Guest Boaz Roth talks about rebuilding his library after a house fire, the joys of Bleak House, the influence of Orwell's essay, Inside the Whale, superhero movies, the merits of Lost, and what he's learned over 18 years of teaching literature.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 2, Episode 11 - Fire and Bleak House
[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you're listening to a podcast about books in life, not necessarily in that order. This time around, the twining of books in life is pretty tight. My guest is Boaz Roth, an English teacher at a small private school in St. Louis. Also, he's my brother. Those of you who've listened to the show for a while may recall that my brother's house burned down last January. He and his family got out safely, but the place was a total loss. The rebuilds going along pretty smoothly, and they hoped to move back in some time after the high holidays this month. As I mentioned in the last episode, the one with Lynn Ballard, my wife and I made the trip to St. Louis in August for the butt mitzvah of Boaz's oldest daughter, Leot. At the end of a very long weekend for him, he graciously sat down with me in his dining room to record a conversation. We started out with the subject of how he plans to rebuild his library once he moves back into his home, but the conversation takes a lot of turns after that. I know I should have just gone with my initial idea, the fantasy football-style draft where we have to pick back and forth for our top 20 books if we're rebuilding, but I tried to keep things as comprehensible as possible for people who haven't read exactly the same books that we have. Frankly, you guys should just be thankful that we didn't drift into a conversation about basketball and springsteen. Anyway, dear listeners, here's a conversation with Boaz Roth about books, teaching, surviving a house fire, and the shock of agreeing with David Brooks. The notion of recording phone conversations because I'm largely convinced that the other person would just be goofing around on the internet or watching TV, which I would be doing. No. Both. That's just what I do. I don't know. That's part of my thing, but it looks like we're on. My guest is my brother, Boaz Roth. I'm in St. Louis visiting for my niece's Bat Mitzvah, which went wonderfully. Now, a few episodes ago, I sort of had my rambling monologue about how you lost your house in January to a fire. We're glad that everything's getting rebuilt and you'll be moving back in in October, but this podcast being focused on books in life, I thought I'd ask how you go about rebuilding the library, and you were lucky enough not to lose everything because your office contained a lot of your books. Well, fire is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to the library. The house was destroyed by fire, but the firefighters did most of the damage to my books. My books were in the basement, and since the fire originated low and went up, the firefighters busted open windows and started shooting cannons, thousands of gallons of water into the basement, fruitlessly as it turned out because my room where the books were and where the water was being fired into was fireproof, so no fire was getting through and no water could get through. So when I finally went through the remains, the books were relatively unscathed, but they were all flooded, and I had a notion of maybe giving them a home, but I guess for emotional reasons I decided to just dispense with them and decide one day which has not yet come to start all over and rebuild the library. You had a goodly amount of work that you teach. You're a teacher by day, so enough of your, at least some of the fiction and such managed to survive in your office. Well, in my office, I have mostly fiction, literary criticism, a lot of Greek texts since I teach Greek, my math books. One thing over the years I've discovered, it's very helpful to have copies at home and in the office, and the office ones are usually the ones that have all my notations in them, so I actually only lost one book that I was teaching last year with all my notes, and that was Arcadia, which was the second last book that I taught, by that Arcadia, yes. In fact, I hadn't taught Arcadia for about eight or nine years, but this particular group of kids, I thought, would like it, and my instincts were right. I swung and missed on a few pitches, Middle March was a disaster with this particular group. It would have worked well with a year before, but the reason I picked it wasn't a good reason for this particular set of kids, but Arcadia was, and I had Arcadia, it was over winter break at the fire hit or right at the end, tail end of it, so I had Arcadia at home because I usually, my method as a teacher is to, after my syllabus is set, and I switch it up every year, I tend to read the books that I'll be teaching from September to December over the summer, and then during my winter break I'll read the books that I'm going to teach from January through June, and since the only book I really needed to take home was Arcadia, I lost that one, but of all of them, if I had to lose one, it's really easy to find all the good stuff, and to underline it, so it didn't really set me back, and everything else survived. I mean, my copy of Heart of Darkness has lasted 15 years of teaching, and I, and all the King's men, and one particular edition of Hamlet is really underlined, in fact there's more underlining there than there are lines too underlining, so they were all in the office, they survived. There were all the philosophy, all my St. John's books, which are not easy to replace. I can go to St. John's and get them, but the Klein, you know, there were a lot of books about Plato that I picked up along the way, they were all lost and annotated. The annotations are what really hurt to lose, because none of that, of course, was right. I'm dumber now at 44 than I was at 24, but when I got to 74, I was kind of hoping to see all the stupid things I thought I knew, plus I had really neat handwriting 25 years ago because there was no computer in my life, and now I can't, I'm embarrassed that I can't even read my own writing, I write kids essays, and they ask me what I wrote, and I know clearly. And back then, I might have a few things in my office that survived, but I wrote really neatly back then, and tiny and that's lost. But there is a line in Arcadia, of course, that helped me get through it. We pick up as we shed, so I look at the fire as a great shedding, and maybe one life settles down a little bit. They'll be picking up. We purposely bought very little, overall, until the house is rebuilt and ready to move in, and books have not been acquired in any books since. I didn't send you one of my spare copies of cultural leadership, but I figured you need more. That's on a book that is an addictive, that's like, that's crack with letters. I mean, that's, I refuse to read that until probably December. I was glad after four years of reading it that I finally finished it before. It's not a book that's meant to be finished, it seems to me. It's wrong to read it sequentially, or to me. It's right the first time. That was my big lesson from past conversations I've had. That book in particular, I mean, yeah, you can dive into it in all sorts of sequences, or just the people you want to read about, but it's not really about the people you want to read about. It's about James in the 20th century. Again, a book that I wish Clive James was in much better health, and would be able to come out