POPULARITY
I have just been reading the youthful correspondence between my future father, Henry M. Rosenthal, and his best friend in college and for some years thereafter, Lionel Trilling. Trilling went on to make for himself the most brilliant career of his generation as a public intellectual. Since they had been so very close, I never knew exactly why my father broke it off with him, but that could well have been the reason. On the race track of life, it's hard to eat your friend's dust. . . Abigail L. Rosenthal is Professor Emerita at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. She is the author of Confessions of A Young Philosopher (forthcoming), which is a woman's "confession" in the tradition of Augustine and Rousseau. She writes a weekly online column, "Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column" along with "Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Podcast," where she explains why women's lives are highly interesting. Many of her articles are accessible at https://brooklyn-cuny.academia.edu/AbigailMartin. She edited The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes's Secret; Spinoza's Way by her father, the late Henry M. Rosenthal. She is married to Jerry L. Martin, also a philosopher. They live in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She can be reached a dearabbiesilvousplait@gmail.com.We live under the sheltering umbrellas of our worldviews. To the point where we would feel naked if we were caught in the street without them.
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
Today's poem demonstrates that, unlike Arnold's sideburns, loving the Bard never goes out of style. Although remembered now for his elegantly argued critical essays, Matthew Arnold, born in Laleham, Middlesex, on December 24, 1822, began his career as a poet, winning early recognition as a student at the Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, had earned national acclaim as a strict and innovative headmaster. Arnold also studied at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1844, after completing his undergraduate degree at Oxford, he returned to Rugby as a teacher of classics.After marrying in 1851, Arnold began work as a government school inspector, a grueling position which nonetheless afforded him the opportunity to travel throughout England and the Continent. Throughout his thirty-five years in this position Arnold developed an interest in education, an interest which fed into both his critical works and his poetry. Empedocles on Etna (1852) and Poems (1853) established Arnold's reputation as a poet and, in 1857, he was offered a position, which he accepted and held until 1867, as Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Arnold became the first professor to lecture in English rather than Latin. During this time Arnold wrote the bulk of his most famous critical works, Essays in Criticism (1865) and Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which he sets forth ideas that greatly reflect the predominant values of the Victorian era.Meditative and rhetorical, Arnold's poetry often wrestles with problems of psychological isolation. In “To Marguerite—Continued,” for example, Arnold revises John Donne's assertion that “No man is an island,” suggesting that we “mortals” are indeed “in the sea of life enisled.” Other well-known poems, such as “Dover Beach,” link the problem of isolation with what Arnold saw as the dwindling faith of his time. Despite his own religious doubts, a source of great anxiety for him, in several essays Arnold sought to establish the essential truth of Christianity. His most influential essays, however, were those on literary topics. In “The Function of Criticism” (1865) and “The Study of Poetry” (1880) Arnold called for a new epic poetry: a poetry that would address the moral needs of his readers, “to animate and ennoble them.” Arnold's arguments, for a renewed religious faith and an adoption of classical aesthetics and morals, are particularly representative of mainstream Victorian intellectual concerns. His approach—his gentlemanly and subtle style—to these issues, however, established criticism as an art form, and has influenced almost every major English critic since, including T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Harold Bloom. Though perhaps less obvious, the tremendous influence of his poetry, which addresses the poet's most innermost feelings with complete transparency, can easily be seen in writers as different from each other as W. B. Yeats, James Wright, Sylvia Plath, and Sharon Olds. Late in life, in 1883 and 1886, Arnold made two lecturing tours of the United States.Matthew Arnold died in Liverpool on April 15, 1888.-bio via Academy of American Poets Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
Samuel Moyn, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Alexander Somek, Fabio Wolkenstein LIBERALISM AGAINST ITSELFThe Cold War Roots of Liberalism´s Present Crisis By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era—among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling—transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In his new book “Liberalism Against Itself” Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy—a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Alexander Somek and Fabio Wolkenstein will discuss with Samuel Moyn his findings and thoughts. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University and author of many books on the history of ideas and politics in the twentieth century Herlinde Pauer-Studer is Professor emeritus, Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna Alexander Somek is Professor of Legal Philosophy at the Faculty of Law, University of Vienna Fabio Wolkenstein is Associate Professor at the Institute for Political Science, University of Vienna
Historian Ronnie Grinberg's new book Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals couldn't be better "Know Your Enemy" fodder. (Main characters include: Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, Diana and Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and Mary McCarthy!) These writers, Grinberg shows, built and sustained a novel, secular, Jewish, and masculine concept of the intellectual life, an ideology that would profoundly affected the development of Cold War liberalism, neo-conservativism, Zionism, and right-wing reaction against feminism, gay rights, and black power. As we discovered in this conversation, it's impossible to make sense of the creative and scholarly contributions of the New York Intellectuals — good and bad — without gender as an essential lens. Moreover, Grinberg shows how scholars can easily misapprehend the deeper motivations for neoconservative reaction (among those such as Podhoretz and Decter) if they are not attentive to the centrality of gender, sexuality, and patriarchy in these thinkers' work. Further Reading:Ronnie Grinberg, Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (Mar 2024)Sam Adler-Bell, "The New York Intellectuals Were a Boys' Club," Chronicle of Higher Education, Apr 10, 2024Matthew Sitman, "Midge Decter to Howard Meyer, April 15, 1987," Friends and Enemies, Apr 8, 2024B.D. McClay, "Of Course They Hated Her: The Uncomfortable Honesty of Mary McCarthy," Commonweal, Dec 18, 2017William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (1982)Mary McCarthy, The Group (1963)Tess Slesinger, The Unpossessed (1934)Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (1979)Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (1976)Further Viewing:D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus,"Town Bloody Hall" (1979)Further Listening:KYE, "Midge Decter, Anti-Feminist Cold Warrior (w/ Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub," Jul 28, 2023KYE, "What Happened to Norman (w/ David Klion)," Jan 16, 2020
Reading List:* “When Liberalism Was at Its Best,” Parts 1 (Isaiah Berlin), 2 (Lionel Trilling), and 3 (Reinhold Niebuhr), by Damon Linker.* “Philosophy and the Far Right”—Part 1 and Part 2* “Conservatism and Skepticism”—Part 1 and Part 2My guest on the show today is Damon Linker, perhaps the nation's most enthusiastic, unapologetic center leftist (he and Matt Yglesias occasionally punch it out for the title in an underground fight club built in the tunnels under the charred timbers of the former headquarters of the New Republic). Damon is a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Notes from the Middle Ground newsletters on Substack, is a senior fellow with the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, and is the author of two books, The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege and The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Beliefs of Our Leaders.I asked Damon on the show to discuss his recent series of essays on three of the seminal thinkers of post-war liberalism, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the literary critic Lionel Trilling, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. We also got into his conflicted feelings about the philosopher Leo Strauss and the movement—Straussianism—that he birthed.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe
In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Samuel Moyn about cold war liberalism. They provide a definition of liberalism, cold war liberalism, and some of the differences between these two forms of liberalism. They discuss some of the lessons from Cold War liberals for liberals today and the rise of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. They discuss the work of Judith Shklar, romanticism for Shklar and Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and historicism, Hannah Arendt on liberalism, Lionel Trilling on Freud and Cold War liberalism, the future of liberalism, and many more topics. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He has his law degree from Harvard University and his PhD in modern European history from University of California, Berkeley. He is fellow at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Berggruen Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His main interests are in international law, human rights, and 20th century European moral and political theory. He was recently named one of Propsect Magazine's top thinkers in the world for 2024. He is the author of numerous books including his most recent, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of our Times. Website: https://campuspress.yale.edu/samuelmoyn/Twitter: @samuelmoyn Get full access to Converging Dialogues at convergingdialogues.substack.com/subscribe
On this edition of Parallax Views, Samuel Moyn, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, joins the show to discuss his new book Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. Samuel examines and dissects the beliefs of Cold War intellectuals like Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lionel Trilling, Isaiah Berlin, and Hannah Arendt to argue that liberals of the Cold War in many ways ended up undermining the progressive and Enlightenment principles of the liberal tradition in their attempts to combat communism. In doing so, he makes the case, they helped paved the way not only for modern equivalents/heirs of the Cold War liberalism like Anne Applebaum, Timothy Garton Ash, Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, Tony Judt, and Leon Wieseltierm, but also the reigning power of the current neoliberal order and the withering of the welfare state. A note that this conversation is talking about liberals and liberalism in a very academic sense rather than it's colloquial usage. Among the topics discussed are Judith Shklar's After Utopia (and why Shklar is a guiding force throughout Liberalism Against Itself), Sigmun Freud and the politics of self-regulations, decolonization and paternalisitic racism in the Cold War era, Jonathan Chait's scathing review of Liberalism Against Itself and Samuel's response to it (excluive, thus far, to this show), Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed and Samuel's critique of the burgeoning postliberal right, thoughts on Sohrab Ahmari's Tyranny Inc., Karl Popper of The Open Society and Its Enemies fame and the problem his critique of historicism, the Mont Pelerin Society and neoliberalism, F.A. Hayek, Gertrude Himmelfarb and the Christian thinker Lord Acton, the Cold War liberals' critique of romanticism and Samuel's response to it, the Soviet Union and the idea of Progress and who lays claim to it, the concept of emancipation and the French Revolution, and much, much more!
