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Podcast Episode Notes: Benjamin Moser on the Dutch Masters, Brazil, and Cultural Icons
Podcast Overview Title: Conversations with Tyler Host: Tyler Cowen Description: Tyler Cowen engages today’s deepest thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between.
Episode Summary In this episode, Tyler Cowen converses with Benjamin Moser, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author known for his in-depth studies of literary and cultural figures. They discuss Moser's latest book, which explores a twenty-year fascination with Dutch masters, particularly focusing on artists like Vermeer and Rembrandt. The conversation spans various topics including Dutch art history, cultural icons, the socio-political landscape of Brazil, and literary insights.
Key Discussion Points
Dutch Masters and Art History
- Vermeer’s Rediscovery:
- Moser explains that Vermeer was relatively unknown until the late 19th century, primarily due to limited access to his paintings and the small number of works he produced.
- Notably, only 35 paintings exist, and much of his work was owned privately.
- Rembrandt’s Productivity:
- Moser attributes Rembrandt’s prolific output to his longevity (dying at 63) and his obsessive nature as a creator, often working until the end of his life.
- Discussed the contemporary auction market for Rembrandt prints and the decrease in appreciation for prints among collectors.
- Cultural Context of Dutch Art:
- Moser comments on how Dutch paintings are often best appreciated in homes rather than galleries, reflecting on their intimate and decorative quality.
- The socio-political implications of Dutch art and its historical context were also touched upon.
- Art Museums:
- The Kunstmuseum in The Hague is highlighted for its unique collection, emphasizing the importance of context in appreciating Dutch art.
Brazilian Culture and Politics
- Interviewing Latin Americans:
- Moser reflects on the challenges of interviewing Brazilians, attributing it to a cultural history of political oppression and personal trust issues.
- Brasilía’s Urban Design:
- Discussed whether Brasilía functions effectively as a city, with Moser expressing skepticism about its separation from the socio-economic realities faced by many Brazilians.
- Modernism in Brazil:
- A deep dive into why modernism has remained relevant in Brazil, linking it to the nation’s historical desire for progress and modern identity.
Literature and Influence
- Clarice Lispector:
- Moser advocates starting with "The Hour of the Star" for those new to Lispector, emphasizing the unique emotional resonance of her work.
- Susan Sontag’s Legacy:
- Moser discusses Sontag’s complex relationship with visual culture and her insights into representation, suggesting her writings offer valuable frameworks for understanding modern media.
- V.S. Naipaul’s Impact:
- Moser reflects on Naipaul’s influence on his own writing and the complexities of emulating such a towering literary figure.
Personal Reflections
- Living in Utrecht:
- Moser describes Utrecht as an ideal city, particularly for intellectual pursuits, contrasting it with the more commercially driven culture of Houston.
- Language Learning:
- He shares his current endeavor to learn Serbo-Croatian, discussing the challenges and joys of language acquisition later in life.
Key Takeaways
- The conversation provides deep insights into the interplay between art, culture, and politics, particularly within the realms of Dutch art and Brazilian society.
- Moser's reflections on literature highlight the changing dynamics of reading and interpretation in contemporary culture.
- The importance of personal experience and history in understanding and appreciating cultural icons is emphasized throughout the episode.
Closing Thoughts Benjamin Moser's perspectives illuminate the nuanced layers of cultural heritage, artistic appreciation, and the socio-political intricacies of Brazil. His discourse on literature and personal reflections on learning offer valuable insights into the ongoing conversation about art and culture today.
--- *For a deeper understanding, consider listening to the full episode or accessing the complete transcript available on the [Conversations with Tyler](https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/benjamin-moser/) website.*
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:03Hello everyone, this is Tyler. We want to hear from you about the show. In the show notes, there's a link to a short survey where we want to learn more about you. Why do you listen to the podcast? What do you think is under or overrated about the show? Is there someone you would just love to hear me interview? Your feedback will help us understand our listeners so we can produce better episodes, as well as future live events and listener meetups. Again, please find the link at the top of the show notes to fill out the survey. And thank you. We very much appreciate your feedback.
0:44Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatis .org. For a full transcript of every conversation and hands with helpful links, visit ConversationsWithTiler .com.
1:06Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations With Tyler. Today I'm very happy to be chatting with Benjamin Moser and Benjamin Moser has no title. He is a writer, he is an author of a very recent book which I liked very very much. That book is called The Upside Down World, Meetings with Dutch Masters. Benjamin is probably best known for his Pulitzer Prize -winning biography of Susan Sontag, and he also has the best known English language biography of the Brazilian author Clarice Lyspector, and he has a homepage where he writes on many disparate topics, whatever comes to mind for him. Benjamin, welcome.
1:45Thank you. Your book on Dutch art. It was Vermeer Catholic. It was a Catholic, but not originally. He converted. Yeah, apparently he did convert. He was from a Protestant family, but like a lot of families at that time, it wasn't a clear dividing line because a lot of times you would have people within the same family who would have, some of them would have gone over to the Protestants and some of them wouldn't. Does he have Catholic paintings? Yes, he does. And there are his worst paintings, actually. There's one in the Met in New York. You mean allegory of the Catholic faith? For example, well, that's the big one.
2:26It's kind of his - Why is it a bad painting or not a great painting? I think it's because we like Vermeer's to be indirectly. I mean, we kind of like the suggestion, kind of, the hint of something going on, the sort of the fact that you know the class the gaze and not being beaten over your head with all this kind of overwrought symbolism at least that's my impression isn't the art of painting in some ways a Catholic painting and that's a great painting it's probably Vermeer's best work which one the art of painting oh right you have the map in the background with the 17 provinces from the century before isn't Did that some kind of nostalgia for a distant Catholic past or not?
3:11No, not necessarily. I mean, actually, if I can drop a name, I got to go to the Royal Palace in the Hague the other day. I'd never been there before, actually. And they had not exactly the same map on the wall, but it was a very close relative of that map where the country is kind of on the side. So where you would be used to having north on the top, you have north on the right side. and it was thrilling to see it and I, interior, it looks just like that. I don't think it's a castle painting. I mean, it's a painting that has a lot of symbolism and a lot of allusions to literature and to art, but it's not necessarily a castle.
3:49I mean, quite a lot of people, Protestants would have done that in the way. How do you account for the fact, as far as I can tell, Vermeer was not extremely well known until the late 19th century. Is that because it was hard to see them? Or because, just people didn't get it? Well, it's always usually a bit of both. I mean, there's only 35 from years. He dies when he's 43. So there's not really, he has 11 or 12 children. So there's not really that much time for him to make that many paintings. They're also bought up mostly by one guy who was his neighbor, who had something like 20 of them in his house.
