the English Homer. Wordsworth is the English Homer, but of the speech of the ordinary man. All these old things, these are all true and these are all colossal achievements and I don't really feel that we should be picking between them. I think Spenser wrote an epic that stands alongside the works of Shakespeare and Milton in words with T.S. Eliot whose poetry, frankly I do not love in the way that I love some of the other great English writers cannot be denied his position as one of the great inventors.James: Yeah, I completely agree. It's funny, I think, I mean I really do love T.S. Eliot. Someone else had spent a lot of time rereading. I'm not quite sure why he hasn't gone into quite my top category, but I think I had this—Henry: Is it because he didn't like Milton and you're not having it?James: Maybe that's part of it. I think my thought something went more along the lines of if I cut, I don't quite feel like I'm going to put John Donne in the same league as Milton, but then it seems weird to put Eliot above Donne and then I don't know that, I mean there's not a very particularly fleshed out thought, but on Wordsworth, why is Wordsworth there for you? What do you think, what do you think are the perms that make the argument for Wordsworth having his place at the very top?Henry: Well, I think the Lyrical Ballads, Poems in Two Volumes and the Prelude are all of it, aren't they? I'm not a lover of the rest, and I think the preface to the Lyrical Ballads is one of the great works of literary criticism, which is another coin in his jar if you like, but in a funny way, he's much more revolutionary than T.S. Eliot. We think of modernism as the great revolution and the great sort of bringing of all the newness, but modernism relies on Wordsworth so much, relies on the idea that tradition can be subsumed into ordinary voice, ordinary speech, the passage in the Wasteland where he has all of them talking in the bar. Closing time please, closing time please. You can't have that without Wordsworth and—James: I think I completely agree with what you're saying.Henry: Yeah, so I think that's for me is the basis of it that he might be the great innovator of English poetry.James: Yeah, I think you're right because I've got, I mean again, waiting someone out of my depth here, but I can't think of anybody else who had sort of specifically and perhaps even ideologically set out to write a kind of high poetry that sounded like ordinary speech, I guess. I mean, Wordsworth again is somebody who I didn't particularly like at university and I think it's precisely about plainness that can make him initially off-putting. There's a Matthew Arnold quote where he says of Wordsworth something like He has no style. Henry: Such a Matthew Arnold thing to say.James: I mean think it's the beginning of an appreciation, but there's a real blankness to words with I think again can almost mislead you into thinking there's nothing there when you first encounter him. But yeah, I think for me, Tintern Abbey is maybe the best poem in the English language.Henry: Tintern Abbey is great. The Intimations of Immortality Ode is superb. Again, I don't have it with me, but the Poems in Two Volumes. There are so many wonderful things in there. I had a real, when I was an undergraduate, I had read some Wordsworth, but I hadn't really read a lot and I thought of I as you do as the daffodils poet, and so I read Lyrical Ballads and Poems in Two Volumes, and I had one of these electrical conversion moments like, oh, the daffodils, that is nothing. The worst possible thing for Wordsworth is that he's remembered as this daffodils poet. When you read the Intimations of Immortality, do you just think of all the things he could have been remembered for? It's diminishing.James: It's so easy to get into him wrong because the other slightly wrong way in is through, I mean maybe this is a prejudice that isn't widely shared, but the stuff that I've never particularly managed to really enjoy is all the slightly worthy stuff about beggars and deformed people and maimed soldiers. Wandering around on roads in the lake district has always been less appealing to me, and that was maybe why I didn't totally get on with 'em at first, and I mean, there's some bad words with poetry. I was looking up the infamous lines from the form that were mocked even at the time where you know the lines that go, You see a little muddy pond Of water never dry. I've measured it from side to side, 'Tis three feet long and two feet wide, and the sort of plainness condescend into banality at Wordsworth's worst moments, which come more frequently later in his career.Henry: Yes, yes. I'm going to read a little bit of the Intimations ode because I want to share some of this so-called plainness at its best. This is the third section. They're all very short Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,And while the young lambs boundAs to the tabor's sound,To me alone there came a thought of grief:A timely utterance gave that thought relief,And I again am strong:The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,And all the earth is gay;Land and seaGive themselves up to jollity,And with the heart of MayDoth every Beast keep holiday;—Thou Child of Joy,Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.And I think it's unthinkable that someone would write like this today. It would be cringe, but we're going to have a new sincerity. It's coming. It's in some ways it's already here and I think Wordsworth will maybe get a different sort of attention when that happens because that's a really high level of writing to be able to do that without it descending into what you just read. In the late Wordsworth there's a lot of that really bad stuff.James: Yeah, I mean the fact that he wrote some of that bad stuff I guess is a sign of quite how carefully the early stuff is treading that knife edge of tripping into banality. Can I read you my favourite bit of Tintern Abbey?Henry: Oh yes. That is one of the great poems.James: Yeah, I just think one of mean I, the most profound poem ever, probably for me. So this is him looking out over the landscape of Tinton Abbey. I mean these are unbelievably famous lines, so I'm sure everybody listening will know them, but they are so good And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. Therefore am I stillA lover of the meadows and the woodsAnd mountains; and of all that we beholdFrom this green earth; of all the mighty worldOf eye, and ear,—both what they half create,And what perceive; well pleased to recogniseIn nature and the language of the senseThe anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soulOf all my moral being.I mean in a poem, it's just that is mind blowingly good to me?Henry: Yeah. I'm going to look up another section from the Prelude, which used to be in the Oxford Book, but it isn't in the Ricks edition and I don't really know whyJames: He doesn't have much of the Prelude does he?Henry: I don't think he has any…James: Yeah.Henry: So this is from an early section when the young Wordsworth is a young boy and he's going off, I think he's sneaking out at night to row on the lake as you do when you with Wordsworth, and the initial description is of a mountain. She was an elfin pinnace; lustilyI dipped my oars into the silent lake,And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boatWent heaving through the water like a swan;When, from behind that craggy steep till thenThe horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,As if with voluntary power instinct,Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,And growing still in stature the grim shapeTowered up between me and the stars, and still,For so it seemed, with purpose of its ownAnd measured motion like a living thing,Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,And through the silent water stole my wayBack to the covert of the willow tree;It's so much like that in Wordsworth. It's just,James: Yeah, I mean, yeah, the Prelude is full of things like that. I think that is probably one of the best moments, possibly the best moments of the prelude. But yeah, I mean it's just total genius isn't it?Henry: I think he's very, very important and yeah, much more important than T.S. Eliot who is, I put him in the same category, but I can see why you didn't.James: You do have a little note saying Pope, question mark or something I think, don't you, in the document.Henry: So the six I gave as the spine of English literature and everything, that's an uncontroversial view. I think Pope should be one of those people. I think we should see Pope as being on a level with Milton and Wordsworth, and I think he's got a very mixed reputation, but I think he was just as inventive, just as important. I think you are a Pope fan, just as clever, just as moving, and it baffles me that he's not more commonly regarded as part of this great spine running through the history of English literature and between Milton and Wordsworth. If you don't have Pope, I think it's a missing link if you like.James: I mean, I wouldn't maybe go as far as you, I love Pope. Pope was really the first perch I ever loved. I remember finding a little volume of Pope in a box of books. My school library was chucking out, and that was the first book of poetry I read and took seriously. I guess he sort of suffers by the fact that we are seeing all of this through the lens of the romantics. All our taste about Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser has been formed by the romantics and hope's way of writing the Satires. This sort of society poetry I think is just totally doesn't conform to our idea of what poetry should be doing or what poetry is. Is there absolutely or virtually nobody reads Dryden nowadays. It's just not what we think poetry is for that whole Augustine 18th century idea that poetry is for writing epistles to people to explain philosophical concepts to them or to diss your enemies and rivals or to write a kind of Duncia explaining why everyone you know is a moron. That's just really, I guess Byron is the last major, is the only of figure who is in that tradition who would be a popular figure nowadays with things like English bards and scotch reviewers. But that whole idea of poetry I think was really alien to us. And I mean I'm probably formed by that prejudice because I really do love Pope, but I don't love him as much as the other people we've discussed.Henry: I think part of his problem is that he's clever and rational and we want our poems always to be about moods, which may be, I think why George Herbert, who we've both got reasonably high is also quite underrated. He's very clever. He's always think George Herbert's always thinking, and when someone like Shakespeare or Milton is thinking, they do it in such a way that you might not notice and that you might just carry on with the story. And if you do see that they're thinking you can enjoy that as well. Whereas Pope is just explicitly always thinking and maybe lecturing, hectoring, being very grand with you and as you say, calling you an idiot. But there are so many excellent bits of Pope and I just think technically he can sustain a thought or an argument over half a dozen or a dozen lines and keep the rhyme scheme moving and it's never forced, and he never has to do that thing where he puts the words in a stupid order just to make the rhyme work. He's got such an elegance and a balance of composition, which again, as you say, we live under romantic ideals, not classical ones. But that doesn't mean we should be blind to the level of his accomplishment, which is really, really very high. I mean, Samuel Johnson basically thought that Alexander Pope had finished English poetry. We have the end of history. He had the end of English poetry. Pope, he's brought us to the mightiest of the heroic couplers and he's done it. It's all over.James: The other thing about Pope that I think makes us underrate him is that he's very charming. And I think charm is a quality we're not big on is that sort of, but I think some of Pope's charm is so moving. One of my favourite poems of his is, do you know the Epistle to Miss Blount on going into the country? The poem to the young girl who's been having a fashionable season in London then is sent to the boring countryside to stay with an aunt. And it's this, it's not like a romantic love poem, it's not distraught or hectic. It's just a sort of wonderful act of sympathy with this potentially slightly airheaded young girl who's been sent to the countryside, which you'd rather go to operas and plays and flirt with people. And there's a real sort of delicate in it that isn't overblown and isn't dramatic, but is extremely charming. And I think that's again, another quality that perhaps we're prone not to totally appreciate in the 21st century. It's almost the kind of highest form of politeness and sympathyHenry: And the prevailing quality in Pope is wit: “True wit is nature to advantage dressed/ What often was thought, but ne'er so well expressed”. And I think wit can be quite alienating for an audience because it is a kind of superior form of literary art. This is why people don't read as much Swift as he deserves because he's so witty and so scornful that a lot of people will read him and think, well, I don't like you.James: And that point about what oft was thought and ne'er so well expressed again, is a very classical idea. The poet who puts not quite conventional wisdom, but something that's been thought before in the best possible words, really suffers with the romantic idea of originality. The poet has to say something utterly new. Whereas for Pope, the sort of ideas that he express, some of the philosophical ideas are not as profound in original perhaps as words with, but he's very elegant proponent of them.Henry: And we love b******g people in our culture, and I feel like the Dunciad should be more popular because it is just, I can't remember who said this, but someone said it's probably the most under appreciated great poem in English, and that's got to be true. It's full of absolute zingers. There's one moment where he's described the whole crowd of them or all these poets who he considers to be deeply inferior, and it turns out he was right because no one reads them anymore. And you need footnotes to know who they are. I mean, no one cares. And he says, “equal your merits, equal is your din”. This kind of abuse is a really high art, and we ought to love that. We love that on Twitter. And I think things like the Rape of the Lock also could be more popular.James: I love the Rape of the Lock . I mean, I think anybody is not reading Pope and is looking for a way in, I think the Rape of the Lock is the way in, isn't it? Because it's just such a charming, lovely, funny poem.Henry: It is. And probably it suffers because the whole idea of mock heroic now is lost to us. But it's a bit like it's the literary equivalent of people writing a sort of mini epic about someone like Elon Musk or some other very prominent figure in the culture and using lots of heroic imagery from the great epics of Homer and Virgil and from the Bible and all these things, but putting them into a very diminished state. So instead of being grand, it becomes comic. It's like turning a God into a cartoon. And Pope is easily the best writer that we have for that kind of thing. Dryden, but he's the genius on it.James: Yeah, no, he totally is. I guess it's another reason he's under appreciated is that our culture is just much less worshipful of epic than the 18th century culture was. The 18th century was obsessed with trying to write epics and trying to imitate epics. I mean, I think to a lot of Pope's contemporaries, the achievement they might've been expecting people to talk about in 300 years time would be his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey and the other stuff might've seen more minor in comparison, whereas it's the mock epic that we're remembering him for, which again is perhaps another symptom of our sort of post romantic perspective.Henry: I think this is why Spenser suffers as well, because everything in Spenser is magical. The knights are fairies, not the little fairies that live in buttercups, but big human sized fairies or even bigger than that. And there are magical women and saucers and the whole thing is a sort of hodgepodge of romance and fairy tale and legend and all this stuff. And it's often said, oh, he was old fashioned in his own time. But those things still had a lot of currency in the 16th century. And a lot of those things are in Shakespeare, for example.But to us, that's like a fantasy novel. Now, I love fantasy and I read fantasy, and I think some of it's a very high accomplishment, but to a lot of people, fantasy just means kind of trash. Why am I going to read something with fairies and a wizard? And I think a lot of people just see Spenser and they're like, what is this? This is so weird. They don't realise how Protestant they're being, but they're like, this is so weird.James: And Pope has a little, I mean, the Rape of the Lock even has a little of the same because the rape of the lock has this attendant army of good spirits called selfs and evil spirits called gnomes. I mean, I find that just totally funny and charming. I really love it.Henry: I'm going to read, there's an extract from the Rape of the Lock in the Oxford Book, and I'm going to read a few lines to give people an idea of how he can be at once mocking something but also quite charming about it. It's quite a difficult line to draw. The Rape of the Lock is all about a scandalous incident where a young man took a lock of a lady's hair. Rape doesn't mean what we think it means. It means an offence. And so because he stole a lock of her hair, it'd become obviously this huge problem and everyone's in a flurry. And to sort of calm everyone down, Pope took it so seriously that he made it into a tremendous joke. So here he is describing the sort of dressing table if you like.And now, unveil'd, the Toilet stands display'd,Each silver Vase in mystic order laid.First, rob'd in white, the Nymph intent adores,With head uncover'd, the