How to Be a Serious Reader

Henry Oliver, thank you for joining me. Thank you for having me.

I want to ask you about Philistines. And how Philistines have taken over the culture. Mm-hmm. I think uh I think is the phrase that you've used Philistine supremacy. That's right. Yeah. A lot of the time when we talk about Philistines we mean, oh, that awful person I know who doesn't appreciate the high arts and it's a kind of snob thing. Mm-hmm. I'm not interested in that. Everyone's a Philistine, right? I'm a Philistine, you're a Philistine.

The the really important thing is whether the literary elite are Philistines. And what we have now are English professors saying that mm, you know, uh Taylor Swift is as good as Mary Shelley and the guy who runs the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middle March and doesn't think it's a problem. And there are just So many examples like that, um, that sort of suggest that the the elite tier have kind of given up on being elites in a way.

Are you familiar with the phrase poptimism that came up in music criticism? Sure. Yeah. I think I sort of was reading even just like Pitchfork or something, which is not exactly highbrow music criticism, but it sort of prided itself on finding obscure smaller artists trying to talk about the you know the the artistic quality of those. And then they took a hard optimist turn and suddenly they're telling you.

why the Ariana Grande mm album is the best new thing in indie music or something. And it seems like a total capitulation to popular culture as opposed to thinking that there could be alternative cultures or even, you know, high culture. Yep. And I think part of it is we had what was called Prestige T V. Mm-hmm. And people wanted to write about that and talk about that.

And maybe you can argue like, okay, the Soprano was was was really great or something. But the idea that Prestige T V is actually that good and actually requires like full length pieces in the New Yorker, comparing succession to King Lear. I mean it's just crazy and everyone kind of knows it's just crazy. But it's easy and it's nice and it's fun and you don't have to be mean to anyone and you don't have to say things that sound exclusive. And I I just think it's a huge mistake.

Let's talk about why you think it's crazy. Because I I'm I'm gonna imagine let me play devil's advocate for a moment. So I say, No, but succession's really good. The writing is very interesting, the cinematography adds like a new layer to how it's presented. Um the storytelling's good and there are sort of it gives you room to explore various themes in a way that like a play doesn't because of the its runtime and its multi season uh sort of arc. So I don't know, tell me why it's crazy.

There are two questions here. Is succession good and is succession the sort of thing that merits the cultural elite giving it the kind of attention that they have? Mm-hmm. And those are separate questions. Okay. And we often eled them in order to make the argument again nicer and friendlier. Maybe succession is good. I neither know nor care. I found it boring. I I couldn't watch very much of it. Personally, I think the cinematography is hugely derivative.

It's all full of the ordinary T V tropes we're all used to from a million other things. I didn't think the dialogue was that good. And I also felt the story was just dragging and dragging and dragging. But I'm happy to say, okay, a lot of people know T V better than me and they think it was amazing and like I can just be wrong about that. I watched everything except the last season. There you go. So I'll just take your word for it. fact that I didn't want to finish it.

Indeed. I think that says quite a lot. Yeah. Um, but like, should we be talking about it a in partnership with King Lear? Should we be devoting the kind of space and the kind of critical attention that we give to it, that we also give to the great works of uh fiction and and drama and stuff. That's obviously a no. Even the advocates can't really make a serious case for it. Um and, you know, King Lear

is four hundred years old at this point and is acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of the West. No one's printing out the succession scripts and doing a close reading like an analysis. Like it's just insane. It's common sense. Like this is just obvious. So why do you think that's a good thing?

Or what were the conditions that sort of led to this Philistine supremacy? What like what changed so that, you know, literary magazines or even, you know, something kind of higher middle brow like the New Yorker, um, would want to talk about television rather than to talk about a new work of literature. So one thing I should say is there's still a lot of excellence and um it I'm not saying like everything's gone bad. I'm saying there's this new segment in the culture, right?

Um, I think part of it is that it's very hard to make money writing about Shakespeare, writing about new novels, writing about whatever the New York Review publisher is is putting out. Like it's very hard to get an audience for that. And if I I think if you're reading the New York Review of Books, the majority of the time The cover stories won't be about novels. That's a long standing thing though.

Yeah, it'll be it'll be the new nonfiction book that's intended to sell really well and then some novels maybe tough. Sure, and that's fine. I'm yeah. What I'm saying is like how many New York review of books can there be? How big is their audience base ever going to be? No one is really pretending that like we can hit a million subscribers, we just need to do these six things. Like it's not there, right? And so I think part of it is just to stay commercial and to stay relevant.

Um we had T V, now we have social media. That's just where people are. I'm not I'm a bit close to being like, It's the people, blame the people. Yeah. Um but partly you just have to adapt in the normal ways, right? I was certainly encouraged by people. I've I haven't done this.

I'm not taking it off the table. That for my own YouTube channel, they're like, Oh, if you want to get a lot of views, start doing the philosophy of and then pick some popular media title, you know, some work of anime or manga or you know, not the philosophy of Shakespeare. But the you know, the philosophy of something that's big in the culture just because it's the thing that people want exactly to talk about. And do you think that's just because

There are larger audiences for those kinds of works. So then the there's going to then be larger audiences for critical discussions of those kinds of work. It's partly that and it's partly everything has become it has to actually be a political essay or a cultural essay or something that's relevant or it has to have a hook. It can't just be an essay about the book or an essay about the movie. Yeah. That's the audience for that truly is much smaller. Yeah.

Even if you're writing about a you know, a popular literary novelist like Brandon Taylor or Sally Rooney, the audience is just much smaller for a here's what I think the books about essay than are like What does Sally Rooney say about conservative sex politics in this moment in our generation? That's just a massive essay.

think I've ever read a review of a Rooney novel that wasn't actually about Rooney's politics. Indeed. And it's or just about Sally Rooney. There's a there's actually a shocking turn towards the author. Yeah. So it'll half you know half of the word count will just be about what Sally Rooney is up to or what Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, um, did she support this political cause enough or too much? Or has she, you know?

But any sort of in-depth discussion of her character work or her dialogue or I admit I've never read a Sally Rooney novel. So I I couldn't even tell you if it's worth talking about. People seem to like it. Um but the same I think would probably be true for for Brandon Taylor's work. You know, and I've read I've read some of his novels and a lot of uh the critical discussion will end up being

About Brandon Taylor. Sure. Yeah. Or what he stands for. Sure. Rather than you know, you just reviewed his new novel, right? Minor Black Figures. You liked it, right? I think it's his best novel. I thought I thought it was great. He is openly engaging with ideas in a different way. So obviously all novels are novels of ideas mm and there are lots of different ways in which novelists diffuse ideas, embed them in different parts of the book. They might be more open, more more subverted, but

But he is now making his characters ideological, making them have um arguments about ideas. The the n the narrator voice is quite intrusive in the discussion of these ideas and it ties the themes together as well.

It's a bit more like we you we're used to from an Iris Murdoch novel or something, right? The idea of it is right open on the page and th and they're fighting it out. And that I think that's a very good development for him as a writer. And I also think it's a good development for fiction as a whole.

You think about Iris Murdoch, that's a that's a good comparison because you she is a novelist, she's a serious novelist worth taking seriously. She's also just a thinker and an essayist. And Brandon has increasingly if you just follow what he does online he's engaging very much with literary criticism, with philosophies, with you know, and it would be very hard for a good writer to engage with that and then not want to bring it into the novel somehow.

Exactly. But I don't know how many writers are consciously doing that while trying to write literary fiction That's not a good thing. purposefully experimental, maybe, and and aiming for a niche where he's writing, you know, he's writing that major presses and writing big novels, uh, but also engaging with ideas. Right. And he's trying to revive realism in a way because there's a there's a large segment of the literary um community that dislikes realism and he's trying to defend it.