4:23So, you know, this was kind of a local favorite. I think that he does get rediscovered, like a lot of the Dutch painters get rediscovered. Actually, there's like two that don't get rediscovered. And that's Rembrandt and Youngstain. Everybody else has some story about this. And you know, paintings disappeared in the people's houses. You didn't have museums. You didn't have public places really, except for churches. And in the other ones, the churches didn't have very much art because they had lacked it in their teleban, like movement of a conoclasm in the late 16th century. So yeah, and it just kind of vanished into the ether.
5:05Did you see the big vrimier show in Amsterdam last year? It did. I got to go through. What did you learn from it? Yeah, that's great. You've lived there over 20 years. You already were studying Dutch art for the book. What did you learn from the show, per se? Well, I think I learned two things. So I'd seen all the paintings because most of them are, except for one, there's one that's in Japan that's this kind of copy of an Italian painting that I've never seen. So I think seeing them all together, you see the break in Vermeer. You see he goes from these very big formats at the beginning of his career.
5:38They're big, like the one in Dresden or the one in, you know, the early kind of heroic Vermeers. So there is this question about Vermeer, which is what happens to him, halfway through his life. He only paints for about 20 years. There's a really big break in the style about halfway through. So he paints these big, very allegorical, mythological religious paintings, and then all of a sudden they shrink into these little bitty paintings that are the famous for meers. You don't like to grow with a pearl earring or the little steams of people in a little table with the window. Those paintings look really different.
6:15You can see it's the same painter, but it's actually a really big break. It's interesting that during World War II, I tell this story in the book as well. This was a lacuna that invited a clever forger because the question of how do you go from A to B is really interesting in Premiere. So this forger named Han Funmeh, who was a kind of Hitler -esque, you know, I mean Hitler was an art school dropout. He didn't really, he wasn't quite talented enough to make it and he was quite embittered by that. And Han Funmeh was also, he thought he was just as good as any old master. So he starts painting his fake premieres that are supposed to fill in the scat between A and B.
6:55And they're tremendously successful. I mean, I think by the end of World War two, he owned something like 15 country estate, so he owns 50 something houses in the center of Amsterdam. I mean, he made bazillions and they were all fake. And ever if you see him now and you can see them, some of them are still on display in museums, you say, you've got to be kidding me, right? This is just totally ridiculous. But it makes you kind of wonder about what do you actually see when you see a Vermeer, you see a famous name, because often you see the huge line, the website that crashes, you know, the people who flew in from Bangkok and Rio to see this stuff.
7:36And you know, you're already kind of prepared to see something that isn't really there. A similar, if I can go on a, if I know you're a heterodox person, maybe you'll like this comparison, but in Islam, there's a famous cliche that every Muslim will tell you, that one of the miracles of the Quran is that it has the perfection of its style. It's so beautiful, it's so elegant, it could only have been composed by divine inspiration, or by God himself. Now the thing about this, it's really funny is that if you're a Muslim and you grow up hearing the Quran, you're so used to hearing it your entire life.
8:17You hear it at every occasion memorized, often a lot of really pious Muslims will memorize the entire thing. You're prepared to think it's beautiful. And so when you see it from here, you're prepared to think this is the most fabulous thing in the world. This is so rare. There's only 35. It was the only time if ever less, you know, this collection in France that nobody ever gets to see, you're prepared to see something by this legend and this name. And it makes it very hard to actually see it. So when you see the fake premieres, you think, come on, that's ridiculous. But if you try to see it without the perfume, it becomes a real challenge.
8:57How is Rembrandt so productive? Well, he got to be quite old, first of all, by the standards of the Dutch. He was 63 when he died. And as you know in the book, a lot of these people died in their 20s, 30s. You know, Vermeer dies at 43. So Rembrandt gets a whole extra generation of work. He also though was just one of these obsessive creators and a kind of a volcano. You know, it's completely dismay. When I came to this country and I was a kid, and I would see the early Rembrandt in the museums here, and I would realize he was younger than I was. He was already paying the incredible masterpieces, and I was sitting here trying to write some article that wouldn't get turned down by some terrible magazine I didn't even want to write for.
9:45He was painting these canvases that were like the anatomy lesson in the hey, or these incredibly famous paintings. And I think he does, as I say, somewhere in the book. I mean, this is kind of a, we fill it in a little bit, but he basically dies in front of his easel. He goes, he was an obsessive -driven creator. And that's why he died in front of the easel. He also died very poor and, and mostly forgotten. Do you think Rembrandt prints are still underpriced? As you may know, there was a London auction of quite a few of them a few months ago. And many went for two X or three X the estimates. Yeah.
10:22Why aren't Rembrandt prints just totally unaffordable? They're very good. many of them. People don't seem to care anymore. They're unaffordable for me. I doubt if that's true. I'm not trying to inquire into your personal finances, but some of the lesser priced ones, I think you could afford. Well, you have different states, you know, like so you have the first, the original prints they're actually made by Rembrandt in his lifetime and then you have the plates that are kind of done afterwards or later on and they're a little bit fuzzier and they're a little bit. But I think, you know, this was always, people collected Rembrandt for a lot of reasons.
10:57The Dutch collected him later, really, and there were obsessive Rembrandt collectors who actually would be a good book for someone to write about the collectors of Rembrandt, because some of them are completely bonkers, you know, and obsessive, like, like, like a lot of collectors. And, you know, now I think, I don't know if you followed the auctions this week at Christie's in Sotheby's. Some of the old master ones I looked at. Yeah. So the top, top at the top of the top is very, very expensive. It's going for three or four times the estimate. But half of the paintings are not being sold. So that means that, whereas with these contemporary auctions, you have this totally hideous looking stuff that sells for $50 million, and you think like, I mean, for $50 million, you can buy a lot if that's paintings.
11:41You can buy paintings from the greatest masters. You know, what you see is that the kind of scholarly approach to painting, the kind of what the French call the amateur, you know, the person who personally does it out of love and who does it out of study and out of historical scholarship and all that. Those people are kind of disappearing. And so, prints and drawings are the ultimate like nerd thing in the art world. That's for people who really know what they're doing who are really scholarly because you don't really get to hang, like, you know, you can hang a drawing on your wall, but like, it doesn't, But it doesn't have the, what I call, I mean, I don't, it's not my phrase, but in the book, I say wall power.
12:20It's not like having a big Picasso on your wall that everybody thinks, wow, you know, you really have to have gone to grad school in art history to really know what all this stuff is. So that stuff is getting, so maybe if educational standards continue to collapse, by the time I'm a little bit older, the prices will also collapse and I can afford them. So you think the growing size of homes and walls and sofas has hurt the market value of a lot of Dutch art. It looks better in a small home, right? Well, I don't know. I was just reading an Edith Wharton story. Don't ask me which one, because I forgot which one.