to America. I saw him on TV, some interview with him, maybe at the time that, what's at that lunatic who died? Robert Hughes. No. It's been a long weekend. Christopher Hitchens. Christopher Hitchens. That lunatic. Yes, I think, I guess they were either friends, enemies, or frenemies, and so I think there was a ton of pitch and stuff, I think. There were interviews with James, but he was, there were interviews from a hospital. He's already in, he was in poor health then. He was not in any shape. He basically, it lungs, our disastrous won't be able to travel again and, you know, never be able to get home to Australia, which in an interview that I'd read, filled in with great regret. So my books were split, yeah, but if you were starting. If the fire had happened at my house, everything would be gone. I keep two books in the office, cultural amnesia and love happiness and war by Hitchens because I had a second copy of it. Everything would be gone. And so it would be that question of where you start. Well, this will sound like I'm a high maintenance man and it's probably true. There's a part of me that felt relief, phenomenology, the critique, all these books were staring at me and I understood why there were so many 50-year-olds in that GI program and of course I was 23, 24, but I'm closer to 50 than I am to 20 and I could see what the value of taking a whole summer to read those books again and there was a part of the felt guilty that I hadn't kept in that Hegel philosophy of right. I had an incredible preceptorial amount. I lived with that book for three months. I could tell you everything about, since it's Hegel I guess I could also tell you nothing about it. I could never be able to tell you something about it and those books seem so distant and I felt like maybe a bad friend because I hadn't kept them as close as possible. I'm another 10 books right now I could tell you everything, the things I've been teaching year after year after year, but those books that were so foundational when I felt I was starting to grow intellectually, I felt almost like a parenthood bat in his children. Now my children got burned instead of burned in the great conflagration of 2012. So I don't know when I would ever, it's what I'm going to replace I'm not sure. If I'm not going to read the phenomenology do I really need it on my shelf or more taking space? There was a part of me 25 years ago I thought you'd have to have all these books in plain sight for you to see for the world to see. There's no world, it's the library is a such a private thing I've determined. So I don't know. I find that the books that I want are things that I happen to need, I'm giving a huge address next month at the synagogue and it'll probably be about a 25 minute address and it's called inside the whale because part of the Yom Kippur cycle of readings is Jonah on the, right the beginning of the end of the, it's not the second name of the first day. So at the end of the 25 hour period, the haftarized Jonah and the best insight I have about Jonah comes from a man named George Orwell. In fact you're going to be an important part of this, I've already been, in fact I started this evening sketching out, sketching out at the beginning of this 20 page monstrosity I plan on delivering. And so, and I've given it some thought about two or three weeks ago and then I, and that was one book that was always on my table in the office and a slim or well collection of essays. Yes, and it's not in the, the Orwell reader in some other way, it's in the other one as you all know. I didn't have it, and those are the times the, the, the fire impacts me. I do have six different copies of it back at home. I actually bought one for Jane, so she's got one too, so, and she hates that essay for the passion. So I, I plan on rereading it, and I, and since I had those tapes, I do have those two tapes were in my office and as it turned out inside the whale, long ago when this was really hard to do, I took a tape recorder and made it an MP3 of inside the whale, it sounds terrible. And in fact, I tried to listen to it as I was jogging, but it doesn't work very well when you're trying to go. You need to be able to listen to it driving from Annapolis to New Jersey. That's really part of the, that's part of the speech, actually, about that, about that particular event meant for both you and for me. I thought that, that essay still is the most crucial thing I've ever had in my life, and it's not the greatest thing I've ever had in my life, it's not the best thing I read, but what it meant at that particular time, and both, I think I shouldn't take liberties with your, your intellectual history, but certainly for mine, that was transformative. And that really made me see that many pieces could be turned into a hole and probably everything I've done professionally and you see the hijinks that I, I perform weekly at the same time, it all comes back to that, that, that one essay, that just what that essay tried to accomplish, all those different strands, just tying it into this, this single image that, that isn't even explained until four fifths of the essays that is over your, your niece essentially gave an inside the whale, um, speech yesterday I thought, so, so those are the things that, that have to be replaced, things that, that have an important role in my life, that's, that's one thing that's never changed, I, I can't be made to be convinced that books are just things, and then they really are friends, and sometimes enemies, but that they live, and those are the ones that the loss of them hurts the most, but they're easily acquireable, I just, yeah, but there's, you know, the priorities we put on these things, again, when we finished the first stage of the building library downstairs, I began restocking shelves based on where my desk was going to be to, to begin understanding, you know, the, the configuration of the whole library, and this is a sort of thing I do in my spare time, by the way, I, I need to just, you know, organize the books, and it's, the, the bottom shelf right where my desk is going to be, is at this point, I think, thirty one Arden Shakespeare's complete Orwell essays, Montaigne's complete essays, and the copy of the Western canon by Bloom, one, one shelf above that is the Greeks, a shelf above that is now the Romans, who I gave short trip to until earlier this summer, and now that shelf is, is pushing off the very, like the Roman Empire itself, yes, it's, it's overtaking its boundaries at this point, but it, it's, it literally the shelves radiate outwards in terms of importance, the, the Nabokovs and Prusts and such, it's, it's one of those things that while I was doing it, I was quite conscious of what you've experienced last, last January with the, the fire, and what you lose in the process, and I almost positioned things near the door downstairs, so that if I'm running out in the process of escaping a fire, I can grab a few things and keep going, I'm telling you, I thought that was the case also, I ran past my wallet, past my phone, I saw them all, and I, I don't know, maybe I'm just, you know, who calls me coward, breaks my pate across, tweaks me by the nose, gives me the line of the throat, see if it's along, who tells me this, take that Mr. May, I ran out of that house as fast as I possibly could, and there, there is no 30 second grace period in my experience, and, and I don't think in any ones, because it's, you know, you can picture fire, you can, you can think of Tom Selleck, you know, but the fireman suit running up, but