He's been reading Lukash and Zola and you know, he's really like dug into what is realism and and is trying to like bring some of those things back. I do think other writers are engaging with ideas but in with a different set of ideas and in different ways. So Katherine Lacey wrote biography of X, I think one or two years ago now. And one of the most enjoyable things about the book that makes it accomplished is that it

hugely embedded in the ideas of mid twentieth century culture and literature, but is um fictionalizing them to some greater or lesser degree throughout the book. So you get this sort of constant weird feeling of Yes, I know this, but I don't know it in the way that it's being presented. Mm-hmm. So there's a there's a s sort of I mean it's we're overdoing the Iris Murdoch thing, but there's a sort of similar quality to that as well. So it shows up in different ways. Yeah.

Three references to Murdoch might not be overdoing it yet, but we'll we'll We could do a h we could do the whole podcast on Iris Murder. Yeah. Oh man, I should have prepared. Uh do you have a favourite Murdoch novel? No, I don't know actually. Yeah. I just reread the See the Sea, and I again I was like, This is so good. Yeah, I should just be reading this every year.

Yeah. Yeah. So okay, Brandon Taylor, Katherine Lacey, who are other contemporary writers right now that you're excited about? Oh, I like Sally Rooney. I don't have a problem I think she's great. Mm-hmm. Um I don't think you can you have these arguments like oh it's just commercial fiction, disguised as literary fiction, it's such an affront, all this stuff.

Just relax. You can just read a book and enjoy it and not like worry that is it is it George Elliot enough? You know, this this whole thing. Yeah. I think she's a very clever writer. Uh the last book Which everyone hated'cause it had the fake Ulysses kind of kind of writing style and and it like drove everyone crazy. And as you say, all the reviews were not really reviews. They were just like personal essays going, I thought she was the voice of my generation. Why is she doing this?

Actually that book was a very interesting exploration of autism and uh at least one of the characters is plainly autistic in some degree. There's a lot of discussion now about, you know, the expansion of the diagnostic criteria but it you know, somewhere on that new way of understanding it, this character is autistic. And I think it's one of the better novels that we have about what is autism, what is it like to be autistic in that sense. Not in the

You know, that famous book about the the curious incident of the dog about the boy who is autistic. Yeah, yeah. That's a different kind of thing. But that that's what I found interesting in the last book. Yeah. I don't know if you have followed the critical discussion of the new pinchon novel that's coming out soon. No. I I you're you you don't strike me as the biggest pension guy. But there was a uh I believe it was in the New Yorker. If not, I'll put a link down below so people can see.

There was a big new. And the the sort of headline was it would be great it's great for Pension fans and it's great at what pension does, but what about the rest of us? And I thought if That might be a great example of sort of this Philistine attitude where it it it it is engaging with a work of like serious fiction, great, but its first response is why isn't this for everyone?

Yes, yes. And I do think there's a kind of um democratic impulse to the way we treat art these days that's misguided in the sense that It creates a false opposition. Mm-hmm. Some works are both democratic and elite. Like a lot of the canonical authors, like Jane Austen and Shakespeare, work on both levels. You can read it for the story. Or you can really get into the footnotes and and like spend your life on it. Right. And those were conscious decisions that those authors made.

But a lot of works aren't like that. Like Ulysses isn't like that. You can obviously everyone can read it and get something from it, but Ulysses is a conscious attempt to do something else. Yeah. And that's fine. And we should just again just relax. Like, what's the big deal? There is a a group in the uh they meet at the Austin Public Library once a week and they have been reading Finnegan's Wake for ten years. And it's like six six or seven of them meat. There was a news story about them.

Yes. Um and uh at least I believe they're in the Austin Public Library. I'll have to check that as well. Yes, and I think but they spent, you know, years just going page by page together. And really diving in'cause it's the kind of novel that could do that. And it's it's very much not a democratic novel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you think, Oh, I'm going to read Finnegan's wake in a month by reading in an hour before bed every night. Get real. Yeah. It's just it's just not it's just not that sort of

But that I think is the perfect example. I'm so glad you brought that up. I loved that news story because it it is open to people, the non democratic form of art. It it's not like pure you know, there used to be this idea that um I think Frank Kermode first said it and then Philip Larkin said it and Bechman used to say this. Modernism had put up a no through way sign on the road and l said people can't come in anymore, literature's not for you anymore. But in a funny way

That sort of both is and isn't true and that sign is a simultaneous little invitation to say, Well, actually if you want to go to the library every week for a decade, it is for you. Yeah. Yeah. And for some people that is quite democratic, right?

I think that this is a part of the positive legacy of Harold Bloom because, you know, Bloom is sort of held up as the great snob. Yeah. hates Harry Potter, he hates Stephen King. I I don't know if you ever heard the story about uh someone asked Harold Bloom, what about the kids who uh go on

to read Harry Potter, but then eventually they'll go on to read real literature and he said, I don't think they'll read real literature. No. And the example that the person then offered was Stephen King and he said basically my point exactly. But at the same time he dedicates his life not to just doing scholarly work. But to writing

books for the masses. You know, here are the poems of the English language that you should read. Here are these great books. Here is I'm going to write ten pages about why you should read The Crying of Lot Forty Nine and Blood Meridian and Melville and Shakespeare. Uh and it seems to come from a place of saying, Yes, this could be for you. But it's sort of a it's it's for you if you make the choice that it's for th that it's for you.

The criticism people would make of Bloom is that he is not a very serious critic and what he's doing As someone said this to me the other day, he was doing great missionary work of bringing literature to people. But I think there's an idea that like to what extent did he really bring literature to them? And to what extent did he bring them the very entertaining performance of Harold Bloom? Yeah. Right.

So he's a he's an earlier generation and he's an anti technology person. Hates TV, hates the internet, thinks it's like we're all lemmings going off a cliff, we should be reading instead, and it's like But Harold, you're so good on television. Yeah, yeah. How do I square that circle? So you might say, well, how many people picked up Moby Dick? Or just

actually kept watching Harold Bloom. Mm-hmm. I'm on your side though. I think that that criticism is misguided because some people will have done. Mm. And he what he used to say is, I've taught tens of thousands at Yale It's not enough. I need to reach everyone. Mm-hmm. And he knew that the more people you reach, the more people pick up the book and that's just how you keep it circulating and growing. Um and I think he was right. I think a lot of people can just pick up Ulysses.

Just read it and don't understand some bits of it and you'll still get if you get like half of Ulysses, wow. Amazing. Yeah, like a ma like some bits of Moby Dick you'll be thinking, you know, what am I reading? That's good. That's the best the part of reading. Yeah. Yeah. Um so uh so I agree with you. I think he did great work and he's unloved in the academy, maybe for sensible reasons. But he was one of the last great bridges between the academy and the public. I've never read his

you know, critical works. I've never read his his writing specifically on Shakespeare. I've never read Shakespeare and what is it? The invention of the human. I know you did a interview with another Shakespeare scholar recently and did not have kind things to say about

Rodri Lewis, who is a a wonderful Shakespeare scholar and his book Shakespeare's Tragic Art, fully recommend to everyone. Really, really a brilliant book. Um it's fine for him to not like Harold Bloom. He's a different totally different sort of critic, totally different sort of thinker. I always am surprised though when excellent professors can't just acknowledge what it is that Bloom got right. And Shakespeare The Invention of the Human is overstated.