12:58But Edith Wharton refers to Dutch paintings since his 1900 or something, as kind of a typical faux -offie, expensive thing that these millionaires on Fifth Avenue would have in their huge mansions. But you know, so and you do have a lot of Dutch paintings that are quite massive, but you don't always see them because they're in storage a lot of them in museums. So maybe if you want to build a huge mansion somewhere, you know, in suburban Houston or somewhere like that, you can drag something out of the basement. Who would be a Dutch artist who is good, but when you see them all together in the form of a single artist exhibit.
13:41You think, eh, that's actually pretty boring. Well, that's a sad fact that there's actually more of them than you'd think. Most of them, I would say. I mean, I like Ruistale, I like Fengoyan, but if I were to see 50, 60 together, I would start walking rapidly through the rooms, I suspect, and nodding my head and saying, they're all nice. Well, the thing is, you know, Dutch art is for houses. But coming back to you're mentioned that you're building in suburban Virginia. Dutch paintings are for people who have like 10 or 15 paintings on the wall. And they would have different people and different artists and maybe a few same people.
14:19But they weren't really like, it's true. I think I say it in the book that if you go through Dutch galleries and museums, you go through 20 different rooms and actually try to look at all the pictures, you're going to get completely bored by the end of it. because that's just not the way they're meant to be looked at. But, you know, for me, when I first came to this country and I started looking at them, the more I looked, the more rewarding it got in Rouse Dahl, who you mentioned, that's one I would actually have to stand up for him, fun boy and maybe not. But, you know, and then you have some of them that are just, not everybody gets, not everybody is well served by overexposure.
14:57I mean, I think this is two of humans in general, You know, like some people are fun to meet for like dinner once, but you don't want to marry them There's a few that you want to marry. I mean like in some of them are just tragic, you know like young levens who is Rembrandt's best friend Sush Friend of me growing up if you see too many of his paintings you actually get almost disgusted by them It's more than just boring. It's like gross after a while But if you see one or two of them we would think wow, this is great Maybe you would challenge the premise, but why does Dutch art become so boring by the early 18th century?
15:34Maybe even sooner. Oh, well, this is not, see, I would challenge the premise. If you ever want to darken the door of this nation, I can take you to some absolutely beautiful places that were built in the 18th century with beautiful paintings and beautiful interior design, which isn't always preserved from the 17th century. But there's quite a lot of it. and it's very decorative, it's not quite the heroic thing, but by the end of the golden age, which is traditionally thought to be 1672, which is when Vermeer has to move in with his mother -in -law, things aren't going very well, the country gets invaded.
16:09The economy collapses, and then this whole generation dies, but up to the present day, the duts were always good at visual stuff. They're good architects, they're good designers, you know, they make like that weird coffee pot that cost $400 and you're thinking like, why am I spending $400 on a coffee pot? But actually like somebody thought about how to put a screw in there so that the coffee comes out in the exact right way. You know, there's something kind of they are, they were always visual and so in the 18th century they continue and then the 19th century there's a series of very great artists culminating with Feng Go.
16:44So, you know, so there's more continuity than people. But post -World War II Dutch art, as far as I can tell, seems terrible, or don't you agree? Not designed, right? Not furniture. Yeah. That actual paintings. Well, it's not terrible. I mean, you know, the Dutch always, they're good at photography. They are, there are some very good painters. It's not really my thing. So it's not really the thing that I'm going to die on the barricade for this cause. But you know, and then up to Mondrian and Dastyle and Rietfeld those are pretty interesting Those are pretty interesting artists. I would much rather live in a huge Beautiful 18th century house along one of the rivers then live in a super modernist house But the Dutch you know they were good architects and good designers Does Mondrian still look fresh to you or have you seen it on too many shopping bags so to speak oh?
17:37Way too many but you know so I live in Utrecht and what I didn't realize So Mondrian also he dies in New York so he's presented as an American at least on museum labels It'll say maybe Dutch born American painter and you see him next to all these modernist painters from all over the world You know including now like if he's gone to the moment lately and see the new hang of the modern galleries So they have like the big names you know you have Rothko and Hossow and Mondrian and now they're next to a lot of Latin Americans and maybe some people from the Middle East and from Eastern Europe So it's kind of all mixed up, but when you come to Utrecht, you see that Monterian actually really comes out of this City and that sort of style.
18:19It's very typical of a very specific place and time. What I would say is fresh about Monterian, if you ever get to go to the Hague and get to go to the it's now called the Art Museum. It used to be called the Municipal Museum until like last week. It was called the Gimens Museum. Is that right? Yeah, come here to museum. That's the municipal museum. Yeah, forgive my for now. It's called. Yeah. It's called the what it's it's a couldn't museum like just the art museum early. I hope I'm getting that right Anyway, it has a new name, but it's an old modern museum and it has all or a lot of the early Mondrian's Which are absolutely beautiful and that is surprising because you would never think that he was Going in this direction That's one of my favorite museums in the world and how you see the expressionism turning to cubism and then pure abstraction It's phenomenal.
19:08The three of us. It's like an art history textbook that you can actually see. It's like walking through something. You understand how it all, where it comes from. Why is Dutch fiction so hard to read over time? Well, I could give you an hour on that, but I'll try to give you a couple of minutes. There's one thing that is really a characteristic. So we talk about the design and that part, the visual stuff. First of all, the language is not only an unfamiliar language to most foreigners, but it's also a language that has suffered quite a lot of modifications in terms of spelling and vocabulary. So, if we read Henry James or Euthorton, it doesn't sound like we can tell it's not written last week, you know, but the language is totally transparent.
19:56And that's not true in Dutch. and that's one thing that in fact somebody told me I hope this isn't true speaking of the decline and fall of everybody's civilization you can't actually assign a book from the four world war two to any Dutch high school class because I just won't understand it. Is there any book you would want to assign? Right well I mean will the classic tradition of this country's language is gone people just not only don't bother to read it, they're convinced that they can't read it. This is totally not true, by the way. I mean, it is like there are some spelling things, but you know, if you're a minimally literate person, you can read a book from 1935, it's not.
20:39But the kids won't read it, you know, so my friends who are professors and high school teachers of Dutch, you know, really struggle with this. Besides your partner, Arthur J. Peein, who else should people read in Dutch fiction? Harry Milisch, or Reno Feld, forgive all my pronunciations. I'm glad he mentioned Arthur. He's a great writer. We met actually because his first novel, which is called The Two Hearts of Quasi Boaci, it's actually called The Black Man with the White Heart in Dutch, but that was considered to racially charged in America, even though it was a quote from a 19th century letter.
