Guest Lyn Ballard talks about her gateway books, the metaphysical poets, reading Huck Finn at the age of 5, an embarrassing Stanley Elkin anecdote, the importance of making literary pilgrimages, and more.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 2, Episode 10 - Four Quartets and Other Pilgrimages
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and summer 2012 is coming gone. I didn't get too much time after in that span, but, you know, them's the breaks. The schedule of my magazine results in a ton of work in June and August, as well as a breakneck run through September to put on this big conference every year. Still, I tried to make time for family and friends. In mid-August, my niece out in St. Louis had her butt mitzvah, and I wouldn't have missed that for the world. She did a fantastic job, especially considering that there were like 300 people at the shul for the event. I'm pretty sure I was totally out of pitch and made a ton of mistakes in the Huff Tower reading at my bar mitzvah, but that took place at the whaling wall in Jerusalem, and there were so many people around, all doing their own thing that no one gave me that much of a hard time about it. I've got a ton of family in Israel, so I spent the summer after my 13th birthday over there, along with my brother. My mom joined us for the last two weeks, but my old man couldn't make it over for the event. When we got to the wall for my bar mitzvah, we started scouting out other small-sized bar mitzvah groups. See, you need to have 10 men to conduct a Torah-based ceremony. It's called a minion for you non-Jews out there, and we had like five. So we found another group of five or six men and a 13-year-old kid, which under normal circumstances, might look a little weird, but we got our minion together and we got bar mitzvahing. And the other kid and I shot the breeze for a minute or two before things got rolling. After we exchanged names and got past the embarrassment of being set up on a halocic play date, my asked him where he was from. And he said he was from New Jersey. He said, "Really? Me too. What town?" Glenrock, he said. That's maybe like 12 miles from my house. That's my top memory from the bar mitzvah. The close number two is one of the presents I got that night. See, one of my Israeli relatives decided for bar mitzvah gift, I deserved the book Vengeance by George Jonas. That's the non-fiction story of the Israeli hit team that hunted down the terrorists behind the Munich massacre. I was 13. I doubt my niece Leon got a gift quite so awesome, but it was a great weekend of celebration. I got pretty teary during her haftara and her speech later in the service. When her dad, my brother, spoke during the service. I was really struck by how I'd been to the same shul for Leont's parents' wedding and for her naming ceremony. And now for her butt mitzvah. I never had that sense of community and continuity in my life, which is entirely my fault. And I really respect my brother and his family for building that for themselves. (upbeat music) If you're like me, you scan people's bookshelves and you see them. The first time I went to my brother's in-law's house in St. Louis back around 1999, I was really happy to see a whole ton of books by writers I like. It turned out that Boaz's mother-in-law, Lynn Ballard, is a former English lit professor and a really devoted reader. We always have good book conversations when I visit. She was kind enough to take me up on my offer to record a podcast episode during the butt mitzvah trip. We had a wonderful conversation about her gateway books, the ones that started her on the lifetime adventure reading and the literary pilgrimages she's made over the years. In fact, the conversation sorta has me dusting off my plans to visit Orwell's last home and Montaigne's library in Jura and Bordeaux. (upbeat music) My guest in this episode of the Virtual Memory Show is Lynn Ballard. I'm branching out from the friends from college and now I'm going for my brother's mother-in-law, who, okay, it's somewhat of a stretch, but I figured the first time I came into the house as I tend to do in people's homes, I immediately looked over the bookshelf and thought, wow, she's got T.S. Eliot. She's got some other good stuff up here. That's clearly somebody I need to have a literary conversation with, so I thought we might as well get that on tape. Lynn, welcome to the show. - Thank you very much, Gil. - I thought our conversation, we could sort of talk about your literary history, but also talk about gateway books as we talk about the books that we discover early on in our reading lives that push us into the hard stuff as we know it. So tell us a little about yourself and bet your more early history and discovering literature. - Well, if you want to know about me in books, it starts very early. You also have to know I grew up on a farm, way out in the middle of the country in Missouri. In fact, our house didn't have electricity until I was one year old. But we always had books in the house, and one of the favorite games we had as children was a deck of cards called authors. And authors was, it was a rummy game, I now know, but we played authors and I learned all of