In his provocative new book, Liberalism Against Itself, historian Samuel Moyn revisits the work of five key Cold War thinkers—Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Lionel Trilling—to explain the deformation of liberalism in the middle of the twentieth century, a time when, in his telling, liberals abandoned their commitment to progress, the Enlightenment, and grand dreams of emancipation and instead embraced fatalism, pessimism, and a narrow conception of freedom. For Moyn, the liberalism that emerged from the Cold War is, lamentably, still with us—a culprit in the rise of Donald Trump, and a barrier to offering a compelling alternative to him. Sources:Samuel Moyn, Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023)Judith Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (1957)Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (1947)Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (1950)Matthew Sitman, "How to Read Reinhold Niebuhr, After 9-11," Society, Spring 2012 ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day
By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, and Lionel Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Phoenix Hou a publié l'année dernière une vidéo intitulée "Learning Languages Ruined my Life" (Apprendre des langues a ruiné ma vie). Phoenix explique que c'est le titre d'un livre de Lionel Trilling qui l'a fait réfléchir à l'impact de l'apprentissage et de la pratique de plusieurs langues sur un individu. Le titre est The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent (L'obligation morale d'être intelligent). Phoenix ne parle pas du contenu du livre, mais se concentre sur le titre : The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent. Mais au lieu de réfléchir à la notion d'intelligence, il se penche sur la notion de polyglottisme. Il explique qu'être polyglotte, c'est-à-dire parler plusieurs langues, est douloureux. Pourquoi est-ce que c'est douloureux ? Find the podcast transcription and information about French courses on my website: https://connect2french.com/podcast/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/connect2french/message
Last year, Remnant regular and AEI scholar Matt Continetti published The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, a tome so nerdy that he and Jonah needed two full podcast episodes just to discuss the first half of it. Today, Matt returns to the program to continue working through the history of the right from the ‘80s to the present. Or, at least, that was the plan. Instead, the conversation ends up focusing on the nature of the new right, how Pat Buchanan changed conservatism, and what Donald Trump's devotees actually want. Plus, listeners of the Commentary podcast will be delighted to find that Matt is actually allowed to speak. Show Notes: - Matt's page at AEI - The Right, now available in paperback - Part one of Matt's previous Remnant nerdfest… - …and part two - The Commentary podcast - Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination - Julius Krein: “I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It.” - Christopher Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites - Tom Wolfe: “The Great Relearning” - Ezra Klein: “The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode, Matt and Sam go deep into the life and times of Whittaker Chambers, most famous for his role in the "trial of the century"—the trial of Alger Hiss for perjury after Chambers accused Hiss of being a Communist spy during his years working in the federal government, especially the State Department. The two figures, once friends, came to symbolize a clash that was bigger than themselves, and prefigured the turn American politics would take at the onset of the Cold War. Chambers would become a hero of the nascent postwar conservative movement, with his status as an ex-Communist—one of many who would congregate around National Review in the mid-to-late 1950s—bringing his moral credibility to the right as one who had seen the other side and lived to tell his tale. Before all that, though, Chambers's life was like something out of a novel: a difficult family life, early brilliance at Columbia University, literary achievement in leftwing publications, and years "underground" engaging in espionage for the Soviet Union against the United States. "Out of my weakness and folly (but also out of my strength), I committed the characteristic crimes of my century," writes Chambers in his 1952 memoir/jeremiad Witness. Your hosts break it all down, assess his crimes and contributions, and explore one of the most consequential American lives of the twentieth century. Sources:Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (1997)Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952)Whittaker Chambers, Cold Friday (1964)Whittaker Chambers, "Big Sister is Watching You," National Review, December 28, 1957The Whittaker Chambers Reader: His Complete National ReviewWritings, 1957-1959 (2014)William F. Buckley, Jr., editor, Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. (1969)L. Brent Bozell, Jr. and William F. Buckley, Jr., McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning (1954)Murray Kempton, Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (1956)Landon R.Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (2013)Richard H. Crossman, editor, The God that Failed: A Confession (1949)Lionel Trilling, The Middle of the Journey (1947)Matthew Richer, "The Cry Against Ninevah: A Centennial Tribute to Whittaker Chambers," Modern Age, Summer 2001Christopher Hitchens, "A Regular Bull," London Review of Books, July 1997Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, "No Laughing Matter" (YouTube, 2007)Jess Bravin, "Whittaker Chambers Award Draws Criticism—From His Family," Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2019Isaac Deutscher, "The Ex-Communist's Conscience," The Reporter, 1950. John Patrick Diggins, Up From Communism: Conservative odysseys in American intellectual history, (1975)Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left, (1961)Larry Ceplair, Anti-Communism in Twentieth-Century America: A Critical History, (2011) ...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!
A direct descendent of a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, Morrow Wilson graduated from The Putney School and from Columbia College, where he studied English and American literature with, among others, Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. Though admitted to Columbia's Graduate School of English, he chose not to pursue an academic career.His father was a writer - a protege of Theodore Dreiser, author of some three dozen books as well as articles in every major American magazine, and a reporter for The Arkansas Gazette, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The New York Times. Doris Grumbach devoted her entire column in The New Republic to Morrow Wilson's first novel, M.I.M. Eliot Fremont-Smith (book critic of The Village Voice, The New York Times and, before that, Editor-in-Chief of Little-Brown) wrote about another, David Sunshine, that it is "delightful and full of truth." And literary agent Virginia Barber described his work this way: "a wonderful writing style" with "tremendous drive and energy."A professional playwright, theatrical producer and award-winning New York actor, as well, Morrow Wilson has written novels, plays, columns, editorials, reviews, short stories and articles. He has been an anthology, encyclopedia, and trade book editor, a publishing executive and twice a small press CEO, has appeared on every New York City broadcast television channel, nationally on Inside Edition, Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, on many radio talk shows, and has been cast in more than 100 New York City stage productions, numerous commercials and six New York soap operas.He has been written up in The New York Times, The New Republic, Crain's New York Business, MORE Magazine, Show Business, The Star, The National Enquirer, The Globe, Columbia College Today and Who's Who in America. He is a member in good standing of the Authors League of America, the Dramatists Guild and the Columbia College Resource Council for the Arts, a life member of The Actors' Fund of America, this country's oldest theatrical charity (recipient of its Encore Award), and a board member of The Players, this country's oldest theatrical and literary social club.*** AND NOW ***The ‘X' Zone TV Channel on SimulTV - www.simultv.comThe ‘X' Zone TV Channel Radio Feed (Free - No Subscription Required) - https://www.spreaker.com/show/xztv-the-x-zone-tv-show-audio The ‘X' Chronicles Newspaper - www.xchroniclesnewspaper.com (Free)To contact Rob McConnell - misterx@xzoneradiotv.com
A direct descendent of a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, Morrow Wilson graduated from The Putney School and from Columbia College, where he studied English and American literature with, among others, Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. Though admitted to Columbia's Graduate School of English, he chose not to pursue an academic career.His father was a writer - a protege of Theodore Dreiser, author of some three dozen books as well as articles in every major American magazine, and a reporter for The Arkansas Gazette, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The New York Times. Doris Grumbach devoted her entire column in The New Republic to Morrow Wilson's first novel, M.I.M. Eliot Fremont-Smith (book critic of The Village Voice, The New York Times and, before that, Editor-in-Chief of Little-Brown) wrote about another, David Sunshine, that it is "delightful and full of truth." And literary agent Virginia Barber described his work this way: "a wonderful writing style" with "tremendous drive and energy."A professional playwright, theatrical producer and award-winning New York actor, as well, Morrow Wilson has written novels, plays, columns, editorials, reviews, short stories and articles. He has been an anthology, encyclopedia, and trade book editor, a publishing executive and twice a small press CEO, has appeared on every New York City broadcast television channel, nationally on Inside Edition, Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, on many radio talk shows, and has been cast in more than 100 New York City stage productions, numerous commercials and six New York soap operas.He has been written up in The New York Times, The New Republic, Crain's New York Business, MORE Magazine, Show Business, The Star, The National Enquirer, The Globe, Columbia College Today and Who's Who in America. He is a member in good standing of the Authors League of America, the Dramatists Guild and the Columbia College Resource Council for the Arts, a life member of The Actors' Fund of America, this country's oldest theatrical charity (recipient of its Encore Award), and a board member of The Players, this country's oldest theatrical and literary social club.*** AND NOW ***BEAUTIFUL MIND COFFEE is delicious coffee your brain will love.Made with ethically sourced 100% Arabica coffee grown in the volcanic soil of the Tolima Columbia region, BEAUTIFUL MIND COFFEE is roasted and ground in small batches, to ensure each bag contains a wonderful full bodied artisan coffee.BEAUTIFUL MIND COFFEE contains herbal ingredients to aid in boosting your daily mental clarity and focus.Maca root powder, green tea extract and American ginseng have all been selected for their ability to support good brain health.Taking care of your brain's health now can help delay or prevent the onset of cognitive dysfunction, including dementia, Alzheimer's, and more general memory loss as you get older just by enjoying the delicious flavor of our roasted coffee and herbal ingredients found exclusively in BEAUTIFUL MIND COFFEE .For more information on BEAUTIFUL MIND COFFEE visit us online at www.beautifulmindcoffee.ca.BEAUTIFUL MIND COFFEE is NOW available at Amazon.ca
In this episode, we finish up reading Mansfield Park, with Chapters 46 to 48. We talk about contrasts within the book, the attitude to Maria and Henry, Edmund and Fanny's views of Mary, Sir Thomas's reflections in the final chapter, the wrapping up of the other characters and how we are told about Edmund falling in love with Fanny.We discuss Fanny Price, then Ellen talks about principle and education, and Harriet looks at how adaptations and modernisations treat these chapters. Things we mention: General and character discussion:Margaret Drabble, “Introduction”, Mansfield Park (1996 – Signet Classics edition)Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant [volume 5 of A Dance to the Music of Time] (1960)William Shakespeare, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern, Talking of Jane Austen (1943) and More Talk of Jane Austen (1950)Tony Tanner, various works including “Introduction”, Mansfield Park (1966 – Penguin Books edition)Marvin Mudrick, Jane Austen; irony as defense and discovery (1952)Mary Brunton, Self-Control (1810)Linda V Troost and Sayre N Greenfield, “A History of the Fanny Wars”, Persuasions 36 (1), 2014, pp. 15–33.D W Harding, ‘Regulated Hatred: An aspect of the work of Jane Austen', Scrutiny, 8 (4), 1940, pp. 346–362.C S Lewis, ‘A Note on Jane Austen', Essays in Criticism, IV (4), October 1954, pp. 359–371.Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park“, Partisan Review 21 (September-October 1954): 492-511. Also published in Encounter, September 1954: 9-19.Kingsley Amis, “What Became of Jane Austen?”, The Spectator, 4 October 1957 – republished in What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions (1970)Historical discussion:Maria Edgeworth, Moral Tales: Angelina; Or L'amie Inconnue. the Good French Governess. Mademoiselle Panache. the Knapsack (1801)Popular culture discussion:Adaptations:BBC, Mansfield Park (1983) – starring Sylvestra Le Touzel and Nicholas Farrell (6 episodes)Miramax, Mansfield Park (1999) – starring Frances O'Connor and Jonny Lee MillerITV, Mansfield Park (2007) – starring Billie Piper and Blake RitsonModernisations:YouTube, Foot in the Door Theatre, From Mansfield With Love (2014-2015)D.E. Stevenson, Celia's House (1943)For a list of music used, see this episode on our website.