21:14It's about two African princes who are given as a gift to the king of the Netherlands in 1837. I have to actually never read Rhinofeld, although a friend of mine is has translated that. Moulish is a great writer. You know, he was really somebody that I really enjoyed reading when I first got to this country. In the New York Review Classics, there's a book called, I think it's called Amsterdam Stories. It's by someone called Nesquio, which is a pseudonym. It's like a hundred pages long. And it's basically the only thing he ever wrote. But it's just some stories about some kids hanging out in this bad neighborhood in about 1890.
21:52And that I thought was one of the best books I've ever read. It's just one of those miracle things that somebody wrote one book. Dutch literature is very rich and it's very old. There's a lot of it and it goes back all the way into the Middle Ages, deep into the Middle Ages. What's your favorite Dutch movie? Well, actually, something I think you can see on YouTube that I mentioned in my book is called Dutch Light Hollands Licht, which is a documentary I saw years ago about how filling in the water for this country is a delta. It's built, the land is, it's not always, people think it was all dried, it was drained, it wasn't all necessarily drained, but the thing is it sinks.
22:37You have to kind of keep filling it up so that it doesn't sink into the water, which is not going to go well. By the way, just in parentheses in a few years, that's going to be over with the global warming. But as this land gets filled up more and more, the water that was on the surface, it's very shallow water. It's not deep water. So it's shallow water and it reflects light onto the clouds. So it's a cloudy country, northern depressing gray weather. But it has this amazing light that when you see the old landscape paintings you really can see. Before when there was a lot more water it reflected more light and it was more radiant.
23:15And this movie, so again it's called Dutch Light, I'm pretty sure it's on YouTube. It shows how that process went and how the country was darkened and how this is reflected in the I thought it was fantastic. It was very kind of wonk sort of subject, but it's true. The country, you know, it has warmed up in my time here, but it's also, if you look at the light and the old paintings, you really notice the difference. How much do you feel you're living and what is still ultimately a Calvinist country or not? It's a cliche, like they always say it, like every time somebody's a little bit uptight or conservative or doesn't not as fun, they'll say, oh, it's because you're such a Calvinist.
24:02I mean, it has a heritage of Calvinism, but don't forget that half the country is Catholic. 50%. It was always about 50 .50. So the idea that it's not a purely Protestant country like Scandinavia or something. It was always a very mixed country, racially, culturally, it's always been right in the middle of the three biggest countries in Europe and it's managed to keep both open to those to the world while also being its own thing. The Calvinist thing, I mean, I just don't... I never even really know what that means. Calvinism is a very dark, very terrifying view of God and the world and mankind.
24:47And I don't necessarily I certainly feel this is a very dark country. I see some disparate facts about the Netherlands today, and maybe you can make sense of them for me in a kind of simple unified theory. So drug use and sex work, they're more legal in the Netherlands than in most other places, right? It's a long -standing history of toleration, which you could even say is unparalleled. And yet in the latest election, Geert Wilders takes the greatest share of the vote. People claim as a February 2024. Or if there's no coalition formed and another election were needed, he might take even more of the vote.
25:23How does this all fit together? Explain it to me and outsider. That's a great question that I need to unpack a little bit to try to maybe explain it. It's true that Wilders won this election, winning an election in a Dutch system that has gazillions of parties. I mean, I don't even know the names of the parties anymore because everybody like they succeed in the party and then they start a new party and then somebody dies and then they get, I mean, it's really very complicated. But the fact is that Wilders only got about, I think, 16 or 17 % of the vote. So that means that 85 % roughly of the Dutch did not vote for him.
26:00That, I mean, it's a big result, but it's still, you know, it's a minority. The idea of Dutch social tolerance of things like drugs and prostitution and things like that. But I mean, this is, I think a lot of countries, including our country, have started to understand that, you know, I mean, first of all, you're in Washington, DC, like how hard is it to get a joint or a hooker in Washington? You know, it's not that hard. And it never has been that hard. It's just that, you know, that they wanted to regulate that. And so it got this reputation for a very free -wheeling place. I think they really just wanted to tax it.
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26:37And that's, it's, but even, even so, I mean, as I'm sure you also know the cocaine market in the United States is saturated. So the cartels are pushing a lot of cocaine into Europe right now, particularly through the port of Rotterdam. And so even though we have these laws here that are quite tolerant of the stuff, there is a real terrifying thing happening now where people are even saying that it's becoming a narco state. I mean, it's true, people are getting killed in a way that didn't happen before. I think every society kind of tries to to figure out how to regulate things and how to keep the side of things under control and usually fails in different ways.
27:15I mean, the real glory of Holland that is part of the 17th century story is that they were much more religiously and socially tolerant in the 17th century than any place in the world. That doesn't mean it was perfect. I mean, if you read the story of what happens to Spinoza and what happens to a lot of other people, you know, it was not a completely free country. by any means. I mean, you know, this was a country in the 17th century where like if you denied the existence of the Holy Trinity, you could be headed. And that was better than anywhere else. So it's a kind of country that, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, they're losing their minds in the same way that everybody else is just a little bit of a delayed reaction politically.
28:01What makes the Eastern Netherlands special? Would you try to talk people into visiting there? Arnhem, Benignan? Eastern Netherlands? Yeah. I don't think I'd talk him into going there. I mean, that's nice. It's rural. You know, it's not. I don't think you're... I think the real pretty... I mean, the real fascinating part of... The Netherlands is never really the countryside. You know, it's... You wouldn't go to Italy and not want to see the hills of Tuscany. You know, you wouldn't want to go to a lot of places and not see the rural landscape, but here it's not so exciting. But there are quite a lot of towns in the eastern other ones that are very pretty.
28:39I have to say I'm a I've become a worse tourist and I've been here so long. I used to go go on the train and go visit some you know Nunnery that made special honey or something every weekend and now I never do anything like that If you're trying to sell someone and living in Utrecht, how would you make the case? It's the perfect city is what I would say. It's the most ideal place I've ever lived. I've lived here for a long time. It is kind of like Brooklyn, in the sense that it's about the same distance. If you go from Midtown Manhattan to Brooklyn, you have the same distance. You know, it's like 45 minutes with door to door.
29:22But it's much quieter and smaller, even though you also have everything because it's a university town. and so you have, and you know, this country is small, so physically small, but have a lot of people. So even in the towns like this, you pretty much, there's nothing I don't really think there's anything here I don't have. There's not much that I would think, it's only, I have to go to Amsterdam tonight, actually for the Frans Hall's opening at the Reichs Museum. I'd love for the Reichs Museum to be here in town, but the fact is, we don't have the tourists, You know Amsterdam has really been struggling with the tourist question just like Barcelona and Lisbon and Venice and You know increasingly so many cities.