the authors and what they wrote by playing this little game. I went to a country schoolhouse, one teacher, eight grades, and I did that from first grade through sixth grade. There was no kindergarten out in the country then. - We needed a farm labor from four or five-year-olds, I assume. - And we walked to school down a dirt road. I mean, it was very classic. You could, it was not exactly a little house on the prairie, but it came pretty close. And then even then, when I went to a consolidated school in the town near the farm, there were 60 students in my high school class. So I got into books because it was just a wonderful way to get out into the big world when I lived in what I felt was such an isolated spot of the world. - And which books started you on that path? And in fact, who were the authors you discovered through the other rummy game? - Well, the rummy game had authors like Alfred Lord, tenants, and I thought Lord was his middle name, you know. James Fennimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Louis Stevenson, all of those. And in fact, I still have a deck of cards, it's out in my little hermitage here. At school, the school library at that one room schoolhouse was pretty neat. It was packed with old books and new books, and I can still see it in front of me. It was a, a wooden kind of a plywood wooden cabinet, the door swung open with solid wood door, so you had to swing those doors open. And I remember probably the first big book I read, and I thought this is a major accomplishment, was Little Women, Louisa May Alcott. Now little did I know that she was gonna leave me one day to that whole Concord group, and I was gonna know much more about her, and all the people that her family were associated with, but at the time I thought Little Women was amazing, then I began to read all her other books that I could find that were on the shelf there. But there were, there were the twain books. Now, here I am, I was five years old when I started first grade. My best friend was a year older than I was, and we were competing and fighting over the books and this sort of thing. And I remember we were going to read twain, and we both wanted to read Tom Sawyer first, and I'd lost and got Huck Finn. - Was it Rock Paper Scissors, how did you compete? - I don't remember, I think she just had a stronger will. - She was a little bit taller and got it up the shelf first. - She was a little bit bigger, yeah. She was just a little bigger. Well, of course, Little did I know that I had the gem. - Right, the greatest book in America, no. - I could still see it, I could see those illustrations and the pen and ink drawings, and just marvelous, marvelous experience. And later on in life, when I read it again as a student, and then when I taught it, it's a wonderful book that just keeps growing and growing and growing. And I live two miles from, not two miles. I would say it's more like four miles from the Mississippi River right now. So I have a little sense of Huck being out there. - Was there that, well, I guess it's something to start with Huck Finn early on, given anyone looking for a plot will be shot at the ground at the beginning, not having any literary expectations, I suppose, that's gotta be a novel experience. - I'm trying to remember the things I remember about Huck Finn at first, where he was really, he was the childhood. There was no one around making him behave properly. And I thought that was kind of neat, and I was in a household that was made to behave properly, so I think I really enjoyed it. - That sort of changed Link idea that you were the-- - A little alter ego kind of thing. - But the fact that he was poor, the fact that he, and I never felt poor, that I thought I could associate with a rural child and I love the dialect. I love books written in dialect. Now, this is a confession, it's not politically correct, but one of my favorite early books as a child was Uncle Remus, Joel Chandler Harris' book. And I love the music of the dialect in that. I had no idea that Uncle Remus would someday be seen as putting down people. I just thought he was a wonderful storyteller, and I loved all those fables and stories about the tar baby, and it was-- - But again, you don't have a political context at that age. That's not a, that's gotta be interesting again, seeing that stuff develop around you or how it changes in the course of these generations. - So to me, Hup Van and the way he talked and the way his words came across on the page was a lot like hearing Uncle Remus tell his stories, and so it just went on. Of course, now I know, Twain was such a, I mean, he really understood that dialect at that time. - Did you have issues teaching the book at all? I mean, nowadays there's all sorts of Huck Finn issues in our politically correct era, but you were teaching at an earlier time in history. - Oh, I'm being taught at, I'm Treg Reuber. I graduated from college in '68 as an English major. Then went straight to grad school and did the masters into a doctoral program. And I remember teaching it, my favorite part, teaching it, has to do with the extreme romanticism of some of the people along the river. And I'm trying to remember. The old Stephen