Cosmetic pow'rs.A heav'nly image in the glass appears,To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears;Th' inferior Priestess, at her altar's side,Trembling begins the sacred rites of Pride.What a way to describe someone putting on their makeup. It's fantastic.James: It's funny. I can continue that because the little passage of Pope I picked to read begins exactly where yours ended. It only gets better as it goes on, I think. So after trembling begins the sacred rites of pride, Unnumber'd treasures ope at once, and hereThe various off'rings of the world appear;From each she nicely culls with curious toil,And decks the Goddess with the glitt'ring spoil.This casket India's glowing gems unlocks,And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,Transformed to combs, the speckled, and the white.Here files of pins extend their shining rows,Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.It's just so lovely. I love a thing about the tortoise and the elephant unite because you've got a tortoise shell and an ivory comb. And the stuff about India's glowing gems and Arabia breathing from yonder box, I mean that's a, realistic is not quite the word, but that's a reference to Milton because Milton is continually having all the stones of Arabia and India's pearls and things all screwed through paradise lost. Yeah, it's just so lovely, isn't it?Henry: And for someone who's so classical and composed and elegant, there's something very Dickensian about things like the toilet, the tortoise and the elephant here unite, transform to combs. There's something a little bit surreal and the puffs, powders, patches, bibles, it has that sort of slightly hectic, frantic,James: That's sort of Victorian materialism, wealth of material objects,Henry: But also that famous thing that was said of Dickens, that the people are furniture and the furniture's like people. He can bring to life all the little bits and bobs of the ordinary day and turn it into something not quite ridiculous, not quite charming.James: And there is a kind of charm in the fact that it wasn't the sort of thing that poets would necessarily expect to pay attention to the 18th century. I don't think the sort of powders and ointments on a woman's dressing table. And there's something very sort of charming in his condescension to notice or what might've once seemed his condescension to notice those things, to find a new thing to take seriously, which is what poetry or not quite to take seriously, but to pay attention to, which I guess is one of the things that great perch should always be doing.Henry: When Swift, who was Pope's great friend, wrote about this, he wrote a poem called A Beautiful Young Lady Going to Bed, which is not as good, and I would love to claim Swift on our list, but I really can't.James: It's quite a horrible perm as well, that one, isn't it?Henry: It is. But it shows you how other people would treat the idea of the woman in front of her toilet, her mirror. And Swift uses an opportunity, as he said, to “lash the vice” because he hated all this adornment and what he would think of as the fakery of a woman painting herself. And so he talks about Corina pride of Drury Lane, which is obviously an ironic reference to her being a Lady of the Night, coming back and there's no drunken rake with her. Returning at the midnight hour;Four stories climbing to her bow'r;Then, seated on a three-legged chair,Takes off her artificial hair:Now, picking out a crystal eye,She wipes it clean, and lays it by.Her eye-brows from a mouse's hide,Stuck on with art on either side,Pulls off with care, and first displays 'em,Then in a play-book smoothly lays 'em.Now dexterously her plumpers draws,That serve to fill her hollow jaws.And it goes on like this. I mean, line after this is sort of raw doll quality to it, Pope, I think in contrast, it only illuminates him more to see where others are taking this kind of crude, very, very funny and witty, but very crude approach. He's able to really have the classical art of balance.James: Yes. And it's precisely his charm that he can mock it and sympathise and love it at the same time, which I think is just a more sort of complex suite of poetic emotions to have about that thing.Henry: So we want more people to read Pope and to love Pope.James: Yes. Even if I'm not letting him into my top.Henry: You are locking him out of the garden. Now, for the second tier, I want to argue for two anonymous poets. One of the things we did when we were talking about this was we asked chatGPT to see if it could give us a good answer. And if you use o1 or o1 Pro, it gives you a pretty good answer as to who the best poets in English are. But it has to be told that it's forgotten about the anonymous poets. And then it says, oh, that was stupid. There are quite a lot of good anonymous poets in English, but I suspect a lot of us, a lot of non artificial intelligence when thinking about this question overlook the anonymous poets. But I would think the Gawain poet and the Tom O' Bedlam poet deserve to be in here. I don't know what you think about that.James: I'm not competent to provide an opinion. I'm purely here to be educated on the subject of these anonymous poets. Henry: The Gawain poet, he's a mediaeval, assume it's a he, a mediaeval writer, obviously may well not be a man, a mediaeval writer. And he wrote Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, which is, if you haven't read it, you should really read it in translation first, I think because it's written at the same time as Chaucer. But Chaucer was written in a kind of London dialect, which is what became the English we speak. And so you can read quite a lot of Chaucer and the words look pretty similar and sometimes you need the footnotes, but when you read Gawain and The Green Knight, it's in a Northwestern dialect, which very much did not become modern day English. And so it's a bit more baffling, but it is a poem of tremendous imaginative power and weirdness. It's a very compelling story. We have a children's version here written by Selena Hastings who's a very accomplished biographer. And every now and then my son remembers it and he just reads it again and again and again. It's one of the best tales of King Arthur in his knights. And there's a wonderful book by John Burrow. It's a very short book, but that is such a loving piece of criticism that explicates the way in which that poem promotes virtue and all the nightly goodness that you would expect, but also is a very strange and unreal piece of work. And I think it has all the qualities of great poetry, but because it's written in this weird dialect, I remember as an undergraduate thinking, why is this so bloody difficult to read? But it is just marvellous. And I see people on Twitter, the few people who've read it, they read it again and they just say, God, it's so good. And I think there was a film of it a couple of years ago, but we will gloss lightly over that and not encourage you to do the film instead of the book.James: Yeah, you're now triggering a memory that I was at least set to read and perhaps did at least read part of Gawain and the Green Knight at University, but has not stuck to any brain cells at all.Henry: Well, you must try it again and tell me what you think. I mean, I find it easily to be one of the best poems in English.James: Yeah, no, I should. I had a little Chaucer kick recently actually, so maybe I'm prepared to rediscover mediaeval per after years of neglect since my degree,Henry: And it's quite short, which I always think is worth knowing. And then the Tom Bedlam is an anonymous poem from I think the 17th century, and it's one of the mad songs, so it's a bit like the Fool from King Lear. And again, it is a very mysterious, very strange and weird piece of work. Try and find it in and read the first few lines. And I think because it's anonymous, it's got slightly less of a reputation because it can't get picked up with some big name, but it is full of tremendous power. And again, I think it would be sad if it wasn't more well known.From the hag and hungry goblinThat into rags would rend ye,The spirit that stands by the naked manIn the Book of Moons defend ye,That of your five sound sensesYou never be forsaken,Nor wander from your selves with TomAbroad to beg your bacon,While I do sing, Any food, any feeding,Feeding, drink, or clothing;Come dame or maid, be not afraid,Poor Tom will injure nothing.Anyway, so you get the sense of it and it's got many stanzas and it's full of this kind of energy and it's again, very accomplished. It can carry the thought across these long lines and these long stanzas.James: When was it written? I'm aware of only if there's a name in the back of my mind.Henry: Oh, it's from the 17th century. So it's not from such a different time as King Lear, but it's written in the voice of a madman. And again, you think of that as the sort of thing a romantic poet would do. And it's strange to find it almost strange to find it displaced. There were these other mad songs. But I think because it's anonymous, it gets less well known, it gets less attention. It's not part of a bigger body of work, but it's absolutely, I think it's wonderful.James: I shall read it.Henry: So who have you got? Who else? Who are you putting in instead of these two?James: Hang on. So we're down to tier two now.Henry: Tier two.James: Yeah. So my tier two is: Donne, Elliot, Keats, Tennyson. I've put Spenser in tier two, Marvell and Pope, who we've already discussed. I mean, I think Eliot, we've talked about, I mean Donne just speaks for himself and there's probably a case that some people would make to bump him up a tier. Henry: Anybody can read that case in Katherine Rudell's book. We don't need to…James: Yes, exactly. If anybody's punching perhaps in tier two, it's Tennyson who I wasn't totally sure belonged there. Putting Tenon in the same tier as Donne and Spenser and Keets. I wonder if that's a little ambitious. I think that might raise eyebrows because there is a school of thought, which I'm not totally unsympathetic to this. What's the Auden quote about Tennyson? I really like it. I expressed very harshly, but I sort of get what he means. Auden said that Tennyson “had the finest ear perhaps of any English poet who was also undoubtedly the stupidest. There was little that he didn't know. There was little else that he did.” Which is far too harsh. But I mentioned to you earlier that I think was earlier this year, a friend and I had a project where we were going to memorise a perva week was a plan. We ended up basically getting, I think three quarters of the way through.And if there's a criticism of Tennyson that you could make, it's that the word music and the sheer lushness of phrases sometimes becomes its own momentum. And you can end up with these extremely lovely but sometimes slightly empty beautiful phrases, which is what I ended up feeling about Tithonus. And I sort of slightly felt I was memorising this unbelievably beautiful but ever so slightly hollow thing. And that was slightly why the project fell apart, I should say. Of course, they absolutely love Tennyson. He's one of my all time favourite poets, which is why my personal favouritism has bumped him up into that category. But I can see there's a case, and I think to a lot of people, he's just the kind of Victorian establishment gloom man, which is totally unfair, but there's not no case against Tennyson.Henry: Yeah, the common thing is that he has no ideas. I don't know if that's true or not. I'm also, I'm not sure how desperately important it is. It should be possible to be a great poet without ideas being at the centre of your work. If you accept the idea that the essence of poetry is invention, i.e. to say old things in a fantastically new way, then I think he qualifies very well as a great poet.James: Yes..Henry: Well, very well. I think Auden said what he said because he was anxious that it was true of himself.James: Yeah, I mean there's a strong argument that Auden had far too many ideas and the sorts of mad schemes and fantastical theories about history that Auden spent his spare time chasing after is certainly a kind of argument that poets maybe shouldn't have as many ideas, although it's just reading. Seamus Perry's got a very good little book on Tennyson, and the opening chapter is all about arguments about people who have tended to dislike Tennyson. And there are all kinds of embarrassing anecdotes about the elderly Tennyson trying to sort of go around dinner parties saying profound and sage-like things and totally putting his foot in it and saying things are completely banal. I should have made a note that this was sort of slightly, again, intensifying my alarm about is there occasionally a tinsely hollowness about Tennyson. I'm now being way too harsh about one of my favourite poets—Henry: I think it depends what you mean by ideas. He is more than just a poet of moods. He gives great expression, deep and strongly felt expression to a whole way of being and a whole way of conceiving of things. And it really was a huge part of why people became interested in the middle ages in the 19th century. I think there's Walter Scott and there's Tennyson who are really leading that work, and that became a dominant cultural force and it became something that meant a lot to people. And whether or not, I don't know whether it's the sort of idea that we're talking about, but I think that sort of thing, I think that qualifies as having ideas and think again, I think he's one of the best writers about the Arthurian legend. Now that work doesn't get into the Oxford Book of English Verse, maybe that's fair. But I think it was very important and I love it. I love it. And I find Tennyson easy to memorise, which is another point in his favour.James: Yeah.Henry: I'm going to read a little bit of Ulysses, which everyone knows the last five or six lines of that poem because it gets put into James Bond films and other such things. I'm going to read it from a little bit from earlier on. I am become a name;For always roaming with a hungry heartMuch have I seen and known; cities of menAnd manners, climates, councils, governments,Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;And drunk delight of battle with my peers,Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.I am a part of all that I have met;Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fadesFor ever and for ever when I move.I think that's amazing. And he can do that. He can do lots and lots and lots of that.James: Yeah, he really can. It's stunning. “Far on the ringing planes of windy Troy” is such an unbelievably evocative phrase.Henry: And that's what I mean. He's got this ability to bring back a sort of a whole mood of history. It's not just personal mood poetry. He can take you into these places and that is in the space of a line. In the space of a line. I think Matthew Arnold said of the last bit of what I just read is that he had this ability in Ulysses to make the lines seem very long and slow and to give them this kind of epic quality that far goes far beyond the actual length of that poem. Ulysses feels like this huge poem that's capturing so much of Homer and it's a few dozen lines.James: Yeah, no, I completely agree. Can I read a little bit of slightly more domestic Tennyson, from In Memoriam, I think his best poem and one of my all time favourite poems and it's got, there are many sort of famous lines on grief and things, but there's little sort of passage of natural description I think quite near the beginning that I've always really loved and I've always just thought was a stunning piece of poetry in terms of its sound and the way that the sound has patented and an unbelievably attentive description natural world, which is kind of the reason that even though I think Keats is a better poet, I do prefer reading Tennyson to Keats, so this is from the beginning of In Memoriam. Calm is the morn without a sound,Calm as to suit a calmer grief,And only thro' the faded leafThe chesnut pattering to the ground:Calm and deep peace on this high wold,And on these dews that drench the furze,And all the silvery gossamersThat twinkle into green and gold:Calm and still light on yon great plainThat sweeps with all its autumn bowers,And crowded farms and lessening towers,To mingle with the bounding main:And I just think that's an amazing piece of writing that takes you from that very close up image that it begins with of the “chestnut patterning to the ground” through the faded leaves of the tree, which is again, a really attentive little bit of natural description. I think anyone can picture the way that a chestnut might fall through the leaves of a chestnut tree, and it's just an amazing thing to notice. And I think the chestnut pattern to the ground does all the kind of wonderful, slightly onomatopoeic, Tennyson stuff so well, but by the end, you're kind of looking out over the English countryside, you've seen dew on the firs, and then you're just looking out across the plane to the sea, and it's this sort of, I just think it's one of those bits of poetry that anybody who stood in a slightly wet and romantic day in the English countryside knows exactly the feeling that he's evoking. And I mean there's no bit of—all of In Memoriam is pretty much that good. That's not a particularly celebrated passage I don't think. It's just wonderful everywhere.Henry: Yes. In Memoriam a bit like the Dunciad—under appreciated relative to its huge merits.James: Yeah, I think it sounds, I mean guess by the end of his life, Tennyson had that reputation as the establishment sage of Victorian England, queen of Victoria's favourite poet, which is a pretty off-putting reputation for to have. And I think In Memoriam is supposed to be this slightly cobwebby, musty masterpiece of Victorian grief. But there was just so much, I mean, gorgeous, beautiful sensuous poetry in it.Henry: Yeah, lots of very intense feelings. No, I agree. I have Tennyson my third tier because I had to have the Gawain poet, but I agree that he's very, very great.James: Yeah, I think the case for third tier is I'm very open to that case