A direct descendent of a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, Morrow Wilson graduated from The Putney School and from Columbia College, where he studied English and American literature with, among others, Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. Though admitted to Columbia's Graduate School of English, he chose not to pursue an academic career.His father was a writer - a protege of Theodore Dreiser, author of some three dozen books as well as articles in every major American magazine, and a reporter for The Arkansas Gazette, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The New York Times. Doris Grumbach devoted her entire column in The New Republic to Morrow Wilson's first novel, M.I.M. Eliot Fremont-Smith (book critic of The Village Voice, The New York Times and, before that, Editor-in-Chief of Little-Brown) wrote about another, David Sunshine, that it is "delightful and full of truth." And literary agent Virginia Barber described his work this way: "a wonderful writing style" with "tremendous drive and energy."A professional playwright, theatrical producer and award-winning New York actor, as well, Morrow Wilson has written novels, plays, columns, editorials, reviews, short stories and articles. He has been an anthology, encyclopedia, and trade book editor, a publishing executive and twice a small press CEO, has appeared on every New York City broadcast television channel, nationally on Inside Edition, Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, on many radio talk shows, and has been cast in more than 100 New York City stage productions, numerous commercials and six New York soap operas.He has been written up in The New York Times, The New Republic, Crain's New York Business, MORE Magazine, Show Business, The Star, The National Enquirer, The Globe, Columbia College Today and Who's Who in America. He is a member in good standing of the Authors League of America, the Dramatists Guild and the Columbia College Resource Council for the Arts, a life member of The Actors' Fund of America, this country's oldest theatrical charity (recipient of its Encore Award), and a board member of The Players, this country's oldest theatrical and literary social club.*** AND NOW ***The ‘X' Zone TV Channel on SimulTV - www.simultv.comThe ‘X' Zone TV Channel Radio Feed (Free - No Subscription Required) - https://www.spreaker.com/show/xztv-the-x-zone-tv-show-audio The ‘X' Chronicles Newspaper - www.xchroniclesnewspaper.com (Free)To contact Rob McConnell - misterx@xzoneradiotv.com
With death close at hand, Castaneda races against the clock to finish what will be his very last book. But in order to complete it, he will need to author the final chapter of his own life. After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/38bJ9YcOne Extra Thing: bit.ly/3P5a8oODiscussion Thread: bit.ly/3MRWBPIwww.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval Shapira We wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter
Intimating the end, Castaneda decides it is time for him to anoint his successor, the next nagual. His selection is Tony Karam—a student not only of his but also the Dalia Lama. Castaneda informs Tony that has a year to decide whether or not to take the position of the nagual. After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/3vA6Ge4One Extra Thing: bit.ly/3y3clv7Discussion Thread: bit.ly/3MY1cjdwww.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval Shapira We wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter
With the start of the ‘80s, Carlos Castaneda has now become the darling of the New Age movement. But while New Agers are busy championing his past work, Castaneda has begun turning his sights to something new—a secretive project unlike anything he's done before. To secure the help needed, Castaneda opens up admission to his circle of followers. Hollywood producer Janet Yang soon becomes one of his most prized recruits. After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/3vecjyMOne Extra Thing: bit.ly/3vdhZcjDiscussion Thread: bit.ly/3xSWMG5www.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval Shapira We wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter Trickster Podcast, LLC. All rights reserved.
The Remnant ascends to a higher plane of nerdom today, as Matthew Continetti returns to discuss his new book, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. This episode presents the first half of a two-hour conversation between Jonah and Matt, which takes us on a freewheeling journey from the ‘20s to the ‘70s. They begin by exploring whether it's possible to provide a simple definition of conservatism before digging deeply into the evolution of the movement. What did conservatism look like before the New Deal? How did William F. Buckley Jr. shape modern politics? Is fusionism still relevant? And how should we remember figures like Richard Nixon, Calvin Coolidge, and George Wallace? All of these questions and more are addressed within. But to learn about the Reagan era onward, and to hear some of Jonah's quibbles with the book, you'll have to tune in next week. Show Notes:- Matthew's page at AEI- The Right, available now- George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945- George Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences- Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind- Matthew previews The Right in the Wall Street Journal- Frank Meyer's reluctant and apologetic essay collection, What Is Conservatism?- Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination- The Remnant with Stephanie Slade- How William F. Buckley changed his mind on civil rights- Buckley's The Unmaking of a Mayor- Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative
This is a live recording. I will be coming back to this episode, to ruminate and redo. That version is some weeks away. This is an episode about freedom. Freedom was the title of a book I read over the holiday period. Link below. 9.38 The Article I read out from: https://culturacolectiva.com/books/on-the-road-jack-kerouac/“Without this book we might have never had Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or films such as Thelma and Louise, Paris, Texas, or Easy Rider. Kerouac's influence is such that in the biographical Light My Fire: My Life With The Doors, the band's keyboard player, Ray Manzarek, claimed that without that book, the band might not have existed.” 12.17 Lines from the Ghost Song, by the Doors. Links Learner Centered Design Education: https://rawslearn.wordpress.com/ Who is Soumitri: http://soumitri.com.au/ On the Road by Jack Kerouac: LINK “With his barbaric yawp of a book, Kerouac commands attention as a kind of literary James Dean,” the reviewer noted. The Free World by Louis Menand: Book Review LINK Menand is truly one of the great explainers. He quotes approvingly a lesson taken by Lionel Trilling from his editor Elliot Cohen: “No idea was so difficult and complex but that it could be expressed in a way that would make it understood by anyone to whom it might conceivably be of interest.” Menand puts his own practice to the test. He is accurate, he is insightful, and he is not a dumber-downer. It is notoriously hard to summarize Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, structural linguistics, serial composition in music, or the formation of Great Power rivalries in the period of decolonization. Menand's account of each is an abbreviated tour de force. His explanations work at all levels: interpretation for scholars, review for general readers, introductions for neophytes. Where another writer would take 20 pages to tell us why someone or something mattered historically, Menand does it in two. Howl by Ginsberg: Review LINK Ginsberg's poem was an incantatory epic – emotionally and sexually explicit and intent on exploding the anxieties of the atomic age. Podcasts John Cage: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/strong-songs/id1443417194?i=1000484979414 How Not Podcast, John Cage: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/how-not/id1562586787?i=1000525410531 The Reason Interview, Louis Menand Interview: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-reason-interview-with-nick-gillespie/id1485021241?i=1000529629177 Legacy, Jack Kerouac: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/legacy-the-artists-behind-the-legends/id1232652684?i=1000427749693 Witness Archive, Jackson Pollock: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/witness-history-archive-2012/id1003007466?i=1000377912938
In this episode, we read Chapters 12 to 16 of Mansfield Park. We talk about why Fanny refuses to act, why Edmund agrees to join in, the sheer amount of comedy in the scenes of the theatricals, and the Cinderella aspect of the plot.We talk about Tom Bertram, and then Ellen looks at theatre in the Regency period, and why Fanny and Edmund disapprove of the the theatricals. Harriet talks about the popular culture versions, including some modernisations and a variation that she hasn't looked at before.Things we mention: General and character discussion:John Wiltshire [Editor], The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen: Mansfield Park (2005)Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park“, Partisan Review 21 (September-October 1954): 492-511. Also published in Encounter, September 1954: 9-19.Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern, Talking of Jane Austen (1943) Historical discussion:Chuck Hudson, ‘Theatre in Georgian England' (2015)Elizabeth Inchbald, Lovers's Vows [full text on Project Gutenberg] (1798)Deirdre Le Faye [Editor], Jane Austen's Letters (1995)Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park“, Partisan Review 21 (September-October 1954): 492-511. Also published in Encounter, September 1954: 9-19.Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite, 30 Great Myths about Jane Austen (2020)Popular culture discussion:Adaptations:BBC, Mansfield Park (1983) – starring Sylvestra Le Touzel and Nicholas Farrell (6 episodes)Miramax, Mansfield Park (1999) – starring Frances O'Connor and Jonny Lee MillerITV, Mansfield Park (2007) – starring Billie Piper and Blake RitsonModernisations:Westerly Films, Allagash Films, Metropolitan (1990) – starring Carolyn Farina and Edward ClementsYouTube, Foot in the Door Theatre, From Mansfield With Love (2014-2015)D.E. Stevenson, Celia's House (1943)John Mullan, Live at the Hay Festival (2014) [YouTube] – referred to in the discussion of Celia's HouseVariations:Lona Manning, A Contrary Wind(2017), A Marriage of Attachment (2018) and A Different Kind of Woman (2020) For a list of music used, see this episode on our website.