Dowling bots deceased. They, the poem to the boy who died from falling down a well, but he is eulogized by the young girl and the family that Huck has stopped with down going down river. And that whole sense of overblown sentimentality, to me was one of the things I thought that Twain was campaigning against. And I love his put down of Fennimore Cooper's, literary mistakes. If you've never read Fennimore Cooper's literary offenses, it's a wonderful essay about how, well, it really compares romanticism to realism with Twain being on the side of the realists. And he talks about how Cooper designs these Indians who are creatures of the wild, but absolutely have no sense whatsoever as they're trying to attack a river boat going slowly down a river scraping its banks because he's described it as being of such a whip that it can't possibly fit between the banks of the river. And it's gliding upstream and it should be going downstream, all this sort of thing. But to me, that's one of Twain's great gifts is being able to use humor to show, to puncture that sentimentality. Now, the only thing I've checked to Twain is that he didn't seem to like Jane Austen. Oh, no, very much not. - I love Jane Austen. - It's one of those very difficult literary contradictions. - He wouldn't even spell her name right. He didn't spell it right. But, and I love Jane Austen, but I'm glad I waited till later in my, to be a more mature person before I read my first Austen. - Certainly, there are some writers where, again, discovering Huck Finn at five might be great other books you need to sense it fully. - Well, the subtle piece of social behavior, all of those things I wouldn't have got at all. - That's, I was just talking with my brother yesterday about the leopard, the Leopoldusa novel from 1960, which I only discovered last year, although it had been on my shelf for 10 years. - He's been urging me to read it. - I pushed it on him and your daughter, Jane read it in Italian apparently in college and made little impression on her. And honestly, had I read it 10 years ago when I first bought it at 30 or 31, probably wouldn't have done as much as it did when I discovered it at the age of 40 and then sort of felt the passing of a person's life and way of life, which we experience an awful lot nowadays in this sort of hyper-shifting world that we're in. But let me ask the master's program you were in. What was your thesis? - Well, I didn't have to do thesis in my master's program. - I got through one the same way, good. - But my area of concentration was modern poetry and that's where he began really deeply to delve into T.S. Eliot. But had I completed a dissertation in the doctoral program, it would have been the poet John Crow Ransom, he was one of the group called Fugitive so with Robert Penmore and Alan Tate. And he was, he started out at Vanderbilt University and was at Kenyon College. So I didn't tell Jane when she was college shopping and starting to fall in love with Kenyon that it was... - You were gonna come by there and hit the library again. - To join the line to that she was actually going to be in the college where John Crow Ransom taught Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell and others, where all that happened. She found that out later. - You have to say those surprises for people. What did you focus on particularly besides T.S. Eliot? Where did you really find in modern literature or modern poetry? What was your... - All right, this is, I didn't because while I was enjoying and loving modern poetry, I took an amazing course in the metaphysical poets and began to read Helen Gardner and then read the poetry of John Dunge or George Herbert and so on and it's like, okay, the metaphysicals, they've got me. Which is probably a link to Eliot too because Eliot left the metaphysical poets. And I didn't remember writing this amazing paper. I had such a great time writing paper on John Dunge where it was probably more literary sleuthing than anything else and I don't think I convinced anyone but he did an epithelamium on the marriage of the Duke of Somerset and a very shady woman who they were later accused of the poisoning murder of Sir Thomas Overberry in the Tower. But I realized that by that I thought what I saw in Dunge's epithelamium was a sort of reverse praise. He was over praising them to the extent that it was just way overdone and anybody should have seen that he was killing himself to praise them and he was really pointing out their nasty side. Now, that was never published but I still think I... - That's your thesis? - I'm sure there's some scholarship now, if you look online. - I recently read a wonderful historical work on the murder of Sir Thomas Overberry and I thought, you know what, my theory still holds pretty true. - Again, you still have time, you can watch. - Yeah, that's your time. - Yeah, speaking of one of the big questions I have nowadays since I'm middle-aged and insist on forcing everybody else's mortality upon them, books that you hadn't gotten to yet. - Oh. - The big ones, you know, we all have the, you know. - I've got this process going now. The big ones I haven't gotten to yet, I'm now downloading onto my iPad. So that when