30:05We don't have that here. It's quite nice Brazil why are Brazilians harder to interview? Brazilian target interview they're not for me Well for you, but you said this one said in general Latins are harder to interview. Oh Well, I know what I mean by that. Yes, Americans love to talk It's a question that you really feel in countries that have had a long tradition of political freedom where you can kind of mouth off and not get into too much trouble. People are much more open to strangers. Edmund White once said that everybody in New York, either re -arrested or interviewed, that's kind of... Or both.
30:45Or both. Often it's both. But, you know, in Latin America where they have a tradition that's not old, I mean, people remember it. It was very recently of dictatorship and of censorship and of the cops knocking down your door to find forbidden books and all that. People don't talk quite as easily about sensitive subjects. So, they might be very warm and hospitable and they often are. But when you interview them about anything sensitive, anything political, anything that they, you know, you have to kind of gain their trust. And so when I started Interving people in Latin America, you know, which was a long time ago, you know, 25 years ago, I would kind of barge in a little bit to Aggressively, I think in retrospect, I wouldn't kind of respect the Isn't it a beautiful day?
31:37Oh, yes, you know, this is my grandson's, you know, he just went to third grade like all that kind of stuff that can often in Latin American take a long time. And eventually I figured that it was about kind of seeing if you're an okay person if you can actually be trusted. Yeah, I mean, every interviewing people, which is something I've done my whole career, basically, is fascinating because you learn how different cultures are and how that gets expressed in just what people will say and what they won't say. Does Brazillia actually work as a city? If you want to keep the great unwashed at a sanitary distance and live in a little colonial island where you don't ever have to interact with the actual country, yeah.
32:24I mean, people like living there. It's a little diplomatic island that's surrounded by this green belt, quote unquote, which is just a bunch of scrub. It's not like any beautiful park or anything. And then at a very, very, very great distance, you have all the poor people, millions of them. And this is really, it's quite disconcerting, if you know Brazil, because one of the things about Brazil that makes it both scary in certain moments, but also really dynamic in other moments is that despite massive class differences, which are humongous, of course, and that has a racial component as well, you're always quite, if you've ever been to Rio, you know that, like, right behind the fancy apartment buildings, you have the slums just right there.
33:14So, it's not, it's segregated in a certain way, but it's not really geographically segregated. So, when you go to Brasilia and you see, and it looks like some kind of architectural drawing, but nobody's on the streets and nobody's, you know, it's, it's very weird. And I think it's even weirder that people like it, but apparently, you know, people who grow up there. I like it. I've been twice. Have you really? I think it's beautiful. Robert Hughes said that the only reason anybody likes Brazil, yes, that they've never been there, you're offering a counter example. It's not an ambition, I share, but it's a monument to a certain kind of ambition that was seen through consistent sense of how things should be, and it's still that way maybe even more so.
34:04Why did you go there twice? Why did you go there once? I wanted to see the modernist architecture which to me is quite interesting and then I wanted to show some friends so that makes twice. I wouldn't mind going again, I don't think I will but... I found that first time I went I was really excited because I knew all those buildings I was kind of a Brazil person I've been in Brazil for a long time and I'd never been there because it's quite hard to get there. You have to be going there. You're not going to ever be stopping by. And I was so bored after a few hours actually, but you liked it. I think it's a wonderful place for two days.
34:45Let's put it that way. Okay, well that's true. I had a week. I think maybe that was the first time I kind of went a little bit stir crazy there. That's far too much. Speaking of Dutch novels, a lot of the great Dutch novels actually take place in Indonesia, which was the Dutch East Indies. And they have a lot of the thing is this colonial life. You know, everybody's sitting around like waiting for tea at two and then they're like, somebody's going to come over at 315 and then they're going to have another half of tea and then they're going to like go on a walk for 15 minutes. They're just really bored and they're in this little kind of hill station communities.
35:18And then there's this like a threatening foreign country around them. And my experience in Brazil was often like, I felt that colonial boredom to it. But I didn't have a job. You know, a lot of people who work there, they do have real jobs in the government or in the embassies or. Isn't it striking to you how much more colonialized Brazil feels than Indonesia? Well, I mean, because Indonesia got rid of the Dutch and the Dutch also never left their language there. But Indonesia is a colony of the Javanese. I mean, that's that's something that I feel is not quite seen. You know, when you go to the other island, you realize they really impose themselves on on these quite different nations really.
36:06So it's a different kind of thing. Now, as you probably know, at least in broad brush terms, manufacturing used to be about a third of Brazilian GDP. And now it's about a tenth. That's a big drop. So Brazil is deindustrializing. What is the political economy of the future deindustrialized Brazil? Well, I think you're seeing it now. I mean, I think that the idea of free trade, and I know you're an economist. I mean, so you know more about this than I do, but the idea of free trade is that like, let's just figure out where it's cheaper to make this and if we can make this in Guangzhou and ship it over to Sao Paulo for cheaper than it would cost to set up something in Salt Hollow and let's do it that way.
36:49I mean, of course, it's caused great, great instability. It's caused the rise in extremism. As we've seen in so many countries, it has a slight different tinge there, but it's basically the same problem, I think. It's fascinating that in the last 20 years, the main Latin American ideology since World War II, which was import substitution, gone. So, So you know, you have the market just flooded with cheap shit from all over the place. You know, that offers a seemingly attractive option to consumers. But ultimately, you know, Brazil has not done very well in the last couple of generations. What do you think is the underrated Brazilian city to visit?
37:40Oh, Resefei, I think. Have you ever been there? No, but it seems like such a mess. I'm even a little afraid to go. I've been to Salvador and that was possible But I always had to have my guard up entirely. I've been to Rio and been shot at and have you got shot eleven year old chase me Yeah, shot at chase me with pointed sticks. I was not shooting to be clear So I love Brazil. It's one of my favorite countries But I always worry about where I shouldn't should not go there, but make it easier for me Brazilian physically you could be Brazilian. You don't easily come up to me they speak Portuguese when I'm really.
38:16Yeah, yeah, yeah, you could fit in perfectly. I mean I'm a little bit, I mean I talk Portuguese so it's different. No go to receive an O 'Linda. No it's fantastic. I mean I always I've listened. I've spent so much time in Brazil. I feel almost dishonest that I've never been mugged but I really haven't I mean I feel like I'm not a true Brazil file until I've like like how the kidney removed by some drug lord. But I've always had a great time there. No, I don't know. It's receive a place you go to have that happen to you. To have a kidney removed by drug lord or? Yeah. I mean, I'm telling you, I'm missing out.