you don't know where the flames are, you don't, you know, it's, it's, I've never had that situation before where danger certainly was all around, even in Bambi, I mean at least you can see the flames, and you know, Bambi's got to run through the, the forest and jump through the, the waterfall and all the rest, you don't know, I mean, in our particular situation there's only one way in, one way out, there was, there'll be three now, so, in my instance it'll be somehow getting two 80 pound greyhounds out of a second floor, I was the first in the firefight, every firefighter who came up to me said you have pets inside, and I think because they were, and this is very sad, I'm not trying to laugh, I hope you're here listening to think I'm so callous, but it seems like pets really take it, take it, take the second tier, they're not humans, they're not going to run into grab, and they don't involve, and they don't think of getting out of a house with a human being too, so it sounds like pets really get burned up pretty, pretty bad, which again is why I figured out how I will jump off of the deck onto the shed carrying two 80 pound greyhounds and then climbing back up to save the wife, and the music hard, you know, and then going to grab all these individual hard drives that I, you know, this is why I keep copies of everything in the office, just for your listener, so one thing I wish we had done, and we will do, when we actually have property, is to just take the iPhone, walk around the house, either take pictures or movies of every last thing for two reasons, one, we locked out with the way the insurance company looked at our loss, they just declared a total loss, and he gave us a check and said, you know, go do whatever you want to rebuild your life, if it weren't declared a total loss, we had to itemize everything, and trying to, they gave us these huge stack of papers, and we were a little nervous after the first 24 hours, because they didn't get back to us, tell us a total, that would take weeks and weeks to fill out, and if anyone's experienced this like ours, you don't really have that kind of time, and the second reason is, when you have to replace things, I can't remember what everything looked like, and working my wife and probably not many people, so it's really helpful just to have a visual record, and it's so easy, and also whatever kind of insurance you can get, I'm not a chauffeur to the insurance company, but when the firefighters said what kind of insurance policy do you have, I had no clue, all I remember was, when we got our insurance, I was a dumb school teacher, I just said, give us whatever you think is good, and they did give us whatever was good, and it really helps, so that's my two minutes, fire prevention. After that experience, I immediately started figuring out how to get out of the house for everything you got. And a safety deposit box, which we never owned before, or never went to, we nearly have one, and there was no way for me to prove my identity for about 48 hours, and every paper that this important was, wasn't burned, it was actually drowned, and there's no way to salvage it, and at least now, if the next house catches fire, I've got a copy of everything in the safety deposit box, it was only like 50 bucks a year, so, things I never would have thought of, and I wish someone would have told me, so I'll pass that along. I appreciate it, again, it's just so out of the realm of our experience, but obviously something we can all experience, that's, yeah, which we hope never to, but if we were doing a fantasy football draft of how you would build your library back up, and you had to alternate with, you know, another picker, who do you start with? Well, if everything was gone, if you didn't have the office, you know... Well, you know, the books I teach, that would really be a kick in the stomach, I mean, I'm really good at what I do, you know, the Mr. May interview and the Mr. Townsend interview that you had really made me understand, in the back of my mind, I always thought, like Platon, if you'd want to approach your teaching, so you could ascend to the position of a St. John's tutor, that's the epitome of teaching, and I don't think, from my memories and what they described, that I would be any good at that, I think, great teaching requires a really strong hand in the classroom, that it's not productive to let people just pick up a saxophone and hit any notes, and I think that's what I took from those two interviews, I've started washing dishes and changing diapers, and not listening clearly enough, but that's kind of my memory, too, of St. John's. I think great teaching comes from having read books over and over again, and knowing what questions to ask ahead of time. It's syllabus writing, and you can't write a good syllabus if you don't have a command of the book, and you really need annotated copies. I need them, I'm sure there are human beings who do this way better than me, and don't require the resources, but I've taught really, really good English classes. My students have had the highest AP grades, for what it's worth, of any subject in our school for years and years and years, and if I lost those, your question, this is a category mistake, I guess, it's hard for me to get excited about what book I need, I need my books, but if I don't have my books then you have to start with Shakespeare, and I don't know if he's a center of the canon or the creator of this or that, but that's the place to begin for me, but I require next. Do you do away with philosophy at this age, and stick to the original? No, I really would like to read a lot of Plato again. We can get the Bollingin as a single book, that's the big green Bible of the complete play that. That's lost that one. You know what hurts just badly is the loss of borders just as bad to me as the loss of my library for the fire, because Barnes and Noble is ridiculously poor and under-stocked, and it's filled with garbage, I'm sorry Barnes and Noble people, I don't come to, I mean at least in St. Louis, it's terrible, you know, and I thought borders was a little more adventurous with what they had on their shelves, and I can't find any Plato anywhere, you know, the three Barnes and Noble's around here, and that's nothing. It's the death of Socrates business again, and it was such a wonder to me when I was back in Annapolis in May and June, just going into the St. John's bookstore, and having that moment of, oh, well these are all the books I'm supposed to have, not, you know, whatever, Fifty Shades of Grey and all the other crap that's floating around, but it's not even, it's like, you know, the Hamlet they'll have, they'll have, you know, the updated Hamlet. And the third are, you know, I don't need that, you know, anyway, so, back to the classics. It's not, you know, or, you know, can you find a Tropic of Cancer anywhere in a Barnes and Noble? Can you find Invisible Man, you know, that, so, the first thing I bought, I had, so I've been teaching the Brothers Carimals off for the last five or six years, and that's one where I had two copies, and you don't want to bring that 700-page book home in your bag night after night. So that was one of the first things I had to get, and that was just for my teaching. The one in the office survived, and that had most of my notes in it, but the one that I had at home, so I could just prepare, some books I really don't need to read, most of the ones that, the eight or nine that I live with here, I know where everything is. I estimate reading Bleak