I have some time in an airport when I'm waiting here or whatever and I... So now I've downloaded War and Peace. I loved Anna Karenina, I taught Anna Karenina, I've never written War and Peace. - Yeah, it's very different though. - Yeah, it is. - Proost, I don't have all. - I initially, in college I used to insist that I would wait 'til I was 40 or 50 to read him and I sat down in my early to mid-30s and ended up making it through in a very short period of time. Once you get rolling, or at least in my case, once I get rolling with something, I occasionally am capable of actually focusing on a single task and read through. Although I'm convinced I need to go back in a few years and perhaps each decade, reread Proost just so I can assert my superiority over other people. - I congratulate you so far. - It takes work, but it's really one of those once you get into his world and once you're used to that. One of the interesting aspects to me was once I finished the series, reading normal books. After that, I discovered I was reading them almost twice as quickly as I was before. I think because my brain had been geared to these peruseian sentences and breaking down this much more difficult grammar, always much more complex grammar. Once I sort of downshifted back to normal prose for the first few books, I just was plowing through things in no time at all. So that's something to look forward to, the sort of the uphill downhill. - Now, I have chalked one up in this past year and that was Ulysses. - Which I have not finished. - After which, I promptly went to Dublin and to celebrate. - Did you hear the walking tour? Did you manage to hit most of the sites? - I did a number of those sites and enjoyed that very much. It capped it off with the Abbey Theatre. So yeah, Ulysses made me feel good, have that under my belt, but it just made me realize I have to do more. Now, Boaz, I know, read Bleak House this summer. - I'm probably not going to do that. - It's a wonderful book and it's just length. It's not complexity with Dickens. You just have to keep going, but you're not going to find incredibly obscure esoteric passages. That's, at least that's my expert, but I read the book when I was in college and haven't gone back to it in 20 years. - They keep that with Dickens. - No, no, it's just, it's just long, you know. - There's characters and stuff happening. - Although there is a case of spontaneous human combustion in Bleak House. You do have to keep an eye out for one of those. He comes up with something off the wall because he needed to get the plot moving and a character literally bursts into flames on his own. That's- - I find that at middle March, that's another one on my list. - Oh, it's a wonderful book too. That one actually, it was just pre-kindle and pre-i-pad. I was in Milan for a trade show and I brought two books with me, but finished them part way through the show. And I was staying in a hotel and relatively in the financial district. So there weren't a lot of stores around. Found a bookstore, it had an English language section that was about three feet long, one shelf, and it was all penguins. And I thought, well, you gotta start middle March sometime. And so I grabbed it and read about 300 pages over the rest of the trip and the flight home and let the momentum keep me going. But that's one that I'm sure I would have put off and put off and put off. But it was the case of just looking over a limited number of books and saying, this is where I'm going. Now with the Kindle in the iPad with me, I can always find something to be lazy about or procrastinate over. - There are books, there are enough books in this house that could keep me going, reading them for the first time through a long retirement. I just, I love to collect books, but I do run the risk of anything because I possess a book that I know a book. - It was something I used to do in college, just by having more books than anybody, everyone else was afraid to ask me anything about them for fear that I was some great literary mind. So they just assumed I knew everything in these books and it was a great cover, honestly worked for years. Is there anything you go back to repeatedly, second, third, or fourth readings? - The one, I'll give you one prose work, more poetic work. I go back and back and back to heart of darkness. Every time I read it, I could say, I had to be this old to understand this much. I had to have this much life experience to be able to get at what he's trying to tell us. It, to me, it's just immensely deep and satisfying. And then I do make a practice. Every spring I sit down and I slowly, carefully and to great enjoyment read Eliot's four quartets. - And you showed me before we started speaking a very nice edition of it. Can you tell us the story about that? - Well, I now have this lovely first edition of the four quartets as they were published in pamphlet form, but it sort of capped off the experience. My husband gave it to me as a gift after, and he went with me on these journeys, but I had a regular scheme and a pilgrimage to visit all four sites. And the, actually, the first site associated with four quartets that I went to was East Coker, which is the second of four, but