In this episode, we read Chapters 4 to 7 of Mansfield Park. We talk about the character-revealing scenes, how the presentation of Fanny may make some readers dislike her, why Maria became engaged to Mr Rushworth, and Henry Crawford's behaviour.We discuss the character of Mary Crawford – who is perhaps almost as divisive as Fanny Price – and then Ellen talks about baronets, Members of Parliament, and the idea of ‘interest'. Harriet considers how the three adaptations, and two of the modernisations, present these chapters. Things we mention: General and character discussion:John Wiltshire [Editor], The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen: Mansfield Park (2005)Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park“, Partisan Review 21 (September-October 1954): 492-511. Also published in Encounter, September 1954: 9-19.Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern, Talking of Jane Austen (1943) and More Talk of Jane Austen (1950)John Mullan, Live at the Hay Festival (2014) [YouTube]Kingsley Amis, “What Became of Jane Austen?”, The Spectator, 4 October 1957 – republished in What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions (1970)The Daily Knightley (2021) [podcast] Popular culture discussion:Adaptations:BBC, Mansfield Park (1983) – starring Sylvestra Le Touzel and Nicholas Farrell (6 episodes)Miramax, Mansfield Park (1999) – starring Frances O'Connor and Jonny Lee MillerITV, Mansfield Park (2007) – starring Billie Piper and Blake RitsonModernisations:YouTube, Foot in the Door Theatre, From Mansfield With Love (2014-2015)D.E. Stevenson, Celia's House (1943)Creative commons music used: Extract from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sonata No. 12 in F Major, ii. Adagio.Extract from Joseph Haydn, Piano Sonata No. 38. Performance by Ivan Ilić, recorded in Manchester in December, 2006. File originally from IMSLP.Extract from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sonata No. 13 in B-Flat Major, iii. Allegretto Grazioso. File originally from Musopen.Extract from George Frideric Handel, Suite I, No. 2 in F Major, ii. Allegro. File originally from Musopen. Extract from Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 28 in A major. File originally from Musopen.
The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense―economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Rights spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.
A direct descendent of a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, Morrow Wilson graduated from The Putney School and from Columbia College, where he studied English and American literature with, among others, Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. Though admitted to Columbia's Graduate School of English, he chose not to pursue an academic career.His father was a writer - a protege of Theodore Dreiser, author of some three dozen books as well as articles in every major American magazine, and a reporter for The Arkansas Gazette, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The New York Times. Doris Grumbach devoted her entire column in The New Republic to Morrow Wilson's first novel, M.I.M. Eliot Fremont-Smith (book critic of The Village Voice, The New York Times and, before that, Editor-in-Chief of Little-Brown) wrote about another, David Sunshine, that it is "delightful and full of truth." And literary agent Virginia Barber described his work this way: "a wonderful writing style" with "tremendous drive and energy."A professional playwright, theatrical producer and award-winning New York actor, as well, Morrow Wilson has written novels, plays, columns, editorials, reviews, short stories and articles. He has been an anthology, encyclopedia, and trade book editor, a publishing executive and twice a small press CEO, has appeared on every New York City broadcast television channel, nationally on Inside Edition, Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, on many radio talk shows, and has been cast in more than 100 New York City stage productions, numerous commercials and six New York soap operas.He has been written up in The New York Times, The New Republic, Crain's New York Business, MORE Magazine, Show Business, The Star, The National Enquirer, The Globe, Columbia College Today and Who's Who in America. He is a member in good standing of the Authors League of America, the Dramatists Guild and the Columbia College Resource Council for the Arts, a life member of The Actors' Fund of America, this country's oldest theatrical charity (recipient of its Encore Award), and a board member of The Players, this country's oldest theatrical and literary social club.*** AND NOW ***The ‘X' Zone TV Channel on SimulTV - www.simultv.comThe ‘X' Zone TV Channel Radio Feed (Free - No Subscription Required) - https://www.spreaker.com/show/xztv-the-x-zone-tv-show-audio The ‘X' Chronicles Newspaper - www.xchroniclesnewspaper.com (Free)To contact Rob McConnell - misterx@xzoneradiotv.com
A direct descendent of a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, Morrow Wilson graduated from The Putney School and from Columbia College, where he studied English and American literature with, among others, Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. Though admitted to Columbia's Graduate School of English, he chose not to pursue an academic career.His father was a writer - a protege of Theodore Dreiser, author of some three dozen books as well as articles in every major American magazine, and a reporter for The Arkansas Gazette, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The New York Times. Doris Grumbach devoted her entire column in The New Republic to Morrow Wilson's first novel, M.I.M. Eliot Fremont-Smith (book critic of The Village Voice, The New York Times and, before that, Editor-in-Chief of Little-Brown) wrote about another, David Sunshine, that it is "delightful and full of truth." And literary agent Virginia Barber described his work this way: "a wonderful writing style" with "tremendous drive and energy."A professional playwright, theatrical producer and award-winning New York actor, as well, Morrow Wilson has written novels, plays, columns, editorials, reviews, short stories and articles. He has been an anthology, encyclopedia, and trade book editor, a publishing executive and twice a small press CEO, has appeared on every New York City broadcast television channel, nationally on Inside Edition, Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, on many radio talk shows, and has been cast in more than 100 New York City stage productions, numerous commercials and six New York soap operas.He has been written up in The New York Times, The New Republic, Crain's New York Business, MORE Magazine, Show Business, The Star, The National Enquirer, The Globe, Columbia College Today and Who's Who in America. He is a member in good standing of the Authors League of America, the Dramatists Guild and the Columbia College Resource Council for the Arts, a life member of The Actors' Fund of America, this country's oldest theatrical charity (recipient of its Encore Award), and a board member of The Players, this country's oldest theatrical and literary social club.*** AND NOW ***The ‘X' Zone TV Channel on SimulTV - www.simultv.comThe ‘X' Zone TV Channel Radio Feed (Free - No Subscription Required) - https://www.spreaker.com/show/xztv-the-x-zone-tv-show-audio The ‘X' Chronicles Newspaper - www.xchroniclesnewspaper.com (Free)To contact Rob McConnell - misterx@xzoneradiotv.com
In search of a creative elixir to bring new life to his flailing film career, the great Italian director, Federico Fellini, pursues his long-cherished dream of adapting Castaneda's books into films. But on his trip to Los Angeles, in 1984, to meet Castaneda, his dream soon turns into a nightmare. After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/3a5adFLOne Extra Thing: bit.ly/3A1ykQoDiscussion Thread: bit.ly/3ivJGGy www.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval Shapira We wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter
The story of what put Patricia Partin on the path to Death Valley is a story that ultimately goes back to her childhood. It's a story of how a devastating family tragedy can alter the whole course of a person's life. After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/3i6WcvWOne Extra Thing: bit.ly/3CNEPrJDiscussion Thread: bit.ly/2XsR0Le www.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval Shapira We wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter Trickster Podcast, LLC. All rights reserved.
Celebrating the launch of Season 2 with Moby! We'll take you back to the beginning of Yaddo, with a live performance by director and Tony Award-winning actress Blair Brown and legendary artist John Kelly. PLUS the mega-talented photographer and activist Dona Ann McAdams offers a preview of “Hardboots & Legends,” her ongoing project on the behind-the-scenes backstretch workers at the oldest horse racing track in America—Saratoga Racecourse. Contributing artists: Hot Club of Saratoga, Patricia Highsmith, Sylvia Plath, Lionel Trilling on James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, Carson McCullers, John Cheever, Katherine Anne Porter, Leo Lerman, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Michael Cunningham, Amy Tan.
Richard de Mille—son of the famed Hollywood director—makes it his mission to prove that Castaneda has perpetuated the greatest literary hoax of the 20th century. But spurring his investigation to uncover Castaneda's secrets are secrets of his own. After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/3lDVU0uOne Extra Thing: bit.ly/2XIeUD1Discussion Thread: bit.ly/39oUnWq www.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval ShapiraWe wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter Trickster Podcast, LLC. All rights reserved.
