Willard Spiegelman talks about his wonderful book, Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness, his addiction to ballroom dancing, how to find joy in the day-to-day world, why he hates book clubs, what Dallas, TX is like for a secular Philadelphia Jew, how he turned me on to one of my favorite novels, who his Desert Island Poets are, how he writes about the visual arts, why the world's great novels are lost on the young, what it was like to attend his 50th high school reunion, and more!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 2 - The Magnificent Seven
[music] Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and I believe in Second Chances. In a while back, The New York Times profiled Mark Marin, who's WTF podcast is the podfather for this show. Accompanying the article, there were photos of Marin interviewing John Hodgman, the literary agent comedian, I'm a PC guy, and all around funny man. Fans, of course, were dying to hear the episode, and Marin unfortunately had to break the news that the episode was lost. The recording apparently didn't work, which brings me to Willard Spiegelman. Now, I first met and interviewed Willard late December. I reached out to him a while back to thank him for his column in the Wall Street Journal that turned me on to The Leopard by Giuseppe Lampedusa, a book that's become one of my all-time favorite novels, and Willard was kind enough to consent to come on the show. We had a great time talking about his book, Seven Pleasures, Essays on Ordinary Happiness. We also talked about his experiences teaching poetry at SMU, some of the poets he didn't get in his youth, but now loves, and a lot of other great arts-related topics over about an hour. During the conversation, I noticed that my backup recorder's battery died, but so what, the main recorder was working fine, so I wasn't that concerned. I got home that afternoon and took the SD card out of the recorder and popped it into the computer and discovered nothing, not a zip. The previous recordings were still on the SD card, but there was absolutely no sign of the conversation with Willard. I freaked out and punched my work table and spent $100 on a data recovery program that just scoured the hell out of that SD card, but nothing showed up. The backup had the first 18 minutes of the conversation before the battery had died, but that wasn't going to help. I was embarrassed and humiliated, and I wrote to tell him what happened, and begged for his forgiveness. He laughed over my incompetence, and we rescheduled for this past weekend. We decided to pretend that the previous one hadn't happened in this recording. I decided I would share this with you anyway, because as humiliated as I was by the whole process, I had to tell myself, "Well, it happened to Marin. It can happen to me." And Marin, by the way, just posted his make-up WTF episode with Hodgman this week. Before we start with the conversation, I thought I'd give you a little tease with Willard reading a passage from seven pleasures. This bit is about choosing what to read as we get older. In adulthood, what should, what does, one read? No longer having the luxury of youthful promiscuity, knowing with the clock ticks, that every choice of something eliminates something else, what should you do? Readers are gamblers. Every recommendation from enthusiastic friends comes at a risk. You might begin a new work and get tired, not finding its rewards and pleasures soon enough. What to do next? Stick with it, and hope that the payoff will soon roll in, or cut your losses and move on to something else. My suggestion, reread those books that gave pleasure in the past. A photographic memory is not necessarily a blessing, there's a charm in forgetting, so if you're not cursed with perfect recall, you'll have the joy of discovering some things as though for the first time, while others will hit you with the refreshing rush of repetition. As an older version of the person you've always been, you can have things two ways at once, something old, something new, something recalled, something revealed. And now, Willard Spiegelman on The Virtual Memory Show, Take Two. Welcome to The Virtual Memory Show, my guest this episode is Willard Spiegelman, author of Seven Pleasures, Essays on Ordinary Happiness. Willard, I thought we'd dive right in if you could tell us about the Seven Pleasures and what they are and how you came to write about them. Thanks, Gil. The book came about piecemeal, the way many books do, especially collections of essays. I would say, well, gee, this goes back almost 15 years. I became addicted briefly and still would be if I had the opportunity to ballroom dancing, which I loved. And in fact, I say the very first sentence of this book, which I'm going to read to you, goes this way, first paragraph, this book had a long gestation. It started with the Fox trot. The Fox trot has no raison d'etre, there is no reason to dance at all except one pleasure and the greatest pleasure is calculated uselessness. One evening several years ago, I stood on the sidelines at Manhattan's Lincoln Center watching the dancers of the three-week event called A Midsummer Night's Swing. They were smiling, they were having fun. I took one look and realized that dancing can make you happy. This is a book about happiness, about the pleasurable things you can do to promote it and to increase the sense of general well-being of what is called sanguinity. So I became a dancer. And then in about 2005, I published an essay on the pleasures of ballroom dancing. And the following year, I wrote an essay for another literary journal about the pleasures of walking, not just walking for cardiovascular exercise, but sort of being a flaner, a stroller in the streets, mostly of big cities, of the sort that I do not live in. I live in Dallas, Texas, which is a modern American city, and there is no real urban or pedestrian or street life there. But the pleasures of walking in London or Paris or New York or any other old cities where the car is not central. And then the year after that, I did another essay. These are all things about the body, as it turns out, and this was an essay about swimming, something that I've done for 40 years almost every day. If I can, and I published these three essays, and then I said to a friend of mine who was a literary agent, do you think I could turn this into a book? And she said, yes. Now this was in 2007, before the downturn in the economy and the collapse, partial collapse of the publishing industry, and she said, all you have to do is put together a kind of list of what you might want to do with this book. And so I came up with four other subjects to write about. And as it turns out, the seven pleasures, I'll tell you in a