for the reasons that I said.Henry: Keats, we both have Keats much higher than Shelly. I think Byron's not on anyone's list because who cares about Byron. Overrated, badly behaved. Terrible jokes. Terrible jokes.James: I think people often think Byron's a better pert without having read an awful lot of the poetry of Byron. But I think anybody who's tried to wade through long swathes of Don Juan or—Henry: My God,James: Childe Harold, has amazing, amazing, beautiful moments. But yeah, there's an awful lot of stuff that you don't enjoy. I think.Henry: So to make the case for Keats, I want to talk about The Eve of St. Agnes, which I don't know about you, but I love The Eve of St. Agnes. I go back to it all the time. I find it absolutely electric.James: I'm going to say that Keats is a poet, which is kind of weird for somebody is sent to us and obviously beautiful as Keats. I sort of feel like I admire more than I love. I get why he's brilliant. It's very hard not to see why he's brilliant, but he's someone I would very rarely sit down and read for fun and somebody got an awful lot of feeling or excitement out of, but that's clearly a me problem, not a Keats problem.Henry: When I was a teenager, I knew so much Keats by heart. I knew the whole of the Ode to a Nightingale. I mean, I was absolutely steeped in it morning, noon and night. I couldn't get over it. And now I don't know if I could get back to that point. He was a very young poet and he writes in a very young way. But I'm going to read—The Eve of St. Agnes is great. It's a narrative poem, which I think is a good way to get into this stuff because the story is fantastic. And he had read Spenser, he was part of this kind of the beginning of this mediaeval revival. And he's very interested in going back to those old images, those old stories. And this is the bit, I think everything we're reading is from the Oxford Book of English Verse, so that if people at home want to read along they can.This is when the heroine of the poem is Madeline is making her escape basically. And I think this is very, very exciting. Her falt'ring hand upon the balustrade,Old Angela was feeling for the stair,When Madeline, St. Agnes' charmed maid,Rose, like a mission'd spirit, unaware:With silver taper's light, and pious care,She turn'd, and down the aged gossip ledTo a safe level matting. Now prepare,Young Porphyro, for gazing on that bed;She comes, she comes again, like ring-dove fray'd and fled.Out went the taper as she hurried in;Its little smoke, in pallid moonshine, died:She clos'd the door, she panted, all akinTo spirits of the air, and visions wide:No uttered syllable, or, woe betide!But to her heart, her heart was voluble,Paining with eloquence her balmy side;As though a tongueless nightingale should swellHer throat in vain, and die, heart-stifled, in her dell.A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,All garlanded with carven imag'riesOf fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,And diamonded with panes of quaint device,Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.I mean, so much atmosphere, so much tension, so many wonderful images just coming one after the other. The rapidity of it, the tumbling nature of it. And people often quote the Ode to autumn, which has a lot of that.James: I have to say, I found that totally enchanting. And perhaps my problem is that I need you to read it all to me. You can make an audio book that I can listen to.Henry: I honestly, I actually might read the whole of the E and put it out as audio on Substack becauseJames: I would actually listen to that.Henry: I love it so much. And I feel like it gets, when we talk about Keats, we talk about, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer and Bright Star and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and these are great, great poems and they're poems that we do at school Ode to a Nightingale because I think The Great Gatsby has a big debt to Ode to a Nightingale, doesn't it? And obviously everyone quotes the Ode to Autumn. I mean, as far as I can tell, the 1st of October every year is the whole world sharing the first stands of the Ode to Autumn.James: Yeah. He may be one of the people who suffers from over familiarity perhaps. And I think also because it sounds so much what poetry is supposed to sound like, because so much of our idea of poetry derives from Keats. Maybe that's something I've slightly need to get past a little bit.Henry: But if you can get into the complete works, there are many, the bit I just read is I think quite representative.James: I loved it. I thought it was completely beautiful and I would never have thought to ever, I probably can't have read that poem for years. I wouldn't have thought to read it. Since university, I don't thinkHenry: He's one of those people. All of my copies of him are sort of frayed and the spines are breaking, but the book is wearing out. I should just commit it to memory and be done. But somehow I love going back to it. So Keats is very high in my estimation, and we've both put him higher than Shelly and Coleridge.James: Yeah.Henry: Tell me why. Because those would typically, I think, be considered the superior poets.James: Do you think Shelly? I think Keats would be considered the superior poetHenry: To Shelly?James: Certainly, yes. I think to Shelly and Coleridge, that's where current fashion would place them. I mean, I have to say Coleridge is one of my all time favourite poets. In terms of people who had just every so often think, I'd love to read a poem, I'd love to read Frost at Midnight. I'd love to read the Aeolian Harp. I'd love to read This Lime Tree Bower, My Prison. I'd love to read Kubla Khan. Outside Milton, Coleridge is probably the person that I read most, but I think, I guess there's a case that Coleridge's output is pretty slight. What his reputation rest on is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, the conversation poems, which a lot of people think are kind of plagiarised Wordsworth, at least in their style and tone, and then maybe not much else. Does anybody particularly read Cristabel and get much out of it nowadays? Dejection an Ode people like: it's never done an awful lot for me, so I sort of, in my personal Pantheon Coleridge is at the top and he's such an immensely sympathetic personality as well and such a curious person. But I think he's a little slight, and there's probably nothing in Coleridge that can match that gorgeous passage of Keats that you read. I think.Henry: Yeah, that's probably true. He's got more ideas, I guess. I don't think it matters that he's slight. Robert Frost said something about his ambition had been to lodge five or six poems in the English language, and if he'd done that, he would've achieved greatness. And obviously Frost very much did do that and is probably the most quotable and well-known poet. But I think Coleridge easily meets those criteria with the poems you described. And if all we had was the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I would think it to be like Tom O' Bedlam, like the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, one of those great, great, great poems that on its own terms, deserves to be on this list.James: Yeah, and I guess another point in his favour is a great poet is they're all pretty unalike. I think if given Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a conversation poem and Kubla Khan and said, guess whether these are three separate poets or the same guy, you would say, oh, there's a totally different poems. They're three different people. One's a kind of creepy gothic horror ballad. Another one is a philosophical reflection. Another is the sort of Mad Opium dream. I mean, Kubla Khan is just without a doubt, one of the top handful of purposes in English language, I think.Henry: Oh yeah, yeah. And it has that quality of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard that so many of the lines are so quotable in the sense that they could be, in the case of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, a lot of novels did get their titles from it. I think it was James Lees Milne. Every volume of his diaries, which there are obviously quite a few, had its title from Kubla Khan. Ancient as the Hills and so on. It's one of those poems. It just provides us with so much wonderful language in the space of what a page.James: Sort of goes all over the place. Romantic chasms, Abyssinian made with dulcimer, icy pleasure dome with caves of ice. It just such a—it's so mysterious. I mean, there's nothing else remotely like it at all in English literature that I can think of, and its kind strangeness and virtuosity. I really love that poem.Henry: Now, should we say a word for Shelly? Because everyone knows Ozymandias, which is one of those internet poems that goes around a lot, but I don't know how well known the rest of his body of work is beyond that. I fell in love with him when I read a very short lyric called “To—” Music, when soft voices die,Vibrates in the memory—Odours, when sweet violets sicken,Live within the sense they quicken.Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,Love itself shall slumber on.I found that to be one of those poems that was once read and immediately memorised. But he has this very, again, broad body of work. He can write about philosophical ideas, he can write about moods, he can write narrative. He wrote Julian and Maddalo, which is a dialogue poem about visiting a madman and taking sympathy with him and asking the question, who's really mad here? Very Swiftian question. He can write about the sublime in Mont Blanc. I mean, he has got huge intellectual power along with the beauty. He's what people want Tennyson to be, I guess.James: Yeah. Or what people think Byron might be. I think Shelly is great. I don't quite get that Byron is so much more famous. Shelly has just a dramatic and, well, maybe not quite just as, but an incredibly dramatic and exciting life to go along with it,Henry: I think some of the short lyrics from Byron have got much more purchase in day-to-day life, like She Walks in Beauty.James: Yeah. I think you have to maybe get Shelly a little more length, don't you? I mean, even there's something like Ode to the West Wind is you have to take the whole thing to love it, perhaps.Henry: Yes. And again, I think he's a bit like George Herbert. He's always thinking you really have to pay attention and think with him. Whereas Byron has got lots of lines you can copy out and give to a girl that you like on the bus or something.James: Yes. No, that's true.Henry: I don't mean that in quite as rude a way as it sounds. I do think that's a good thing. But Shelly's, I think, much more of a thinker, and I agree with you Childe Harold and so forth. It's all crashing bore. I might to try it again, but awful.James: I don't want move past Coledridge without inflicting little Coledridge on you. Can I?Henry: Oh, yes. No, sorry. We didn't read Coledridge, right?James: Are just, I mean, what to read from Coledridge? I mean, I could read the whole of Kubla Khan, but that would be maybe a bit boring. I mean, again, these are pretty famous and obvious lines from Frost at Midnight, which is Coledridge sitting up late at night in his cottage with his baby in its cradle, and he sort of addressing it and thinking about it. And I just think these lines are so, well, everything we've said about Coledridge, philosophical, thoughtful, beautiful, in a sort of totally knockout, undeniable way. So it goes, he's talking to his young son, I think. My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heartWith tender gladness, thus to look at thee,And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,And in far other scenes! For I was rearedIn the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breezeBy lakes and sandy shores, beneath the cragsOf ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,Which image in their bulk both lakes and shoresAnd mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hearThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligibleOf that eternal language, which thy GodUtters, who from eternity doth teachHimself in all, and all things in himself.Which is just—what aren't those lines of poetry doing? And with such kind of confidence, the way you get from talking to your baby and its cradle about what kind of upbringing you hope it will have to those flashes of, I mean quite Wordsworthian beauty, and then the sort of philosophical tone at the end. It's just such a stunning, lovely poem. Yeah, I love it.Henry: Now we both got Yeats and Hopkins. And Hopkins I think is really, really a tremendous poet, but neither of us has put Browning, which a lot of other people maybe would. Can we have a go at Browning for a minute? Can we leave him in shreds? James: Oh God. I mean, you're going to be a better advocate of Browning than I am. I've never—Henry: Don't advocate for him. No, no, no.James: We we're sticking him out.Henry: We're sticking him.James: I wonder if I even feel qualified to do that. I mean, I read quite a bit of Browning at university, found it hard to get on with sometimes. I think I found a little affected and pretentious about him and a little kind of needlessly difficult in a sort of off-puttingly Victorian way. But then I was reading, I reviewed a couple of years ago, John Carey has an excellent introduction to English poetry. I think it's called A Little History of Poetry in which he described Browning's incredibly long poem, The Ring in the Book as one of the all time wonders of verbal art. This thing is, I think it's like 700 or 800 pages long poem in the Penguin edition, which has always given me pause for thought and made me think that I've dismissed Browning out of hand because if John Carey's telling me that, then I must be wrong.But I think I have had very little pleasure out of Browning, and I mean by the end of the 19th century, there was a bit of a sort of Victorian cult of Browning, which I think was influential. And people liked him because he was a living celebrity who'd been anointed as a great poet, and people liked to go and worship at his feet and stuff. I do kind of wonder whether he's lasted, I don't think many people read him for pleasure, and I wonder if that maybe tells its own story. What's your case against Browning?Henry: No, much the same. I think he's very accomplished and very, he probably, he deserves a place on the list, but I can't enjoy him and I don't really know why. But to me, he's very clever and very good, but as you say, a bit dull.James: Yeah, I totally agree. I'm willing. It must be our failing, I'm sure. Yeah, no, I'm sure. I'm willing to believe they're all, if this podcast is listened to by scholars of Victorian poetry, they're cringing and holding their head in their hands at this—Henry: They've turned off already. Well, if you read The Ring and the Book, you can come back on and tell us about it.James: Oh God, yeah. I mean, in about 20 years time.Henry: I think we both have Auden, but you said something you said, “does Auden have an edge of fraudulence?”James: Yeah, I mean, again, I feel like I'm being really rude about a lot of poets that I really love. I don't really know why doesn't think, realising that people consider to be a little bit weak makes you appreciate their best stuff even more I guess. I mean, it's hard to make that argument without reading a bit of Auden. I wonder what bit gets it across. I haven't gotten any ready. What would you say about Auden?Henry: I love Auden. I think he was the best poet of the 20th century maybe. I mean, I have to sort of begrudgingly accept T.S. Eliot beside, I think he can do everything from, he can do songs, light lyrics, comic verse, he can do occasional poetry, obituaries. He was a political poet. He wrote in every form, I think almost literally that might be true. Every type of stanza, different lines. He was just structurally remarkable. I suspect he'll end up a bit like Pope once the culture has tur