Uh you know, John Carey famously wrote a review where he said as you turn the pages, you begin to get the feeling that this man wears a tinfoil hat and thinks his television is speaking to him. I think that's so misguided. Bloom knew Shakespeare's work incredibly well and had very strong opinions about it, and that is the starting place for all proper serious engagement with literature and criticism. So the s the thesis is overstated, but his actual reading of Shakespeare

Is is not crazy all the time. It's quite interesting. He's trying to bring back a form of criticism that comes from A. C. Bradley. Bradley was a Hegelian. He thought that you know he was thought that everything was about subjective um development of the individual and that Shakespeare had sort of just made this great discovery and this was what leads on to romanticism. This is now very unfavourable, very unfashionable in the Academy. But

Who can deny the common sense of that view and the the fundamental importance of character and individualism to Shakespeare? Like he's clearly one of the great individualists in the Western canon. Um and there should just be some more straightforward acknowledgement of that. Yeah.

the the one of the most intense dramatic explorations of the sort of divided individual. Mm. Yeah. Exactly. And the Macbeth chapter in Bradley is what's often quoted by the people who scorn him because he may he said something very silly about Lady Macbeth being like a sheep or something. The whole thing is just crazy. But actually the Macbeth chapter is one of the better pieces of Shakespeare criticism.

that we have and the way he talks about it as a play of black and red and he says a sanguine mist hangs in the air. Like he really gets to the heart of um the bloody terror of that play. And it's, you know, it's the sort of book that should still be given to teenagers. If we're talking about Shakespeare for a moment. You know, what if someone were listening to this and they think, like, well, I read Romeo and Juliet in high school and I hated it. Yeah.

Um I think I read Romeo and Juliet in high school and hated it. You know, but then I read A Midsummer Night's Dream and I thought, Oh, I like I know I liked this more and then I read Othello and thought, Oh, I really like this. So I'm just wondering how would you kind of coax them to Give Shakespeare another chance, perhaps they're a little older, they're no longer being forced to read it. What would you do specifically about Shakespeare?

So the first thing I would say is you're not at school and you're not that person anymore. And there are a lot of things you did and didn't like at school that no longer that's no longer relevant. Move on. Right. Put that to one side. That's over. Um Shakespeare's the best. Mm-hmm. People get a little fussy about can we say the best and can we have rankings? Whatever. Yes.

He's the best. He's the heart of the English canon. He's the best reading experience you can have. You owe it to yourself to see or read. Some Shakespeare, in the way that you would travel to see amazing landscapes, amazing buildings, have the best food of the world, hear the best music of the world. No one thinks it's crazy to jump on a plane for eight hours.

to go and do something incredible on the other side of the world. But spending three hours with this book is too scary. Like come on, you can just do it. It's fine. Um Uh it is remarkable. You could get through the entire works of Shakespeare in a couple of months if you dedicated yourself. Would that be the best reading of it? Probably not. But you could know Shakespeare front to back. Oh yeah. In three months. If you just set aside a few hours.

And also like the nice thing about Shakespeare is that unlike other classic works, you can watch it and that is legitimate. Right? Watching the movie of Jane Austen is not really the same, it's not really good enough. Yeah, you can watch Shakespeare, of course. Yeah. That if that's the only way you s you get Shakespeare, that's also fine. There are some good films, there are some good BBC productions. I think he often suffers in performance.

I think he never fails on the page, but he does sometimes fail on the stage. Okay. Not his fault, the fault of the people who don't know how to put his work on properly. Yeah. But You know, The Hollow Crown, the BBC production, it's on Amazon Prime and you know various platforms. Tom Hiddleston playing Henry the Fifth. These are really good. You can just watch them and you will have seen some of the best Shakespeare that there is.

You should compile something on your Substack that's sort of if you want to experience Shakespeare, here are the performances you should watch or something. I do have a list somewhere. I might republish it and make it a bit longer. I don't like watching it because very few performances are good enough. Um if you do want to read it It's up to you whether you want footnotes or not. Some people prefer to just barrel through and not get tangled up. And some people are constantly thinking

What does that word mean? Yeah, yeah. If you're a what does that word mean person, get the Arden Edition, read the footnotes as you go. The first reading will be more difficult or slower. It won't be more difficult to be slower. But the second and third reading, like It you pick it up very quickly. People used to go and watch this stuff.

who signed their name with an X right and who who were bakers and artisans and whatever they were. This is not just written for the high ups. People, you know, people piss on the stage. And there are murders and clowns and like all s like it's all it's all of life. There's comedic breaks in between very serious scenes. That's right. Like it's not just serious, serious, clever, clever. It there's a lot of fun. Yeah. Um I'm sure it's like this in the UK too, but in the US, go to a used book store.

You will find five or six copies of the collected works of Shakespeare. One of the plays will be heavily marked up because a student tried his best and then gave up. And then you can have a perfectly fine edition of Shakespeare for ten dollars. You know, I I I like to point out to people that if you had like a hundred dollars in your pocket and went to a used bookstore, you could buy

A lifetime's worth of reading. That's right. Books that you could just read over and over again. That's right. And the complete works of Shakespeare would likely be on that list. And it's very easy. It's it's very affordable. It is. Yeah. You'll also in those stores get the annotated single player editions if that's what you want. Yeah. You'll you'll get everything, yeah. So

You have this piece about how to have good taste. Yes. It's very I think it's your most popular piece on Substack. I think so. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about what taste is and maybe what's different about taste and preferences. So taste is the idea that you have a well refined sense of what is good or what is not good in a particular domain. So you might have taste in movies, books

uh food. But people increasingly talk about the importance of taste at work. Mm-hmm because one of the things that AI is doing is making human taste and human judgment one of those fields that's going to rise in importance and rise in value. Um because it's a good idea.

obviously something that's slightly more reserved to to us than than to the AI. But the question of taste is very confused in popular discourse. And it what the confusion is, is that people don't see the difference between taste and preference. And sometimes when they say when people say I need to refine my taste, whatever, improve my taste, they think they need to have a stronger set of preferences. Mm-hmm.

But that's not really taste. That's just knowing what you like and being better at knowing what you like. And I think you see this when people first kind of develop a sense of ownership over their aesthetic sensibilities. Yes. They start saying, Oh, that stuff, that's shit. Yes. And this stuff's great. Exactly. And they speak in these these very stark terms. Yes. But in a way that kind of reflects that maybe they don't understand what they're talking about.

I think so. And I think whether you enjoy it and whether it is good, as we talked about with succession, are separate questions and should be treated s often they'll there'll be overlap, but o often there won't. Um taste is knowledge. Okay, that's that's what it comes down to. If you're a chef and you have taste, you can pick up ingredients. You can tell if they're fresh enough, firm enough.

You know how sharp or strong the taste is going to be based on how fresh or how mature they are. You know how to combine them. You know what the result of that will be. Right. So so your taste. in selecting and using and cooking ingredients is just a huge knowledge bed that you're able to draw on all the time. Jeff might hate scallops, sure. But know how to make them.

Exactly right. It doesn't have to be their favorite food for them to have this knowledge and for them to deploy it. And for them to say to their you know, to the other chefs in the kitchen, you know, this won't be so good, this is great today, look at this beef, this is ready to do XYZ with, but don't do A B C with it. That's taste. This used to be a kind of commonplace among aesthetic philosophers and critics. You can see how easily that transfers over into film, books

paintings, whatever, you need to know a lot. And the people with the best taste are not the ones who are like I totally love Keats, but I can't stand Emily Dickinson. Like that whatever. That's nothing. It's the people who have read enough poetry or enough novels or been to enough art galleries or whatever that they can see how something new fits in. Mm-hmm.

And therefore they can know. How does it compare? Is this original or is this just something we've seen a thousand times? Have they done anything that's actually good compared to the ways it's been done Before? And if you look through the history of what is called literary production, i. e. people writing poems,

Um, you see that all the time. The best poets are the ones who know what they're doing relative to all the other work that has been done. They they have an extensive education, right? They have they have this deep immersion in the culture. They're not just people with the strongest feelings or

the biggest preferences. So these are the ideas that need to be brought into commercial life to understand that taste isn't just what you like, it's you knowing why you like it and how it compares to other things.