moment if you want to know why there are seven, the seven pleasures that I came up with are in the order in which they appear in the book, reading, walking, looking, dancing, listening, swimming, and writing. And you'll see that some of them are of the body, some of them are of the mind or the soul. And with the exception of dancing, which was the first one, it's the central chapter, these are all things that you do alone, because I wanted to write about things that give happiness and that lead from and lead back into sanguinity or cheerfulness, that give us a chance to be by ourselves, reading, above all, does that, listening to music, can do that. If you're listening at home, as opposed to a concert hall, looking at pictures in a museum, you get the sense of what I'm doing. So I cobbled these things together, and then the book came out in 2009, and then in paperback in 2010. When I picked it up, I mistakenly thought it was sort of going to be along the self-help vein, you know, how to pursue these, or how to have these pursuits in the name of becoming happy. And it's certainly not self-help, it's also not exactly a memoir, but how would you characterize that? Well, it's interesting that you talk about self-help. A friend of mine said he sought when the book came out, and books have shelf lives. But when it came out, he sought in the self-help category of some big Barnes and Noble. And I thought, "Lo, have a mighty or fallen," but then I thought, "What the hell?" If this is where it's going to sell, and it's going to be put there, it's fine with me. It's not a self-help book, and it's not a memoir. It is a series of essays in the spirit of Montaigne, who invented the essay. It's a series of contemplations about things which involve discussions of myself, but also involve things that are not myself. What is it like to be a writer? What is it like to listen to music? What is it like looking at pictures? What is it like to be a dancer? So I weave myself in and out of these essays, but it's not my life. It is my life and others' lives as well. How big an influence would you say Montaigne's essays have been as you were developing your writing style and working particularly on this one? It's consciously not at all because when I was writing, I was just writing as I would anything, allowing my own mind and my pen, or my fingers on the keyboard, to go where they would. I think probably, unconsciously, a great deal. I read Montaigne when I was in high school and then in college, and I go back to Montaigne, but I was in no way imitating him, but it was Montaigne who taught us how to use an essay as a way of exploring things, and it was Montaigne who said the only thing I really know was myself, but was also Montaigne who knew a lot more than just himself and was able to weave these two things himself and the world or himself and others into a kind of seamless whole. Emerson did the same thing. All of the great essayists do the same thing, Virginia Woolf, for example, Haslett. So these are people whom I was emulating, but not consciously. And what was the reception of the book like when it came out? Well I can't say it was received with wild applause, but it did. It was well-reviewed, it had a good amount of sales. One of the things that interested me is that as an academic who has been writing academic books, the sales and the publicity were hundreds of decibels beyond anything I would have imagined from a book of literary criticism. And that was gratifying because, you know, a writer is somebody who wants to write, but a writer in order to express himself, but a writer is also somebody who wants a reader. And if you're an academic writing academic prose, you don't get many readers. And so to know that tens of thousands of people have looked at this book or part of this book is a kind of source of gratification that I would not have thought possible otherwise. Can you fan mail at all? Oh, yes. Mail in old-fashioned letters, and then email too, and I've answered every letter that's ever come to me. So that gives you a sense of how many there have been. There have been many, but not so many that it interferes with my daily life. Is there any sort of this book change my life sort of? Not so much change, well, not so much change my life as confirmed some of my own prejudices. For example, I remember that somebody wrote to me and said, "Thank you for telling us why you don't like book clubs." I mean, I know that book clubs serve a great social and intellectual service and function for many people, mostly women, though there are now gendered book clubs. Men get together, women get together. I've always heard it's a drinking society around a book, but I've never been part of it. It may be in part, but I said the idea of sitting around under enforcement and discussing a book with people is my idea of not a day of pleasure. And they're also now, I think Oprah Winfrey must have been the one who started this. It's the idea that everybody will read one book. We do this at the university. All cities do this too. All incoming freshmen are going to read this book and then they're all going to get around and sit in little groups and talk about it. I am excluded from this enterprise. I don't want, because among other things, readers tend to be loners. Readers are idiosyncratic. Readers don't want to be told what to do. There's a difference between being told what to do or commanded to do something. And going out on your own and asking a friend for a recommendation. But to be told, this is what we're going to do now, smacks of the classroom. And I am a teacher and I tell my students what to do, but that's our time together. Now how do you see the contrast of those seven pleasures, the way you talked about the alternating chapters between the body and the mind? Were you conscious at the time of constructing it in that way really? Or are they putting a sense of primacy and how you put together the chapters? After they were all written, I decided, well, it's one of the questions that I was asked when I would give readings or be interviewed, why seven? Why that number? And I said, well, I think also unconsciously I picked seven because it is a kind of magic number. We have the seven virtues, we have the seven vices, we have the seven dwarves, we have the seven pillars of wisdom. Even as a kind of magical number, it seemed to have the right shape to it. And it occurred to me that the book was equally, almost equally divided between pleasures of the mind and pleasures of the body. I was insistent, I remember talking to my editor about this, Jonathan Galassi at Ferris Trust, Drew, I was insistent that the book begin with reading and end with writing. Because these are the book ends of my life, that is when