Who else in literature today could be more interesting to interview than Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans, as well as the author of popular reviews and the sweater weather Substack? We talked about so much, including: Chopin and who plays him best; why there isn't more tennis in fiction; writing fiction on a lab bench; being a scientific critic; what he has learned working as a publisher; negative reviews; boring novels; Jane Austen. You'll also get Brandon's quick takes on Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Franzen, Lionel Trilling, György Lukács, and a few others; the modern critics he likes reading; and the dead critics he likes reading.Brandon also talked about how his new novel is going to be different from his previous novels. He told me:I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. I want my books to feel like books. I don't want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation.I have enjoyed Brandon's fiction (several people I recommend him to have loved Real Life) and I think he's one of the best critics working today. I was delighted to interview him.Oh, and he's a Dickens fan!Transcript (AI produced, lightly formatted by me)Henry: Today I am talking to Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans. Brandon is also a notable book reviewer and of course he writes a sub stack called Sweater Weather. Brandon, welcome.Brandon: Yeah, thanks for having me.Henry: What did you think of the newly discovered Chopin waltz?Brandon: Um, I thought, I mean, I remember very vividly waking up that day and there being a new waltz, but it was played by Lang Lang, which I did not. I don't know that, like, he's my go-to Chopin interpreter. But I don't know, I was, I was excited by it. Um, I don't know, it was in a world sort of dominated by this ethos of like nothing new under the sun. It felt wonderfully novel. I don't know that it's like one of Chopin's like major, I don't know that it's like major. Um, it's sort of definitively like middle of the road, middle tier Chopin, I think. But I enjoyed it. I played it like 20 times in a row.Henry: I like those moments because I like, I like it when people get surprised into realizing that like, it's not fixed what we know about the world and you can even actually get new Chopin, right?Brandon: I mean, it felt a little bit like when Beyonce did her first big surprise drop. It was like new Chopin just dropped. Oh my God. All my sort of classical music nerd group texts were buzzing. It felt like a real moment, actually.Henry: And I think it gives people a sense of what art was like in the past. You can go, oh my God, new Chopin. Like, yes, those feelings are not just about modern culture, right? That used to happen with like, oh my God, a new Jane Austen book is here.Brandon: Oh, I know. Well, I mean, I was like reading a lot of Emile Zola up until I guess late last year. And at some point I discovered that he was like an avid amateur photographer. And in like the French Ministry of Culture is like digitized a lot of his glass plate negatives. And one of them is like a picture that Zola has taken of Manet's portrait of him. And it's just like on a floor somewhere. Like he's like sort of taken this like very rickety early camera machinery to this place where this portrait is and like taken a picture of it. It's like, wow. Like you can imagine that like Manet's like, here's this painting I did of you. And Zola's like, ah, yes, I'm going to take a picture to commemorate it. And so I sort of love that.Henry: What other of his photos do you like?Brandon: Well, there's one of him on a bike riding toward the camera. That's really delightful to me because it like that impulse is so recognizable to me. There are all these photos that he took of his mistress that were also just like, you can like, there are also photographs of his children and of his family. And again, those feel so like recognizable to me. He's not even like a very good photographer. It's just that he was taking pictures of his like daily life, except for his kind of stunt photos where he's riding the bike. And it's like, ah, yes, Zola, he would have been great with an iPhone camera.Henry: Which pianists do you like for Chopin?Brandon: Which pianists do I love for Chopin? I like Pollini a lot. Pollini is amazing. Pollini the elder, not Pollini the younger. The younger is not my favorite. And he died recently, Maurizio Pollini. He died very recently. Maybe he's my favorite. I love, I love Horowitz. Horowitz is wonderful at Chopin. But it's obviously it's like not his, you know, you don't sort of go to Horowitz for Chopin, I guess. But I love his Chopin. And sometimes Trifonov. Trifonov has a couple Chopin recordings that I really, really like. I tend not to love Trifonov as much.Henry: Really?Brandon: I know it's controversial. It's very controversial. I know. Tell me why. I, I don't know. He's just a bit of a banger to me. Like, like he's sort of, I don't know, his playing is so flashy. And he feels a bit like a, like a, like a keyboard basher to me sometimes.Henry: But like, do you like his Bach?Brandon: You know, I haven't done a deep dive. Maybe I should do a sort of more rigorous engagement with Trifonov. But yeah, I don't, he's just not, he doesn't make my heart sing. I think he's very good at Bach.Henry: What about a Martha Argerich?Brandon: Oh, I mean, she's incredible. She's incredible. I bought that sort of big orange box out of like all of her, her sort of like masterwork recordings. And she's incredible. She has such feel for Chopin. But she doesn't, I think sometimes people can make Chopin feel a little like, like treacly, like, like a little too sweet. And she has this perfect understanding of his like rhythm and his like inner nuances and like the crispness in his compositions. Like she really pulls all of that out. And I love her. She has such, obviously great dexterity, but like a real sort of exquisite sensitivity to the rhythmic structures of Chopin.Henry: You listen on CD?Brandon: No, I listen on vinyl and I listen on streaming, but mostly vinyl. Mostly vinyl? Yeah, mostly vinyl. I know it's very annoying. No, no, no, no, no.Henry: Which, what are the good speakers?Brandon: I forget where I bought these speakers from, but I sort of did some Googling during the pandemic of like best speakers to use. I have a U-Turn Audio, U-Turn Orbital record player. And so I was just looking for good speakers that were compatible and like wouldn't take up a ton of space in my apartment because I was moving to New York and had a very tiny, tiny apartment. So they're just from sort of standard, I forget the brand, but they've served me well these past few years.Henry: And do you like Ólafsson? He's done some Chopin.Brandon: Who?Henry: Víkingur Ólafsson. He did the Goldbergs this year, but he's done some Chopin before. I think he's quite good.Brandon: Oh, that Icelandic guy?Henry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the glasses? That's right. And the very neat hair.Brandon: Yes. Oh, he's so chic. He's so chic. I don't know his Chopin. I know his, there's another series that he did somewhat recently that I'm more familiar with. But he is really good. He has good Beethoven, Víkingur.Henry: Yeah.Brandon: And normally I don't love Beethoven, but like—Henry: Really? Why? Why? What's wrong with Beethoven? All these controversial opinions about music.Brandon: I'm not trying to have controversial opinions. I think I'm, well, I'm such a, I'm such, I mean, I'm just like a dumb person. And so like, I don't, I don't have a really, I feel like I don't have the robust understanding to like fully appreciate Beethoven and all of his sort of like majesty. And so maybe I've just not heard good Beethoven and I need to sort of go back and sort of get a real understanding of it. But I just tend not to like it. It feels like, I don't know, like grandma's living room music to me sometimes.Henry: What other composers do you enjoy?Brandon: Oh, of course.Henry: Or other music generally, right?Brandon: Rachmaninoff is so amazing to me. There was, of course, Bach. Brahms. Oh, I love Brahms, but like specifically the intermezzi. I love the intermezzi. I recently fell in love with, oh, his name is escaping me now, but he, I went to a concert and they sort of did a Brahms intermezzi. And they also played this, I think he was an Austrian composer. And his music was like, it wasn't experimental, but it was like quite, I had a lot of dissonance in it. And I found it like really interesting and like really moving actually. And so I did a sort of listening to that constantly. Oh, I forget his name. But Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, love Rachmaninoff. I have a friend who says that Rachmaninoff writes Negro spirituals. And I love that theory that Rachmaninoff's music is like the music of the slaves. It just, I don't know. I really, that really resonates with me spiritually. Which pieces, which Rachmaninoff symphonies, concertos? Yeah, the concertos. But like specifically, like I have a friend who said that Rach II sounded to her like the sort of spiritual cry of like the slaves. And we were at like a hangout with like mostly Black people. And she like stopped playing like Juvenile, like the rapper. And she put on Rach II. And we just like sat there and listened. And it did feel like something powerful had entered the room. Yeah, but he's my guy. I secretly really, really love him. I like Liszt, but like it really depends on the day and the time for him. He makes good folk music, Liszt. I love his folky, his folk era.Henry: What is it that you enjoy about tennis?Brandon: What do I enjoy about tennis? I love the, I love not thinking. I love being able to hit the ball for hours on end and like not think. And like, it's the one part of my life. It's the one time in my life where my experience is like totally unstructured. And so like this morning, I went to a 7am drill and play class where you do drills for an hour. Then you play doubles for an hour. And during that first hour of drills, I was just like hitting the ball. I was at the mercy of the guy feeding us the ball. And I didn't have a single thought about books or literature or like the status of my soul or like the nature of American democracy. It was just like, did I hit that ball? Well, did I hit it kind of off center? Were there tingles in my wrist? Yes or no. Like it was just very, very grounding in the moment. And I think that is what I love about it. Do you like to watch tennis? Oh, yeah, constantly. Sometimes when I'm in a work meeting, the Zoom is here and the tennis is like playing in the background. Love tennis, love to watch, love to play, love to think about, to ponder. Who are the best players for you? Oh, well, the best players, my favorite players are Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Stanislas Wawrinka, love Wawrinka. And I was a really big Davydenko head back in the day. Nikolai Davydenko was this Russian player who had, he was like a metronome. He just like would not miss. Yeah, those are my favorites. Right now, the guy I'm sort of rooting for who's still active is Kasper Rud, who's this Norwegian guy. And I love him because he just looks like some guy. Like he just looks like he should be in a seminary somewhere. I love it. I love, I love his normalness. He just looks like an NPC. And I'm drawn to that in a tennis player.Henry: It's hard to think of tennis in novels. Why is that?Brandon: Well, I think a lot of people don't, well, I think part of it is a lot of novelists. Part of it is a lot of novelists don't play sports. I think that they, at least Americans, I can't speak for other parts of the world, but in America, a lot of novelists are not doing sports. So that's one. And I think two, like, you know, like with anything, I think that tennis has not been subjected to the same schemes of narrativization that like other things are. And so like it's, a lot of novelists just like don't see a sort of readily dramatizable thing in tennis. Even though if you like watch tennis and like listen to tennis commentary, they are always erecting narratives. They're like, oh yeah, she's been on a 19 match losing streak. Is this where she turns it around? And to me, tennis is like a very literary sport because tennis is one of those sports where it's all about the matchup. It's like your forehand to my backhand, like no matter how well I play against everyone else, like it's you and me locked in the struggle. And like that to me feels incredibly literary. And it is so tied to your individual psychology as well. Like, I don't know, I endlessly am fascinated by it. And indeed, I got an idea for a tennis novel the other day that I'm hopefully going to write in three to five years. We'll see.Henry: Very good. How did working in a lab influence your writing?Brandon: Well, somewhat directly and materially in the case of my first book, because I wrote it while I was working in the lab and it gave me weirdly like time and structure to do that work where I would be pipetting. And then while I was waiting for an assay or a experiment to run or finish, I would have 30 minutes to sit down and write.Henry: So you were writing like at the lab bench?Brandon: Oh, yeah, absolutely. One thousand percent. I would like put on Philip Glass's score for the hours and then just like type while my while the centrifuge was running or whatever. And and so like there's that impression sort of baked into the first couple books. And then I think more, I guess, like spiritually or broadly, it influenced my work because it taught me how to think and how to organize time and how to organize thoughts and how to sort of pursue long term, open ended projects whose results may or may not, you know, fail because of something that you did or maybe you didn't do. And that's just the nature of things. Who knows? But yeah, I think also just like discipline, the discipline to sort of clock in every day. And to sort of go to the coalface and do the work. And that's not a thing that is, you know. That you just get by working in a lab, but it's certainly something that I acquired working in a lab.Henry: Do you think it's affected your interest in criticism? Because there's there are certain types of critic who seem to come from a scientific background like Helen Vendler. And there's something something about the sort of the precision and, you know, that certain critics will refuse to use critical waffle, like the human condition. And they won't make these big, vague gestures to like how this can change the way we view society. They're like, give me real details. Give me real like empirical criticism. Do you think this is — are you one of these people?Brandon: Yeah, yeah, I think I'm, you know, I'm all about what's on the page. I'm all about the I'm not gonna go rooting in your biography for not gonna go. I'm not I'm not doing that. It's like what you brought to me on the page is what you've brought to me. And that is what I will be sort of coming over. I mean, I think so. I mean, very often when critics write about my work, or when people respond to my work, they sort of describe it as being put under a microscope. And I do think like, that is how I approach literature. It's how I approach life. If there's ever a problem or a question put to me, I just sort of dissect it and try to get down to its core bits and its core parts. And and so yeah, I mean, if that is a scientific way of doing things, that's certainly how I but also I don't know any other way to think like that's sort of that's sort of how I was trained to think about stuff. You've been to London. I have. What did you think of it? The first time I didn't love it. The second and third times I had a good time, but I felt like London didn't love me back. London is the only place on earth I've ever been where people have had a hard time understanding me like I like it's the only place where I've like attempted to order food or a drink or something in a store or a cafe or a restaurant. And the waiters like turned to my like British hosts and asked them to translate. And that is an entirely foreign experience for me. And so London and I have like a very contentious relationship, I would say.Henry: Now, you've just published four classic novels.Brandon: Yes.Henry: George Gissing, Edith Wharton, Victor Hugo and Sarah Orne Jewett. Why did you choose those four writers, those four titles?Brandon: Oh, well, once we decided that we were going to do a classics imprint, you know, then it's like, well, what are we going to do? And I'm a big Edith Wharton fan. And there are all of these Edith Wharton novels that Americans don't really know about. They know Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. And if they are an English major, they maybe know her for The House of Mirth. Or like maybe they know her for The Custom of the Country if they're like really into reading. But then they sort of think of her as a novelist of the 19th century. And she's writing all of these books set in the 1920s and about the 1920s. And so it felt important to show people like, oh, this is a writer who died a lot later than you think that she did. And whose creative output was, you know, pretty, who was like a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald in a lot of ways. Like, these books are being published around the same time as The Great Gatsby. And to sort of, you know, bring attention to a part of her over that, like, people don't know about. And like, that's really exciting to me. And Sarah Orne Jewett, I mean, I just really love The Country of the Pointed Furs. I love that book. And I found it in like in a 10 cents bin at a flea market one time. And it's a book that people have tried to bring back. And there have been editions of it. But it just felt like if we could get two people who are really cool to talk about why they love that book, we could sort of have like a real moment. And Sarah Orne Jewett was like a pretty big American writer. Like she was a pretty significant writer. And she was like really plugged in and she's not really read or thought about now. And so that felt like a cool opportunity as well to sort of create a very handsome edition of this book and to sort of talk about a bit why she matters. And the guessing of it all is we were going to do New Grub Street. And then my co-editor thought, well, The Odd Women, I think, is perhaps more relevant to our current moment than New Grub Street necessarily. And it would sort of differentiate us from the people, from the presses that are doing reissues of New Grub Street, because there's just been a new edition of that book. And nobody in America really knows The Odd Women. And it's a really wonderful novel. It's both funny and also like really biting in its satire and commentary. So we thought, oh, it'll be fun to bring this writer to Americans who they've never heard of in a way that will speak to them in a lot of ways. And the Victor Hugo, I mean, you know, there are Hugos that people know all about. And then there are Hugos that no one knows about. And Toilers of the Sea was a passion project for my co-editor. She'd read it in Guernsey. That's where she first discovered that book. And it really meant a lot to her. And I read it and really loved it. I mean, it was like Hugo at his most Hugo. Like, it's a very, it's a very, like, it's a very abundant book. And it's so wild and strange and changeful. And so I was like, oh, that seems cool. Let's do it. Let's put out Toilers of the Sea. So that's a bit of why we picked each one.Henry: And what have you learned from being on the other side of things now that you're the publisher?Brandon: So much. I've learned so much. And indeed, I just, I was just asked by my editor to do the author questionnaire for the novel that I have coming out next. And I thought, yes, I will do this. And I will do it immediately. Because now I know, I know how important these are. And I know how early and how far in advance these things need to be locked in to make everyone's life easier. I think I've learned a bit about the sometimes panicked scramble that happens to get a book published. I've learned about how hard it is to wrangle blurbs. And so I think I'm a little more forgiving of my publishers. But they've always been really great to me. But now I'm like, oh, my gosh, what can I do for you? How can I help you make this publication more of a success?Henry: Do you think that among literary people generally, there's a lack of appreciation of what business really involves in some of the senses you're talking about? I feel like I see a lot of either indifferent or hostile attitudes towards business or commerce or capitalism, late stage capitalism or whatever. And I sometimes look at it and I'm like, I don't think you guys really know what it takes to just like get stuff done. You know what I mean? Like, it's a lot of grind. I don't think it's a big nasty thing. It's just a lot of hard work, right?