that's where Eliot's ashes are in turn. - I keep thinking of going to Jura to see Orwell's last site. - Do it. I mean, literary pilgrimage to me is something that's really important. I mean, to feel the place, to be there. And now when I read East Coker, having been there, I actually know what it feels like to go into that village where the road surface itself, this narrow road, is so far below the level of the fields that it is almost dark as you drive into the village. I would have no idea what exactly he was getting at until I'd actually done it. The next place was Bert Norton, which is in The Cotswolds. And it's nothing that, except I say I was there. - Yeah. - The-- - Planting a flag. - It was where an event occurred and sort of triggered that poem. But it's now owned, I mean, it's a commercial place where people throw wedding parties and things like that. It's kind of high level, but that's what it is. Then a marvelous place we went to Little Giddy, which is in Flatland, northwest of Cambridge, out in the middle of nowhere. And this tiny little chapel sits there and in front of the chapel, there's a tomb with a flat stone on it. There's a commune there now, actually, sort of literary and spiritual commune, very small commune. But you're welcome to walk out, to sit in the chapel, to get a feel for this place where you said, you know, where faith is valid. And so I loved that, but I have to tell you on the way there, Frank and I still laugh about this. As we're driving through, and this is pre-GPS travel, with map, he's driving, I'm reading the map, and we're looking for this place out in the middle of nowhere, and driving these little one-lane roads with sharp turns, and we came to a little intersection where one little road intersected at a T intersection with the other, and directly across from us was a farmyard, and the gate to the farmyard had a hand-printed, hand-painted sign that said, "Dead, slow children playing." I'm just sad there. I hope this isn't me, but I think it will be. So I've always wanted to write a play. There would be a comedy, but the title would be "Dead, Slow Children Playing." (laughing) So that's one of my great memories from little getting, but Elliot would have approved because he had great sense of humor, always. And found art was by the hatred of other modernists. - Yeah, yeah. - But the fourth step in the pilgrimage was the Dry Salveges off the coast of Massachusetts, which I had to do, I mean, thank God for Google because I began with Google and trying to find where are these rocks? I wanted to, where are they? And once I was able to zero in on where they were, and we were planning to be in Boston anyway, then we planned a jaunt up north of Boston to Rockport north, north of Gloucester, bought ourselves a little ride on a sailboat that went out into the bay and then around the rocks, and I accomplished that. (laughing) I don't know, it's not a trifecta. There are four of them. What would you call it? - Yeah, it's gonna, I guess, a quad fact. - I don't know. - Yeah, it got me. - I don't know. - We have to be etymologists too. That's part of our whole literary history here. - But it was very, very, very satisfying to have those four trips to feel like I've been to the place. - Yeah, I had that a little in Big Sur, I did a driving, well, I had a trade show in San Francisco and had friends in San Diego, so rented a convertible and went down and just had the Henry Miller vibe, which, for all of his later stuff, whatever, but Tropic of Cancer meant a lot to me, at least in the interplay of him and George Orwell, who, again, I've mentioned. And then when I drove down further, I realized I was passing through Oxnard where two of my favorite cartoonists are from, and then Venice Beach, where Ted Hawkins, the great musician, used to play, and thought, well, that's pretty much literature, comic books and music. That's, my life is hitting these three little spots there, but then, recent years, I discovered that Montaigne's library is still standing in Bordeaux, and now I have to figure out some way to get out there, and the palace that inspired the leopard, that novel is still standing in Palermo, so, again, we start building these other icons to other loci, I guess, to focus on. - And I really do. It's more than I've been there done that kind of experience, because having a feel for the landscape, particularly, let's say, going to Chaughton and actually seeing the village of the house and the way it's laid out, where Jane Austen lived and wrote, and to Bath, and to Hallworth, and to tramp around out on the hills behind Hallworth Village, and imagining yourself in the middle of weathery pints. Yeah, it's fun, and the landscape tells you something, and the urban landscape does, too, if it's-- - I was gonna say what does St. Louis give you in that context, the unimproxivity to the river, obviously. - T.S. Eliot was born here, and-- - So, it was William Burroughs, but that's a little-- - So, William Burroughs, and you don't want, I know one of his descendants, Hall, who is a very uptight and straight bow-tied lawyer, but, and the chancellor of the Episcopal Diocese. - Indeed. - But he is a descendant of the, well, he