I was a kid, I was a precocious reader. I don't mean to say I was a genius, I started reading early, but everybody catches up sooner or later. But reading was my first and greatest pleasure, and in some ways it still is. So reading was the thing that defined me as a child. I wasn't particularly athletic, I wasn't particularly in anything other than words and books. And from reading, it is a logical, though not inevitable, step to writing. I think all writers start as readers, not all readers become writers. And I became a writer as a scholar, as a journalist, and so I wanted writing to be the last thing in the book. So there's a kind of vocational as well as autobiographical dimension to the book, starting with the young Willard Spiegelman reading very young, going to the mature or adult or old Willard Spiegelman, scribbling his own books at the end. Now within the looking chapter, you mentioned the use of writing about painting and writing about the visual arts and how it sort of takes you outside of a language, we said, stuttering. It's a way of writing that removes you from the sort of easy vocabulary I would suppose you'd have. Are there other areas you write about in particular that you take up with that sort of challenge Anything you write about is going to involve language. I'm giving a lecture, I was invited to give a lecture at a museum this spring, and I had to base my choice of what I was going to talk about on the collection in the museum. And the first thing that I proposed was something about abstraction because of all the forms of painting, and I like looking at painting, abstraction is the one that most defies description. Or let me say it this way, you can describe what the abstraction looks like. There are lines, there are shapes, there are colors, there are forms, but abstraction has no meaning. Then I said the next thing I would want to talk about would be still life, a genre of painting that I'm very fond of, which in the old hierarchy of painting occupied the lowest order. Still life, portrait, landscape, heroic paintings, that's how the latter went. But the still life that I wanted to talk about wasn't going to be on display. So I couldn't do that. So then I elit upon something which might be an odd choice because this is the work of a painter who is a landscape painter, who is given to meaning, who is given to subjects, and that's Nicolas Poussaint. And the title of the talk is Why Poussaint Matters, and you could lock Poussaint I should say. And I'm going to talk about why Poussaint is such a great painter, not just because of his use of Christian mythology and pagan mythology, but because of how he bridges the gap between the Renaissance and the 18th and 19th centuries in terms of form and color. So looking at a Poussaint painting, well, looking at any mythological painting, it's easy to say, this is the story of Venus and Adonis, or this is Mars and Venus, and this is who they are, and this is what they were doing. But it's more interesting for me to talk about the shapes in the picture and the use of the colors and the lines. When a child looks at a picture, the first thing a child wants to know is what's going on here? Who are these people? What is the story being told? That's how Keats begins in the first stanza, the old one of Grecian urn, what men or gods or these, what maidens loathe, what's going on, what's happening here. And that's one way of looking at a picture. But the other way is to step back and look about it and to look at it and to think about it in terms of the dynamics of shape and color that inform it. Who was it? Clive Bell, Virginia Woolf's brother-in-law, the husband of Vanessa, Steve, and Bell. Clive Bell was the one who coined the term "significant form." And this is a kind of catchphrase for art for art's sake, but it was Bell who said even in a representational painting, what most fixes us, what most engages us is not the subject matter and not the meaning per se, but the way in which the artist has brought to bear matters of form and color. And that's what interests me, and that's why I like abstraction, but in any great painting, you can talk about those forces. So that's what I want to talk about with regard to Pusan, an artist to whom I came late. I always thought he was kind of, I don't know, cold and classical, but I find him much warmer. You know, it's an interesting phenomenon. There are people, there are things, there are events, there are writers, there are musicians, there are pieces of art, which you didn't take to as a young person, which you come to appreciate or love or think of differently as you get older. And for me, Pusan was one of them, it's easy for anybody to like the impressionists. Dufy, Utrio, even Matisse, I mean much greater painters, Matisse, they're easily accessible. Pusan was a little harder for me. It's a topic that I brought up a few times in other podcasts. I wanted to do a segment called "Second Hand Loves" about the particularly literature, the works that we once upon a time didn't take to and then in our adult lives, somehow they changed enough that they became valuable to us or in fact we matured into them. Can you think of any particular poets or prose writers who you basically detested once upon a time but have now learned to treasure? I can think of some whom I detested or whom I didn't get and then came to love or to understand. When I was a senior in college, I did a seminar on the novels of Henry James. And we did a novel a week, that was 12 James novels. To be honest, I've got 42 years and I haven't done a single one. Well, this was tough and we started with some of the shorter and the easier ones. And we ended with the great late trilogy, "The Wings of the Dove", "The Ambassadors" and "The Golden Bull". These are dense, dense works. You can't get a college student today to read a James novel in a week and it's because today's students are much more programmed, much busier. They don't have the zits flashed to sit down and read 600 pages, they don't have the time. And even if they did have the time, as I did, they wouldn't understand them. I was able to do the kinds of things that a smart English major does with Henry James, analyze the syntax, analyze the symbolism, figure out what was going on. I had no idea what these people were like and 10 years later, I picked up for the second time, "Portrait of a Lady", which is an earlier and somewhat easier novel. And I said, "Oh, now I understand Isabelle Archer." And the same thing happened with a much less dense book or much less complicated book in terms of style, Anna Karenina, which I read when I was 20. And then when I was 35, I read it again and Anna Karenina had changed in 15 years. And she had changed because she met