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, 1000%. Or if it's not a sort of misunderstanding, but a sort of like disinterest in like, right, like a sort of high minded, like, oh, that's just the sort of petty grimy commerce of it all. I care about the beauty and the art. And it's just like, friend, we need booksellers to like, sell this. I mean, to me, the part of it that is most to me, like the most illustrative example of this in my own life is that when I first heard how my editor was going to be describing my book, I was like, that's disgusting. That's horrible. Why are you talking about my race? Why are you talking about like my sexuality? Like, this is horrible. Why can't you just like talk about the plot of the book? Like, what is the matter with you? And then I had, you know, I acquired and edited this book called Henry Henry, which is a queer contemporary retelling of the Henry ad. And it's a wonderful novel. It's so delightful. And I had to go into our sales conference where we are talking to the people whose job it is to sell that book into bookstores to get bookstores to take that book up. And I had to write this incredibly craven description of this novel. And as I was writing it, I was like, I hope Alan, the author, I hope Alan never sees this. He never needs to hear how I'm talking about this book. And as I was doing it, I was like, I will never hold it against my editor again for writing this like, cheesy, cringy copy. Because it's like you, like, you so believe in the art of that book, so much that you want it to give it every fighting chance in the marketplace. And you need to arm your sales team with every weapon of commerce they need to get that book to succeed so that when readers pick it up, they can appreciate all of the beautiful and glorious art of it. And I do think that people, you know, like, people don't really kind of, people don't really understand that. And I do think that part of that is publishing's fault, because they are, they've been rather quick to elide the distinctions between art and commerce. And so like publishing has done a not great job of sort of giving people a lot of faith in its understanding that there's a difference between art and commerce. But yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of misapprehension out there about like, what goes into getting bookstores to acquire that book.Henry: What are the virtues of negative book reviews?Brandon: I was just on a panel about this. I mean, I mean, hopefully a negative book review, like a positive review, or like any review, will allow a reader or the audience to understand the book in a new way, or to create a desire in the reader to pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree or that they, that they have something to argue with or push against as they're reading. You know, when I'm writing a negative review, when I'm writing a review that I feel is trending toward negative, I should say, I always try to like, I don't know, I try to always remember that like, this is just me presenting my experience of the book and my take of the book. And hopefully that will be productive or useful for whoever reads the review. And hopefully that my review won't be the only thing that they read and that they will in fact, go pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree. It's hopefully it creates interesting and potentially divergent dialogues or discourses around the text. And fundamentally, I think not every critic feels this way. Not every piece of criticism is like this. But the criticism I write, I'm trying to create the conditions that will refer the reader always back to the text, be it through quotation, be it through, they're so incensed by my argument that they're going to go read the book themselves and then like, yell at me. Like, I think that that's wonderful, but like, always keeping the book at the center. But I think a negative review can, you know, it can start a conversation. It can get people talking about books, which in this culture, this phase of history feels like a win. And hopefully it can sort of be a corrective sometimes to less genuine or perceived less genuine discourses that are existing around the book.Henry: I think even whether or not it's a question of genuine, it's for me, it's just a question of if you tell people this book is good and they give up their time and money and they discover that it's trash, you've done a really bad thing to that person. And like, there might be dozens of them compared to this one author who you've been impolite to or whatever. And it's just a question of don't lie in book, right?Brandon: Well, yeah. I mean, hopefully people are honest, but I do feel sometimes that there is, there's like a lack of honesty. And look, I think that being like, well, I mean, maybe you'll love this. I don't love it, you know, but at least present your opinion in that way. At least be like, you know, there are many interpretations of this thing. Here's my interpretation. Maybe you'll feel differently or something like that. But I do think that people feel that there have been a great number of dishonest book reviews. Maybe there have been, maybe there have not been. I certainly have read some reviews I felt were dishonest about books that I have read. And I think that the negative book review does feel a bit like a corrective in a lot of ways, both, you know, justified or unjustified. People are like, finally, someone's being honest about this thing. But yeah, I think it's interesting. I think it's all really, I think it's all fascinating. I do think that there are some reviews though, that are negative and that are trying to be about the book, but are really about the author. There are some reviews that I have read that have been ostensibly about reviewing a text, but which have really been about, you don't like that person and you have decided to sort of like take an axe to them. And that to me feels not super productive. I wouldn't do it, but other people find it useful.Henry: As in, you can tell that from the review or you know that from background information?Brandon: I mean, this is all projection, of course, but like there have been some reviews where I've read, like, for example, some of the Lauren Oyler reviews, I think some of the Lauren Oyler reviews were negative and were exclusively about the text. And they sort of took the text apart and sort of dissected it and came to conclusions, some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't agree with, but they were fundamentally about the text. And like all the criticisms referred back to the text. And then there were some that were like projecting attitudes onto the author that were more about creating this sort of vaporous shape of Lauren Oyler and then sort of poking holes in her literary celebrity or her stature as a critic or what have you. And that to me felt less productive as like a book review.Henry: Yes. Who are your favorite reviewers?Brandon: Ooh, my favorite reviewers. I really love Christian Lawrence. And he does my, of the critics who try to do the sort of like mini historiography of like a thing. He's my favorite because he teaches me a lot. He sort of is so good at summing up an era or summing up a phase of literary production without being like so cringe or so socialist about it. I really love, I love it when he sort of distills and dissects an era. I really like Hermione Hobie. I think she's really interesting. And she writes about books with a lot of feeling and a lot of energy. And I really love her mind. And of course, like Patricia Lockwood, of course, everyone, perhaps not everyone, but I enjoy Patricia Lockwood's criticism. You don't?Henry: Not really.Brandon: Oh, is it because it's too chatty? Is it too, is it too selfie?Henry: A little bit. I think, I think that kind of criticism can work really well. But I think, I think it's too much. I think basically she's very, she's a very stylized writer and a lot of her judgments get, it gets to the point where it's like, this is the logical conclusion of what you're trying to do stylistically. And there are some zingers in here and some great lines and whatever, but we're no longer, this is no longer really a book review.Brandon: Yeah.Henry: Like by the, by the end of the paragraph, this, like, we didn't want to let the style go. We didn't want to lose the opportunity to cap that off. And it leads her into, I think, glibness a lot of the time.Brandon: Yeah. I could see that. I mean, I mean, I enjoy reading her pieces, but do I understand like what's important to her at a sort of literary level? I don't know. I don't, and in that sense, like, are they, is it criticism or is it closer to like personal essay, humorous essay? I don't know. Maybe that's true. I enjoy reading them, but I get why people are like, this is a very, very strong flavor for sure.Henry: Now you've been reading a lot of literary criticism.Brandon: Oh yeah.Henry: Not of the LRB variety, but of the, the old books in libraries variety. Yes. How did that start? How did, how did you come to this?Brandon: Somewhat like ham-fistedly. I, in 2021, I had a really bad case of writer's block and I thought maybe part of the reason I had writer's block was that I didn't know anything about writing or I didn't know anything about like literature or like writing. I'd been writing, I'd published a novel. I was working on another novel. I'd published a book of stories, but like, I just like truly didn't know anything about literature really. And I thought I need some big boy ideas. I need, I need to find out what adults think about literature. And so I went to my buddy, Christian Lorenzen, and I was like, you write criticism. What is it? And what should I read? And he gave me a sort of starter list of criticism. And it was like the liberal imagination by Lionel Trilling and Guy Davenport and Alfred Kazin who wrote On Native Grounds, which is this great book on the American literary tradition and Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. And I, and then Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle. And I read all of those. And then as each one would sort of refer to a different text or person, I sort of like followed the footnotes down into this rabbit hole of like literary criticism. And now it's been a sort of ongoing project of the last few years of like reading. I always try to have a book of criticism on the go. And then earlier this year, I read Jameson's The Antimonies of Realism. And he kept talking about this Georg Lukács guy. And I was like, I guess I should go read Lukács. And so then I started reading Lukács so that I could get back to Jameson. And I've been reading Lukács ever since. I am like deep down the Lukács rabbit hole. But I'm not reading any of the socialism stuff. I told myself that I wouldn't read any of the socialism stuff and I would only read the literary criticism stuff, which makes me very different from a lot of the socialist literary critics I really enjoy because they're like Lukács, don't read in that literary criticism stuff, just read his socialism stuff. So I'm reading all the wrong stuff from Lukács, but I really, I really love it. But yeah, it sort of started because I thought I needed grown up ideas about literature. And it's been, I don't know, I've really enjoyed it. I really, really enjoy it. It's given me perhaps terrible ideas about what novels should be or do. But, you know, that's one of the side effects to reading.Henry: Has it made, like, what specific ways has it changed how you've written since you've acquired a set of critical principles or ideas?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is, part of it has to do with Lukács' idea of the totality. And, you know, I think that the sort of most direct way that it shows up in a sort of really practical way in my novel writing is that I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. Like, I don't want, I want my books to feel like books. I don't want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation and stuff like that. And so like that, that's sort of, that's sort of abstract, but like in a concrete way, like what I'm kind of trying to resolve in my novel writing these days.Henry: You mentioned Dickens.Brandon: Oh, yes.Henry: Which Dickens novels do you like?Brandon: Now I'm afraid I'm going to say something else controversial. We love controversial. Which Dickens? I love Bleak House. I love Bleak House. I love Tale of Two Cities. It is one of the best openings ever, ever, ever, ever in the sweep of that book at once personal and universal anyway. Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities. And I also, I read Great Expectations as like a high school student and didn't like it, hated it. It was so boring. But now coming back to it, I think it, honestly, it might be the novel of our time. I think it might accidentally be a novel. I mean, it's a novel of scammers, a novel of like, interpersonal beef taken to the level of like, spiritual conflict, like it's about thieves and class, like it just feels like like that novel could have been written today about people today, like that book just feels so alive to today's concerns, which perhaps, I don't know, says something really evil about this cultural stagnation under capitalism, perhaps, but I don't know, love, love Great Expectations now.Henry: Why are so many modern novels boring?Brandon: Well, depends on what you mean by boring, Henry, what do you mean? Why?Henry: I mean, you said this.Brandon: Oh.Henry: I mean, I happen to agree, but this is, I'm quoting you.Brandon: Oh, yes. I remember that. I remember that review.Henry: I mean, I can tell you why I think they're boring.Brandon: Oh, yes, please.Henry: So I think, I think what you said before is true. They all read like movies. And I think I very often I go in, I pick up six or seven books on the new book table. And I'm like, these openings are all just the same. You're all thinking you can all see Netflix in your head. This is not really a novel. And so the dialogue is really boring, because you kind of you can hear some actor or actress saying it. But I can't hear that because I'm the idiot stuck in the bookshop reading your Netflix script. Whereas, you know, I think you're right that a lot of those traditional forms of storytelling, they like pull you in to the to the novel. And they and they like by the end of the first few pages, you sort of feel like I'm in this funny place now. And to do in media res, like, someone needs to get shot, or something, something weird needs to be said, like, you can't just do another, another standard opening. So I think that's a big, that's a big point.Brandon: Well, as Lukasz tells us, bourgeois realism has a, an unholy fondness for the, the average, the merely average, as opposed to the typical. And I think, yeah, a lot of it, a lot of why I think it's boring echoes you, I think that for me, what I find boring, and a lot of them is that it feels like novelists have abandoned any desire to, to have their characters or the novels themselves integrate the sort of disparate experiences within the novel into any kind of meaningful hole. And so there isn't this like sense of like things advancing toward a grander understanding. And I think a lot of it is because they've, they are writing under the assumption that like the question of why can never be answered. There can never be like a why, there can never be a sort of significance to anything. And so everything is sort of like evacuated of significance or meaning. And so you have what I've taken to calling like reality TV fiction, where the characters are just like going places and doing things, and there are no thoughts, there are no thoughts about their lives, or no thoughts about the things that they are doing, there are no thoughts about their experiences. And it's just a lot of like, like lowercase e events in their lives, but like no attempt to organize those events into any sort of meaningful hole. And I think also just like, what leads to a lot of dead writing is writers who are deeply aware that they're writing about themes, they're writing about themes instead of people. And they're working from generalities instead of particularities and specificities. And they have no understanding of the relationship between the universal and the particular. And so like, everything is just like, like beans in a can that they're shaking around. And I think that that's really boring. I think it's really tedious. Like, like, sure, we can we can find something really profound in the mundane, but like, you have to be really smart to do that. So like the average novelist is like better off like, starting with a gunshot or something like do something big.Henry: If you're not Virginia Woolf, it is in fact just mundane.Brandon: Indeed. Yeah.Henry: Is there too much emphasis on craft? In the way, in the way, in like what's valued among writers, in the way writers are taught, I feel like everything I see is about craft. And I'm like, craft is good, but that can just be like how you make a table rather than like how you make a house. Craft is not the guarantor of anything. And I see a lot of books where I think this person knows some craft. But as you say, they don't really have an application for it. And they don't. No one actually said to them, all style has a moral purpose, whether you're aware of it or not. And so they default to this like pointless use of the craft. And someone should say to them, like, you need to know history. You need to know tennis. You need to know business. You need to know like whatever, you know. And I feel like the novels I don't like are reflections of the discourse bubble that the novelist lives in. And I feel like it's often the continuation of Twitter by other means. So in the Rachel Kong novel that I think it came out this year, there's a character, a billionaire character who comes in near the end. And everything that he says or that is said about him is literally just meme. It's online billionaire meme because billionaires are bad because of all the things we all know from being on Twitter. And I was like, so you just we literally have him a character as meme. And this is the most representative thing to me, because that's maybe there's craft in that. Right. But what you've chosen to craft is like 28 tweets. That's pointless.Brandon: 28 tweets be a great title for a book, though, you have to admit, I would buy that book off the new book table. 