House, and this is the first time you've read it. Well, no, I've, on three occasions, I, it defeated me around chapter 20, chapter 21, or close to the spontaneous combustion. I was going to ask genius human combustion, always important aspect of digging. It was just too sheer mountain to climb, and that was one reason I decided I have to read this, and the class I'm anticipating having, I taught half of them in Greek, I had a whole bunch of them as seventh writers in math, and you get to know them really well at the school of '90. They're the kind of group I think that really wants to stand inside of a world, and that's what Bleak House's reputation was. So I had to read that thing really fast, and I finished a thousand pages in three weeks, and I didn't even pick up a pencil or pen, I took no notes, I just, I was reading, lying that couch, I had nothing to do, I had to read like 40 pages, get yelled at, and do what I had to do, go print another pen, and now I'm reading the second time with a pen so I know where to find everything, and it's really not for now, it's not for this year, it's for next year or for five years from now, and that's, I remember, I was at a graduation dinner two or three years ago with a few parents of soon-to-be departing seniors, and I said, what are you reading? So I just, I'm reading, what I'm always reading, I'm reading either the books I'm teaching or I'm reading about the books I'm teaching, isn't that boring? Was there a question, I said, how much did your sons enjoy my class? Well, I loved it, it was the best class I ever took, then it's not so boring, is it? Because I live for this, I live for getting in that classroom, asking lots of questions, and there, then you can pick up your saxophone and play whatever notes you want, and I don't even have to tell you, you're playing it poorly, your classmates, or you will, if I've trained you in the right way to read, I can tell him at times a kid will start speaking and say, no, no, no, I'm wrong, but that's not right, let me try it all over again, and that's, I think maybe the sphere of St. John's, they have his head, it's all that business from Plato that if you give someone else's opinion, it's not true learning, and I believe that, and so what's the result, we're not going to enforce our opinions by asking loaded questions, we're going to let people talk, have the five minutes of silence when no one wants to, one model the two things, and it's shaped me for sure, but I don't, I guess I'm going to lose all job prospects when they start listening to this one, I'd say, but as if, I can believe St. Louis at this point, there's no danger in teaching kids to think critically and then giving them a whole bunch of opinions, whether you believe them or not, and then having them throw them out, and that's the best part of the job, and I've learned so much from them, so I don't, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't read 50 Shades of Grey, I probably should, I haven't read, who's the famous writer from What's or Groves, the, not the Awakenings, is that it? Kate Chopin? No, he's, he's alive, dude, the one, the one who, Oprah, who's going to make the book of the month. Oh, Jonathan Franzen. Yes, I mean, you're not missing anything, it's okay. I might be missing, you know, it's okay, I don't, but all of them, I, I don't want to give this impression that nothing great can have been written in the last 30 years, 100 years from now, there's going to be books that, you know, people will look at it and say, that's amazing the way we look at Tulsa and say, I'm sure there is, I'm sure there will be. Well, it's something I brought up once in a conversation with a relatively known writer and a friend of mine who's a professor at NYU, trying to find anything from the last 30 years that they felt would be taught and, and read devotedly 50 years from now. And it was, and I had also told them to take Philip Roth off the table because he's so polarizing for a lot of people. And by polarizing, I mean, Gentiles don't understand Philip Roth. Yeah, I've only read one of his novels that says that's, in fact, that's the thing that I kind of wish if I weren't so crazed about making this class is making it perfect for each particular group, turning each, you know, each one's like a Lamborghini, there's no assembly line here. I mean, I think about each group of kids I'm going to have. And I missed on some. I'll admit that. But with others, I think I really hit it out of the, or together we hit it out of the park. But Roth is a good, good example. If I had the time, that'd be magnificent. I'd love to read this is over. But yeah, I just don't think you could teach that to high school kids. No, everything, everything is just, you know, just surrounds my teaching. I just, you know, I can't get enough of it. I live for it. And summers are a little empty sometimes, so I don't get to teach. Just that I can't insult a teenager to his fate. You know, you see someone I do at the synagogue. I mean, this is, this is, this is, you did refer to, you know, the bar mitzvah kids of the previous generation as losers. Yeah, of course they were. Well, they didn't, they didn't sneer, they didn't do that. Interesting. Just, just make them laugh and, and, and make them know that you, you acknowledge our existence as human beings. I think they'll, and that they can, they can throw back to them. That's, I have a red pen, but I'll put my red pen down. I mean, I, I guess we don't want vulgar language in the podcast, but I've had, I've told some of my, my, my advice is more than my students. If you need to say a strong four letter Anglo-Saxon word, as an imperative, you can say it, if you think so, but it better be done discreetly and get it out of your system. And then we can start talking because sometimes these things are necessary. I find with teenagers and, and that's great, but don't, don't, don't you do it in front of my boss and don't, you know, don't, you know, don't embarrass me and don't say Mr. Roth tells us we can go ahead and, and curse, but so it's all the reading, all my readings for the teaching. And I don't know how long that's going to last. I, David Brooks, do you read? Not too often I'd stand to find him. He made me vomit this summer with his Bruce bracing paracosums, but he wrote, I think it's the August 1st column, essentially he rewrote Shakespeare's Stages of Man, but through an attack on Barack Obama. As I took it, one of those Joe the Plumber things, I guess that was the time where Obama's words were pulled out of context. You didn't make yourself. Who's responsible for this? And Brooks, Brooks's column is about the match our conversation one might have with oneself about who's responsible for the kind of human being become. And then he paints a picture of how we think in our 20s, our 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. And I think he was right. And what scares me is my life might be transformed by a man like David Brooks, who totally misunderstands Bruce bracing, that when we get to this stage in our lives, and I can start to feel this pull, the direction we take is to make sure that others, not just our children, but even professionally, are as well developed as we can help them. And God help me. I don't want to be a principal. But I don't understand why I took this job to be present in the synagogue. It's a lot of work and it pulls me away from my family. And I'm awfully good at it. But I think it's to connect with others and to help others who can't see things maybe as clearly as you can at