somebody who himself had changed and understood what life was about. So those are two examples. In fact, I really do think that the world's great novels are lost on the young. When I was a kid, when I was a teenager in my 20s, nothing gave me greater pleasure than being locked in a dark room, reading long novels. But you have to have a sense of life to understand great fiction. I recently finished rereading Bleak House, but as I told my brother, the first time I read it was 20 years ago, and that essentially means I didn't read it. That's right. The other thing is, of course, I was doing, my life was going backwards in some ways. When I was young, in high school and college, I loved reading fiction. And now I read mostly poetry, and this is also what I write about. So my love of poetry developed a little later than my love of prose with one exception, which I will mention in a moment. But as I started reading and thinking about poetry, there were some poets, I think the most prominent example that I can think of is Walt Whitman, to whom I did not take a liking. Because Whitman has a big, blousey, loudmouth braggadocio side full of hot air and a flatus. And this put me off. As I matured, I realized that Whitman is much more various than just the barbaric yap that he brags about. The cosmos includes lighter tones and tenderer tones, and he's a poet of great variety of tone and style. So I came to Whitman late in life realizing how important he is, not only as a poet, but also as an American poet. Did your response to him initially also was it simply in relation to his poetry, or also in terms of the critical reception, that was there any sort of the sky's overrated vibe? No, I wasn't aware of the critical perception. I just started reading it, and I said to myself, there's a lot of long lines, and it doesn't sound like poetry to me, so I was being somewhat blind or deaf. When I said a moment ago that I was not a great reader of poetry when I was, say, a teenager in my formative years, the two things that would qualify that are these. One, when I was a junior in college at the age of 19, and I took a course called Modern Poetry, which was 20th century poetry, taught by a brilliant professor, and that absolutely knocked me for a loop. I mean, I was so overwhelmed by this that I couldn't get enough of it. So that was the point at which, with regard to English poetry, I can date my interest in this as a subject and as a passion. But even before that, there had been another phenomenon, and that was my study of foreign languages. I must have been out of school the week that we diagram sentences, if we ever did that, because I never remember having diagrammed a sentence in my life. Maybe they didn't do it at my suburban Philadelphia high school, or junior high school, when I was there. It was assumed, I think, that because English was our native language, we knew how it worked. My first occasion to understand grammar and syntax came when I was studying French and even more Latin in high school. And that was also not coincidentally the time when I became interested in poetry. And the reason was quite simple. When you are reading something in English, you think mistakenly that because it is your native language, you can understand it. And poetry is a foreign language. It is written in English, of course. It is written in a language called poetic, but it's also written in a language or an idyllic called Whitman, or Dickinson, or Keats, or Spencer, or whoever it is. And poetry requires slow reading. And slow reading was then, and is even now more endangered, people don't read slowly. One of the things I'm sure that recommend Twitter and tweeting is the fact that everything is condensed into a very, very small-- 140 characters. That's right. But there's an upside to this. Everyone is aware, well, people in New York are aware of the phenomenon called poetry and motion in which you have on buses or subways little placards instead of ads that give you, as many lines or as many words, can fit comfortably on a page. And if you are sitting on the subway and you are staring at that, you are taking in, let's say, a somnet, probably nothing much longer than a somnet or something shorter, and you are focused on that for the duration of your consciousness. So I was aware, and for me, the greatest or the first poet who was a great poet for me was Virgil, because I was reading Virgil in Latin going very slowly, trying to figure out what part of the line or the sentence related to what other part of the line or sentence. And as my great high school Latin teacher used to say, "Always go for the verb." And once you find the verb, you can figure out how the other things relate to it. So I realized that poetry was a kind of puzzle that had to be decoded or at least taken apart in order to be put together. And that was the thing that made me aware of the magic of language because it was foreign. My native tongue wouldn't have done that for me. You know, I was thinking, I perhaps am giving you too much information, but I think this is important, Robert Frost, I was very struck by this, Robert Frost said that he first heard the speaking voice in poetry by reading Shakespeare and, more surprisingly, Virgil. And not just the Aeneid, but reading Virgil's pastrals, his eclogues, the first poems he wrote. And this struck me as quite extraordinary because he was talking about poetry that had been written 2,000 years before him, poetry that was written in a language that had been dead for a thousand years, and poetry that was in a genre which was the most artificial, which is the most artificial of all genres, the pastoral. But Frost said he heard the speaking voice of poetry in skim--sorry, in Virgil's eclogues. And it's not without some interest that Frost himself became a writer of pastoral poetry, with speaking voices in it. And so for Frost, who was always so brilliant at measuring or weighing the heft and the movement of the sentence against the heft and the movement of the line, you can see these two forces working together in a way that you would never see in prose because prose is written in sentences. Poetry is written in sentences and lines. So that's why poetry became important to me. The other thing I would mention in that regard, this goes back to poetry and motion and tweeting and twittering today, is the great remark. I read poetry because it saves time. That remark was made by Marilyn Monroe. And she was right. I mean, it does save time. Poetry is condensed. Poetry is, as Coleridge said, the best words and the best order, but it takes less time to read a poem than it does to read a novel. That doesn't mean it takes less time to absorb or understand the poem. And what poems mean the most to you now? Or which poets? Well if you're asking the version of a kind of desert island question, what poets would I take with me to the desert island? I would say it's a very sort of expected and uninteresting kind of list. Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and that's an odd taste, perhaps. Keats, Yeats. One more. We're going to stick with seven. Seven being a lucky number. Well, I might say Elizabeth Bishop as one who is different from the others and one wants to be fair, at least in part, issues of gender, but I would say this in terms of desert island poems. And I'm going to quote Coleridge again. Coleridge said brilliantly that when you read, not when you see, when you read Shakespeare, you have the sensation of being made for the duration of your reading experience being made into a poet yourself, by which he meant you are required to think in poetic terms. How does this work? And there are two 20th century poets who have that effect on me, though I did not name either one of them as my desert island poets in this regard. And they are in the first half of the 20th century, Wallace Stevens, and in the second part of the 20th century, still with us, John Ashbury. These are poets who are sometimes difficult poets, but the reading of whom repays the effort, let me quote something that Steven says that I always quote to my students. Steven says in one of his aphorisms, the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. And of course, everyone knows that the keyword there is the adverb almost. If the poem resists your intelligence entirely, then you're up against nothing and you come away with nothing. If there is no resistance in the reader or the poem, then it's too easy, and you take nothing away with you that way. So there has to be a kind of, I don't want to say combat, but there has to be a kind of tension, tension is a better word, thank you, a kind of tension or a kind of incomprehension or incredulity, which instead of inspiring frustration, inspires an effort or a desire to go farther and deeper. There are certain things which when you experience them, when you read them, when you see them, when you listen to them, you say, this is bad, and it's the fault or the pretension of the artist. There are other things which when you see them or hear them or read them, you say, I don't quite understand this, but it's my fault, and therefore I'll have to go deeper or slower into it. >> It reminds me, in fact, it's the way you and I met or the way I first reached out to you in one of your other roles, you're the, a culture columnist for the Wall Street Journal and you had written a piece about the leopard, the novel by Lapidusa back in about April of 2011. I had had that book on my shelf for 10 years, had started at once, didn't get it, get it in the first 10 or 15 pages, and on the strength of your column, I sat down and read it again. It was one of the few life-changing experiences I've had in the last few years, which I consider a good thing that I could still have in a life-changing moments. And it was a book that, again, I don't think I would have been ready for 10 years earlier at 31 when I first come across it, and one that I think the early challenges really bore up to, you know, just sitting and reading slowly and carefully and understanding whether the narrator was centered, which isn't too clear early on, but then becomes, you know, this giant tapestry built around the, or woven around the, the prince. The one thing I found curious when I read Seven Pleasures, when I finished the leopard, I put it down for 24 hours, picked it up, and started reading it all over again. And I discovered you had the same experience at the age of 14, rather than the age of 40 or 41, and the novel, instead of the leopard, was Gone with the Wind, which I hadn't read, but I'll, you were much more high-minded. I was busy reading X-Men comics at that age, so that's really no great praise on my part. Do you find authors nowadays who can still move you in that degree? I don't mean contemporary authors, but other books you still discover now on a first reading that you feel that moved by anything that not necessarily you're going to sit and reread a thousand pages after. I can think of two, and I don't read as much fiction as you do. I read mostly nonfiction and poetry. But I can think of two living fiction writers who, and actually I'm going to name a book of one of these people, which is not fiction, but a memoir, two living fiction writers whom I love for the primary reason that I like anything, and that is their style. One is, they're both still living, they're both in their 80s. One is James Salter, a man who was written about sports, and a man who was written about military things. He's in his 80s, and his memoir Burning the Days was about his life at West Point, then in the Korean War. So this is a culture which is entirely foreign to me, but he's a great, great writer, and he got me immediately at the level of the sentence. The other writer who's almost entirely a fiction writer, she also has done nonfiction, is the great Australian writer Shirley Hazard, who is in her 80s. And I read the Transitive Venus, and then her National Book Award prize-winning book called The Great Fire, and I became ravenous. I wanted to read every word Shirley Hazard had ever written, and I think I almost have. But again, in both cases, it was the level of the sentence at which I was engaged. And again, this sort of goes back to what I was saying about the nature of being struck by words, first in a foreign language, and then in your own language. I'm always interested, not that I would be upset by people who say they read for the plot. I understand why people read for the plot, and The Great Critic Peter Brooks once wrote a book called Weating for the Plot to understand how narrative pacing keeps us along. But I read not entirely for the plot. I read for the words. So I'm always interested when people say, "Oh, this book had too many hard words in it. It had drove me to the dictionary." God, those are the books I want. I like going to the dictionary. The dictionary is our friend, and especially now you don't even have to get up to go across the room. You can have the dictionary write at your fingertips on your computer. You can just look up a word and figure out what it means. That to me is kind of a literary sleuthing that is the best fun. Well, it's about being curious or being incurious, ultimately. That's right. And to the extent that you're going to be an active rather than a passive reader. Which brings me to the question, it's something you mentioned earlier, in terms of students today. Have you been teaching how many years? This is mine. I'm sorry to bring this up. No, no, no. I can't