said-- - Well, an offspring from the family. - Not a straight descendant, but he is of the Burroughs family. - Yeah. - Tennessee Williams spent time here, but-- - Harold Brodke, we had from here, although he's a very-- - Yeah. - A writer that everybody mentions, but nobody finishes. - Yeah. - I have a good buddy who loves to take, he's made it his job, and he'll take you around St. Louis sometime if you would like. Jerry Garrett has got himself quite a little niche of taking people on literary tours of St. Louis, and he throws in things like Phyllis Diller's house, and Webster Brodke was just for fun, along with Tennessee Williams' burial place in Bell Fountain Cemetery, and it's kind of fun, and there are a lot of-- - It surprised me, and I wonder about the, this year volume of the, before this, I had looked up only because I knew a few authors from St. Louis, and it's more, started coming up-- - Marianne Moore from Kirkwood. - Kate Chopin, who I had no idea. - Kate Burrows, William Gas, who is another problematic writer, who I'd love to talk to sometime, but I think would be a bit difficult. - Well, one of the best who was associated with Washington University is Stanley Elkin, and I like to call him Stanley, not that I knew him that well, but I got to-- - Did you get to know him? - I got to meet him and I got to interview him for an audio prose library project, and it was a thrill of my life. I had to, I picked him up at his house in University City, and we drove to Columbia, Missouri, where the radio studio was, where we were to record, and he smoked like a stove, and at that point in his life, the MS had him pretty crippled. I mean, he could walk on his own steam with, he was very slow, but we just had the most, we had, so we had two hours going there, and two hours coming back with me driving in my car, and him, just, he decided he liked me. He didn't like everybody. - Oh, okay. - Didn't like everybody. - Now, he did one of his books, and I get that sort of cantankerous, you know. - Of course, yeah, but I was driving, I guess he had to like me, but he was great fun, and when I remember him saying most, that I still hear it, he said, well, you know, what do you like to do for fun outside of literary things? And he said, I'd love to go to the symphony. I said, oh, you like music? You like classical music? He said, I don't know, music very well, I'd just like to watch all that cooperation. - For someone in a solitary profession. - Yeah, all those people, all of working together to make that happen. But he, he, he was funny, and then of course, we got to Columbia, and I hadn't even thought about this, and the person who had arranged this, hadn't thought about it either. But here was this man who could barely walk across the sidewalk, and we got to this radio studio, which was up like two flights of stairs. - Naturally. - And the poor man, he, he was game. I mean, he walked up every step of the way, but I thought, oh, I feel so bad. - But a good interview with him? - It was good, it was good. He was charming, he, the way the interviews were set up, but he read from his own works for about an hour, and then we had our conversation. But he did tell me about a reading that I, I told you about earlier, he told me about reading to a group of school girls at a private school in England. He had been, he was on a reading tour in England, and he'd been with one audience that was not school girls at all. And he was sort of rushed to this next reading session, and he picked up and began to read a short novel of his, in which a bear has its way with a human being. And he realized, and it was a school with nuns, as far as he said, he began, he was getting deeper and deeper into this story, and he knew he couldn't just stop and say, "Well, never mind," and he was, first they were gassed, and then he could see the body language, they were anger. So if you're ever reading to a group of B, no, you're audience, I don't know what you're saying. He sort of forgot what was in the thing he wrote. - Because I have an A and a B selection, I suppose of nuns, okay, let's put that one away. - They didn't write about a town on a rail or anything, but he did thoroughly embarrass himself. - Crass Americans, that's nice. So when you mentioned going back to the heart of darkness again and again, what did you find most recently in it? What changed or what grew either in you or in the work? - Again, it's the landscape thing, and it's not the landscape of the condo, it's the landscape of the tamas. I hadn't realized the first time I read it. You know, it's got a narrator. - Yeah, they're on the river. - And it opens on a barge, boat on the Thames, and the narrator is talking about the ancient time on the banks of this river, and that house civilization has developed there. And to me, that was the real revelation that Conrad was working toward that it's not just in the Congo, where you need the heart of darkness. - The inklet was its own colony, or as a colony once. - That the heart of darkness is anywhere where the human beings get out of control in their desire to possess and in their greed and the other things that drive them. But again, and you know, one of the things I love about