Alberto Manguel tells this story in his A History of Reading. That's a great book. A wonderful book. Yeah. I I love it. Uh and you know, as a young teenager, he would read to Borges as Borges was going blind. Mm-hmm. And uh he tells that story there. And one of the remarkable

like it's a sentence in the book, right? Like uh but it that stands out to me is that Borges would sometimes spontaneously compile lists based on themes that were coming from their discussions. And one of those lists were um Terrible lines from great writers. And from memory he could tell you. And like, you know, uh I think there's one, uh, where

He uses uh in Hamlet where the word uncle appears in the middle of a at the end of a an exclamation. And Borece could tell you, Well, no, I think with the diction it would have fit better with my brother's kin or some or my father's kin would have would have sounded better.

But what comes out in that is not only that he has this great love of literature and this great sort of passion about literature, it's that he knew all of it well enough so that even when he was blind, he could start reciting poems from memory. and then he could situate the discussion here. He had to know enough about the English language and and German and you know, the various languages that he would read in to be able to give that kind of criticism.

And that doesn't come from one reading of Shakespeare. That's right. And that doesn't come from only reading Shakespeare either. It comes from reading Shakespeare, his contemporaries, his forebears, those he influenced, and then being able to place them within sort of a larger system of knowledge. It also comes from not reading for judgment, but for knowledge. And I think a lot of people

who want to be critics or who want to have critical opinions, read and then come to judgments. And what they need to do first is read and come to some understanding of how does this fit with everything else that I've read. Mm-hmm. I... had put a note on Substack a while ago where I just said that I considered it a deficiency of myself that I didn't really enjoy enough poetry.

Yeah. And and you and you gave me some advice. I ended up following it. A few other people I respected gave me this advice too, Adam Walker, a guy we know, which was to just buy anthologies. That's right. And I started doing that. And I think that I'm still working. This is still a personal project of mine. It's only been a month, right? And I haven't made much progress.

But I realized that it was probably that my lack of enjoyment first came from me approaching new poems and then reading them and thinking, Do I like this? Right. And and another thing was that just that I wasn't familiar with enough poetry. And so I just bought the Viking anthology of romantic poetry that Auden had uh and I just started reading through it. And like I read like a Philip Frneau, you know, poem and thought

I like that. I don't know why I like it yet, but I'll just keep reading and then I exactly and I've sort of read each poem in the anthology or I'll get through them and then I'll probably read it again'cause I've been enjoying this anthology and then I'll read other anthologies and then just s sort of be able to like see how the conversation has developed a little bit.

And then someone asked me like, Oh, do you plan to start writing poetry or like start doing poetry criticism on your subject? I was like, No, I just I just I just feel like there's there's this bit of human art and knowledge that I've That's right. I have no knowledge about like I I I feel deficient. Not in so like a moral sense, but just that there's something out there that I could experience and that I would just like to know more about. And that's what I was that's what I was looking for.

That's right. And are you memorizing things? Not yet. So right now I'm just sort of trying to read through the whole anthologies and then I thought I would choose some of the things that I like the most and then go back and try to memorize them. It's important to memorize whole poems. Mm-hmm. But you should also if there's just one line or a phrase, just commit those to memory. Yeah. I think that's some people are a bit like, Oh, I have to jump

memorize a whole poem. This is like being at school. Two lines. Yeah. You know, that's great. Just get as much of it in as works for you. And I think it really the question of following your nose but then widening the circle that you're operating in is really the the best approach.

So I started with the romantics. I had a feeling I would like them. Um I'm sure there are going to be other areas of poetry or other schools of poetry that I like less, but that I need to sort of experience in order to understand. Well A lot of people start with the romantics and they are popular for a reason. But i y you know, we talked about the role of pleasure and preference. Obviously that does have a role and I'm not saying like

Like, just read for thousands of hours things you don't enjoy in order to become a stern critic. Like, no, no, no. Read what you like, follow your nose. Just just don't confuse that with proper judgment. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I don't think I ever have any desire to start writing criticism of poetry, you know, or Yeah. But it just came like I'd like to be a slightly more fleshed out human being and poetry seems to be A component of that.

Poetry is one of the great excellences of human culture. Why wouldn't you want to read it? There's a poem about everything, right? There are poems about laundry. Um, you know, uh Richard Wilbur wrote a poetry about um what happens when the soul enters the body at the beginning of the day. You know, the truly the range is huge. Um you will find something that moves you And that you just feel compelled by. And that's a really great feeling. It very few things give you that feeling in your life.

Yeah. So let me ask you about some more of the work that you're doing um on Substack. The publication's called The Common Reader. Why did you choose that? That is a phrase from Samuel Johnson. knew, probably many of them memorized, which now no one reads. And he had spent several pages trashing Gray.

saying, My God, you know, look at this, terrible rhyming, lazy in the meter. Uh, you know, he's re he's really just upset with everything. And then he turns around and says, Well, the eulogy in a country churchyard though is a wonderful poem and I rejoice to concur with the common reader and say that I love it. Yeah.

Okay. And it became a famous phrase. The whole concept of what is a common reader, is there such a thing? Some people deny it. But you can see with Um, the rise of commercial society, the sheer number of books that were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there did become such a thing as

um, a common reader. They're not involved in criticism, academia, maybe they're not very well schooled, maybe they're not even formally trained in literature in any way. They pick up the books and they read them and the tradition is there for them. The phrase was then famously taken up by Virginia Wolfe.

who called her books of critic two books of critical essays the common reader. And she took that from Johnson. And she wrote the best literary criticism of the twentieth century. And she was a true common reader. She read Everything. I mean she was so deeply immersed in the tradition. So that's where I got the phrase from.

So do you feel this sort of kinship with you know, the uneducated or the the less educated person who just wants to read literature because they love it or they just have a desire. For it? I don't know if I feel a kinship. Um, but that's that's basically what I think is is the blog is about and I think there are a lot of those people out there.

And um I think there will be more of them in the future. I think we're going to live through a small revival of the humanities and those people are going to be a big part of it. Yeah, I I definitely Suspect that we are going to see an emergence of kind of

an era of autodidacts. Yeah. People who are just curious about knowledge or about art that's out there. And for a very long time we thought that if you wanted to explore any of those topics You you went to school, you went to university, maybe you went and got a master's degree, uh you know, maybe considered doing a PhD, and then you were serious enough to like really discuss this stuff.

But I think that increasingly people have this urge to sort of take their education in their own hands. Yes. I've written about this a decent amount. Um and I think the humanities stand to benefit from that. Yes. You know, I don't think that they have I I do not endorse a view that some people would want to put out that, you know, the academy has killed the humanities or anything like this. I think people who say that often don't know what's going on in the academy.

Yeah. But I think that the humanities can thrive outside of the academy in a way that, say, mechanical engineering can. Exactly. Well, but also even when the academy's doing well, it relies on having common readers. Mm-hmm. And there is a a much more direct relationship than there is with you know, uh maybe some of them all STEM subjects. Um, in the sense that people who have nothing to do with it, who never took the degree, are a big part of your reading base for the primary texts at least.

And even if the professors don't want to be directly engaged with those people simply the fact that they exist is part of why we have as many departments, as many courses, as many graduates as we do. Um so I I think it's very important. And I also think we wouldn't have literature if we didn't have an ordinary Audience. Someone has to buy the book.

Well someone has to want the books to exist, is uh how I would say it. Because you used to have this before they were selling lots of like Chaucer didn't sell any books, but sorts of manuscripts maybe but There were still people who wanted to have his poems read out and those people were not always in the universities. Maybe they were at court or maybe they were elites in their own way, but like fine. in in one sense, they're still common readers. Um and that's very, very important for poetry.

I think there are certain topics in the academy that you're incentivized to write about just due to the nature of publishing regularly, you know, in scholarly journals. I had a very close friend of mine, he was the best man at my wedding. He was working on his PhD in English literature and when he first applied to programs and they asked for what sort of research he was interested in and he wanted to explore the concept of beauty in the works of Nobokov.