believe it's been so long because it remains always in some ways fresh today. I've been teaching for 41 years full time. How have students changed within the context of what you're teaching? I can't answer that for several reasons. The primary of which is that when you are in a place and of a place, it's hard to register the changes that are taking place, just as when you look at yourself every morning in the mirror, you are the same person, but all of a sudden you became old. When did that happen? I don't remember this. I don't remember the wrinkles or the gray hair. So the students have always been there. They get younger every year. You know, first they were 19. Now they're still 19 or 20. I remain the same, but of course it's just the opposite. So I think one thing can be said. Although there have always been students who have been deep readers and obsessive readers, I think there are fewer of them today because there are too many other demands on their time. I was giving a lecture last year at a high school and I was talking to the kids afterwards and I said to them, I asked them, how many of you read for fun and they all raise their hands? And that surprised me and delighted me. And then the light bulb went on over my head and I said, what is it that you're reading for fun? It was mostly the text messages of their friends. That was the shot. And websites with cat pictures. That's right. That's right. It's the definition of reading for fun. But there are many more ways of being intelligent or there are different ways of being intelligent now than there were when I was a child 50 years ago. We read. I mean, that's what we did. When I was a child growing up in the '50s and '60s, the three passions that I and my other baby Beatnik friends had were music, politics, and reading. And reading was next to godliness. It was a sort of a secularized version of religious meditation. We read all the time. I don't think there are that many young people who do that now. Once upon a time, we also had authors on Time magazine covers and things of that. Now we get Jonathan Franzen. And that's... Well, now we don't have many of those magazines. Yes, it's true. And they should have stuck with putting more authors on the cover, I guess. Do you have students whose subsequent careers have just sort of floored you and amazed you in what they've gone on to do? I don't have many students, maybe a handful, who have gone into the predictable academic path that I took, in part because that's the nature of students today. In part because that's the nature of universities today. The humanities are a dying enterprise, and there are more job seekers and fewer jobs for them. So it's not a career path that I would encourage any of my students. Well, you're plugging one of the positions for 41 years, isn't it? Well, that's right. And I do feel very strongly that it is my ethical obligation to step down, stand aside, to let brilliant young people come and take my place. That will happen in due course. I've had students who have gone on to the normal variety of careers in business, law, and medicine that you would expect. I've had students who have become rock stars. So I don't know if there's anybody who's been particularly surprising. These are good-- well, I teach at a university, a private university, where the stock is mostly white middle class students who go on to lead white middle class lives in the professions. You're a secular Philadelphia Jew. What was your experience of Dallas, Texas over all these years? How different was it from-- or how different is it from your idea of home? I've written about this, and I think about it a lot. You're having this interview in Manhattan right now, and Manhattan makes me feel comfortable and happy. And there's a lot of walkable cities. Correct, but not only that, it's kind of home turf for me. And it is an interesting question. Where does one feel at home? There's a great poem by Elizabeth Bishop called Questions of Travel, which ends with the question, should we have stayed here and dreamed of home? We have stayed at home and dreamed of here. I'm badly mangling, the quotation. But that's the question, what is home? What do we mean by it? And there are some people who have a great sense of rootedness or who feel more contented in one location or another. There are other people who are perfectly happy and equable, no matter where they are. Location or scenery is irrelevant to them. I feel very comfortable in a city like Manhattan. Dallas, Texas, when I went there 40 years ago, was a different world for me. I was sheltered. I had never been west of the Mississippi. I had never been south of Williamsburg, Virginia. And so it was different. And it's a car city. It's a modern American city. I was not one of those Easterners who never had a driver's license. I was driving when I was 16, but it lacked walkability, and it still does. That having been said, there's a great deal to recommend Dallas. For one thing, it has changed. It has become more sophisticated. It's sort of like what happened with me and those books that I mentioned before. The city has changed, but I have changed too. It's a very easy city to live in. It's not especially attractive. The weather is fiercely hot for five months of the year, and I hate that, and it's not particularly walkable. Because of money, it has a great cultural life. Symphony Hall, Opera House, theaters, great museums in Fort Worth and in Dallas. And so there is a sense of vibrancy there. It lacks, I would say, soul, at least I don't connect to it that way. Texas is a red state. Texas is a second amendment state. I'm not singling it out in this way. But Texans are very devoted to hunting and guns and football. And the belief that you can secede from the Union. Well, yes, they seem some of my co-residents are trying that. I teach at a school, which is a Division I NCAA school, which means we spend a lot of money on sports. By sports, we mean basketball and especially football. Football is king. And these budgets are huge, and we often run at a deficit. All of the schools, private as well as public, run athletic deficits. There are many reasons that are always brought forth to defend big-time athletics in universities, none of which is legitimate. The myths have been blown. There was a book by William Bowen, the former president of Princeton some years ago about the lies that are told in defense of big-time athletics. But if you raise these points with anybody in Texas, the conversation ends with the remark, but this is Texas and this is football, that's the end of the discussion right there. So it is a religion. It interests me sort of culturally or anthropologically, and this is not unique to Texas by any means, why do people