heart of darkness is I didn't have a clue what it was, but the first T.S. Eliot poem I ever read, and I remember this, it was sophomore year in high school, it was the hollow man. And the epigraph is Mr. Kurtz, he did. I had no idea what that meant. You know, it's the inverse of what an illusion is supposed to be, you're like, "Oh." - This is the key to everything I'm reading, yeah. - It didn't add meaning, but it made me really curious. Who is this Mr. Kurtz, and why would T.S. Eliot guy use that? And then, of course, a penny for the old guy. And then I learned about Guy Fox Day because why did these things go together? - And do you find that sort of chain of learning? It meant one thing once upon a time when you have to actively go out and find these things. And nowadays, you would plug that quote into Google and you'd come back with what it meant discreetly and be able to write it off. Do you enjoy that more? - At least the immediate access to knowledge now or did it mean more when you actually had to hunt something down and find all these other threats that kept spinning off of it? - I don't know. It's sort of like you're going at life from both ends. As a child, as a kid who was just loved and loved with literature, but it was the world opening up to me, I would follow that trail. What does this mean and I wonder why? But now I find the illusion is very, very satisfying. I think that's part of why I love for cortex because they're buried so deep. And the example there is that all will be well and all manner of thing will be well. The lines toward the end of that. Before I got, where is this from? Julian of Norwich. Find out more about Julian of Norwich. Ended up in Norwich, England in "Stand It On The Spot." Where Julian of Norwich would have had his or her cell, most likely they don't really know who Julian was, but they're most likely a woman and they know her time and her place. So I had to go there too. But again, out of four quartets comes this illusion. I've got to find out about it. Now I've been there and now I work back and when I read it again, it just has all these reverberations. And what books really started you on that chain? I mean, we started with the five-year-old you and with the Louisa May Alcott and Twain. Was that really the key or was there more proliferation as you got to your teens and then things have sort of floured out from there? Let me tell you two. Okay. That probably created it. 'Cause mine are all comic books and-- Here's a comic book. Yeah, and that just, you know. I love historical novels. And I'm trying to remember which was the first one. Probably the first one I read was sort of this, had a lurid reputation. Kathleen Windsor's Forever Amber. It was written in the '40s, I believe. And the main character was a woman who became the mistress of King Charles II of England. And you've learned all about the restoration of the monarchy and then the restoration of the theater in London following Cromwell's death and all of those things, the suppression of art and theater that had gone on during Cromwell's protectorate. Somebody brought back the Jews. So that was a plus side to that too. I figured again. Absolutely. I mean, it was like the whole world reversed and changed and it was glorious. And so this book, which was sort of considered a pot and boiler, best seller, to me, before I was done, I was reading everything I could about Charles II. I was reading about the theater of that time. I was learning about those things and ended up in college taking every Tudor and Stuart history course I could. And now I've haunted those places in my adulthood. But that's one book. And the other one was a historical novel about Jeffrey Chaucer. But it was a novel about Catherine Swinford who became the wife of Bullingbroke and eventually her grandson or whatever, became Henry IV, I believe that was the line. But the person who, there was a character who was woven in this because his wife was this Catherine Swinford's friend, lady and waiting, there was a connection there. They may have been sisters. I'm not even sure about that now. But Jeffrey Chaucer, who is the sky? And so learning about him in the context of the historical period, I'm gonna, well, I-- - I gotta know more. - I gotta know about Chaucer. And believe me, I took every course that I could. I studied everything I could. Oh, the Middle English and all those things that about Chaucer and did my travel to Canterbury, had to do that. But to me, that all started with that book and I'll pull it off the shelf and tell you the name of it in a while because it's, but I still own the book. I own the book because it just meant so much to me. And it sort of pointed me in the direction I wanted to go. - I found sort of revamping my library at home that all the old novels, I can't find anywhere. My wife has a whole ton of hers, all these old mass market paperbacks that helped to find her childhood and her youth. Somehow in my melodramatic days must have, no, no, I can't possibly keep these things and pushed away all that stuff, but deep down. That's what really makes us who we are. - It is, it's called its formation. How you get formed as a person and those historical novels