38:54I'm going, I'm hanging out the wrong people. I think I need to run with a rougher crowd. I like the rough and fuzzy. I like the rough and fuzzy. The foul. Even the boring city like Kordachiba, I think is very nice and has wonderful food. It does not really anything to do there, right? I've only been there once. It's not my favorite. I've been, I mean, I went to Porto Alegre again a couple of years ago where it hadn't been a long time. It's not, I mean, it's a totally decent, I think, to live there. It's sort of easier than it would be to live in the Northeast, but I love the Northeast. I mean, if I have to choose, I'll always go up to the Northeast.
39:29Why did modernism so persist in Brazil? Well, I have a whole long theory about that. have actually kind of written a book about it in Portuguese book. This is the auto imperialism book. That's right, which I wrote a few years ago and I thought I was going to finish writing it and make it a real book in English and I never did. Maybe I will sometime, but Brazil desperately wanted to be modern. It desperately wanted to join the modern world. It desperately wanted to project itself into the world. There's a great sense of inferiority among Brazilian intellectuals that goes back really to the 19th century.
40:02They always write about this. Actually, all these books back here. This is all Brazilian literature behind me. And Brazilians found, I think, in art and especially in architecture, a way to create a new identity for themselves. And that's my problem, I think, with Brazilians. The city is that it creates a new look for something that doesn't require changing any social structures. So this was a great subject on the left, the Brazilian left forever is that you know Brazil is actually an incredibly conservative country always. And the great frustration was that incremental change of the sort of you know kind that we would associate with with maybe Franklin Roosevelt was just impossible.
40:51And so I think a lot of that energy, I mean this is just my bullshit theory. I don't know if it's true. But I think a lot of that energy gets subsumed into things that you can do. I mean, you can design a building, you know, you can do these things. But in Brazil, you see that actually this modern design is actually the outward appearance of an incredibly authoritarian and very repressive state. So those things could go together. That was Neymar's big discovery. If you were trying to sell a reader on Clarisse Luspector who would never read any Luspector before, how would you make the case and where should they start?
41:31I'd first of all not make the case. I would say to read the Hour of the Star which is her last book which is the first book of hers that I ever read when I was in college. And if you love it then it'll be one of the great things that ever happens to you in your life. And if you don't love it, then move on. Read something else. Because it's so I once read this story about this Canadian sex toy just to diverge for a moment here. And it was this toy for women that was so big that it had to be brought over in a van and set up. Don't ask me where I saw this. This was a long time ago. I It was so complex this thing that it would either give these women these incredible orgasms that we have the last for weeks, you know, be the greatest experience in their life, or if it was just like the radio signal was a little bit off, you'd feel absolutely nothing.
42:35And I always think about this Canadian sex toy because there's some sorts of art that But just really, you know, it can be the same arc, it can be the same frequency that will blow someone's mind. Somebody else just won't feel it. And I've known a lot of Brazilians who actually are quite troubled by their failure to appreciate Clarice's specter because they feel dumb. You know, she's this great national and international icon. You know, she's this incredible figure. It's just, you know, you feel stupid. It's like not getting Shakespeare or something. But I do think it's so specific and it's a specific kind of person.
43:15And I think if you read the hour of the start, I'll take you an hour, the 80 pages long. If you feel the frequency, then it'll be one of the great things that you've ever read. And if you don't, then it's okay. Everybody's different. You once wrote about Susan Sauntag and I quote, quote, so much of Sontag's best work concerns the ways we try and fail to see." Please explain. Well, I mean, this is what on photography is about. This is what a concentration is about in Sontag's work. And of course, you know, in my new book, The Upside Down World, I talk about how I'm not really great at seeing particularly.
43:53I'm not that visual. Like, I'm a person. I'm a reader. I'm a bookworm. Often when I've looked at paintings, I've realized how little I actually see. I mean, I really sometimes I do feel embarrassed by it. Like you'll read the label and it'll be like three sentences and it'll say like a man with a dog and you're like, oh, like I didn't even see the dog. You know what I mean? Like I just like on these very basic levels. I just think, oh, like if I don't, if someone doesn't point it out to me, I really don't see. And I think that that was one of the fascinating things about Sondheim is that she was not not only not really able to see, but she was actually quite terrible at seeing.
44:34And this was especially true in her relationship. She was very bad at seeing what other people were thinking and feeling. And I think because she was aware of that, she tried very hard to remedy it. It's not something you can force. You know, I mean, you can't force yourself a like certain music or to like certain the tastes that you might not really like. What was Sauntag most right about or most insightful about? I think, you know, this question of images, what images do and photography and how representations metaphors can prefer things. He had a very deep repulsion to photography. I mean, she really hated photography.
45:19And this is why a lot of photographers kind of hated her because they felt this even as she doesn't really say it. She really didn't trust it. She really thought it was kind of wicked. And at the same time for somebody who had a deficit, I guess you could say it, seeing, really relied on it to kind of understand the world. And so I think that tension is very instructive for us because now I mean, she already says 50 years ago, there's all these images we don't know what to do with them. We don't know how to process them. I mean, forget AI, forget Russian trolls on Twitter. I mean, it's such a, uses this word I really like, I gene a lot.
46:00She talks about like mental hygiene. How you can kind of clean the rusty pipes in your brain. That's why I think reading her helps me at least to understand a lot of what I'm seeing in the world. You think she will simply end up forgotten. So in my view, against interpretation is one of the great books. Many of the essays in there are amazing. But I don't see it resonating with most people anymore. And will it just disappear? So as you mentioned in your book, she spent what, seven years collecting Antonin Otto into some kind of volume, and he did theater, and he's forgotten. And she must have thought he was quite important, right?
46:44Well, she just meet the same fate. Well, I think it doesn't everyone. I mean, it's very New York stuff, right? And New York is not really the cultural center of the world or even the United States anymore. Well, I'll tell you, I can tell you a lot about that. I have many thoughts about that. I'll try to give you a couple. The first one is that I'm 10 Texas. So I knew exactly that. I mean, I'm a New Yorker by, you know, some sort of, in the way that most New Yorkers are, you know, the validatoring from Boise. I knew that people in Houston have heard of her, but they don't read her. And I know that everybody in New York is obsessed with her.
47:25And they thought, this is, you know, and I can tell you like the sales of my song type book, I mean, it was reviewed everywhere. It was, you know, it won this prize, all that kind of stuff, but you know, it didn't sell that much. It, because it sold to like, you know, a few groups of people who care very passionately about her. That's not to say it shouldn't. I think that her legacy is very uncomfortable. It's very spiny. It's kind of cactacy. It's like chewing the cactus without removing the exterior. It demands a lot of the reader. I mean, I was saying about Dutch literature that you can't read anything before World War II.