get so excited? Why are they a-bullient when the team wins? Why are they tearful when the team loses? There was a great documentary which I saw a couple of months ago made maybe four or five years ago about one of the greatest football games, college football games in history. The Harvard Yale game in November 1968, which Harvard sort of won in the last minute by tying the game and the great headline as it appeared in the Crimson the next day was Harvard, Beech Yale, '28, '28, or maybe it was '29, '29, '29, '29, and it was very interesting to see coverage of the game and then to talk and then to see the interviews with these men, 40 years later, all middle-aged or fat-balled men well into their prime, beyond their prime, and at least three of them said it's only a game and they were the heroes and they said it's only a game, that's antithetical to the American way of thinking of football. And what I found interesting in that documentary was that at least the way it was framed somehow Yale was the snobby elita school while Harvard had some of the working-class athletic scholarship students there playing, which is a rather odd way to frame it that Harvard was championing the little guys. Well, the Ivy League has always prided itself on saying we do not give athletic scholarships, but that's in name only. They have other ways of getting around it, but this is a pleasure that is not a pleasure of mine. And I was wondering about that in relation to the book again that as you mentioned outside of dancing, every one of your pleasures is a solitary, singular one. You don't have ones that even the listening and going to the opera and such, you become part of the audience, but there isn't that group participation the way you're alluding to in sports. I like aloneness, and it's interesting, going back to what we were saying about being a city like New York, I could be in Manhattan entirely by myself on a fiercely cold and bitter day or on Christmas Eve and not feel lonely or alienated. Well, New York Christmas Eve is Jewish wonderland, I can tell you stories about it. But that's part of it, but that's not the main part. But I can feel much more alienated in a city like Dallas than I would in New York. One of the reviewers of my book began the review by saying, "Willard Spiegelman wants to be left alone?" And he meant that as a kind of criticism. But in point of fact, I guess that's true. So much of our lives is or are spent in groups and in mass entertainment, that solitude is in short supply. One thing that interests me is now the kind of interactivity and the kind of group life that is taking place in museums, which in my mind, and this is very old-fashioned of me, used to be like temples, not just because they had architecture like the Metropolitan Museum with Corinthian columns and steps that you mounted, but also because they were designed to foster silence and contemplation. And you go into any museum now, by and large, unless you're very lucky, and it's like being in a mall. People are talking not in indoor voices. People are screaming. People are stepping on your toes. It requires heroic effort to be able to block out all of the noise as well as the people stepping on your toes. If you want to look at the picture across the wall, well across the room, on the wall. That's why I've always been happy that the Frick somehow has managed to avoid dragging in too many people, given the quality of their, the artwork there. It's never really been overrun in my experience. The Frick can be crowded. The great thing is going to any big museum, like the Metropolitan or the Louvre, and just wandering into the outer chambers. I go to the Louvre, and I go look at the Chardin paintings. There's not a single person in that wing. You go to look at the Mona Lisa, well you don't need to look at the Mona Lisa, because what you see, the Mona Lisa is behind glass, and then there's a rope in front of it, so you're more and more removed. And then between you and the rope on the glass on the Mona Lisa, stand three hundred other tourists, all of whom are taking pictures of the Mona Lisa. They are getting the memories, but without having the experience. My first trait showed a Paris back in 2002. My publisher wanted to go to the Louvre in 45 minutes, and just see the highlights. As he put it in, he and two of my co-workers ran through it in that short period of time, and I say, "Yeah, I'll catch you guys later." I'm going to actually walk around here for hours on end, and I don't know if we want to just characterize that as some American need for the quick consumption or something. No, no, no, no. It's absolutely international. I mean, you see tourists en masse everywhere doing exactly the same thing. And that's fine. I'm not a snob about this. I mean, if this is what gives them pleasure, then more power to them. And you never know at what point something that seems so trivial like this will light a spark in somebody who will then come back for deeper or slower or more extended experiences of the same sort. I'm just like with reading. I don't know. I mean, no teacher ever knows who is listening to him. You don't know whom you are reaching, the one who is smiling and perky, maybe playing a game, and the one on the back row who is looking surly and judgmental and iron-clad, maybe the one who is having a life-changing experience, or will have that life-changing experience five years later when neither you nor he will have known that. Whether you get an alumni, thank you from years later, someone who didn't get what was going on at the time. Every teacher does. Every teacher does. It's one of those things I've missed out on. The only teaching I ever did was GED skills for highway workers on spun a time. But the flip side of that is that sometimes I'll get a letter from a student who will say, "I remember when you said something or other, and it changed my life. And either I know that I never said that, or what I said was just the opposite of that. But better to be remembered than not be remembered at all." >> That's an old girlfriend of mine posted a quote of my college dorm room doors, "Better to be wanted for murder than not to be wanted at all." So I figure that's comparable. Now, the one question that, well, the person who seems to keep coming up in these podcasts of mine, which means at some point I hope to interview him, Harold Bloom comes up a few times and seven pleasures just in passing in terms of reading, misreading, and things of that. What was your experience with Bloom, or what experience have you had with Bloom, and what influence do you think his type of criticism has had on your approach to either reading or teaching or writing? >> Harold Bloom is a great genius, and I am a journeyman, so