And his undergraduate advisor who was helping him write his application said, You can't say that. No one will think that that's a serious research topic. And he kind of filtered it through like a political lens. First. And then and he's like, But I'm gonna get back to writing about beauty in Naboka. He never got right back to writing about beauty in Nabokov.

I I mean I think that what happened was then he started going through the sort of regular motions of getting a PhD in English literature where so much of its cultural studies. They'll even explicitly say this what are your s your specialization? Cultural studies.

or some sort of digital humanities that involves a lot of textual history or something like this, working with databases and archives, which uh all of it can be interesting and and but it seemed like someone who just wanted to go in and say, I'm just so In love with reading Shakespeare. I'm so in love with the way he uses language, would have a bit of a harder time being taken seriously as a scholar. Uh and in that way if you just want to read Shakespeare because you love the language.

Yes. then just being someone who reads Shakespeare outside of the confines of the academy might just be the right choice for you. Yeah. I do think I mean so I agree I agree with a lot of that. And I think beauty has been undervalued and remains undervalued. There was a famous book.

I think called On Beauty by Catherine Belzy, mm-hmm, who was one of these dreadful postmodernists who used to say that, you know, we can't say that Shakespeare was better than anything else being produced in his day and it's all just cultural judgment and all this complete rubbish. Um And that series of lectures was the inspiration for Zadie Smith's novel on beauty. And

It's a it's a good series of lectures, but it's a slightly tortured process where she's trying to sort of come to terms with the idea that we can just accept beauty and think that it's good and it's a sort of basically platonic argument. And it's like Why do you why do we need to be so convoluted about why do we need to talk ourselves into this? Yeah. Like this is known. This has been known for centuries. This is just what it is. It's part of the basic experience of coming to literature.

Yeah. Like this isn't this you're not discovering anything. You're just trying to maintain your ideological position while also acknowledging something else in the world. Like the whole thing is just ridiculous. That said, there is there is an idea that the study of English literature

I th uh James Marriott wrote about this. You know, the perfect exam question is, isn't this poem beautiful? And the perfect answer is yes. Mm-hmm. Because the poem speaks for itself and all that. I think that's very misguided. Mm-hmm. And I think that the appreciation of beauty and the understanding of how it is that the poem is beautiful um is an important part of criticism. Academic research must contribute to knowledge in some way. Yeah. Right? And Uh if you can write about Nabakov and say

Like what is the conception of beauty in this novel's? What is Nabakov's idea of beauty? How does he achieve that beauty? And tell us something we have not really understood about Nabakov before. That's great. But if you just want to enjoy it because it's wonderful I'm not convinced that that is graduate school. Yeah. Worthy um of of a PhD or whatever. Um and I so I'm sort of in the middle on this one, right? Um

And if you get to the point of saying the poem is beautiful, it speaks for itself, it doesn't need anything else added, it's like, great, so what are you doing here? Yeah. Like I agree, but we don't need you with the PhD for that, right? Yeah, yeah. You're you're not a scholar or a critic at that point, you're just someone who loves it.

Well maybe you're a sort of critic, but you're so that's not scholarship. So I think the whole debate again, it gets very confused and ideological um and are we talking about how we teach undergraduates? Are we talking about what's a suitable topic of of like archival research. Um but I I do agree beauty is is fundamental and

You know, the great English poets are frequently very, very beautiful writers. As are many of the prose writers, um, and many of the people we would associate with other disciplines. John Stuart Mill is a beautiful writer. Adam Smith is frequently a beautiful writer. I think David Hume is a beautiful. David Hume's a wonderful writer.

So let's go back to taste for a minute, because I feel like we wandered. How does one then develop their taste? If they say to you, Henry, I really want to have better taste. Yeah. What's the process? Well, uh we ca we've we have in fact been discussing that in the last few questions, right? You're doing that with your anthologies. Um, but also these questions surrounding beauty and how to appreciate something, those are the questions that you're learning to answer as you develop taste. Mm-hmm.

So as you get your anthologies and do more reading and just think more seriously to yourself, not just what do I like not just do I like it, but what do I like about it. Mm-hmm. Right? Do I like the way he rhymes? Do I like the way she cuts the lines up, do I like is there something in the lilt of the rhythm? Like what is it that's capturing me here? That's how you develop taste. But also you must be very careful and recognise that your ignorance about poetry, novels, painting, whatever

means that you also don't know which critics are reliable. They all talk to you as if you know, yes, yes, please, you can listen to me. You don't know. You don't know what they don't know. And the more aware you become, you know, you read a ten Victorian novels and you start to get this dizzying feeling of Oh wow, there's a lot and I just don't know anything and it just goes on forever. Uh well think about the critics and think about how much you trust.

Yeah. Their judgment. Because as you develop taste, everyone's trying to tell you what to do and what to think and what to read. And you might have to say to yourself, Actually I'm not gonna rely on some of these people. Yeah. And so part of it is like equipping yourself to be more self guided and to be more circumspect about who you trust and maybe to go more directly to the academics. One reason why I quote a lot of scholarship and sometimes summarise scholarship on my blog is that I think

uh ser the serious readers, the common readers out there, will benefit from knowing what have scholars said, what have critics said about Northanger Abbey? And how can that help you read Northanger Abbey and decide what it is you like about it? I remember following the bit of controversy that came from um Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey. The Woke Odyssey. The Woke Odyssey. Yeah, okay. Um and I had read her translation of the audio. Yeah, it's good.

it was good. Yeah. But I I don't know enough Greek to be able to really get into the the details of it, but I I found it to be a very enjoyable read. And Um a friend of mine who knows Greek quite well. pointed out that uh some of the critics would regularly talk about how she hadn't captured the the rhythm of the original Greek and then they would go on to describe the rhythm the the rhythm or the meter of the original Greek. And he's like, they're wrong.

Like they they they just they uh but but if you didn't know enough about Greek, you wouldn't even be able to assess the argument. And it's very easy to sort of write authoritatively or to write in a way that seems authoritative. I sang. Oh, she's just failed to capture the meter of Homer. and you go oh yes Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. And she's like, I don't think you can capture the meter of Homer in English or it would be incredibly difficult to do so.

There's a new translation of the Odyssey. And I've I'm unwell and I'm I can't bring the translator's name to mind. He's very well known. He's translated other things. It is it is a good translation. But he has done Something like the what the original lines were. So he's stuck very closely to the wording. He's kept them as long 16 syllable lines. Yeah. He's got something like um the meter of it. And it's very admirable. It's it's won a lot of praise. I quite enjoyed it.

But at the end of the day we're reading in English and there's only so close that English can get to the Greek. And probably it's very useful to to read a translation or to read several translations like that. But there is something very enjoyable about Wilson's pentameters and um I don't really have a problem with that. I'm so far away from reading the original Greek and actually getting really close to it that I think you have to just say, Well, I'll go round and I'll try all these different

views it you know, you look you look through every window of the house and you get some sense of what it's like in the house. Yeah. Yeah. The idea that like there's this one window and that's the true view of inside the house. Yeah. I mean Pope has Pope has basically a prose translation of the

Pope does does iambic pentameters but it always sounds very much like Pope. There's some great work in there. I haven't read the whole thing, but the bit I've read bits and it's like there's some really good work in there. Um, but a lot of those eighteenths say if you read if you look at like Cooper's translation, it just sounds like an eighteenth it sounds like Cooper, which is great if you like Cooper.

Um, and I think that's true of everyone, right? I think that's true of this new one, of Wilson. Um and it's the people who know the Greek who are like, This is the closest, this is best and it's like, Yeah, you're probably right. I can't get close though. And I can't have that I can't have the knowledge of that it's close. Yeah. And so I'm just gonna have to like work around.