one particular time. And I think that's what, I just look at my computer if you want me to send you the link. But it scares me. I can't imagine a day where I'm not teaching or thinking about my English class. On the other hand, I can start to understand why there's always a Ben Kenobi waiting for Luke Skywalker or a Tommy Lee Jones in Fugitive, some older guy who's really good at what he does. But the main focus is not solving the crime. It's teaching the young cop how to find the clues. And at 44, I think I'm getting to the stage where I need to teach some young cops how to search for clues. The problem that my place of employment is none of the young cops really care very much for me because I think I'm just too old and it's too stupid. And after all, you're 44 and you've been there for 18 years. Well, 18 years. But, you know, if you had something going, you would have left by now, I guess, is the, yeah. Or, you know, just, you know, spend all your time just doing, you know, talk to teenagers. I mean, why would I do that? You know, it's kind of stupid, isn't it? And there's a lot of reasons for animosity in the workplace and I've certainly rightfully engendered those with brilliant expressions that have come out of my mouth that have been very hurtful to human beings and I regret them and try to make up for it as much as I can. But that's something I've been thinking about recently since August 1st. Is there an inflection point where we stop worrying about perfecting the things that we do for ourselves and start thinking about how we can make things perfect for others? And not just the people we love and care about, but people we're just connected to by paycheck. It's totally accidental that we have the same place of employment. Why would you want to make that person do his job better? Just because he's 20 years younger than you? And what's the point? So I think a lot about that. But it doesn't help you with books and fire, does it? No, it's, you know, the conversations range all over the guys during place. Thank you, St. Charles. Yeah, yeah. That's a part of my workplace scenario is just explaining to the associate editors at one point that you understand, I was doing what you were doing, you know, I actually did move up within this this company takeover magazine. And it's probably the best, that's probably the best image of it, right? Because the editors are old and the writers are young. We happen to be in a stretch where there's enough of us who are in our 40s or late 30s, early 50s, that there hasn't been a turnover for a few years and some of the associate editors, I think you'd see them start to get frustrated. And I would try and explain that really, as I think I mentioned to my last interview with Jane Borden, career by attrition is nothing to be embarrassed about. People will die ahead of you and you'll get moved up. That's, you know, something to look forward to. But yeah, I've tried to explain to him that night I was in a cubicle like you and I wasn't always, you know, in an office. You know, young people need to know, I think it happens really fast. I mean, nothing happens. No one's dying. No one's getting married. No one's, you know, running off with the secretary. And then all of a sudden, from what, in my own experience and what I've seen from hearing from students of mine who have moved into the business, it happens awfully, it's like falling in love. I mean, nothing, nothing. And then all of a sudden, you just can't get something out of your mind and your whole life has changed. And I just, you know, Tony Corinizer says his one piece of advice in life is just have your hands out. Someone will throw money off the back of a truck. And if you have to have your hands out at all times and just be right, you don't know when that truck's going to pass. And I think that's so true about life. I mean, if you're, if you've got a brain and you're worth something to somebody, they'll find you. It's inevitable. I mean, especially now, I think it's, thank heavens, I have my job. I don't want to speak lightly of those who are struggling to find a job, but hold your hands out. Because I think there's always opportunity ready to be thrown away. I think he's right about that wrong by many other things, but right about. Your extra credit question. What books do you want to get to that you haven't? What's your, your Moby Dick, Al Azalea? It was Bleak House. I mean, I, you know, I want to run around your question and be cared about, but it really frustrated me that I couldn't, you know, the greatest novel makes him cry. I didn't, I have to admit, I don't cry when Esther Summersson cries. Yeah, maybe I need 10 more readings. And there are books that move. I can't get through. I, you know, the, the last thing I took my English class every year. I say goodbye to the students. I read the last two paragraphs of the row runs through it and I asked them just to close your books and leave the room and close the door and leave me alone, because we're never going to ignore the weaving. No, it's my allergy. It's not because our year together, we, you have a final exam, but the final exam question's always something about them, more than about the books. The whole year is to prepare them for that one moment to read those two beautiful paragraphs or to appreciate those two beautiful paragraphs. And that's it. So it really frustrated me that Bleak House evaded me and eluded me. And now it hasn't. And, and it's brilliant. There's no K2 behind it. It's just right now. I'll think of something in a second, but it is so rich at work. It's like being in, you know, it really, it's like being at Disney World because every ride is its own thing and it doesn't change. Pirates of the Caribbean is the Pirates of the Caribbean. You, you know, you went on that thing 10 times. You and I went on the haunted house and there was, you know, the dumb mirrors and things are just what they are. And there's so many of them. I mean, that's, that's what that book is like. And it's an amusement park of, if you want to call them grotesque, that's fine, but things in themselves. And gosh, this one I'm reading for 10 years. I mean, I'm not, you know, brothers K. I don't know how I'd ever give that one up at this point. I mean, I think Bleak House might be my summer reading for a long, long time. I just, all right. So what happened, I read all those flip-rock things. I'm embarrassed. Don DeLeo. I've never read any of that. You can pass. Oh, Tristan Shandy, people who I admire like you, like my mother-in-law, say incredible things, but the whole period, you know, besides late 20th century, this whole 17th century period of the 18th, I'm a little blank there. We all have our lacunae. Again, I'm only discovering the Romans now after, and after getting a St. John's education, I managed to put off ever reading anything from the... Syrup book. Yeah, you know, it's not so much what I'd like to read. Was there a sort of money I'd like to read? I mean, I'd like to read Bruce again. I mean, I read it. I remember, I timed it. It was eight months. I remember the night that I finished it because I was invited to go out with our next-door neighbor, Kevin Kitala, and Howie Owens for his bachelor party. I said, "You're gonna have to forgive me." For eight straight months, I've been reading this book, and I'm 10 pages away. I have to finish it tonight, and that was 20 years ago, and Ulysses was 20 years ago. Well, right after I finished Bruce, I watched Anchorman for the first time. I'd finished and sat down, breathed for a little