28 tweets. I would. I would buy that. Yeah, I do think. Well, I think it goes both ways. I think it goes both ways. I somewhat famously said this about Sally Rooney that like she her books have no craft. The craft is bad. And I do think like there are writers who only have craft, who are able to sort of create these wonderfully structured books and to sort of deploy these beautiful techniques. And those books are absolutely dead. There's just like nothing in them because they have nothing to say. There's just like nothing to be said about any of that. And on the other hand, you have these books that are full of feelings that like would be better had someone taught that person about structure or form or had they sort of had like a rigorous thing. And I would say that like both of those are probably bad, like depending on who you are, you find one more like, like easier to deal with than the other. I do think that like part of why there's such an emphasis on craft is because not to sort of bring capitalism back in but you can monetize craft, you know what I mean? Like, craft is one of those things that is like readily monetizable. Like, if I'm a writer, and I would like to make money, and I can't sell a novel, I can tell people like, oh, how to craft a perfect opening, how to create a novel opening that will make agents pick it up and that will make editors say yes, but like what the sort of promise of craft is that you can finish a thing, but not that it is good, as you say, there's no guarantor. Whereas you know, like it's harder to monetize someone's soul, or like, it's harder to monetize like the sort of random happenstance of just like a writer's voice sort of emerging from from whatever, like you can't turn that into profit. But you can turn into profit, let me help you craft your voice. So it's very grind set, I think craft has a tendency to sort of skew toward the grind set and toward people trying to make money from, from writing when they can't sell a book, you know. Henry: Let's play a game. Brandon: Oh dear.Henry: I say the name of a writer. You give us like the 30 second Brandon Taylor opinion of that writer.Brandon: Okay. Yeah.Henry: Jonathan Franzen.Brandon: Thomas Mann, but like, slightly more boring, I think.Henry: Iris Murdoch.Brandon: A friend of mine calls her a modern calls her the sort of pre Sally Rooney, Sally Rooney. And I agree with that.Henry: When I'm at parties, I try and sell her to people where I say she's post-war Sally Rooney.Brandon: Yes, yes. And like, and like all that that entails, and so many delightful, I read all these like incredible sort of mid century reviews of her novels, and like the men, the male critics, like the Bernard Breganzis of the world being like, why is there so much sex in this book? It's amazing. Please go look up those like mid-century reviews of Iris Murdoch. They were losing their minds. Henry: Chekhov.Brandon: Perfect, iconic, baby girl, angel, legend. Can't get enough. 10 out of 10.Henry: Evelyn Waugh.Brandon: So Catholic, real Catholic vibes. But like, scabrously funny. And like, perhaps the last writer to write about life as though it had meaning. Hot take, but I'll, I stand by it.Henry: Yeah, well, him and Murdoch. But yeah, no, I think I think there's a lot in that. C.V. Wedgwood.Brandon: Oh, my gosh. The best, a titan, a master of history. Like, oh, my God. I would not be the same without Wedgwood.Henry: Tell us which one we should read.Brandon: Oh, the 30 Years War. What are you talking about?Henry: Well, I think her books on the English Civil War… I'm a parochial Brit.Brandon: Oh, see, I don't, not that I don't, I will go read those. But her book on the 30 Years War is so incredible. It's, it's amazing. It's second to like, Froissart's Chronicles for like, sort of history, history books for me.Henry: Northrop Frye.Brandon: My father. I, Northrop Frye taught me so much about how to see and how to think. Just amazing, a true thinker in a mind. Henry: Which book? Brandon: Oh, Anatomy of Criticism is fantastic. But Fearful Symmetry is just, it will blow your head off. Just amazing. But if you're looking for like, to have your, your mind gently remapped, then Anatomy of Criticism.Henry: Emma Cline.Brandon: A throwback. I think she's, I think she's Anne Beattie meets John Cheever for a new era. And I think she's amazing. She's perfect. Don't love her first novel. I think her stories are better. She's a short story writer. And she should stay that way.Henry: Okay, now I want you to rank Jane Austen's novels.Brandon: Wait, okay. So like, by my preference, or by like, what I think is the best?Henry: You can do both.Brandon: Okay. So in terms, my favorite, Persuasion. Then Mansfield Park. Sense and Sensibility. Pride and Prejudice. And then Emma, then Northanger Abbey. Okay.Henry: Now, how about for which ones are the best?Brandon: Persuasion. Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park. Emma,.Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey.Henry: Why do people not like Fanny Price? And what is wrong with them?Brandon: Fanny Price is perfect. Fanny Price, I was just talking to someone about this last night at dinner. Fanny Price, she's perfect. First of all, she is, I don't know why people don't like her. She's like a chronically ill girl who's hot for her cousin and like, has deep thoughts. It seems like she would be the icon of literary Twitter for like a certain kind of person, you know? And I don't know why they don't like her. I think I'm, I am becoming the loudest Mansfield Park apologist on the internet. I think that people don't like Fanny because she's less vivacious than Mary Crawford. And I think that people are afraid to see themselves in Fanny because she seems like she's unfun or whatever. But what they don't realize is that like Fanny Price, Fanny Price has like a moral intelligence and like a moral consciousness. And like Fanny Price is one of the few Austen characters who actually argues directly and literally about the way the world is. Like with multiple people, like the whole, the whole novel is her sort of arguing about, well, cities are this and the country is this. And like, we need Parsons as much as we need party boys. Like, like she's arguing not just about, not just about these things like through the lens of like marriage or like the sort of marriage economy, but like in literal terms, I mean, she is so, she's like a moral philosopher. I love Fanny Price and she's so smart and so sensitive and so, and I guess like maybe it's just that people don't like a character who's kind of at the mercy of others and they view her as passive. When in fact, like a young woman arguing about the way the world should be, like Mary Crawford's, Mary Crawford's like kind of doing the above, not really, not like Fanny. But yeah, I love her. She's amazing. I love Fanny Price. And I also think that people love Margaret Hale from North and South. And I think that when people are saying they hate Fanny Price, what they're picturing is actually how Margaret Hale is. Margaret Hale is one of the worst heroines of a novel. She's so insufferable. She's so rude. She's so condescending. And like, she does get her comeuppance and like Gaskell does sort of bring about a transformation where she's actually able to sort of like see poor people as people first and not like subjects of sympathy. But Margaret is what people imagine Fanny is, I think. And we should, we should start a Fanny Price, like booster club. Henry, should we? Let's do it. It begins here. I just feel so strongly about her. I feel, I love, I love Fanny.Henry: She's my favorite of Austen's characters. And I think she is the most representative Austen character. She's the most Austen of all of them, right?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, that makes great deal of sense to me. She's just so wonderful. Like she's so funny and so observant. And she's like this quiet little girl who's like kind of sickly and people don't really like her. And she's kind of maybe I'm just like, maybe I just like see myself in her. And I don't mind being a sort of annoying little person who's going around the world.Henry: What are some good principles for naming literary characters?Brandon: Ooh, I have a lot of strong feelings about this. I think that names should be memorable. They should have like, like an aura of sort of literariness about them. I don't mean, I mean, taken to like hilarious extremes. It's like Henry James. Catherine Goodwood, Isabelle Archer, Ralph Touchett, like, you know, Henry had a stack pole. So like, not like that. But I mean, that could be fun in a modern way. But I think there's like an aura of like, it's a name that you might hear in real life, but it sort of add or remove, it's sort of charged and elevated, sort of like with dialogue. And that it's like a memorable thing that sort of like, you know, it's like, you know, memorable thing that sort of sticks in the reader's mind. It is both a name, a literary, a good literary name is both a part of this world and not of this world, I think. And, yeah, and I love that. I think like, don't give your character a name like you hear all the time. Like, Tyler is a terrible literary name. Like, no novel has ever, no good novel has ever had a really important character named Tyler in it. It just hasn't. Ryan? What makes a good sentence? Well, my sort of like, live and let live answer is that a good sentence is a sentence that is perfectly suited to the purpose it has. But I don't know, I like a clear sentence, regardless of length or lyric intensity, but just like a clear sentence that articulates something. I like a sentence with motion, a sense of rhythm, a sense of feel without any bad words in it. And I don't mean like curse words, I mean like words that shouldn't be in literature. Like, there's some words that just like don't belong in novels.Henry: Like what?Brandon: Squelch. Like, I don't think the word squelch should be in a novel. That's a gross word and it doesn't sound literary to me. I don't want to see it.Henry: I wouldn't be surprised if it was in Ulysses.Brandon: Well, yes.Henry: I have no idea, but I'm sure, I'm sure.Brandon: But so few of us are James Joyce. And that novel is like a thousand bodily functions per page. But don't love it. Don't love it.Henry: You don't love Ulysses?Brandon: No, I don't… Listen, I don't have a strong opinion, but you're not going to get me cancelled about Ulysses. I'm not Virginia Woolf.Henry: We're happy to have opinions of that nature here. That's fine.Brandon: You know, I don't have a strong feeling about it, actually. Some parts of it that I've read are really wonderful. And some parts of it that I have read are really dense and confusing to me. I haven't sort of given it the time it needs or deserves. What did you learn from reading Toni Morris? What did I learn? I think I learned a lot about the moral force of melodrama. I think that she shows us a lot about the uses of melodrama and how it isn't just like a lesion of realism, that it isn't just a sort of malfunctioning realism, but that there are certain experiences and certain lives and certain things that require and necessitate melodrama. And when deployed, it's not tacky or distasteful that it actually is like deeply necessary. And also just like the joy of access and language, like the sort of... Her language is so towering. I don't know, whenever I'm being really shy about a sentence being too vivid or too much, I'm like, well, Toni Morrison would just go for it. And I am not Toni Morrison, but she has given me the courage to try.Henry: What did you like about the Annette Benning film of The Seagull?Brandon: The moment when Annette Benning sings Dark Eyes is so good. It's so good. I think about it all the time. And indeed, I stole that moment for a short story that I wrote. And I liked that part of it. I liked the set design. I think also Saoirse Ronan, when she gives that speech as Nina, where she's like, you know, where the guy's like, what do you want from, you know, what do you want? Why do you want to be an actress? And she's like, I want fame. You know, like, I want to be totally adored. And I'm just like, yeah, that's so real. That's so, that is so real. Like Chekhov has understood something so deep, so deep about the nature of commerce and art there. And I think Saoirse is really wonderful in that movie. It's a not, it's not a good movie. It's maybe not even a good adaptation of The Seagull. But I really enjoyed it. I saw it like five times in a theater in Iowa City.Henry: I don't know if it's a bad adaptation of The Seagull, because it's one of the, it's one of the Chekhov's I've seen that actually understands that, like, the tragic and the and the comic are not meant to be easily distinguishable in his work. And it does have all this lightheartedness. And it is quite funny. And I was like, well, at least someone's doing that because I'm so sick of, like, gloomy Chekhov. You know what I mean? Like, oh, the clouds and the misery. Like, no, he wants you, he wants you to laugh and then be like, I shouldn't laugh because it's kind of tragic, but it's also just funny.Brandon: Yeah. Yes, I mean, all the moments were like, like Annette Bening's characters, like endless stories, like she's just like constantly unfurling a story and a story and a story and a story. Every scene kind of was like, she's in the middle of telling another interminable anecdote. And of course, the sort of big tragic turn at the end is like, where like, Kostya kills himself. And she's like, in the middle of like, another really long anecdote while they're in the other room playing cards. Like, it's so, it's so good. So I love that. I enjoy watching that movie. I still think it's maybe not. It's a little wooden, like as a movie, like it's a little, it's a little rickety.Henry: Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. But for someone looking to like, get a handle on Chekhov, it's actually a good place to go. What is the best make of Fountain Pen?Brandon: That's a really good, that's a really, really, really good question. Like, what's your Desert Island Fountain Pen? My Desert Island Fountain Pen. Right now, it's an Esterbrook Estee with a needlepoint nib. It's like, so, I can use that pen for hours and hours and hours and hours. I think my favorite Fountain Pen, though, is probably the Pilot Custom 743. It's a really good pen, not too big, not too small. It can hold a ton of ink, really wonderful. I use, I think, like a Soft Fine nib, incredible nib, so smooth. Like, I, you could cap it and then uncap it a month later, and it just like starts immediately. It's amazing. And it's not too expensive.Henry: Brandon Taylor, thank you very much.Brandon: Thanks for having me. 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

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a prominent figure in the pro-life movement in the UK, who notably made headlines after being arrested for silently praying outside an abortion center, calls in to share her experience with Patrick. She comments on the controversial buffer zones in front of abortion clinics, wrongful arrests, and the increasing restrictions on freedom of speech and thought in her country. Patrick and Isabel dive deep into the implications of these actions, the polarization in local communities, and the resilience of pro-life advocates like Adam Smith-Connor, who face legal repercussions for their beliefs. Tune in as Isabel opens up about the challenges and support received from international pro-life communities and hear Patrick's message of solidarity and encouragement for all those fighting for their rights to pray and speak freely.   Jenny (email) – I'm looking for a Catholic rehabilitation center for alcoholics (00:39) Christopher - My pastor said that the Eucharistic Ministers hands are consecrated. (02:52) Esmeralda - If babies can be baptized, why do we need to take classes in order to get baptized when we're older? (15:02) Kaden - Can husband and wife ever commit the sin of gossip? (22:54) David (13-years-old) – Are magic tricks that magicians do at kid's parties bad? (28:57) Denise - I'm a Eucharistic Minister and I don't feel worthy.  I have a pastor who has two different parishes, and he is stretched to the limit. (30:57) *Isabel - I was arrested outside an abortion clinic for praying silently (36:43) Mary - I was told that God created three religions. (46:022) Henry – Is being a hypocrite a sin? (49:25)

For this episode, Ben has a fascinating conversation with Henry Kaestner about how he knew he was an entrepreneur, why he started faith-driven entrepreneur, and the power of partnership. Henry Is a co-founder and partner at Sovereign's Capital, a private equity and venture capital management company that invests in faith driven entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia and the US from its offices in Silicon Valley, Washington DC and Jakarta, Indonesia. Henry also was a co-founder and CEO of Bandwidth. And he co-founded the Faith Driven Entrepreneur and Faith Driven Investor ministries.