Carlos Castaneda didn't just write about a Don Juan—he was one. Over the course of his life, his magnetic personality pulled innumerable women into his orbit. Most stayed briefly. Only a few lasted long enough to see all the different facets that lay underneath the surface of his charismatic personality. One of them was Gloria Garvin. And this is her story. After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/3tF7dZJOne Extra Thing: bit.ly/3EeJqEPDiscussion Thread: bit.ly/3E3MTGe www.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval ShapiraWe wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter Trickster Podcast, LLC. All rights reserved.
Dan had the opportunity to study under some of the greatest teachers/writers/critics of the 20th century, including Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. Rabbi Harold Kushner was also there. He also lived in New York at the height of the popularity of Freudian analysis. In this episode, he talks about the people he knew at Columbia, his work with C. Wright Mills, how analysis almost killed him, and about the importance of pure will in a writer's life and work.
A Pumpkin Patch, a Typewriter, and Richard Nixon: The Hiss-Chambers Espionage Case
Whittaker Chambers tries to have a peaceful life, working a farm and becoming a high-paid and powerful editor at Time Magazine. But his past in the Soviet underground won't go away. Stalin's pact with Hitler impels him to inform the government about the underground. Worse, from time to time government investigators ask him for more and more information. Chambers tries to expose the conspiracy without ruining his own career or the friends who shared his treason. How long can he continue threading the needle? If you were Chambers, how would you walk the tightrope, trying to alert the government about the Soviet underground without exposing your own role in its crimes and incriminating your best friend in those years, with whom you committed those crimes? If Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers both witnessed an event and gave different accounts of it, which one would you be more inclined to believe? Hiss, the public man, has the resume to die for and all The Top People vouching for him. Chambers, the creature of the underground, has been a professional liar for years and loves to tell melodramatic tales. But is there something too good to be true about Hiss? Do you wonder who is the real man behind the resume? And while no one would say that Chambers is the embodiment of moderation, he is painfully honest in many ways and he does not hide all his past sins. Even if your first inclination would be to believe Hiss, what would make you change to put more faith in Chambers? Further Research: Episode 3: Professor Weinstein's book and Chambers' memoir, referenced above, contain much about what Chambers called “the tranquil years.” Re Chambers' emergence from the Communist underground, interesting memoirs are “The Autobiography of Mark Van Doren” by Mark Van Doren at 218-19 (Harcourt Brace & Co, 1958), “Navigating the Rapids 1918-1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle” edited by Beatrice B. Berle & Travis B. Jacobs at 249-50 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1973), and “Eyewitness to History: Memoirs and Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent for Half a Century” by Isaac Don Levine at 179-200 (Hawthorn Books 1973). Levine was the journalist who accompanied Chambers to see Berle the day World War II began. The best books about Chambers' career at Time are “Harry & Teddy: The Turbulent Friendship of Press Lord Henry Luce and His Favorite Reporter, Theodore H. White” by Thomas Griffith (Random House 1995) and “One Man's America: A Journalist's Search for the Heart of His Country” by Henry Grunwald (Doubleday 1997). Look in each book's index for references to Whittaker Chambers. Concerning the disillusionment with Communism by intellectuals who had been bedazzled by it, see “The God That Failed,” edited by Richard Crossman (Columbia Univ. Press 2001, first published in London in 1950), “Up From Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History” by John P. Diggins (Harper & Row 1975), and “A Better World: The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals” by William L. O'Neill (Simon & Schuster 1982) 259-368 passim. Chambers' admirer in Columbia and later a great Comparative Literature Professor there, Lionel Trilling, wrote a novel about leftist disillusionment with radical leftism. Originally published just before the Hiss-Chambers scandal broke, it was reissued in 1975 (around the time of President Nixon's disgrace). “The Middle of the Journey” by Lionel Trilling (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1975). A major character in the novel, Gifford Maxim, is based on Chambers and the 1975 reissue contains an introduction by Trilling that describes his long relationship with Chambers.
A Pumpkin Patch, a Typewriter, and Richard Nixon: The Hiss-Chambers Espionage Case
Picture: Library of Congress Meet Whittaker Chambers: brilliant, melodramatic, painfully sincere, perpetually discontented and idealistic, and physically hard to forget; writer of controversial poems, plays, short stories, and communist journalism; and, as spymaster for Soviet Military Intelligence, traitor to the United States. Further Research Episode 2: About Chambers' early and communist years, here are some references: 1) Chambers' autobiography Witness, the first 450 pages. The book is still in print and, like most books about this case, can be found on Amazon and eBay. One reviewer said that Chambers' description of his middle class family's wreckage was heart-breaking. One might compare it to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman or Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Chambers' description of his life in the Communist movement (above ground and underground and his attempt to escape) has been compared to Dante's Inferno. 2) Professor Weinstein's Perjury (referenced above) at 92-106, 110-42, 148-64, and 325-33. 3) Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, by Meyer M. Zeligs, M.D. This is a psychobiography of Hiss and Chambers, painting Chambers in a lugubrious light. See pages 27-132, 201-74. I have no expertise in psychiatry or related fields, but to me this book seems a relic of 1950s/60s psychiatry, when Freud was compared to Aristotle and Copernicus. The eminent liberal intellectual Lionel Trilling (an admirer of Chambers), wrote that “no other work does as much as this one to bring into question the viability of the infant discipline of psycho-history.” I include it here, not only because it may have some value today, but mostly because it shows that the real facts of Chambers' life can be used, by skillful hands and a determined mind, to make him seem lunatic.
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), Professor Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), Professor Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), Professor Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), Professor Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), Professor Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), Professor Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), Professor Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), Professor Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), Professor Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies
In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, acclaimed scholar and critic Louis Menand, Professor of English at Harvard University and staff writer at The New Yorker, offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years. The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2021), Professor Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage's residencies at North Carolina's Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg's friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin's transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag's challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood. Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America's once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies
Why The 60's Still Fascinate Us - A direct descendent of a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, Morrow Wilson graduated from The Putney School and from Columbia College, where he studied English and American literature with, among others, Mark Van Doren and Lionel Trilling. Though admitted to Columbia's Graduate School of English, he chose not to pursue an academic career.His father was a writer - a protege of Theodore Dreiser, author of some three dozen books as well as articles in every major American magazine, and a reporter for The Arkansas Gazette, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The New York Times. Doris Grumbach devoted her entire column in The New Republic to Morrow Wilson's first novel, M.I.M. Eliot Fremont-Smith (book critic of The Village Voice, The New York Times and, before that, Editor-in-Chief of Little-Brown) wrote about another, David Sunshine, that it is "delightful and full of truth." And literary agent Virginia Barber described his work this way: "a wonderful writing style" with "tremendous drive and energy."A professional playwright, theatrical producer and award-winning New York actor, as well, Morrow Wilson has written novels, plays, columns, editorials, reviews, short stories and articles. He has been an anthology, encyclopedia, and trade book editor, a publishing executive and twice a small press CEO, has appeared on every New York City broadcast television channel, nationally on Inside Edition, Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, on many radio talk shows, and has been cast in more than 100 New York City stage productions, numerous commercials and six New York soap operas.He has been written up in The New York Times, The New Republic, Crain's New York Business, MORE Magazine, Show Business, The Star, The National Enquirer, The Globe, Columbia College Today and Who's Who in America. He is a member in good standing of the Authors League of America, the Dramatists Guild and the Columbia College Resource Council for the Arts, a life member of The Actors' Fund of America, this country's oldest theatrical charity (recipient of its Encore Award), and a board member of The Players, this country's oldest theatrical and literary social club.For Your Listening Pleasure for these Lockdown / Stay-At-Home COVID and Variants Times - For all the radio shows available on The 'X' Zone Broadcast Network visit - https://www.spreaker.com/user/xzoneradiotv.Our radio shows archives and programming include: A Different Perspective with Kevin Randle; Alien Cosmic Expo Lecture Series; Alien Worlds Radio Show; America's Soul Doctor with Ken Unger; Back in Control Radio Show with Dr. David Hanscom, MD; Connecting with Coincidence with Dr. Bernard Beitman, MD; Dick Tracy; Dimension X; Exploring Tomorrow Radio Show; Flash Gordon; Imagine More Success Radio Show with Syndee Hendricks and Thomas Hydes; Jet Jungle Radio Show; Journey Into Space; Know the Name with Sharon Lynn Wyeth; Lux Radio Theatre - Classic Old Time Radio; Mission Evolution with Gwilda Wiyaka; Paranormal StakeOut with Larry Lawson; Ray Bradbury - Tales Of The Bizarre; Sci Fi Radio Show; Seek Reality with Roberta Grimes; Space Patrol; Stairway to Heaven with Gwilda Wiyaka; The 'X' Zone Radio Show with Rob McConnell; Two Good To Be True with Justina Marsh and Peter Marsh; and many other!That's The ‘X' Zone Broadcast Network Shows and Archives - https://www.spreaker.com/user/xzoneradiotv
ATELIER SPECIAL: YOU, ME, AND THE SCREEN BETWEEN (AN ELEGY) -- A novelist doesn't have to write about the here and now in order to be writing about the here and now. In this special installment of In the Atelier: a new essay by M. Allen Cunningham about how today's civic breakdowns are rooted in a pandemic of screen-addiction that goes back to a misunderstood chapter of American history. Cunningham's new novel Q&A reimagines those historic events in light of our own time. You can read Cunningham's essay in full at: medium.com/@M_A_Cunningham Find excerpts from Cunningham's novel at: mallencunningham.com/qa Mentioned in this episode: clarity of mind and clarity of line; M. Allen Cunningham's novel Q&A; what screens gave us; agitation; neverending flood of images; instantaneousness; Daniel J. Boorstin; involuntary commitments; landfills; questioning the value of privacy; all things reduced to equivalence; performing our lives; sharing economy; attention economy; gig economy; creative class; the Arab Spring; Occupy Wall Street; the Million Women March; Black Lives Matter; new neural networks; from ideas to memes; bots and trolls; 45th American presidency; impeachment; big onscreen metrics; television history; quiz shows; quiz show scandals; Twenty-One; Charles Van Doren; Columbia University; Pulitzer Prize; TV fakes; Van Doren's Congressional statement; disinformation; conspiracy theories; CBS Radio's Invitation to Learning; the warped logic of the small screen; rewards come to those who fake; Lionel Trilling; Trilling's Sincerity & Authenticity; self-deception; seeming over being; JFK assassination; Vietnam War; OJ Simpson trial; reality TV; "likes," "friends," & stats; Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; techno-cultural remodeling of self and society; democratic breakdowns; The Apprentice; counterfeit selves; ideological entrenchment; bamboozling the self; web-enabled tools of self-delusion; viral falsehoods; Covid; the 2020 election; windows versus mirrors; screen addiction; narcissism; the screen mind; YouTube; the insanity of January 6th, 2021. Music: "Youth" by ANBR; "Tremors" by Spearfisher; "Tell Me You Love Me" by Kick Lee; "Unknown" by Kutiman; "Blood Meridian" by Spearfisher; "Thoughts" by ANBR (All music used courtesy of the artists through a licensing agreement with Artlist.) --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/in-the-atelier/support
For the run-up to our episode on MassCult and MidCult, listen as Michial Farmer talks with David Grubbs and Danny Anderson about Lionel Trilling's essay "On the Teaching of Modern Literature."