It's sort of like when I encounter people who tell me that there's this new Bible translation that is much more faithful to the original Greek. And I say, I I don't know, man. I really like reading the Psalms and the King James. Yeah. Yes. Any kind of technical argument you gave me? uh about uh how to translate the psalms. Um Would fail. It would fail to be compelled it would fail to be compelling because

That's right. But this again is the balance of of preference and taste and pleasure and knowledge. And I think you should Read the King James Psalms. That's some of the best writing that we have. You should read the other Psalms. You should take seriously what these people are saying. And you should come as close as you can to some knowledge of what why it is you like what you like and how it is and isn't.

the real thing. But once something's been translated so many times over so many centuries, you know, you're either reading the original or you're not. Yeah. I think. And I think there's something to be said though for something like the King James where it's just Regardless of the Greek, it's just a great work of English literature. One of the best. You just need to be familiar with it as well in the sort of acquiring taste about literature in general, because of how influential it's been.

Reading a King James Psalm out loud is one of the best things, one of the best experiences you can have of English writing. Mm-hmm. Truly wonderful.

Yeah. What do we do about all these Philistines then, who just are are unconcerned with you know the elite philistines yeah the Yeah, well, actually, that's That's why I call it a supremacy, because they're ruling over us. Say a little bit more about what you mean by elite here. The people who are running the institutions. Yeah.

book critics at the big newspapers, the editors, the professors, again like it's a certain selection of them, right? By no means is it all of them. There are so many excellent people out there. But it's reached a sort of tipping point where there's a kind of there's a large presence of it in the media. Um I think You have to uh this is why I say don't trust all the critics. Mm-hmm. Right? Take it into your own hands. Um, go to Substack, go to YouTube, go to

Twitter, go to wherever, because you will also find great stuff there. Mm-hmm. We have this old fashioned model that you follow particular people. Like it used to be that you could just read Michael Durder in the Washington Post. He's always good.

you'll always get some great information from him. Now you really want to be looking around and following different people and finding different things. It varies by topic, it varies by what you're doing, right? So just bear that in mind very strongly. Um but I think You know, Liberties is a new journal that's been set up in the last, I think, five years. That's doing great work. That's a kind of you know, to use awful phrases like a challenger brand or whatever. Yeah, okay.

Uh provides a really strong alternative. I think there's a lot of good work on Substack. Um and I think I think a new culture will emerge from all of those. Those alternative ways of doing it. So one of my favorite things about talking to you is when you talk about writers you hate. You're not gonna make me say names, eh? Well we won't talk about any contemporary writers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Who are are there canonical writers that you think

are just overrated, that have just been included because you're you're kind of a defender of the canon on the grounds that it's all pretty good. Yeah. But are there any canonical writers that you that you look to and say, I just don't see what the argument is Yes, there are some in the twentieth century. It is hard to bring names to mind because you you'd leave things eventually you decide I'm leaving this alone permanently or or for some time. Yeah.

I do think that the cannon is good. I d I do think it's very hard to knock someone out of the cannon. Mm-hmm. And when th when those attempts have been made, they've often failed. So there was famously A generation that didn't like Milton. Mm-hmm. And it it was the sort of T. S. Elliott. generation. And they you know, several very prominent critics, they all made their case against Milton and thought he was overrated and all this stuff.

And you know, I mean, look how that went. Yeah. And it was uh Christopher Ricks, I think, who came back with Milton's Grand Style, which is a really, really good book of criticism, and defended Milton. And he's still here and You would have to be ideological or or crank.

not to pick up Milton and say, Yeah, no, this is some of the best. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Of course no one ever wished Paradise Lost was longer. Yeah. And everyone agrees with that and whatever. But the best of Milton is just extraordinary. And you're not just thinking about Paradise Lost when you say the best of Milton, right? Well, a lot of people would say that is the best of Milton and that the rest of it is

you know, hard work. Uh I think he's a great sonnet writer, a a at a minimum. I think many of the short poems which you can read in the John Carey edition are excellent, but I accept I do accept the general criticism that Liscidas and some of the others are overdone and and not up to his not up to his best standards. Um I also think the prose is excellent. Some of the best pros we have. What what examples for the pros?

Like the Aeropogitica, all the normal things. You just get a a selected Milton. Like he's a he's a remarkably uh powerful prose writer. All right. You were able to steer that conversation towards someone who deserves to be in the canon. Well, on the as an example of it's very hard to knock someone out. The cannon actually that we've we've done a good job with the cannon. It's hard to get in and therefore once someone's in, it's hard to sort of get them out because

Um you know, it it's it's the standards are correct. Yeah. Yeah. Do you like T. S. Elliott? I have very mixed feelings about T. S. Elliott. Um but I it's undeniable that his best poetry is just just superb. I think the f I prefer the four quartets to the wasteland, which probably a lot of people don't agree with. Um I think proof rock is extraordinary. I am old, I am old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. You know, it's really, really good stuff. Um

I like McCavity, I think he's a good light verse writer. And there's a French translation and a basis or something like that. It's in the second volume of the complete poems by Rix. That's excellent. And it doesn't get as much attention, but that's really excellent.

Well, let me ask you about American writing. So I I I think that I told you last night as we were browsing a bookstore. Yeah. That every American writer is secretly an Anglophile. And we we suspect that maybe our literary culture doesn't stand up. I mean, some of them not so secretly. No, no, yes. But even the ones who would deny it, I think. Yes. You know, we all think that the uh the UK editions of our books look better.

Yes. That's right. And what we're putting out is garbage compared to compared to what you can get in But these are all surface considerations. These are yes. Yes. But then I think deep down people start to worry, you know, have we produced great novels in the same way or great poetry in the same way that, you know, England has been able to. Or you know.

I I think that's a very valid question. I'm not as well read in American literature, but I don't think you have as good a poetic tradition as we do by any means. Um there are like twelve names of true excellence. Um And I think some of the African American poets are on that list and there's been some controversy about that over here, which I find

Very puzzling. Gwendolyn Brooks is one of your best poets. I don't even understand that it's a question. Robert Haydn is just clearly one of like what is there to talk about? So when you say controversy you just mean disputes over whether or not Well Helen Vendler and Rita Dove, there were years long disputes about who should and shouldn't be in the anthologies. Articles were written and friendships were broken and you know, all this stuff. Do you like Lynx and Hughes? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Another another perfect example. Um But that said, you've only had two hundred years. Right? Whereas we've had you know, we go back to the Saxons with our poetry. Yeah, yeah. So the Oxford Book of English verse is a sort of summer of like a thousand years of great cultural tradition. You can't really get further beyond you know, you you just can't do that. Yeah.

Um but I am surprised that there are so few truly great poets. I think one thing might one I I I don't know enough about this, but I suspect one reason is that Uh people like Whitman and Dickinson are true originals. Mm-hmm. And they're immersed in the long tradition and they know their Bible and they they know all these things. And then in the quest for an American poetry. This was gradu this gradually faded to become a replication of Whitman and Dickinson. Mm.

Rather than doing what they did, which is to be truly immersed in the long tradition. Um that's probably unfair, but I think there's something to it. We're riffing on this uh this A little bit. Some of the I think is it C K Williams? I think he's a good poet, but it's just I'm just when I read him I'm like I should just be reading Whitman'cause this is like imitation Whitman. Mm-hmm. And I think that's a problem. Yeah. What about um novels though? Novel or American novelists?

I have not read the American novel tradition in the same way. I think the nineteenth century is incredibly strong. Um Willa Cather, who I've started reading recently, clearly one of your best. But when I get into the twentieth century, I I truly I truly don't see the fuss. Um obviously some of it's great, but I think an awful lot of praise has been given to things that are

Not that good. But the 20th century, by the end of the twentieth century, literature is becoming much less significant in culture everywhere. Um and you know, America was not a very literary nation to begin with. Tocqueville says there's a Shakespeare in every every wooden hut, every cabin that he visits. Um Remarkably hide hard to find. I'll take him at his word, but uh yes. You don't see the influence of that in a lot of places. Um

You know, the founding fathers were incredibly literary, but was there a general literary culture? I think one thing when you st you come over here and you start a nation from scratch. You don't have the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review and you don't have the shelves and shelves of books like so maybe that's part of it. Yeah. Um but no, I I'm generally this idea that the mid twentieth century, like Saul Bellow and all these people and they're all such geniuses

I I don't really see it. Okay, interesting. But I'm very English. Mm-hmm. So that might be the problem. You are very English. In my taste. I'm very English in my literary taste. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I I'm you know, I met you yesterday at the airport and you say like hello the first time or something.