Today's Ritter On Real Estate guest is Rich Fettke. Twenty years ago, Rich was told he had six months to live at 37 years old. Thankfully, the doctor's diagnosis was wrong; the melanoma did not spread to his liver. However, that initial diagnosis caused his wife to find a way to make ends meet if he died. She found mentors who helped guide her and led her to learn about real estate investing. After he was healed, they began to invest and learned a way to financial freedom. They wanted to help their friends and family do the same, so they formed what they thought would be a small group of people to learn about investing together. Today that small group has grown to over 60,000 members. The company that Rich and Kathy built, RealWealth, has helped thousands of people create financial freedom in their own lives. Rich is also the author of Extreme Success (Simon & Schuster, 2002) and the audio program, Momentum.  Key Points From The Episode: Rich's life-shattering false positive diagnosis. How it changed his life.Rich's experience house hacking, seeing how real estate creates wealth. Buying 5 properties.Starting Real Wealth, how Rich and his team empower/teach investors. The importance of spending time to get quiet and think.How meditation benefits the brain. The importance of community.What separates Rich's book from other real estate books.Rich defines what a “Henry” Is. Getting clear about what you want in life. Understanding assets vs liabilities.The wealthy value time and education. About Rich's Book:The Wise Investor is an inspiring parable about building what author Rich Fettke calls Real Wealth, the foundation of financial freedom. It tells the story of Ryan Brooks, a husband, father, and CaptivSoft's hard-working lead coder who, with the help of a new friend and mentor, finds a different path to financial security for himself and his family and becomes wealthy in more ways than he thought possible. The foreword was written by Robert Kiyosaki (Author of Rich Dad Poor Dad) and the book has been endorsed by Brandon Turner (BiggerPockets Podcasts and Author of The Book on Rental Property Investing), Kristine Carlson (Co-Author of Don't Sweat the Small Stuff books), Ken McElroy (Author and Investor) and Jon Gordon (Author of The Carpenter and The Energy Bus).Websites & Social Mediahttps://www.thewiseinvestorbook.comhttps://www.fettke.comhttps://realwealth.comhttps://www.instagram.com/richfettkehttps://www.facebook.com/rich.fettkehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/fettke/Books Mentioned:The Wise Investor By Rich Fettke

I was very pleased to talk to Charles Moore, who I have read admiringly for many years. His three volume biography of Margaret Thatcher is one of the most interesting biographies published in the last few years. He also edited a volume of T.E.Utley's journalism. In this discussion you will hear (or read the transcript below!) whether Margaret Thatcher is more left-wing than we think, what Charles thinks of political biography, how his footnotes work, who are the most underrated Thatcher cabinet ministers, the relationship between fiction and biography, why he's not a natural Thatcherite, and more. I asked a lot of my questions much less elegantly than I had written them, but the answers are frequently models of spoken English. I particularly enjoyed Charles' use of “jealous” in its original, perhaps now semi-archaic, meaning (i.e. suspiciously vigilant or careful). He also seems to use “cunning” in the way Johnson defined it, pleasingly. I remember reading once how much Charles enjoyed the language of the Book of Common Prayer as a child. Perhaps those lexicographical waters run deep. The transcript is lightly edited for intelligibility. You will notice, sometimes, that the transcript moves from past to present tense when Charles talks about Margaret Thatcher. Here, as elsewhere, he often refers to her in the present tense. One topic we didn't cover was Margaret Thatcher as a late bloomer. Maybe another time.Henry: You once wrote that you found political biography boring to read, or you used to. Why did you find it interesting to write?Charles Moore: I think making one's own enquiries makes you think about it more deeply, which is intrinsically interesting. But also I think the subject, Mrs. Thatcher, is a particularly interesting person because she was very unusual and because she was the first and, effectively at the time, only woman. And so everything's different. And so the impact of her is very strikingly different from that of even very well-known male politicians.Henry: And do you enjoy reading political biography more now that you've written your book?Charles Moore: I don't find that I do read it more, particularly. But probably the answer's yes because I can understand more how the work is done. And therefore, I can see who's good at it and who isn't, and when they're evading a subject they don't understand or whether they've really got to the bottom of it and so on.Henry: How do you assess that? What sort of things make you think that someone's really got a grip on what they're telling you?Charles Moore: Partly it's their mastery of the sources, of course. And also, it's a matter of, to some extent, perceiving their fairness. And I think that's quite an interesting subject, because fairness doesn't mean, necessarily, that you're neutral about the person. You can be highly sympathetic to the subject, or you can be even unsympathetic to the subject and still be fair. But fairness is something about considering the evidence and trying to give it its right weight. This, I think, is easily detectable in biographies. And some just don't do that. They wish to assassinate the character, or they wish to make a hero of the character, or they're simply rather lazy. If you've walked down that path, you can detect what's going on.Henry: What parts of Margaret Thatcher's life did you find it most difficult to be fair about?Charles Moore: Well of course, I wouldn't be the best judge of that, I suppose.Henry: Were there any bits, though, where you had to work at that practise of fairness?Charles Moore: One way in which you need to be fair to a subject is simply to try to understand the subject. I don't mean the biographical subject. I mean the issue. And there are certain subjects that I'm less good at and, therefore, have to work harder on like, let's say, monetary policy or details about missiles. Neither of which are my natural territory, and both of which are important in the case of Mrs. Thatcher. So I would have to make more efforts about that, mental efforts, to really understand what's going on than I would about, say, fighting an election or reform of the trade unions or something like that. There's a sort of broad point about being fair, which is that biography naturally and inevitably and rightly must focus on the individual. And therefore, it may do that to the exclusion of other individuals or of a wider milieu, which is an inevitable danger but is also a mistake because the individual in politics doesn't act alone, even a very remarkable character like Margaret Thatcher or Winston Churchill. And one needs, somehow, to convey the milieu and the weight of the other characters while never ceasing to focus on the one character.One of the extraordinary features of Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell — Wolf Hall etc — is that, I think it's right to say, he is in the room the entire time, or in the field or whatever. I think Thomas Cromwell is in every scene. Sometimes it's reported speech that he's hearing, but still. And, as a biographer one sort of does that. Mrs. Thatcher is almost always in the room, not absolutely always. And that's right. That's fine. But one mustn't let her crowd everything else out.Henry: Were the Mantel books a conscious model or influence for you, or is that something you've noticed separately?Charles Moore: Not really because I was reading them more towards the end. Well, I read Wolf Hall quite a long time ago, and then I read the other two pretty much when I was finishing. But I think they're very good. Obviously, they're not biographies. But I think, I hope, I learnt something from them because there's a sustained effort of the imagination, which the novelist has to have, to see through the eyes of, in her case, Thomas Cromwell. And though biography is fact not fiction, imagination is required in biography as well. And so in some ways, it's a similar task.Henry: On this question of the milieu that Margaret Thatcher was in, you paid a lot of attention in the three books to the biographies of all the people around her, especially in footnotes, but also when you're describing events such as the leadership election in 1990, there's a lot of biographic information. Is this compilation of brief lives, a way of providing not just information, but commentary, almost like a sort of prosopographia? What stood out to me was that, even just through the footnotes, it really details the way that she was very, very different to everyone else in that world, demographically and socially.Charles Moore: Yes. That's right. So, in putting footnoted autobiographies of most of the characters, that's useful for reference, but it's also a sort of short-hand way of telling you about the milieu and the range of characters she was dealing with, and of course, it brings out the fact that they're almost all male and a very high percentage of them went to public schools and Oxford or Cambridge. She of course went to Oxford, but she didn't go to public school and she wasn't a man. So I think when your eye goes to bottom of the page and picks up one of those biographies, it should be helpful in its own right, but it also should have a cumulative effect of placing Mrs. Thatcher among all of these people and of course, rather like the only woman in the room is very noticeable physically, she's very noticeable as unique in this milieu.Henry: Is that a technique that you took from somewhere, or is that something that you devised yourself?Charles Moore: Well, I think she devised it to some extent, and I picked up on that. She always had to wrestle with the point that it was considered a disadvantage to be a woman in the world in which she was moving. And she realized that though in certain respects it was objectively a disadvantage because of prejudice and so on, she could turn it to advantage. And I think one thing she understood very early on, because though she's a very sincere person she's also a very good actress, is that she could see the almost filmic quality of her position. So she would know that the camera would come in on her, and therefore she should exploit that to the full with her hair, her bag, her dresses, the sense of being different and noticeable, her voice. And she put that to good use and tried to refine that and simplify it really so that it could have maximum impact.Henry: There was a High Tory ambivalence about Margaret Thatcher, so someone like T.E Utley was a supporter, but not a complete supporter, a slightly guarded pro-Thatcher. And I think you potentially fall into this group, not entirely aligned with the Thatcher government on Ireland, Hong Kong for example. How did this position affect you as her biographer?Charles Moore: I don't think my own specific views on political questions were so important in that, but I think perhaps my overall approach affected it. What I mean by that is that my background, I'm actually brought up as a liberal with a big “L” — Liberal Party. And by cultural inclination I wouldn't be a natural Thatcherite, and I would always look at Mrs. Thatcher as somebody different from my way of thinking in that sense, which of course makes that very interesting. I'm not part of her tribe, and wasn't by upbringing, and I hope that's useful because it gives a certain historical detachment. However I wasn't trying to write an interpretation of Mrs. Thatcher coming from my tribe, it wasn't like the Whig interpretation of history sort of thing. And indeed, in some ways, I was more impressed by her because I came from a different tribe, that's to say, she had to overcome more barriers in my mind, perhaps. Suppose I'd been writing a biography of Asquith, that would have been more like the world I grew up in, and perhaps less of a challenge. And writing about Mrs. Thatcher, it's exciting to enter a world which in social terms and political terms, and of course, a different sex as well, was less known to me.Henry: I think you wrote that she is, with the possible exception of Jim Callaghan, the most socially conservative Prime Minister that Britain has had. To what extent do your background and your personal views make it easy or difficult for you to be, as you said earlier, fair in the way that you presented that?Charles Moore: She's a very odd mixture in that way. I think I perhaps did write that. But of course, she also was such a change bringer. If you think of Mrs. Thatcher's natural demeanour and reactions, she would be very socially conservative. I mean not ultra socially conservative. For example, she married a divorcee, which was quite unusual in 1951. But a fairly conventional Christian, starting as a Methodist and sort of sliding gradually into Anglicanism as she rises up the social scale without ever abandoning Methodism. Believing strongly in firm punishments for criminals. A very uncomplicated monarchist. No problem about hereditary peers in her mind, etcetera, etcetera. Very fond of obvious traditional British things like the armed services, support for the police, all that sort of thing. And things like traditional high standards in school of a rigorous kind. So on and so on, all those things. But in another way, she's so impatient to change things and unafraid of challenging whatever it is that people usually go around saying. So it's a curious combination and an interesting one. For me, I don't remember that presenting a particular fairness issue. It's just this funny thing about her, which is also biographically very interesting, that she's very, very conservative and very, very radical.Henry: Do you think the fact that you have religious belief. Do you think that had any part in the consideration to pick you as the biographer? I think you've said before, you don't really know why she chose you.Charles Moore: No, I wouldn't have thought that it did have any consideration. Mrs. Thatcher's religion was quite vague, and she wasn't interested at all in ecclesiastical or theological questions. But one of the things she respected in religion was some sort of seriousness about ultimate purpose. And she certainly had such a seriousness herself. And I remember talking to her about that. This is before I was engaged in the work, I think just in conversation. I had recently become a Catholic, and she talked about that. This is another interesting example of her, in some ways, rather open mind because she's fundamentally brought up anti-Catholic as most English Protestants were. And I don't think she would ever have considered becoming a Catholic. But I remember her being rather pleased that I had become a Catholic because she thought this is a proper serious Christian thing to do, and it was something she respected. She felt this about Jews too, obviously they weren't Christians. But again, she had a respect for Judaism and Judaic law and custom and manners and thought. And that was something which she recognised and liked in other people.Henry: Margaret Thatcher is sometimes thought of, or dismissively described, as un-philosophical. You said in your prefaces that she would confound Socrates with her lack of reflection on her own life. But in some ways she was quite an ideological person, at certain times, about freedom and things. Is the difference between being philosophical and ideological really so great? And was she really living if not a philosophically reflective life, a very philosophical life in what you've just been saying about seriousness and purpose? Is she more philosophical than she looks?Charles Moore: Yes. Good way to think about it, I think. Alfred Sherman, with whom she fell out but who was close to her in the '70s, said that “she is not a person of ideas but a person of beliefs.” And beliefs, he said, are better than ideas. I think he meant better from a political point of view, for politics. And I think that's sort of right. So there was a sense in which Mrs. Thatcher was philosophical, which was that her mind was an enquiring one. And she was always thinking, thinking, thinking. “What's right here? What's the best? What's the problem? What's the solution?” But she didn't have the philosopher's sceptical mind or pure intellectualism. She wanted results. And she wanted good things to happen and bad things to be stopped. And so she did have what you could call a philosophy, but she was not a philosopher. She was a person of action and beliefs.Henry: I heard an interview with you recently where you, I'm going to paraphrase, you said something like the limitation of left-wing political thought is that it has a utopian belief in politics. As in, if everybody only could have the right politics, everything would be okay. And you've written and talked about Margaret Thatcher trying to create a Christian Social Order in Britain. And that's really the drive she had. Is she, in that sense, a bit more of a "left-wing" political thinker, with a more utopian vision, than we would typically think of her as being?Charles Moore: There is an element of that because she is partly a preacher in politics. There's an element of, some sense in her mind of building Jerusalem or rebuilding Jerusalem, I think is there. And that tends to be more associated with socialism and, indeed with certain forms of Protestant Christianity going back, than with conservatism. So there is something of that. However, one of her beliefs, which was true — I mean, which she did adhere to — was that politics doesn't contain the solutions of everything, because people do not political structures. And she did believe that. Though of course, she also, because she was very egotistical, she did believe that something which she ran was bound to be good. So she could accommodate. People said she was very intolerant of other ideas. She was certainly very argumentative. But for example, she respected the Labour Party. She didn't respect the Liberal Party, but she respected the Labour Party because she thought that it represented something in Britain that ought to be represented and that conservatism didn't really represent, the way she put it was that it was the party of the underdog. And she thought there should be a party of the underdog.And her own approach to the problem of people who are less successful and poorer and things like that was to open up their opportunities. But I think within that was also a sort of acknowledgement that not everybody can take those opportunities. And for those people, it's important that there be a party that represents their interests. And she thought that Labour was the party to do that. So that shows a certain sense that, “I, Margaret Thatcher, don't have the answer to everything. I'm trying to do a particular set of things, and I believe I can do this right. But life is bigger than that, and politics is bigger than that.”Henry: On the question of her being argumentative, or however you want to phrase it, you have that great memo, I think from 1981, that someone in her office wrote to her...Charles Moore: Oh, John Hoskyns?Henry: Yeah, yeah. And saying everything that gets quoted about her. But actually, after that memo, she was in power for another nine years. Should we be quite cautious about this idea that she was single-minded, not consensus-minded, a rude person? Should we try and be revising that image of her and saying that actually that was a more narrow part of her leadership style than is thought?Charles Moore: Well, the famous Hoskyns memo was very powerful and contained criticisms which were true. But it's also a sort of protest because he was feeling that she wasn't listening to him. And also she had certain completely maddening qualities, if you were working with her every day, which he had to get off his chest. One of them was, the less sure she was about something and the more tired she was, the more rubbish she talked. And she could, in a tight corner, particularly before she'd made a decision, burble on a great deal and criticise others for a problem which really rested with her because she was psyching herself up to do something. And that happened a lot in certain economic decisions where she was worried about their unpopularity. She might argue with Geoffrey Howe or, later, Nigel Lawson about putting up interest rates, which she was almost always against. They were quite often in favour of it. And she used this tactically and psychologically, I think without realising it. And it could be a nightmare to live with, but leaders perhaps have to be a bit of a nightmare to live with some of the time.The other thing was that because she was so jealous of her position and felt so fragile in her position as the only woman and the leader that she sort of knew people would like to get rid of, she had to — she thought, at least, that the way to deal with this is to be extremely forceful and not to be seen to give in. An upper-class man would tend to think that the graceful and sensible thing to do would be to give in and say, as a tactical thing, to say, “I'm frightfully sorry. You're completely right. I've got this completely wrong.” And she never felt she could do that. She felt she had to maintain her argument, her position at almost all times. But it didn't mean that actually she paid no attention to the criticisms or that she never altered her views because she would always claim consistency, which might not, in fact, always be there. And that was, again, a sort of