48:05And I don't think it's much different. I mean, you're, do you still teach? Sure, of course. I mean, is this, does this sound unfamiliar to you in terms of, I mean, all my professor friends say that the kids have read a whole lot less than they had 15 or 20 years ago. I think that's true. But what I do find is there are certain superstar figures, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Tolkien, who are probably read more. Overall reading is probably down. Diversity of reading past the superstar is definitely that's my impression. Well, I think that you see this with a lot of things all over the place. The big brand does really well.
48:44CVS is doing really well, but maybe all the shops that used to make up the rest of the city have been decimated. They're not there. They're all replaced by chains. So you have a few chain brands. I mean, I think that's true in clothing. It's true in media. It's true in literature. her. But that's not to say, I mean, Sontag is, I don't love reading Susan Sontag. I mean, it's not what I want to read if I pick up a, if I have an hour to kill and I'm sort of sitting on my couch. She's not the writer that I would want to pick up. That said, I've learned more from Susan Sontag, and just about anybody else I've ever read, because she really, I think if you like if you're the kind of boot camp reader, you know, that I always was.
49:31Like I always really liked difficult books. I liked studying things that were kind of hard because I felt that there was something in there that I could maybe learn from them. So there's a kind of masochism to it, but at the same time, I would hate to think of my life without just a sound tag. I think I would be stupider, I think I would be less able to cope with the reality of the world. I have huge gratitude for having read all that stuff. When you read it all together, it's not all so great. She's quite prolific, actually. She writes a lot. People read a couple of books or a couple of essays, but there's a whole lot of sontag to read.
50:16I think if you look in the Library of America, you know, they have a lot of it in those two volumes now. It's just majestic altogether. Beautiful. Why didn't Kimiil Poglia become the next Susan Saantag? That's a great question. She denies that she wanted to be when I spoke to her. But she clearly did. Yes, she clearly did. I mean, I think she had an identity, though. So, I mean, Camille is a complex subject of her own, but she had, he has an idea of herself that she needed to stay in the academy because she felt that teaching and interacting with actual humans was a way of preventing the kind of aristocratic excesses of people like Susan Sontag, which I think is absolutely fair enough.
51:01I mean, I don't, I can't imagine Sontag as a professor. I think that would have, it was just, that's just not who she was. But I think that Camille also, as much as the reason she's a fascinating person, I think, is that she both strategizes a lot of the aspects of the celebrity culture that Spontag was a part of and a very successful part of while also having quite a lot of excesses of her own. I mean, I don't know if you saw which the NATO Connor died a few months ago, a few weeks ago. There's this clip going around the internet of Camille saying, If I were NATO Connor, I would hate myself too and I would want to that kill myself.
51:40It was something that was just like, this was before the internet. When now if you say something like that, you're putting yourself out there as a kind of, I'm an obnoxious person on the internet. This was 30 or 40 years ago. In fact, Shane does kill herself and does have this very miserable life and was abused and all this. So I mean, I think Camille is a... I'm not going to write a book about her, but I think that there is a book to write about her because she does... She both criticizes and also embodies a lot of these questions. I once did a podcast with her and I think of all the guests we've ever had.
52:24She produced the greatest number of words and greatest number of words per minute. Oh my god, now I remember I had to type down the first time I talked to her The first thing she said to me, which I thought was hilarious. I said it's this on the record, you know And she said everything I say is on the record Which I thought was hilarious because so many people would kind of whisper in the corridors and sort of try to make themselves Interesting and she's you know, she owns it. Yes, she talks really fast now to our final segment on the Benjamin and Moser production function. What did you learn from VS Nipol?
53:02Oh, you've been looking at my Instagram. Oh, I don't know where I saw that, but you mentioned it somewhere. Oh, I mentioned it in the book as well. VS Nipol is my absolute. He's probably the most symbolic figure in my head. He's the person that occupies the most space of all the people I've known. He is a kind of almost edible figure for me, a father figure. Someone that I knew very well when I was younger, I've venerated him. And I think I became a writer because of him. And I also stopped reading him because I wanted to be a writer, because his influence was so overwhelming on me. And the sense of never being able to measure up to him was so depressing that I had to find my own way in the world to use a title of one of his novels.
53:57Having that as an example, that integrity and that stealth emulating, self -facrifice belief in the importance of literature and writing, I had to go away from it. I started reading him again about four or five years ago and I thought, actually, you know, when I won the Pulitzer Prize, that's when I thought, now I can read him again. him. Rather than diminishing him in a sense, sometimes like the writers that make a huge impression of you and adolescents or as a young person, you know, you come back to them 20 years later and it's just not as much, not as important. And he was in fact even better than I remember.
54:39I just, again, I had to stop reading him because the impression that he makes on an impressionable young person is too overwhelming. When I read it turn in the South, I greatly enjoyed it, but over time I somehow grew not to like the book, especially after I spent more time in the South. What's the correct stance on that one? He strikes me in part, as just he was a grump, but in a way that infected his writing, and he disliked groups, so same about a million mutinies, quite an interesting book, but ultimately not willing to understand what makes India work. I don't think he thought India worked.
55:18It's done relatively well since he rode million muconies, I think better than almost anyone had predicted in some ways. Well, million muconies is a book about positive change, right? I mean, that's a book about how these, the muconies are the people who instead of being imprisoned in their caste function have liberated themselves with, you know, the son of the real -wake and Dr. Becomes a Dentist. You know, it's that story of mobility. But I mean India is of course an increasingly repressive and increasingly dictatorial country, which video did not see coming quite as much and to certain extent supported.
55:57I think if you when did you last read him? Not recently, not in the last 10 years. Yeah, go back. I mean, go back to those even as early novels he writes in his early 20s. They're so incredibly good like Miguel Street. I mean, I just Away in the world is one of the great books. And if we stay this fantastic house from the studio's loss Well, and there's so many of them. I mean he writes these books. I'm sitting here like Trying very hard to write if I can write a page a day. I feel like it's you know I can take the rest of the week off. He wrote books of equality and of a penetration that I find.
56:39Maybe he's, I wonder if he's read much anymore. He's been canceled every which way for all sorts of reasons. I don't think he's read much anymore. Do people read him? Not that I hear about. You don't? Maybe some people my age, but I never hear about him from younger people. we'll see. I mean, I think it's a body of work that's produced in one lifetime that I think, particularly probably in India and the Caribbean, will endure. I mean, I just read the mask of Africa about a year ago, which made no impression on me at the time it came out. I kind of thought, you know, he was old and he was kind of grumping around to get bone or whatever.
57:24He was obsessed with this idea of animal sacrifice and human sacrifice. Which, and I knew, you know, video, one of my main commitments, socially and ethically, is for vegetarianism. And I knew that he was a... he was always thought of as a vegetarian, but he wasn't actually a vegetarian. This is kind of funny. I don't know why. I think it was the British thought, oh wow, he's Indian, you know. But there was sometimes meat in his house, which I always found quite shocking actually, but he had a Hindu fence of the uncleanness of meat, not just the sinfulness of killing, but the meat was dirty. And he goes to Africa and he goes all over the place and he is only really talking about this idea of the power can be taken from the organ of a slaughtered animal or human.