did it. And I remember another one. This is a book I would love to read some days. Probably not the world's greatest book, but T.E. Lawrence wrote a big fat book called Seven Pillars of Wisdom. - Which you've heard of but haven't read. - I know. But when I was in high school, was when the Lawrence of Arabia was made. - Oh sure, David Lee. - And I wrote a term paper on Lawrence of Arabia and read all about him, I wanted to know more about this character and I never did understand all of that Middle East politics stuff and who were the people he was leading against whom? Like, I don't get it, but boy is this exciting. - It's romantic again, it's just. - Very romantic, but I would like to dip in to Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I read all of those, Jesse L. Weston, the Golden Ball, those sort of myth, those-- - Robert Graves, sort of things. - Robert Graves, the ones that, they really dug into the myths behind the understanding of the world, pre-Western, sieve. But, so that's a book I wanted to dig into. - Again, keeping and beating. - And I'm not committed to reading the whole thing, just dipping into it. - Gotta find out. That's, you know, again, we've got the ones with the big reputations and there's a strange, isolated incense that we adore that other people just don't understand what we're so, you know, interested in, in teaching. What books did you find most difficult to teach that you would have wanted the students to really get, but, you know, you simply, you know, had barriers? - Well, you know, I mean, trying to ask students to understand something when they're just barely learning to live life on their own. I mean, these are people who've never paid a utility bill. And you're asking them to consider the death of Yvonne Illyich, you know. I think one of the hardest ones, the one I just love is Kafka's Metamorphosis. Fascinating story and students like a whole hum, yeah, giant cockroach. - Yeah, all they see is a big body to do. But the last time when I taught it to the community college, there were some nursing students and some adults in that class. It was amazing because we all began to see, you know, if you woke up, if you had a stroke one day, you'd feel just like Greg or Samsa. - And everyone else would transform around you about the same time. - Everyone would transform around you because you would be different. You wouldn't be fully human. You wouldn't, you would probably be, you would be repellent to them. And how do you then survive if you aren't who you've always been. But in one second, one stroke of a second, if it's a stroke or something else or an accident or something, you too could be transformed like that. So this group, these students, they could just place it in reality and they had no trouble. They weren't put off by the giant cockroach. They knew it was a metaphor and they could deal with it. - But again, it's gotta be a dealing with life experience in a certain way. - Probably the Brothers Caramatsov was probably my greatest failure, although I love the Grand Inquisitor passage in that. To me, you can't get students to love something if they're trying to pack it in and take a mid-terming center. - Yeah, I mean, I did a Dostoevsky course that it was simply, again, as being back in college and not having to worry about a job, I could at the time to do all that reading, but it would still, there's something about being 20 and trying to get this versus having really gone through a lot of those questions. But I guess probably-- - And I hadn't killed my father by then, so. - Yeah, yeah. Faulkner is probably the happiest experience of teaching, because not the most difficult Faulkner, but students can really get things like the bear, and my favorite of all time is as I lay dying. - Which I haven't read yet, but do have on my Kindle? It's on my Kindle, actually because Amazon was selling it for $1.99 one day on the Kindle, I grabbed it. - It's always my next time I'm somewhere and just wanna start over. - And you know, that's a literary pilgrimage I have not made. Oxford, Mississippi is just a few hours' drive from St. Louis, I've never been there, and I would love to visit all of this home. - Oh, and you can't go during summertime because it's Mississippi, and maybe 9,000 degrees. - Yeah. - But is that one you put on the far down the line, or? - You can do that. I'll do that someday. - I wanna thank you for your time, Lynn, and I hope you have more good literary paragranations and good travel, and I hope we can catch up again and figure out which Titanic books we've managed to tackle in the intervening time. - All right, thank you. It's been my pleasure to talk with you. (upbeat music) - And that was Lynn Ballard. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Next week, I'll post the one with my brother Boaz, which started with the theme of how he plans to rebuild his library after the fire that consumed his home this past January. It goes pretty far afield after that. Until next time, this is The Virtual Memory Show, and I'm your host, Gil Roth. You can subscribe to the show and find past episodes on iTunes or at my website, chimeraobscura.com. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]