technique of hers. And so she was more consensual and more pragmatic than she would admit. Her colleagues often find that hard to understand because she didn't want them to understand it. She wanted them to think that she was iron and immutable and unchangeable and, as she would put it, staunch. And actually, there was a lot more subtlety, and a sort of listening, than she or they would acknowledge.For example, trade union reform. She was always complaining about Jim Prior going so slowly, but actually she did, herself, want to go slowly. She had a great impatience which made her want to get reforms in and bring about the changes, but she also knew that she mustn't make the mistake of Ted Heath of doing one great big law all at once. She must do it bit by bit. And so she was much more pragmatic in what she did when about trade union reform than she would say she was being.Henry: You found some new material about Thatcher, particularly from when she was a young woman to do with boyfriends and letters to her sister and things that inevitably gave a much broader view of her character than we were used to from the television and the news and so forth. How did that change your view of the way she operated politically?Charles Moore: I think it confirmed something which I sensed, but it brought it out much more clearly, which is what a cunning person she was. I didn't mean that in a nasty way. Her self-description was of somebody who just knew what's right and does it. But it wasn't like that. She did have a strong moral sense and she did have strong convictions, but she also had very strong ambitions and a sense of when to do something and when not to do something.So if you look at Margaret Roberts that she then was, wondering whom to marry, it's the female equivalent of what nineteenth century novels used to call the choice of life for a man, which is often depicted in 19th and 18th century novels. A young man goes out to the world. What does he want to do? Does he want be a soldier or a lawyer, or whatever it might be. And how is he going to shape his life? And she was thinking a lot about that. She wanted, in the case of marriage, she definitely wanted true love, she is a romantic person, but she also wanted security, financial security, and a sense of a man she could look up to, almost certainly older, or very unlikely that anyone she would marry will be her own age, I think would be fair to say. And her most serious boyfriend was twice her age and then Dennis was 11 plus years older than she.And you can see her particularly in the year 1951 when she has three serious boyfriends, one of whom was Dennis, weighing up. One's a farmer. Does she want to be married to a farmer? No. One is a distinguished doctor. Yes, but he is a lot of older than her. And then there's Dennis who had had a good war and had his own business, but on the other hand was divorced. And so she's thinking, wouldn't perhaps put it to herself like this, “How am I going to be an MP? Maybe even, how am I going to be a minister? Maybe, maybe, even how I'm I going to be Prime Minister.” Though I'm be much less sure about that, this is all very early on. But also, “How am I going to marry the right man and have children?” And these things are all going around and around in her head and influencing her decisions. “And how am I going to be able to support myself or be supported by a man. How will I have enough money?” Because she had no money from her family.And so you can see this very ardent person, but also a person who thinks very carefully before she does something, she loves the expression, the well known expression, “time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted,” and I think she was always making reconnaissance.Henry: The political scientist, Mark Garnett, has described Thatcher as banal. This is a quote from him, he says: “She was prepared to face down establishment institutions, if they opposed her. This defiance was not the product of a deep delayed plan: only interesting people engage in that style of thinking.” Is that a helpful way to think about Margaret Thatcher?Charles Moore: No, I think it's an unhelpful way to think about it, because what he's not acknowledging is that she's a politician. So the point about being a politician is not, do you have a brilliantly original mind? But what are you capable of doing? And she's extremely unusual in politicians for a sustained interest, sustained over a very, very long period in her case, in office, in the content of what she was doing. And therefore, she was thinking really hard about some questions. How do we end the Cold War? How do we beat trade union leaders? How to beat inflation? With a resourceful seriousness, which might not be intellectually original, but which was in a political sense, profound. To call it banal is mistaken, because actually nobody else was like that. There was simply nobody else in the first rank who was behaving and thinking that way. So it was original. It wasn't original in the sense that Plato's original, but in politics it was original.Henry: Tyler Cowen has talked about the advantage of having or displaying what he calls autistic cognitive traits, so the ability, and the absorbing interest, to absorb a lot of information to categorize it, to order it, and to do this much more so than other people, along obviously with some other things. Do you think Margaret Thatcher displays those sorts of traits and did they, as I think you are sort of suggesting here, give her a political advantage and an advantage as prime minister?Charles Moore: I wouldn't use the word autistic, and I know something about autistic behavior through my own family, my own wider family. I think it's probably not the right sort of categorisation, but I think Mrs. Thatcher had astonishing powers of application. And she did have the ability to, in order to apply herself to a subject, to shut out other ones, while she was applying herself. However, she was a vulnerable human being as well. And though she wasn't the best person at reading other people's emotions, she was, in many ways, sympathetic to people. I mean, she could be very unpleasant to people. But she was really fond of some people and grateful to them and solicitous in their difficulties and conscientious in how she ought to behave to them. She was odd in the way that all great people are odd. I don't mean all great people are odd in the same way, but all great people are odd in some way.But I don't think her mentality was quite as you described there. And I think she couldn't have survived in politics if it were because one of the things you have to do in politics is you have to have intuition about what other people are thinking. She constantly attended to what she thought voters were thinking, what was the public reaction to something or other. She wasn't obsessed with the media to anything like the degree that politicians are now, but she knew how to sniff the wind. And though she could be very brutal with colleagues, I think she did actually have powers of diplomacy which were put to very good use on the world stage, if you think of her relation with Reagan or with Gorbachev for example.Henry: How much of what we call Thatcherism was actually Lawsonism?Charles Moore: Perhaps they started out more or less together and diverged. And there was a lot in common. Before things went wrong, there was a strong alliance about that. But I think Lawsonism — I wouldn't call it an ism actually — but I think Lawson's views about things were generally more economically based, as you might expect. There was less politics and more economics in it. And he was more thoroughly liberal in economics than she. Whereas she tended to see economics as the instrument. She did believe in free market economics, but she saw them more as the instrument of something wider. Whereas he was more interested in them in themselves, I think.Then there's a second point, of course, which takes us on to rather different territory that Lawson, like Thatcher — because, again, a big ego — suffered from feeling that if he was doing something himself, it was bound to be good. I think all important politicians tend to fall into this category. So it was sort of self-evident to him that if he was Chancellor of the Exchequer it must be better than anybody else being Chancellor of the Exchequer. And this led him, after several successes, to a great mistake which was the whole attempt to get into the ERM and the shadowing of the Deutsche Mark in relation to that. Because it became a sort of totem about how you could manage Sterling, and it became a piece of alchemy or magic or a sort of hieratic thing, which only people of great brilliance could operate. And she, I think, had a wider view, a more common sense view about economic questions and how they weren't really like that. They didn't really depend on such calculations but on things that are, in a certain sense, simpler. Lawson was much the superior economic brain to hers, but I think he was more defective politically and didn't understand. I think there's a reason why he couldn't ever have been Conservative Party leader, though he was a very distinguished Chancellor of the Exchequer.Henry: Who are the most underrated Cabinet ministers from Margaret Thatcher's governments?Charles Moore: Well things went wrong for Geoffrey Howe. It's perhaps forgotten that he was a very good Chancellor of the Exchequer. In some ways he was a very good Foreign Secretary, but he was perhaps too indecisive and too sort of official minded. Howe was also very important in Thatcherism, though he didn't really like Mrs. Thatcher much. Richard Ryder described him as the tapestry master of Thatcherism. I think it's a very good phrase. Howe actually preceded her in his interest in free market economics, even in the '50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. She was interested, but he got there first very often. I think he was very important to her, in the early days, and of course, it was pretty disastrous when they finally fell out. And he was definitely a really high-class servant of the state.I think Nicholas Ridley was so bad in public presentation and politics in that general sense that people didn't realise what a competent Minister he was and what a good brain he had. I think he was temperamentally very unsuited to modern politics in some ways, but of all the ministers in her government I always found he was one most respected by officials interestingly. He was decisive, he would take responsibility, he wouldn't duck problems, he would think through things, he was a bit wild on the political aspects, but he was more impressive than people realised.And then Norman Tebbit is an interesting one because of course, he suffered great difficulties because of the terrible injuries he suffered, he and his wife suffered in the Brighton bomb. So he may not have been such a good minister of a big department, but he did have the most formidable brain and the most tremendous capacity to express something very clearly and often amusingly. And so he sort of cut through both the people who agreed with him and people who disagreed with him. It was a very striking phenomenon, Norman Tebbit, and highly unusual in somebody who in formal terms was a middle to higher ranking rather than top ranking cabinet minister in terms of jobs. You never knew who he was and you had to watch out for him and his fierceness in debate his sort of rather spare eloquence, his toughness. All that was formidable.Henry: We live at a time when so many of the essential moments in Thatcher's political career can be watched on YouTube, and we can hear radio clips, and we can see her letters online, and it's possible to imagine a sort of biographical Museum of Margaret Thatcher where you can be sort of immersed in her and in her world. What sort of challenge does that present to a biographer? There's a sort of inevitable limitation in that Disraeli only exists on paper, but Margaret Thatcher exists in all these mediums. But you as a biographer only have paper.Charles Moore: Yes, well of course I didn't only have paper in a sense that I only have paper on which to express it, but I could myself watch the clips, and indeed I saw them live frequently, because I was around at the time. I think it's very, very interesting and instructive to watch clips of Mrs. Thatcher and I'm always urging people instead of sort of theorizing about it to in television programs to show those clips because she had a tremendous gift of communication, even though sometimes the communication didn't please the recipients. She very, very clear and, in that sense, extremely good at getting a message across and that survives very well in the clip. So you can see her intent often much more clearly and strikingly than that of modern politicians and the sheer sort of emotional force she put into everything.For example, you watch when she's answering questions on the day she resigned in November 1990, answering questions in the house and then doing the no-confidence debate. It's absolutely astonishing. Particularly in the questions. When if you keep bearing in mind that she has just resigned. So she's still Prime Minister, but she's tendered her resignation that day, and there she is, not a hair out of place, incredibly tough argument, really rather witty. And as she said at one point in the debate, “I'm enjoying this.” And sort of playing it for all it's worth and engaging with people from the other side. There's a sort of almost banter she has about the nature of the gap between the rich and the poor, I think it's with Jim Sillars, the Scottish Labour MP. And a bit of a ding-dong with Simon Hughes, the Liberal MP. And it's a very good theatre, and it brings home a lot of us. I think those clips are vivid.And thank goodness for television interviews and news clips, because the House of Commons was not televised until 1989. So she'd been Prime Minister. It was on the radio all through her prime ministership, and not on the television. So we haven't got most of that on television. But we can see other things like Brian Walden interviews or news clips and so on. And they are really, really worth studying.And you're right that, obviously, I can't convey that fully in a book. I can describe it, I can quote from it, but I hope that what would happen is when people read the book, they can get more out of the clips, and when they look at the clips, they can get more out of the book.Henry: One or two general questions to close with. Who should write Tony Blair's biography?Charles Moore: I don't know who should write Tony Blair's biography, at all. And I'm certainly not volunteering myself. But I think, again, the question of fairness is important, because Blair suffered from a thing where he received absurd adulation and then absurd vilification. And, actually, the judgment on him, the historical judgment on him, should be much more nuanced and requires some detachment. And speaking only for myself, I must have written, as a journalist, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of words criticising Mr. Blair and his policies. But I think he deserves to be taken seriously as a political leader and was important, and that his fundamental message about New Labour was actually true. He's often described as a liar, but I think his fundamental message about what he was and what he was trying to do was true, and people appreciated it. And it's also true, unfortunately, that a lot of his actions were rather ill-thought-out and didn't come to much, so that's a slightly tragic element in his time. But he deserves much more serious attention than the great majority of British prime ministers.Henry: What are the most underrated political biographies?Charles Moore: I think there are quite a lot that are overrated, but it would be invidious to say which. What I most value, but this is probably somebody who's in the trade talking rather than the general reader, but what I'm looking for, I want to feel very confident that the author is fair-minded, and it also has a sort of feel for what it is he's writing about. So that he is not somehow off the point or out of his depth, or, as it were, wasn't there. I didn't mean that a biographer has to have been present when these things happen, but I mean he doesn't have a feel for how, let's say, the House of Commons really works or something like that. I like, in that sense, the biographers that are a professional. I think that man D. R. Thorpe is good, for example. I'm afraid I don't have a biography of a modern politician (and by modern I'm going back quite a long way) to hold up and say, “This is it. This is how it should be done.” But this may well be my fault. I've read by no means all of them.Henry: Charles Moore, thank you very much for your time.Charles Moore: Thank you.Don't forget!My salon, on 1st March, TONIGHT, is Samuel Johnson: Reading for Wisdom where we will discuss pessimism, pragmatism, and the good life. The attendee list has some interesting Johnson enthusiasts — join them!My am giving a tour of the City of London tracing the route of the Great Fire and the genius of Christopher Wren on Saturday 5th March. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Henry Is not here joined us on this episode as Oscar knows nothing about football --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Welcome to Storybrooke, Book Eleven: Welcome to Hyperion Heights, Chapter 11: Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Witches: Max and Tina discuss Once Upon a Time, Season Seven, Episode Eleven: Secret Garden, in which Henry IS the father, Gothel's got some pretty big balls, and Robin's got some pretty ironic shoes to fill.iTunes: https://tinyurl.com/wtsbpodTwitter: @ILoveTVZinesEmail: ilovetelevisionzines@gmail.comSite: http://www.ilovetelevisionzines.comPatreon: http://www.patreon.com/user?u=4614965

We've brought on a new host to Rock Your Retirement.  Henry Shapiro, host of Retired Excited. Henry IS retired, and when he started thinking that managing a show was too much for him, I invited him to bring his past episodes to Rock Your Retirement so they wouldn't be lost. We'll be bringing an archived show […] The post Friday Retired Excited Show: Introduction to Henry: RE001 appeared first on Rock Your Retirement.

We've brought on a new host to Rock Your Retirement.  Henry Shapiro, host of Retired Excited. Henry IS retired, and when he started thinking that managing a show was too much for him, I invited him to bring his past episodes to Rock Your Retirement so they wouldn't be lost. We'll be bringing an archived show over each week for your enjoyment.  Then as he has times, he may bring some additional episodes over. We hope he does.  So when you hear “Retired Excited” don't feel that you're lost.  Our plan is to release the Retired Excited episodes with Henry on Friday's, and you'll still get your weekly dose of Kathe on the Monday shows. Henry's First Episode : In this archived session, Henry introduces himself with a short first episode of Retired Excited.  He invites us to his world of retirement, and let us know what to expect in future sessions. He talks about his experience of many people being afraid of retiring.  Although they anticipate it, they don't know what they are going to do with their time. Henry's aim was to provide inspiration for every one of the listeners to have an excellent retirement.  Sound familiar?  That is the aim of the Rock Your Retirement show as well!  What a perfect pairing. Henry went on to say that many people who retire have no plan for the future.  He talks about how their purpose dissolves and how they need to reestablish their focus and meaning. The goal of the Friday show is to look at the options and see how happy retired people are creating their lives.  Mr. Shapiro interviews regular people, not high fliers.  He finds out what gets them up excited every morning. Henry Shapiro's own story is fairly simple. He comes from a normal family.  And his parents struggled to establish themselves in Australia, having migrated here from Europe after the second world war.  His parents managed to put Henry and his brother through school, and gave them the best start they could. Like many of us, Henry has had a variety of jobs and businesses throughout life and is now fully retired and living with ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. So the theme is … there is lots to do, lots to occupy retirees, lots to learn, and a world of fun and comradeship to be enjoyed. Henry and Kathe Special Thanks to: * Angie Strehlow who helps us get great guests that help us with our retirement lifestyle while keeping everything on track * Les Briney who edits the show and makes my guests and me sound terrific * Lesinda Tubalado who helps keep the website up to date * Henry Shapiro, host of Friday's Retired Excited Show * YOU the listener for sharing on social media, and telling your friends about it  

Dan and Jack celebrate their Seventy Epiventery with a returning special guest, Lani Harms! They discuss Season 13's Papa's Got a Brand New Badge, an episode where Homer becomes a vigilante after Lisa's stuff is stolen. Wait, not a vigilante, he starts a private security company, so it's different from that other episode. Homer also faces off with the mafia on the front lawn after reneging on Marge's pretzel debt...? Or was it ferrets or something? Who are these jokes for? Was this episode scripted by O. Henry? Is a sideways bull breaking into K-Mart to steal some dishwashers? All that plus rancid icing, Mar & Momie, and Gotham Season Four: No Batman Yet. PS, Give us your money. NEXT WEEK: Season 24's What Animated Women Want www.weepodcast.com

A fairy tale battle is won, but the Storybrooke battle is still heating up. Will the curse be broken? What will happen to Henry? Is there any more magic?