there is that difference between him and me. I began reading Bloom before he went into the areas of influence studies for which he became most famous in the '70s, and the first books of his I read were the books that helped to transform the field of romanticism, which had been in low esteem from the age of TS Eliot and Cleanthe Brooks and the new critics, all of whom were high Anglican, Episcopalian people, up through the '60s, that is from, say, the '20s to the '60s, romanticism was in bad odor. Bloom was one of the first people, along with Northrop Fry, the great Canadian critic, to start the upward revaluation of romanticism. And Bloom's first book, I think the date is 1959, is called Shelley's Myth Making, about the greatness of Shelley's poetry in terms of, of all people, Martin Boober and the I-Vow relationship. Bloom came from an entirely different tradition, Jewish, Gnostic, Mystic, and he saw in the poetry of Shelley something that must have appealed to him on his Jewish side. And his second book was on Blake, the apocalyptic Blake. And that was something that Northrop Fry also was touched by. And so they, and then somebody like his, like Bloom's Yale colleague, Jeffrey Hartman, great comparatist, began the study of romanticism through a new lens that led into deconstruction and then led into other pathways that romantic studies have followed. In 1973, 1974, Bloom came with Jeffrey Hartman to SMU for a weekend and they gave a series of lectures and discussions and symposia. And that sort of changed my life because I saw not only what a life of scholarship could be or two lives of scholarship, different kinds of lives could be, but also how differently committed to different kinds of literature these men were. That was the time at which the anxiety of influence had just come out and then the three other books that followed in this tetrology, each of which was a little more difficult than the one before. And none of which, probably today, is as well regarded as it was when it was controversial 40 years ago. The six revisionary ratios, as Bloom called them, were sort of like Empson's seven types of ambiguity. And there we are with seven. 40 years, thank you. 40 years before, it didn't matter whether it was type one or type two or whether it was ratio three or ratio four and what the exact boundaries were. It was that somebody was thinking in these ways in these terms. And these ways and these terms were always literary ways. In other words, one of the things I value most about literature is that it is something different from sociology and economics and history. It's not something that should necessarily be used as evidence for historical or economic trends, which is how mostly it's being used today. The latest brand of literary criticism is eco-criticism in which literature is being used. It's very interesting sometimes to suggest things about the environment, about humans' relations to the environment, to the weather. I know a man who's written a book about Mansfield Park, Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, about how it shows the effects of the little ice age that overtook England between 1350 or Europe between 1350 and 1850 and crops and stuff like that. This is of little interest to me. But Bloom and Hartman and Fry were interested in literature as literature, the science of literature as something which is part of our lives but is apart from our life as well as a part of our life. So to that extent Bloom was very important to me and then he went on to his Freudian studies, his biblical studies, his genius studies, his Shakespeare studies. It goes on and on and on. And you get the sense, I mean Harold is a man who is now 81 or 82, that at a certain point he is sort of recycling himself and you can sort of predict what he will say about certain things. But I remember looking at the genius book or looking at the Shakespeare book, Shakespeare and the invention of the human and he will say things that are just breathtaking in their daring and their novelty and their correctness. And if I may compare somebody very great with somebody who is more confrontational, I had the same experience whenever I read the work of Camille Paulia. Really? Because Camille Paulia is like a kamikaze pilot, she'll go on one page, I remember thinking this when I read sexual persona on her first book. She'll say something and on one page and you'll say that is just lunacy. And then on the next paragraph you'll say that's genius because she's going so fast and darting, hither and yawn so quickly that sometimes she hits and sometimes she misses. This is what Lord Byron said about his own poetry by the way. He said I'm like a tiger, sometimes I jump out of the jungle and I miss, but when I strike then I've got it. That's right, it's the thing. My last question for you, what comes after seven pleasures? Well, that's a good question. One could say that there could be seven more pleasures. I once contemplated a book called Seven Jewish Pleasures, but we couldn't get that many. We couldn't get that one. I asked various friends. I said, what are the seven Jewish pleasures? Do you know what the first one was, that everybody said immediately? - Go back to it. - Catching is the first one. Catching is the first one. But then it's Jews, we can't have sex, catching, gnashing, shopping, I don't know. I don't know. I'm writing essays, I'm writing a long essay about nostalgia, which takes its cue, which takes its point of origin from my, having just come from my high school fifty or three union in suburban Philadelphia two months ago, an event about which I had all kinds of high hopes and turned out to be, not a disappointment, it turned out to be perfectly ordinary, pleasant, and banal. - Were you expecting any sort of fifty-year grudges, and either grudges or revelations or great moments of intimacy, and it was a cocktail party, because people living their lives for fifty years. It was people living their lives and showing a certain degree of fellow feeling and kindness. I guess that's the best that can be hoped for. - Lord Spiegelman, thank you so much for your time. - Thank you, it's been a pleasure. - And that was Willard Spiegelman. You can find his culture column occasionally in the Wall Street Journal, and his essays appear in various online venues. You should give seven pleasures to read, it's a really wonderful collection of essays. It's published by Picador, you can find it in bookstores and on Amazon. That was the Virtual Memories Show. Thanks for listening. You can subscribe to the show and find past episodes on iTunes, or at my website, chimeraobscura.com. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are awesome. I love you that way. I love you. [music] [BLANK_AUDIO]