Uh I'm like, this guy's very English. And then I drop you off at your hotel and you're like, Cheerio, and I'm like, see you later. And I'm like, oh that was almost painfully the the contrast was painful. I've said things to Americans like, I see them in the morning and I say, you know, Are you all right? And they're like Why why wouldn't I be all right? And I said, Oh, it's just something we say in England, you know, you're all right. And and they're like, No, it's more like are you great?

And I can't do that. That's that's too American. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But a lot of your best American writers, as you say, are very English. And I think maybe you'd benefit from more overtly anglophile writing. Yeah. Who who do you have in mind when you say? Robert Front. Rubber first. Okay. He's very, very American in his themes and treatments.

um his influences are all English Victorian. He's kind of a modernist, but he's a modernist who wants to go back to the eighteen eighties. And he had to he had to go to England to write His poems. You know, he wrote Birches. He had all he had all the drafts in his suitcase, he had a hundred pieces of paper in his suitcase, and he was in this little village in Buckinghamshire and that's where he wrote Birches, which is

you know, the perfectly American poem. Yeah. But he had to go to England to do it. I know you like Melville. Yes. Or at least you like Moby Dick. Yes. But you don't maybe like his poetry so much. I tried reading the Civil War poems and I think

Is it Shenandoah or there's there's one about a particular battle that I read the other day and I thought that was excellent. But in general I just did not I I thought the poems would be excellent based on Moby Dick, but I don't know th none of his novels are sort of Moby Dick feels singular in his in his I'm about to read through the other novels and I've been told it's worth it.

But I'm not sure. I don't think they're bad. I just think that Moby Dick sort of stands sure apart, not only in his work, but just in American literature. Yeah. You know, we we again talked last night and I said Moby Dick is the great American novel. I just think I think the argument's easy to make.

Yeah. What do you think about There's been a bit of a resurgence. I see, you know, our friend Ted is a fan of David Foster Wallace. Oh I haven't read David Foster while. Okay. I'm sorry, I know. Wow, okay. Well, that gives me nothing to talk about. Ha ha ha ha. I could see you hating Infinite Jack.

I love his essays. I think he's a great essayist. I've read I've read most of those. Uh I just I don't feel compelled. I read Mason and or some of Mason and Dixon and a couple of the other novels of that ilk that came out at that time and I didn't like any of them. Yeah, you also haven't read Delillo. Nope. Yeah. None of it appeals to me at all. I'll try it at some point. So I I do like this about you that you're willing to say, It doesn't appeal to me. I'll try it. Of course, yeah.

That's a that's a for a lot of people that's a weird sentence to say. Well, but I'm trying to be a professional critic in some way. Yeah. And American literature's not my exactly my area, but I need to know some more about the twentieth century American novel. Yeah. Um, and I will do that. So I sort of consider you um s like a non institutional professional critic. But I'm at the Makitus Center now, so I'm in I'm being institutionalized. Tell people about the Mercada Center so they know.

The Mercadus Centre is a think tank in Washington DC dedicated to classical liberal ideas. And they cover all the things you would expect them to cover housing policy, monetary policy, labor markets, right, fiscal policy, all these questions.

But they're now dedicated to developing talent. And they think that classical liberal ideas are best defended, explained and spread by the cultivation of talent. So they have Dozens of programs for undergraduates and graduates and postgraduates and people like me where they either directly teach.

you know, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Hayek, whatever it is, you know, you know, uh public choice, game theory, all these things. Or programs like the one I'm on where they give you a lot of help and resources and Um, they work with you to develop your work into something. Bigger and more public and grow an audience for you. And you're there for a year? Two years. Two years. Oh excellent. Very exciting.

It's easier to move your family across an ocean if it's gonna be for two years. I think so. Yeah. One year they the kids would just get settled. But they but well on the other hand they might want to go home. Let's see. Yeah. Uh so my work there is focused on uh the overlaps between classical liberal thinking and literature. So for example

the question of empathy in literature mm is widely discussed these days. And I want to bring in some Adam Smith into the consideration of that. And to see how his ideas can be traced through the great novelist. I want to look at the way that Adam Smith influenced Jane Austen, not just in terms of the ideas, but her narrative techniques. I'm interested in liberalism in Jonathan Swift. Okay. And I think there's lots of interesting stuff to say there. But I'm more broadly

working on the idea of literature and the pursuit of happiness. Oh, okay. Because one of the one of the themes of classical liberal thought is human flourishing. Mm-hmm. But when we talk about liberalism today, people take it as a kind of um hands off, indifferent, minimalist philosophy. They liberals Some of them don't want to look into the souls of men, and some of them are accused of not wanting to look into the souls of men.

That didn't bother John Stuart Mill. And it didn't bother Adam Smith. And I think we we there's room for a liberalism that's uh more More expansive like that. But you already see that in like Scott Sumner on his blog. I don't know to what extent he's doing that consciously or he wouldn't want to be associated with what I'm saying. But it's it's clearly what's happening there. Yeah. And he's quite he has really good canonical values. Like he's great when he writes about stuff like that.

And he clearly sees that as part of human flourishing. Cass Sunstein has just written a book on liberalism, covers some of these issues as well. So I think it's coming back.

Okay. So you mentioned this role of empathy. I hear this argument for why you should read literature sometimes. that goes literature is going to make you a better person because it's going to make you a more moral person. And I have to admit, I'm incredibly skeptical of this. Oh the the the great monsters of history have often read a lot of literature. And written it.

Yes. And so I don't know, w what's what's wrong with that that line of thought? It's not even an argument. It's just it's it's an observation people make as if it's true. And it goes something like

Well, you get inside of other characters' heads and thus you'll become more empathetic. And as you become more empathetic, you'll become kinder and gentler and you won't commit mass atrocities or something. But I'm sure that there were you know, guards at death camps with classic literature in their back pockets.

There were and you don't even need to get that far. You just need to like remember that Graham Green said every great writer has a shard of ice in his heart. So the people you're learning this empathy from, you know, in many ways were

were not very nice or empathetic themselves all the time. Some of them were. Like I don't think anyone really thinks that Jane Austen wasn't a good person. But it's by no means a settled thing. Um Obviously the argument itself is poorly reasoned, and it makes a lot of leaps and assumptions and just as as a piece of reasoning it's it's Pretty bad. But if we just put that aside and get into the question of empathy, I think the confusion lies in um what do we mean by empathy?

And there are but I think basically two arguments, one for contagious empathy and one for imaginative empathy. Contagious empathy was defined by Hume, who said that when you have a feeling, it transfers to me the way that a wiggle on a end of a piece of string transfers through the string. So what this means is that if you stub your toe I feel the pain that you feel. I get exactly the pain. Contagion as in I can catch a cold from you.

I think that's just obviously wrong. That's completely insane. For one thing, I I don't feel the same pain that you feel when you stub your toe. That's that's like my toe is not in pain. That's just a physical question. For another thing, someone said online to me the other day, oh well the higher order scale of reading is that you know what Natasha feels like at the ball in war and peace. And I was like We're middle aged men in the twenty first century. Yeah, yeah.

We don't know what she f like what are you saying? That's that's insane. Uh there were middle aged men in the ballroom in the novel who didn't know what she felt like at the time. Like that was the whole point of the scene in a way. Um Now, There is some obvious contagion in human society, and if you look around the political um culture of the last decade, there have been vast amounts of contagion.