while, then turned on the TV. "Oh, hey, Anchorman's on!" I never seen that, and realized I needed to downshift pretty radically. What else? There's nothing you sort of blew off in college or grad school. I mean, I just soaked up the books. I mean, it was funny that at the end of every semester at St. John's, whatever was being offered in seminar, I probably read so scatteredly because the papers were doing preceptorial. So I guess Macbeth, I didn't read closely enough, would ever play about a Greek getting his arms ripped off at the end of the literature seminar. I probably didn't read The Bach Guy or whatever they were, whatever Europeans say they offered. Oh, democracy in America. Yeah, to get much of a dent into the talk. I loved that, but I read that in college before I got to St. John's. I kind of wish I could do that whole program all over again. I never would have thought I'd be, I've taught math 16 years in a row now, and I was on a math guy in high school certainly not in college. And I probably didn't make the most of that St. John's. So that would be, I'm such a limited human being. All I can think about is the books you need to know. A lot better than most people don't have books and just watch dancing with the stars. By the way, when we were going to St. John's, never ever ever would I have thought of watching any of those TV shows, even the ones that might have gotten critical claim like ER. I don't know how I can live without Breaking Bad. I don't know how my life would be without Mad Men. Loss has done more for shaping my view of the world than maybe, well no, it's not exactly what Tolsoi is on. It's giving me an image of what life could be like, what the push past the boundaries of my limited imagination. I just think this is a wonderful time to sit in front of a TV and have your brain sucked out. In a way that 20 years ago, we weren't watching shows like that. TV was a lot crappier back then. And going to see a movie like Batman was a big thrill. I remember we went to see that stupid Batman movie with Danny DeVito. We were so excited, we were disappointed, but there was excitement. I'd punch a car via the punch on windshield numbers. There's no excitement to see any of them because they're all two hours and 20 minutes at their longest. And we know how the three acts are going to unfold. It's just a matter of how you're going to dress them up. There's going to be exposition, the hero's going to be pushed down, and then he's going to beat the bad guy at the end, or he'll have a sneaky ending like inception. By the way, if you do see Dark Knight, I don't know a 1/100th about movies that you know. But you'll have to tell me if a director ever ripped off his own ending from a previous movie because that's exactly what Christopher Nolan did. When I went to see Inception, I went with all my buddies from the synagogue. I don't know, there are, of course, money Jews and there are book Jews. And it was interesting when we were in the parking lot, the money Jews saw the ending of Inception as one way, and the book Jews, and they hated it, and the book Jews loved it because of the ambiguity. And that was, and the movie was designed to end that way, I think. If Inception 2 has ever made someone needs to stab Christopher Nolan with a fork through any soft part of his body, I mean, there's no need to add anything to that. You've created discussion and you've made something come alive inside of people. That's what art's supposed to do. The end of Dark Knight, it's not so much, it's not so much what happens. Everything is just in these grays and the plaques and the blues and the snow is gray. It's not even white. It's great. I mean, it crits it, and there's this final scene, not going to spoil it for people who haven't seen the movie or who aren't going to see it for 10 years. But it's filmed with a warm, lush glow, the same glow at the end of Inception. And I didn't even realize it, but one of my, one of my friends who started debating about the ending, whether a major character survived or his survival was imagined by Alfred the Butler. And it never crossed my mind to even have that debate to my friend who really doesn't think about books and movies the way that I do. That's why he's my friend, because we teach each other so much with our different views of the world. And Donald made that Christopher Nolan ripped off his own ending, and that was really disappointing. If he filmed it just in the same monotone style, he wouldn't have created that. I thought it was very cheap. In the movie, it was no work. If I could editorial that middle one. That was brilliant. I mean, there's not one bad scene in that middle Batman movie, and Heath Ledger is just off the charts, I get that. But I mean, there are moral dilemmas popping up that all the time. This was just, it was the same three acts. It was spectacular. Yeah, you don't, this, this was a comic book movie. That middle one was a thriller with guys in costumes, but this one was more standard, fair, a superhero comic book. It was spectacular. I mean, if I had a lot of leisure, I'd probably go see it again. I think narratively, there's a three-month gap that is real. I mean, that's every scene in that dark night with the Joker. Every scene, it's supposed to be like the real world where people are actually getting poisoned and done. I mean, it's not like, you know, Jack Nicholson with, you know, Deodorant, that's in poison, and everyone's smelling in Gotham City. That's a comic book. That middle movie, it was like what you expect out of a movie. It was bad things happening to innocent people. And here's the guy who's got psychological problems running around in a cape, and he's going to try to help us. This one, there's a three-month gap, four-month gap. You know, the bad guy makes his move in July, and then Batman comes back in January, and you have a montage. I just thought, it ruined the ethos of that middle movie, and I really disappointed. So, sorry. It's a Batman movie. I, you know, I have a certain point in my life where... You see this trailer for Superman yet? No, just... But the one where it's Superman, the Deadliest Catch, where he's on a boat or something? Yes, it was Kansas, right? I don't know. It's Superman. The rocket landed in... Yeah, yeah. He lands in the Midwest, and all of a sudden he's on the Deadliest Catch. He's in Alaska, catching crabs. It was actually a film like... I thought it was a film. In fact, I showed the trailer to sell it at night, and she goes, "Hey, is this a tree of life?" Because, you know, the close of the butterfly. It's interesting. It could be a surrealistic Superman. No, it'll be a really terrible movie, because it's about Superman. It's just going to be another big studio movie about a guy in a cape, which, you know... I probably heard this somewhere else. It's not my own original opinion. TV is right for movies. You can do it longer for more interesting narrative effects, and not have to... Particularly the HBO, where you don't have to worry about advertising. But you've got to watch Breaking Bad, aren't you? On this thing. You start with the HBO model, though, where you don't have advertisers. You don't have to worry about, you know, tied, getting mad that, you know, their product was on something that... Show Tony Soprano, killing someone, and you can start to push the boundaries then, and then you get to AMC. You get to FX, you know, make... I mean, all of a sudden, now. I mean, and I think it just devastates the movies. I mean, I've wrote things... Art movies. It opens the