For the run-up to our episode on MassCult and MidCult, listen as Michial Farmer talks with David Grubbs and Danny Anderson about Lionel Trilling's essay "On the Teaching of Modern Literature."
Michael Aeschliman joins Editor R. R. Reno to discuss the legacy of Lionel Trilling.
“In 1999, Edwin Frank founded New York Review Books to reintroduce out-of-print works—many in first translations from around the world—to the reading public. In the last seventeen years, you’ve likely picked up a New York Review Book—maybe because you were taken with its arresting design, or because you recognized a work you didn’t know by a major author: Walt Whitman’s unexpurgated Drum-Taps, say, or unpublished stories by Chekhov, or new versions of Aeschylus and Balzac, Dante and Euripides, or essay collections by Sartre, Lionel Trilling, Renata Adler, and Janet Malcolm. Since its inception, the series has won dozens of awards for its translations; the New York Times chose Magda Szabó’s The Door as one of the ten best books of 2015. New York Review Books have met not just with critical plaudits but commercial success, which naturally leads the curious reader to wonder: Who is Edwin Frank, anyway?” - Susannah Hunnewell, The Paris Review. Find out exactly who Edwin Frank is and what goes into his process of reissuing books in this installment of "Leonard Lopate at Large"
In her new book, The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling (Columbia University Press, 2017), Natalie Robins examines the life of writer and socialite Diana Trilling (1905-1996). Trilling wrote for The Nation, Harpers, and Partisan Review as well as popular magazines McCalls and Vogue. In addition, she wrote Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor and four other books. The wife of professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling, Diana also edited his work, serving as his most trusted confidant. Robins shares the inner struggles Diana endured through her relationship with Lionel as well as her competing public and private work. In this thorough biography, Robins' extensive and well-researched history of Trilling sheds insight into Diana's life. She examines Trilling's position in anticommunist liberal politics, family feminism, and the university literary circles. Spotlighting an influential member of New York City culture, Robins' work on Diana Trilling is an important addition to literary and popular history of the 1960s. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In her new book, The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling (Columbia University Press, 2017), Natalie Robins examines the life of writer and socialite Diana Trilling (1905-1996). Trilling wrote for The Nation, Harpers, and Partisan Review as well as popular magazines McCalls and Vogue. In addition, she wrote Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor and four other books. The wife of professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling, Diana also edited his work, serving as his most trusted confidant. Robins shares the inner struggles Diana endured through her relationship with Lionel as well as her competing public and private work. In this thorough biography, Robins' extensive and well-researched history of Trilling sheds insight into Diana's life. She examines Trilling's position in anticommunist liberal politics, family feminism, and the university literary circles. Spotlighting an influential member of New York City culture, Robins' work on Diana Trilling is an important addition to literary and popular history of the 1960s. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu.
In her new book, The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling (Columbia University Press, 2017), Natalie Robins examines the life of writer and socialite Diana Trilling (1905-1996). Trilling wrote for The Nation, Harpers, and Partisan Review as well as popular magazines McCalls and Vogue. In addition, she wrote Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor and four other books. The wife of professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling, Diana also edited his work, serving as his most trusted confidant. Robins shares the inner struggles Diana endured through her relationship with Lionel as well as her competing public and private work. In this thorough biography, Robins’ extensive and well-researched history of Trilling sheds insight into Diana’s life. She examines Trilling’s position in anticommunist liberal politics, family feminism, and the university literary circles. Spotlighting an influential member of New York City culture, Robins’ work on Diana Trilling is an important addition to literary and popular history of the 1960s. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In her new book, The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling (Columbia University Press, 2017), Natalie Robins examines the life of writer and socialite Diana Trilling (1905-1996). Trilling wrote for The Nation, Harpers, and Partisan Review as well as popular magazines McCalls and Vogue. In addition, she wrote Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor and four other books. The wife of professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling, Diana also edited his work, serving as his most trusted confidant. Robins shares the inner struggles Diana endured through her relationship with Lionel as well as her competing public and private work. In this thorough biography, Robins’ extensive and well-researched history of Trilling sheds insight into Diana’s life. She examines Trilling’s position in anticommunist liberal politics, family feminism, and the university literary circles. Spotlighting an influential member of New York City culture, Robins’ work on Diana Trilling is an important addition to literary and popular history of the 1960s. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In her new book, The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling (Columbia University Press, 2017), Natalie Robins examines the life of writer and socialite Diana Trilling (1905-1996). Trilling wrote for The Nation, Harpers, and Partisan Review as well as popular magazines McCalls and Vogue. In addition, she wrote Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor and four other books. The wife of professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling, Diana also edited his work, serving as his most trusted confidant. Robins shares the inner struggles Diana endured through her relationship with Lionel as well as her competing public and private work. In this thorough biography, Robins’ extensive and well-researched history of Trilling sheds insight into Diana’s life. She examines Trilling’s position in anticommunist liberal politics, family feminism, and the university literary circles. Spotlighting an influential member of New York City culture, Robins’ work on Diana Trilling is an important addition to literary and popular history of the 1960s. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In her new book, The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling (Columbia University Press, 2017), Natalie Robins examines the life of writer and socialite Diana Trilling (1905-1996). Trilling wrote for The Nation, Harpers, and Partisan Review as well as popular magazines McCalls and Vogue. In addition, she wrote Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor and four other books. The wife of professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling, Diana also edited his work, serving as his most trusted confidant. Robins shares the inner struggles Diana endured through her relationship with Lionel as well as her competing public and private work. In this thorough biography, Robins’ extensive and well-researched history of Trilling sheds insight into Diana’s life. She examines Trilling’s position in anticommunist liberal politics, family feminism, and the university literary circles. Spotlighting an influential member of New York City culture, Robins’ work on Diana Trilling is an important addition to literary and popular history of the 1960s. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In her new book, The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling (Columbia University Press, 2017), Natalie Robins examines the life of writer and socialite Diana Trilling (1905-1996). Trilling wrote for The Nation, Harpers, and Partisan Review as well as popular magazines McCalls and Vogue. In addition, she wrote Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor and four other books. The wife of professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling, Diana also edited his work, serving as his most trusted confidant. Robins shares the inner struggles Diana endured through her relationship with Lionel as well as her competing public and private work. In this thorough biography, Robins’ extensive and well-researched history of Trilling sheds insight into Diana’s life. She examines Trilling’s position in anticommunist liberal politics, family feminism, and the university literary circles. Spotlighting an influential member of New York City culture, Robins’ work on Diana Trilling is an important addition to literary and popular history of the 1960s. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In her new book, The Untold Journey: The Life of Diana Trilling (Columbia University Press, 2017), Natalie Robins examines the life of writer and socialite Diana Trilling (1905-1996). Trilling wrote for The Nation, Harpers, and Partisan Review as well as popular magazines McCalls and Vogue. In addition, she wrote Mrs. Harris: The Death of the Scarsdale Diet Doctor and four other books. The wife of professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling, Diana also edited his work, serving as his most trusted confidant. Robins shares the inner struggles Diana endured through her relationship with Lionel as well as her competing public and private work. In this thorough biography, Robins’ extensive and well-researched history of Trilling sheds insight into Diana’s life. She examines Trilling’s position in anticommunist liberal politics, family feminism, and the university literary circles. Spotlighting an influential member of New York City culture, Robins’ work on Diana Trilling is an important addition to literary and popular history of the 1960s. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative in peoples lives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week we're talking about Allen Ginsberg and Diana Trilling. Specifically, we're talking about an essay Diana Trilling wrote for The Partisan Review about attending an Allen Ginsberg reading at Columbia University in 1959, one which her husband--famous literary critic Lionel Trilling--chose to skip, despite being Ginsberg's former teacher. We try to parse Diana Trilling's attitude toward the reading, which seems to be simultaneously salty and tender. You can read Diana's essay, and peruse all of The Partisan Review's archives, via Boston University. We also talk about lots of other 1959 goings-on, including monkeys in space!