58:20This is something that I know exists in Africa, but in this book, he ties these ideas of sacrifice of power, but also with this extremely fucking view of environmental destruction and what it means to kill animals and to destroy the forest. I put that book down with a chill in a way that, you know, I missed it the first time I read it. I just didn't. I thought, uh, it was kind of boring. What do you think of the biography, Sir Vitya? I'm sure you know it. Patrick French's biography? I think that's who wrote it. Oh no, you mean Paul Thoreau. Thoreau, yeah. It is different titles, I think, in the US and UK.
59:02Well, no, there's a Patrick French biography called The World is What It Is. Patrick French who just died. Yeah, but I mean there's the role of a Bruce Bush. Yeah. Thoreau Vitya's shadow. That's right. That book is a hundred percent accurate if you knew him. 100 % accurate and yet totally wrong. I mean, he was one of these people that if you want to put him through the kind of cancel culture filter and say, this was a obnoxious thing to say about women, this was an obnoxious thing to say about black people, this was an obnoxious thing to say about gay people, it's all there, it's all fair. And he was a provocateur.
59:36He loved getting a rise out of people. And he was funny. He was kind of bitchy. He was fun to talk to. I'll never forget I had like I I'm from America so I don't understand cricket and we were in England I was at this house and he started he was watching cricket said Benji must watch the cricket and I said okay I said but forgive my American ignorance but I still get cricket he sat there and he was so patient and he spent like two or three hours because he was going to this cricket matches last forever explaining everything, I retained zero of it when I see cricket. I still have no idea what's happening.
1:00:20But he was very kind to me. He was very encouraging to me when I was young. God knows why he was a wonderful man. Why does Houston produce so few intellectuals or perhaps he will challenge the premise of that question? I'm from Houston and I'm something of an intellectual, But I won't challenge the premise of the question. I think that when I was growing up, and Houston's changed a lot since I was growing up, Houston is so much bigger than it was. It's so much more diverse. I mean, it's so huge, huge, and fascinating city of which I know absolutely nothing anymore. I think it's Calvin Coolidge said the business of America is business.
1:00:56The business of Houston is business. I mean, it's a business place. It's a place where you go to, you know, ship 500 ,000 tons of crude from Equatorial Guinea to be delivered in Shanghai on Tuesday at 1115 AM. And, you know, everybody I knew growing up with my parents' friends and my teachers and all those people that had worked with adults, you know, I always thought that if you're good at math, you become a doctor, and if you're good at English, you become a lawyer. And that sounds almost like an exaggeration, but like I didn't really know about all these other professions that people could have.
1:01:32The idea of culture was sort of an important phenomenon. I mean, it's not now. It's quite different now. I mean, in my parents were pretty, you know, well -connected people in the art world literary world. My mother had a bookstore. She actually had two bookstores. One for children and one for adults. My father was a lawyer. I mean, I knew I had a pretty good introduction to the interesting people around. But if I hadn't gone away, my mother said she wouldn't pay for me to go to college if I stayed in Texas. I mean, her parents sent her to college in Texas and I think she would have loved to have gone somewhere else.
1:02:17But that was back in those times and different times. I'm fascinated by this question. I think it's a really good question. I think that places are so, they get a character impressed on them very early and it doesn't really change, you know, because I think they just attract a certain kind of people. I don't know. I think I would be pretty lonely in Houston intellectually in a way that I'm not here because even though this city, I'm talking about Utrecht here, I wouldn't say I have this incredibly intellectual existence here at all. I mean, I write books, But that's me in my house. It's not like some idea of Paris with Sartre at the next table or something It's not like that at all like I could get my dry cleaning every week and I go to the grocery store I don't really have a social life like that and yet to think of being in Houston And trying to do this would somehow feel harder.
1:03:12I don't know why Before my last question, let me just present your book again and it is the Upside Down World Meetings with Dutch Masters by Benjamin Moser. Very last question. What will you do next? Well, this is a secret. It's to be revealed very soon. I for reasons dealing with my agent, I cannot tell you. Is that mysterious and sexy? That's mysterious and sexy, but then I need a different final question. The new project aside, what is it you will next seek to learn about? Well, because of Sontag, I spent a lot of time in the Balkans in Bosnia, especially in then in Serbian Croatia. And so I am now learning the language that is the only language that has two alphabets and has four, at least four different names, which used to be called Serbo Croatian in the old days.
1:04:06It's not called Serbian Croatian Bosnian and Montenegroen. It's all the same language. But I've been studying that for the last couple of years and I feel like I'm really too old to learn another language Especially one that I don't really have any and like if I had learned it five ten years ago It would have been useful for this book, but now I'm just like obsessively studying servo Croatian and I have to say I kind of love it Who knows if it? You learn so many things that have no point to them and then they their point is kind of veiled and mystery and then And then eventually, sometimes they come in handy.
1:04:48You know, I studied Swedish in college, which was another story, because I liked the professor of Swedish, who was the wife of a professor I knew, and said, you should take Swedish, and I have anything else to do in that afternoon, so I went. Swedish has never once in 30 years been of any use to me whatsoever. where as Portuguese, which I also studied in college, also completely by accident, has been one of the most important things in my life. So I think that when you study languages, you kind of, you open up that possibility. It's sweetest. I mean, it's still, I'm still waiting for the moment.
1:05:23That's going to come in handy. That's not happened yet. It's not going to be today. You'll still be waiting. Maybe you'll understand all the rules of cricket first. Benjamin Moser, thank you very much. Thanks so much.
From the publisher
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Benjamin Moser is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer celebrated for his in-depth studies of literary and cultural figures such as Susan Sontag and Clarice Lispector. His latest book, which details a twenty-year love affair with the Dutch masters, is one of Tyler's favorite books on art criticism ever.
Benjamin joined Tyler to discuss why Vermeer was almost forgotten, how Rembrandt was so productive, what auctions of the old masters reveals about current approaches to painting, why Dutch art hangs best in houses, what makes the Kunstmuseum in the Hague so special, why Dutch students won't read older books, Benjamin's favorite Dutch movie, the tensions within Dutch social tolerance, the joys of living in Utrecht, why Latin Americans make for harder interview subjects, whether Brasilia works as a city, why modernism persisted in Brazil, how to appreciate Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag's (waning) influence, V.S. Naipaul’s mentorship, Houston's intellectual culture, what he's learning next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded February 15th, 2024.
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Photo Credit: Philippe Quaisse