door for gigantic, idiotic, spectacle movies that are going to make $5 million, but it reduces the guys who would be making thoughtful, intelligent movies. You lose the 70s, you know. But so what? I mean, I'm just saying that... Is it better to... I wonder, I mean, so you have Chinatown, and that's two hours of brilliant narrative storytelling. Chinatown is the closest thing that American art has come to greet tragedy. But is it merely quantitative to get two hours of Jack Nicholson with his nose getting broken, and incest, and all the rest, and the dirty side of life? Or you get five years of Brian Cranston slowly turning from a meek, schlub, to stripping away what protects us from each other, protects us from ourselves, and revealing what's on the inside. I don't want to say TV is better than the movies, but other than... I wonder, sure, the quantity... I mean, it's 60 hours, 80 hours of breaking bad versus two hours of Chinatown. But is there something qualitatively better about what long-form TV now? I mean, I mean... Can we give the character a change over time, over a longer period of time than we do in a movie? And it really gives you a richer canvas to work with, I think. But it seems like it's just quantitative and not. But then on the other hand, who needs it on a 60-bighty screen? What's wrong with having it on your laptop? I wonder. By the way, I talk about all this stuff in class, too, with the kids. Oh yeah, I think this is essentially the Bois Roth School experience. They're extra credit. In the fourth quarter, for four points of the five, they had to read the leopard. But the fifth point was, because I had this kid who was a movie buff, and he always would say things like, "Check out the big brain on Brad." I said, "Okay, so your fifth point of extra credit is you have to go watch Pulp Fiction, and you have to tell me what the best line of the movie was and defend it." And that was so much fun. And some of the kids, the Korean kid who I had in the class, watched it said, "Mr. Roth, I don't understand the movie, it was like out of order." Did I make a mistake? I said, "No." That the movie is out of order. That's the whole point. Now let's talk about what kind of order you expect, and what does it mean to have your order disrupted. And that was in a beautiful conversation for 45 minutes. We watched that movie in Annapolis, actually. During St. John's, a friend of ours worked at the movie theater. They got Pulp Fiction, and he invited us over for midnight showing before it premiered. We were all Reservoir Dogs maniacs. And we were able to sit down. That's the one. Usually, anything you recommend, I think beforehand, even after that one, that's on a movie. Reservoir Dogs is improv. I mean, it's about acting. It's a play. I mean, it's a play that's shown. But watching glorious bastards. In glorious bastards is five interrogation scenes. There's two people. One is trying to hide something from the other in five different occasions. And he stretches that out for two hours and 40 minutes and kills Hitler. Awesome movie, but it's really built. As built around interrogation scenes, not in English. This filmmaker decides, I'm going to do this whole thing in French. I'm going to do this in German. And you're going to come along with me because I've treated you well enough so far, even though most people didn't get around to the end of Kill Bill. You know, these brought them along. And she treated them to Christoph Waltz, becoming a charming Nazi and interrogating someone in a way that I think all of his films are ultimately about acting in a way they're all about understanding a scene in different ways. And some of them are about his own pop culture, background, which informs everything. But I think ultimately his films become about what it means to be a role, but to take on a role, which at the end of Kill Bill, you get from David Carradine explaining why Superman is the greatest character because he's the one who has to act human. Everybody else becomes a superhero. He's a superhero who has to pretend he's a person. He's a lovely observation. Yeah, I think, because I've fallen myself. I think that's really neat because we're all playing. We have different roles that we have to play, but that's the outsider trying to fit in. That man, certainly it's the op. Well, no, but he's still a man who has to act like, you know, a vigilante. He acts into that role, Spider-Man. You know, everyone becomes something. Everyone starts out as a person. Superman doesn't say that as a person. At the end of Spider-Man, I went with my friends and I said, "What was the most unrealistic thing about that movie to you?" And I said that the woman who is playing Gwen Stacy, it's like 20 or 20, that she could ever pass for a high school student. You didn't see Easy A, did you? Not only is she supposed to be a high school student, Emma Stone. She's a wallflower, who all the other kids ignore. And Amy and I were like, "Yeah, okay, that's completely implausible, but beyond that." Well, the strange about the movie, and I think this is just because I've been around high schoolers my whole life. Everyone else who is cast for that movie was probably high school age, but the two leads, who are walking around the hallways, were there are no adults, but I noticed these things because it's my place. So people could get beaten up mercilessly and guys who have fights in the gym because there are no adults around ever in the hallways of this public high school. It's like there were 230-year-olds. It's like they were coming off the set of 90120 or whatever, to go walk into a high school hall. That was more unrealistic than an 18-foot-foot-turning journalism, yeah. Which they blew too, by the way. He was too big. He would have been scarier. In fact, it was more terrifying when the gas gets released and people start turning the lizards when they're human-sized. When they become King Kong-sized. But these movies are video games. These movies are entertainment for a video game. That dark night, so compelling to me. I mean, innocent people's lives are being threatened, and that moral question, "How far do you go?" In all the other ones, it's a question. It's always asked. But never demonstrated. But that movie, it's just stuck with me. I just think they killed the wrong villain at the end. They should have killed their own, like the two first one. Not just because of Heath Ledger's death, but because Two Face is the child of Batman and the Joker, essentially, in the context of that movie. So you kill one of the parents and this offspring is running around. Instead, they kill the offspring and leave the Joker to survive. But that last scene with the Joker, if you remember, he's dangling upside down, and that was it, wasn't it? I mean, because what he's standing for is trying to turn the whole world upside down, and Batman can't stop it. Oh, I just didn't get how he was supposed to be the whole lord of misrule, but all of his plots just revolved to an incredible timing. Like, everything had to be down to the exact minute, even though he was supposed to be the organizer of Chaos. But yeah, I don't know. Anyway, so Batman, books, fire. I'm still trying to figure out what book you want me to, but I haven't read that. Well, I turned you on to The Leopard this summer, so that's, yeah. But I didn't have a desire to make that. No one knows about that book until I put it in front of me. That's really good, though. I've recently got turned on, which I hadn't tried in a million years since I was in college. Robert Musil