Danny once again welcomes Coyle Neal from the City of Man Podcast to discuss that wiggly, squishy, zany concept of “Authenticity.” Learn about Jonathan Edwards and his concept of authenticity and the use and abuse of external standards. Was Emerson “the great villain?” Can you be “spiritual but not religious?” What does Sheryl Sandberg actually believe? Have postmodernists rediscovered truth in the Age of Trump? Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity. Authenticity as performance. Is the House Church movement suffering from Authenticity overload? Coyle authentically begs listeners to write their prayers down. Authenticity that undermines art. Danny mangles Walter Benjamin. Stephen King's writing advice and art. Danny can't distinguish Foucault from Barthes. Donald Trump as the perfect embodiment of Authenticity. Obama versus Hillary: writer throw-down. What is the moral cost of insincerity? The fakeness of talk radio and the American media. All this and much more! Links: Obama Bests Clinton At Craft of Writing - The New York Sun http://ift.tt/2uRmRmm America's First Postmodern President http://ift.tt/2uBFAly This fake TED Talk about nothing might be the best you've ever seen http://ift.tt/25S3UiZ Sheryl Sandberg: The Importance of Authentic Communication - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nRENaRCvLI Jonathan Edwards: Religious Affections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Affections David Wells: The Courage to be Protestant https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Protestant-Truth-lovers-Marketers-Postmodern/dp/0802840078 Neil Cole's ChurchPlanting http://www.churchplanting.com/neil-cole/#.WZ2ysiiGNPY Daniel Franklin: Politics and Film https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Film-Political-Culture-United/dp/0742538095 Francis Schaeffer: The God Who is There https://www.amazon.com/God-Who-There-Francis-Schaeffer/dp/0830819479 Please go to iTunes and leave a review: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sectarian-review/id1031613670?mt=2 Also, visit and like our Facebook page to access more content: https://www.facebook.com/SectarianReview/
This week on StoryWeb: E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India. When I was a senior in high school, my favorite English teacher, Mr. Alwood, agreed to do an independent study with me. He selected four challenging novels he thought I was up to understanding and studying. I think back to those novels now and can’t imagine how a 17-year-old could really have been equipped – intellectually or emotionally – to appreciate them. But in my way, limited by life experience though I was, I did appreciate them. One of those novels was E.M. Forster’s 1924 book, A Passage to India. The novel hinges on an accusation of rape. One of the main characters is Mrs. Moore, a refined British lady who has come to visit India, still a British colony. Mrs. Moore is sensitive to the cultures and religions of others, and when she visits and enters a Muslim mosque reverently, she forms an unlikely but heartfelt friendship with Dr. Aziz, an Indian Muslim doctor in the town of Chandrapore. At first it seems that a bridge can be built between cultures, between the colonizer and the colonized, but when Dr. Aziz and Mrs. Moore go on an outing to explore the nearby Marabar Caves, Mrs. Moore’s potential daughter-in-law, Adela Quested, feels ill and claims that Dr. Aziz has “insulted” her. For the rest of the novel, we follow Dr. Aziz’s trial in the British Raj courtroom. Did Aziz attempt to rape Adela? Or was Adela instead overcome by the power and “otherness” of the caves and imagine an assault? The other key character in the novel is Cyril Fielding, a British headmaster who runs a school for Indians. He, too, is friends with Aziz. Throughout the novel, Fielding and Aziz try to foster a true friendship, but their efforts at knowing each other are strained indeed. Forster asks in this novel whether there can truly be cross-cultural friendship. Can we reach across cultural, religious, national, and gender divides to meet as human beings? Forster seems to answer that question through the novel’s ending. Fielding and Aziz are out riding their horses, and the question that opened the novel – can the British and the Indians form real friendships? – comes up again. In a passionate declaration, Aziz asserts that the Indians can drive the Brits out of their country. “India shall be a nation!” he shouts. “No foreigners of any sort! Hindus and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one! Hurrah! Hurrah for India!” Forster writes: “If it’s fifty-five hundred years, we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then” – he rode against [Fielding] furiously – “and then,” he concluded, half kissing him, “you and I shall be friends.” “Why can’t we be friends now?” Fielding asks, holding Aziz affectionately. “It’s what I want. It’s what you want.” Forster ends the novel with these words: But the horses didn’t want it – they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.” A Passage to India was made into a powerful film by David Lean, who wrote, directed, and edited the film. But the movie closes with a revised ending scene – putting forth the opposite conclusion Forster presents in the novel. Years after the excursion to the Marabar Caves, Aziz and Adela make their peace via correspondence, and Fielding and his wife – Mrs. Moore’s daughter, Stella – see Aziz in India and affirm their friendship. So crucial to the novel is Forster’s ending that to me all the power of the film – its sweeping treatment of the British Raj and the movement for Indian independence – is undone by the less morally complicated ending Lean slapped on the film. The movie ties things up in a neat bow, offers a pat, feel-good ending in which the divisions between the British and the Indians, between the colonizer and the colonized, between the powerful and the powerless are easily erased. Arguably Forster’s enduring motto is “Only connect!” It serves as the epigraph to his 1910 novel, Howards End, and it sums up Forster’s feeling about the centrality of human relationships. But in A Passage to India, his last great work, he leaves us unsettled as Fielding and Aziz swerve apart. Despite the fact that both men want to be friends, their places in their respective worlds leave them unable to fully connect. That truth – the impossibility of connecting across human-created divides – is the heart of A Passage to India. The Guardian named A Passage to India as one of the hundred best novels written in English. To learn about Forster himself, you can go back to Lionel Trilling’s early assessment of the man and his work. A more recent examination of Forster and his fiction can be found in Wendy Moffat’s biography, which provides the first full look at Forster’s somewhat closeted life as a gay man and the impact of his sexuality on his work. The New York Times review of Moffat’s biography provides a good introduction to the themes she considers. Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer is a fictional biography of Forster; it highlights Forster’s relationship with Syed Ross Masood, an Indian Muslim who was Forster’s unrequited love. Forster said, “But for Masood, I might never have gone to India.” The Guardian offers an exploration of their relationship. Visit thestoryweb.com/forster for links to all these resources and to watch a clip from the film in which Mrs. Moore and Dr. Aziz meet in a mosque for the first time. You can also listen as Forster discusses writing novels and his motto “Only connect” and listen as he talks about writing A Passage to India. But as always, the best way to experience the work at hand is to curl up with a hard copy. Really . . . isn’t A Passage to India perfect for a cozy armchair and a cup of tea?
Michial Farmer and Nathan Gilmour respond to listener emails. The time stamps for subject matters are thus: [03:30- 07:40] Fandom email of gratitude [07:45- 10:03] Peter's pronunciation guide [10:05-16:15] Eucharist wars: The Seven Year Battle [16:15- 24:50] Faith and Fiction [24:50- 30:10] The first schism [30:13- 37:30] The honorable Baseball [37:33- 39:17] Lionel Trilling essay, erm, episode [39:19- 45:00] Hitchhiker's Guide
Michial Farmer and Nathan Gilmour respond to listener emails. The time stamps for subject matters are thus: [03:30- 07:40] Fandom email of gratitude [07:45- 10:03] Peter's pronunciation guide [10:05-16:15] Eucharist wars: The Seven Year Battle [16:15- 24:50] Faith and Fiction [24:50- 30:10] The first schism [30:13- 37:30] The honorable Baseball [37:33- 39:17] Lionel Trilling essay, erm, episode [39:19- 45:00] Hitchhiker's Guide
Michial Farmer talks with David Grubbs and Danny Anderson about Lionel Trilling's essay "On the Teaching of Modern Literature."
Michial Farmer talks with David Grubbs and Danny Anderson about Lionel Trilling's essay "On the Teaching of Modern Literature."
Nathan Gilmour talks with Michial Farmer and Danny Anderson about authenticity. A term with etymological roots in reflexive pronouns and historical roots in art criticism, authenticity has taken on philosophical, cultural-critical and pop-cultural meanings that deserve some exploration. Among the texts, trends, and other realities explored are Heidegger's Being and Time, Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity, youth ministry, Emerging Church, and faculty workshop speakers.
Nathan Gilmour talks with Michial Farmer and Danny Anderson about authenticity. A term with etymological roots in reflexive pronouns and historical roots in art criticism, authenticity has taken on philosophical, cultural-critical and pop-cultural meanings that deserve some exploration. Among the texts, trends, and other realities explored are Heidegger's Being and Time, Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity, youth ministry, Emerging Church, and faculty workshop speakers.