And when people talk about the vibes changing and when movements sort of rise and fall and and shift in these weird ways, a lot of that is contagion. I think a lot of the teenage mental health crisis is contagion. A lot of the worry about phones is contagion. I'm not trying to give this as the overall explanation, but it's clearly But there is a contagious element. There's some contagion in human life. We are sort of mimetic or as people say, we want to Exactly.

Yeah. I think that's also often way overstated. Oh my God, we can do a whole hour on that. Yeah. But the point is we're also immune from each other. That's why when one group gets a contagion for woke ideas, another group gets a contagion for anti-woke ideas. And you have to acknowledge that like they cannot cross lines. There is some kind of immunity between those two groups. It is then

not too long until the groups themselves start to fragment into subgroups and the contagion that happens in the subgroups is immune from another subgroup. And so in an important way Whatever contagion we have as humans is limited by a full resistance to to other people. And you see this on the level of like parents and their children, uh people going through a divorce.

uh people with difficult employees who they're managing, complete inability to catch or to be contagious of any of the feelings of the person opposite to them, right? So I think the whole empathy is contagion theory is not just flawed as like, of course you don't know what an eighteen year old girl feels like in a novel, but it's also flawed as a conception of what of what humans are and how they share their feelings.

So, this takes us to imaginative empathy, which is what Smith said in the theory of moral sentiments. And he said, Okay, I don't feel the exact pain that he feels when he stubs his toe. But I imagine what it would be like for me to stub my toe. And I feel that. Mm-hmm. And so the two crucial differences there are Smith does want you to like put yourself in the other person's shoes, but he knows that you're doing it based on your

feelings. You're bringing yourself into play. And he also says, Well, that's quite hard. And if you see someone, for example, doing a good thing, giving someone some money, helping them out. But you know that they do it for like a selfish reason or a manipulative reason or something. He says, Well, you can't enter into sympathy with that because you're resistant to this is the immunity. You're resistant to the bad motive. So he has this much more complicated view of

when we can and can't empathise and how imaginative we have to be about it. And if you look through Austin, Elliot, Isaiah Berlin, various other writers, they are often uh Iris Murdoch in fact, they're often saying a similar thing.

And what they're trying to do is to not make you feel what the character feels, but they're trying to meet you in the novelist and the reader are trying to meet in the middle ground of the character and do some hard work together to come to some kind of imaginative model or awareness of what this character might be like. Um, and that's why you're suspicious of the empathy argument, because you know, right, moral philosophy.

it like very few people get improved by that. Yes. Even after going through all that hard work, they're still just who they were. And so the idea that a novel has some magical power to overcome that hard work I mean that's wrong. It's this it's this difficult meeting in the middle that we have. And Sally Rooney does that and Brandon Taylor do that. They're constantly trying to engage the familiar sentiments of their readers and then turn them round and say, Well,

Let's look at this character and see how they do and don't fit with that and how well they do. Um and that a lot of readers don't want it or miss it and there's a long history of readers denying it. Mm-hmm. But it's clearly what the novelists are up to. Yeah. I think that's a nice point at the end here that readers can also resist it. Oh yeah. Yeah. And so just the just the act of reading is not going to be enough. No. And

Then you then the natural line of thought is like, but what if I go in consciously trying to transform myself? Well, you're very good at diluting yourself, or you're very good at missing the point. I mean, it's just And of all of the arguments for why you should read literature, I think moral improvement might be the worst one. think it's possible. Yeah. And I think if you want to morally improve yourself, reading literature can be in a very important part of that. But as you say, like

It's hard work, it requires more than just novels and it you know, it's it's part of a bigger pattern in your life rather than just some magical effect that that novels have. Yeah. What was the last book that you read that you thought was? Oh gosh. I mean I put so many books down so quickly. I can't even think of I can't even think of the title. I just you know, you you read a chapter and you think no, this is going

Thank you. Yeah. And I don't like naming them actually. I don't I don't want them to get any coverage. Thank you. Okay, what was the last book, aside from Brandon's book, since you reviewed everything the last book that you read that you thought was just great? Oh well I read The Sea the Sea, I read The Masterpiece by Zola. Mm-hmm. I um I looked at the Map in the Territory by Huelbeck for the Brandon Review. That's a really good book. Yeah. Yeah. Um

I like all the well back I've read. I haven't read everything, but I The last two since submission are terrible. Mm-hmm. Really let himself down. Yeah. No, don't read it. No, it's it's worse. Yeah. But I liked I liked platform, for instance. I liked the Buckley biography. I read a mixed review of it, but I read the whole book and I was very engaged throughout. I thought that was really good. And I just reread Mansfield Park and that might be my favourite Austin. That's a really good book.

Yeah, but being like Henry Oliver likes Jade. I know I know big news. Yeah.

Well, Henry, I think we're kinda reaching a natural stopping point here. But I wanna ask you our final question. We ask all of our guests. Okay. I ask for a book recommendation for the listeners. It's supposed to be a book everybody should read, but for some reason nobody's reading it. Uh uh and I prepared you for this. I hope I I hope I hope you have something good. Yeah, I'm gonna pick the Oxford Book of English verse. Mm-hmm. There is something for everyone in it.

it is a storehouse of the mu most of the best writing in English. A lot of it is you'll get bits of Paradise Lost, so it might send you to Milton, or you'll get bits of Shakespeare, so it might send you to one of the plays. So it's good for that. But it also just gives you entire poems from hundreds and hundreds of authors. And you might realise that you love the Elizabethans or you love the modernists or you know, whatever it is.

And that there's a lot of stuff in there that you don't get at school. No one is given any Robert Herrick at school. Um he's wonderful. I just memorized one of his poems because I liked it so much. And that can happen to you with this wonderful anthology. How do you go about memorizing poems? Like is it is there a process or do you just read it a lot and then you find that you're able to recite it?

Uh it's a little bit of that. There there are two basic things. Ted Hughes talks about a poem as a succession of images. So you need to identify the succession of images and that's the spine of of how you memorize the poem like structurally. Associated with that you need to pay a lot of attention to line length and m and uh rhyme and you need to get used to the rhythm and the lilt of it. But then the way I do it is

You have the you have the book or you print it out and get it on your phone or whatever. And you just get the first two lines. Fair daffodils we weep to see you haste away so soon. It was a little unnatural the way I paused at Weep, but that's where the line break is. So then you can memorize it by line, and poems are written in lines, and it's very important that you know where the line breaks are because it then goes on as y as yet the early rising sun has not attained his noon.

So then you hear the natural end point of the rhyme, and you know that those four longer lines are completed, and he then drops into short lines. Stay, stay until the hasting day has run but to its even song. And having prayed together, we will go with you along.

So then you're combining that structure of images and rhymes and things you memorized with the repetition and it makes it much easier to to do it in your mind. Some people are better at seeing images, some people are better at the structural point. But then it it doesn't take very long to do it. And you can just say it to yourself. Like what's that? Like twenty seconds? Yeah. Yeah.

Just say it to yourself when you're in a queue or on the bus or brushing your teeth or I don't you know whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I interviewed Victoria Moole, she says she recites poetry at the dentist. You know, you can do it anywhere. And it and then it it will stick. All those people who are worried about scrolling on their foods too much or something, just start memorizing poetry. Foundation. It's the best website for your phone. Yes. Uh can you recite the whole poem for us?

Fair daffodils we weep to see you haste away so soon As yet the early rising sun has not attained its noon Stay stay until the hasting day Has run but to its even song and having prayed together, we will go with you along. We have short time to stay as you, we have as short a spring, as quick a growth to meet decay, as you or anything, We die as your hours do, and dry away like to the summer's rain, or as the pearls of morning's dew that cannot come again and Henry Oliver, thanks for joining me.

Thank you for having me.