is the man without qualities, but I'm saving that for down the line, if I can do the more obscure modernist books. You know, I guess all those David Foster walls, you know, all that stuff. I mean, I just, I'm so, I don't want anyone in the world to think I'm above anything just because I'd like to read books by dead white European males. And if I don't talk to you well, this is a dead white European male. I suppose. Yeah. By his own man. It's really not snobbery. It's just, what's what you teach? And when something finds its way in, you know, if you told me three years ago, I have this, this mania for true grit, you know, I was a western woman, I wanted to teach them. I can't wait to teach it this year. I can't wait to teach for the next five years. What teaching English classes is about to me. And I would tell any of any aspiring wheelchair, it's about putting a frame around a book. It's the St. John's way of just saying, here it is, you build the frame. Gosh. What English teachers seem to do is know their books really well and put the right frame around it. And then the kids will paint for you, but you got to know what the boundaries are. And I know it's what's right for them, but they can comprehend. And then I can't, this, I will not fail with true grit. The material's just too good and the questions are asked. So on the images, she's surrounded by snakes. She's disfigured at the end. She's disfigured because of this journey. I mean, some of it's so obvious, so easy, sure. But sometimes we miss the obvious and the easy. And sometimes it's not even bad to have the obvious and the easy because it makes us see things that aren't so done. That's the whole republic, isn't it, right? Let's see what justice looks like in the city that's big. And then we can figure out what it looks like in the human being who's really small. Well, let's see what it's like to make these sort of choices that are, you know, that have these devastating consequences where innocence, Maddie's innocence is taken and just trampled upon it and bitten by snakes. And see what that we can do with that in other places. Like when we read Hamlet say, things that aren't so easy or heart of darkness, which I don't think is as easy as people make it out to be. In fact, the other person I interviewed today went on about that. That's her canonical or touchstone work to keep coming back to the heart of darkness. Yeah, I'll tell you this about her. It is the one book I hate the most to read. And it's the one indispensable book that I think everyone really needs to read most. It's really too pretentious. It's too dark and the narrative quite honestly, the paragraphs are just too long. I mean, you know, it doesn't break up things enough. But the way it's structured, I mean, you know, I can't be the one who to have come up with this thought because it's really too good and I don't have the brain power for this. But when you think about that novel, there are four different levels to it. I mean, just going from the inside back out, you've got Kurt's telling a story to Marlow, Marlow telling a story to the narrator who we always call Nelly because he's on the Nelly. And then there's Nelly telling a story to us. And that's brilliant. That's really, really - I mean, that first paragraph and a final paragraph. I'm going to - I know, I understand it, Chebe. You know, we read that essay and it's a race of all that stuff. And that's what a - man, oh man, it's too important not to read. But I hate reading it. I mean, just it's so, so cumbersome in places. But you learn English. You're first English word when you're 21 years old and you produce prose like that. I tip my hat to you, sir, Joseph Conrad. And I will never be able to write one sentence because it's your worst paragraph. I get that. But that's one that I don't look forward to reading it. I don't get excited about reading it, but I do love talking about it. Most of the books I teach, I think, are relatively short, except Brother's Kay. But that's kind of - I actually read it 10 or 15 times. Well, it's like this whole thing just sits inside of you. And there, by the way, that last part of the book doesn't work. If I were Brother's Kay, if I were his literary agent, I would have cut out a lot of - I would have urged him to trial too much testimony. It goes on way, way, too long. It doesn't be the Enrange 38-page court monologue or something. Right, it's a book. By the way, and David Brooks's column, he says, when you're in your 20s, it's perfectly - and I think he's right. Enran makes a lot of sense. But you are Superman. There are no boundaries. You're probably not married. You probably don't have kids. Whatever. Your first job is your first job, yeah. It's not your career. You can conquer anything probably. And I think that was right. In the 30s, you start to fund your pattern. And then 40, you start to go tired of the pattern. And then you realize there's something bigger than you. Uh, and then maybe it's time to turn into a different direction. And I saw - I had one colleague, the most brilliant teacher I had met, um, math teacher. Honestly, I don't counsel this to young teachers. I think this is a mistake unless you're really, really good at what you - not just your material, but you're a really good teacher. You're just walking into the room and say, what do I assign you last night? And someone say, rational algebraic expressions. Oh, okay. Well, here are three different ways we can solve problem. Well, give me problem 14, is that it? And he was that good. And after 17 years, he got tired of it and he walked away. And I think - I don't know if he feels he made a mistake or not. And I'm worried about that when I got to year 17, but I feel the same way and I don't. I mean, I just - I hunger for this more now than ever before. Because I'm getting better at it. I'm getting good at it. And I want to let it go. Something I think like I'm starting a master. But Enran is not really to be taken seriously. No, the fountainhead, maybe, more than that. I mean, that's the thing to add the shrug. I think just - it's sprawled. I mean, if you're going to take anything, so the fountainhead's fine. I mean, are you more important in the world around you? Yeah, we don't need the super society out in Arizona, somewhere where I destroyed the whole world to rebuild it. How about a guy who wants to create something and decides that the world has no business changing his creation? It's fine. It's a decent idea. Let's play with that. And you can have your 35-page speeches in the courtroom. And by the way, you know, you write when guys, with all your cutting taxes in the free - she's not your person. Oh, no. She is not your person. Because if you want her, then you've got to give us a portion back. Yeah, you take the social agenda too. And there's no God for her. I mean, you want no taxes fine. You get no church either. So be, you know, like read the books, you know. But that's not the country we live in now. We don't read the books. We just make the catchphrases. Anyway, thanks for your time. I appreciate it. Congratulations on your daughter's butt mitzvah. And rebuilding your home in your library. Thank you. [Music] And that was my conversation with Boaz Roth, teacher, father, brother, and reader. You've been listening to the virtual memories show. You can find more episodes of the show on iTunes or at my website, chimeraobscura.com. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [Music] It's a town for emotions. A party I win. 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