Lionel Trilling (1905 – 1975) is one of the best known U.S. critics of the twentieth century. A Professor of Literature and Criticism at Columbia University from 1931 - 1975, his teachings focused primarily on the relationships between literature, culture and politics. His first and best known collection of essays, The Liberal Imagination, was published in 1950. I met with David Southward, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, in Gatineau, Quebec at the ACTC Annual Conference to discuss Trilling and his approach to literary criticism.
As an author and literary critic (including for Tablet), Adam Kirsch has written about Lionel Trilling, Benjamin Disraeli, Emily Dickinson, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, among many others. This past August, he moved into less familiar territory when he joined the tens of thousands of Jews participating in Daf Yomi, studying a page of Talmud a day. The study cycle will take seven and a half years to complete. Since he began, Kirsch has been writing a weekly column to share his reflections on these essential Jewish texts, and on the Daf Yomi process itself. On today’s Vox Tablet, Kirsch shares some of those reflections with... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Perhaps most of us interested in psychoanalysis in the United States have the idea that, in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, his first and only visit to this country, the profession was launched. That Freud was perhaps an afterthought to a larger celebration at the school may stun us, but truth be told that appears to be the case. In After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America (University of Chicago Press, 2012)–part of what John Burnham calls “The New Freud Studies”–we encounter scholars looking closely at the way in which American culture interfaced with psychoanalytic thinking. During the mid-twentieth century, for myriad reasons, (the Cold War among them), psychoanalysis was a force to be reckoned with in the States. The book, which includes essays by historians of medicine and of culture, among them Elizabeth Lunbeck, George Makari, Louis Menand, and Dorothy Ross, tells a tale of how psychoanalysis resonated with some of the major thinkers of the time–including Lionel Trilling, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown to name but a few. Given the contemporary context, aka today, in which psychoanalysis is not currying much favor as a mode of treatment or as a system of ideas, looking at the profession in its hey day will give one cause to pause. These historians argue that cultural shifts, among them the advent of psychopharmeceuticals coupled with new ideas about the self that do not consider the unconscious, have placed psychoanalysis on the sidelines. Dr. Burnham was a pleasure to interview and, as an historian, has been studying all things psychoanalytic since the 1950s. What we love to consider is that he has seen, in his lifetime, many of the changes that the book he has edited chronicles. That he has been writing about psychoanalysis, beginning with the completion of his doctorate in 1958 on the early origins of this profession, only makes this interview more compelling. Something prompted him to take notice then and it is an abiding interest that he has cultivated ever since. We were so pleased to have him with us as a result. In assembling an illustrious group of historians to write about this topic, Dr. Burnham has done a terrific service to a profession that might well want to reflect on its origins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Perhaps most of us interested in psychoanalysis in the United States have the idea that, in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, his first and only visit to this country, the profession was launched. That Freud was perhaps an afterthought to a larger celebration at the school may stun us, but truth be told that appears to be the case. In After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America (University of Chicago Press, 2012)–part of what John Burnham calls “The New Freud Studies”–we encounter scholars looking closely at the way in which American culture interfaced with psychoanalytic thinking. During the mid-twentieth century, for myriad reasons, (the Cold War among them), psychoanalysis was a force to be reckoned with in the States. The book, which includes essays by historians of medicine and of culture, among them Elizabeth Lunbeck, George Makari, Louis Menand, and Dorothy Ross, tells a tale of how psychoanalysis resonated with some of the major thinkers of the time–including Lionel Trilling, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown to name but a few. Given the contemporary context, aka today, in which psychoanalysis is not currying much favor as a mode of treatment or as a system of ideas, looking at the profession in its hey day will give one cause to pause. These historians argue that cultural shifts, among them the advent of psychopharmeceuticals coupled with new ideas about the self that do not consider the unconscious, have placed psychoanalysis on the sidelines. Dr. Burnham was a pleasure to interview and, as an historian, has been studying all things psychoanalytic since the 1950s. What we love to consider is that he has seen, in his lifetime, many of the changes that the book he has edited chronicles. That he has been writing about psychoanalysis, beginning with the completion of his doctorate in 1958 on the early origins of this profession, only makes this interview more compelling. Something prompted him to take notice then and it is an abiding interest that he has cultivated ever since. We were so pleased to have him with us as a result. In assembling an illustrious group of historians to write about this topic, Dr. Burnham has done a terrific service to a profession that might well want to reflect on its origins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Perhaps most of us interested in psychoanalysis in the United States have the idea that, in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, his first and only visit to this country, the profession was launched. That Freud was perhaps an afterthought to a larger celebration at the school may stun us, but truth be told that appears to be the case. In After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America (University of Chicago Press, 2012)–part of what John Burnham calls “The New Freud Studies”–we encounter scholars looking closely at the way in which American culture interfaced with psychoanalytic thinking. During the mid-twentieth century, for myriad reasons, (the Cold War among them), psychoanalysis was a force to be reckoned with in the States. The book, which includes essays by historians of medicine and of culture, among them Elizabeth Lunbeck, George Makari, Louis Menand, and Dorothy Ross, tells a tale of how psychoanalysis resonated with some of the major thinkers of the time–including Lionel Trilling, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown to name but a few. Given the contemporary context, aka today, in which psychoanalysis is not currying much favor as a mode of treatment or as a system of ideas, looking at the profession in its hey day will give one cause to pause. These historians argue that cultural shifts, among them the advent of psychopharmeceuticals coupled with new ideas about the self that do not consider the unconscious, have placed psychoanalysis on the sidelines. Dr. Burnham was a pleasure to interview and, as an historian, has been studying all things psychoanalytic since the 1950s. What we love to consider is that he has seen, in his lifetime, many of the changes that the book he has edited chronicles. That he has been writing about psychoanalysis, beginning with the completion of his doctorate in 1958 on the early origins of this profession, only makes this interview more compelling. Something prompted him to take notice then and it is an abiding interest that he has cultivated ever since. We were so pleased to have him with us as a result. In assembling an illustrious group of historians to write about this topic, Dr. Burnham has done a terrific service to a profession that might well want to reflect on its origins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/psychoanalysis
Perhaps most of us interested in psychoanalysis in the United States have the idea that, in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, his first and only visit to this country, the profession was launched. That Freud was perhaps an afterthought to a larger celebration at the school may stun us, but truth be told that appears to be the case. In After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America (University of Chicago Press, 2012)–part of what John Burnham calls “The New Freud Studies”–we encounter scholars looking closely at the way in which American culture interfaced with psychoanalytic thinking. During the mid-twentieth century, for myriad reasons, (the Cold War among them), psychoanalysis was a force to be reckoned with in the States. The book, which includes essays by historians of medicine and of culture, among them Elizabeth Lunbeck, George Makari, Louis Menand, and Dorothy Ross, tells a tale of how psychoanalysis resonated with some of the major thinkers of the time–including Lionel Trilling, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown to name but a few. Given the contemporary context, aka today, in which psychoanalysis is not currying much favor as a mode of treatment or as a system of ideas, looking at the profession in its hey day will give one cause to pause. These historians argue that cultural shifts, among them the advent of psychopharmeceuticals coupled with new ideas about the self that do not consider the unconscious, have placed psychoanalysis on the sidelines. Dr. Burnham was a pleasure to interview and, as an historian, has been studying all things psychoanalytic since the 1950s. What we love to consider is that he has seen, in his lifetime, many of the changes that the book he has edited chronicles. That he has been writing about psychoanalysis, beginning with the completion of his doctorate in 1958 on the early origins of this profession, only makes this interview more compelling. Something prompted him to take notice then and it is an abiding interest that he has cultivated ever since. We were so pleased to have him with us as a result. In assembling an illustrious group of historians to write about this topic, Dr. Burnham has done a terrific service to a profession that might well want to reflect on its origins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Perhaps most of us interested in psychoanalysis in the United States have the idea that, in 1909, when Freud lectured at Clark University, his first and only visit to this country, the profession was launched. That Freud was perhaps an afterthought to a larger celebration at the school may stun us, but truth be told that appears to be the case. In After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America (University of Chicago Press, 2012)–part of what John Burnham calls “The New Freud Studies”–we encounter scholars looking closely at the way in which American culture interfaced with psychoanalytic thinking. During the mid-twentieth century, for myriad reasons, (the Cold War among them), psychoanalysis was a force to be reckoned with in the States. The book, which includes essays by historians of medicine and of culture, among them Elizabeth Lunbeck, George Makari, Louis Menand, and Dorothy Ross, tells a tale of how psychoanalysis resonated with some of the major thinkers of the time–including Lionel Trilling, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown to name but a few. Given the contemporary context, aka today, in which psychoanalysis is not currying much favor as a mode of treatment or as a system of ideas, looking at the profession in its hey day will give one cause to pause. These historians argue that cultural shifts, among them the advent of psychopharmeceuticals coupled with new ideas about the self that do not consider the unconscious, have placed psychoanalysis on the sidelines. Dr. Burnham was a pleasure to interview and, as an historian, has been studying all things psychoanalytic since the 1950s. What we love to consider is that he has seen, in his lifetime, many of the changes that the book he has edited chronicles. That he has been writing about psychoanalysis, beginning with the completion of his doctorate in 1958 on the early origins of this profession, only makes this interview more compelling. Something prompted him to take notice then and it is an abiding interest that he has cultivated ever since. We were so pleased to have him with us as a result. In assembling an illustrious group of historians to write about this topic, Dr. Burnham has done a terrific service to a profession that might well want to reflect on its origins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices