What have you made of it?

Yeah, so I think it's true.

I don't know if the reasons that reading is dying are the reasons that everyone is saying.

So everyone tends to ascribe it to TikTok and the internet, and that's all true.

I do agree with that.

I do think that TikTok and Instagram and all of these things are shrinking our attention spans.

But I also think that there's an aspect of it that has to do with the way that literature is being taught, especially in our classrooms, because You know, for me, I developed my love of literature when I was a kid.

What kind of disappointment did you experience when you showed up at Columbia and said that truth, beauty, and goodness were not on the menu?

What are three novels you think people should read? Like three important novels.

Yeah, I think the first one is Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky.

I think that that is probably the most important novel for most people to read, especially for young men.

Because the novel is about a young male who's in college and he feels very isolated and removed from society.

And I think that's a really big problem that men are facing today.

And his response is, I'm going to... commit a murder um in order to you know make the world a better place so very very relevant to us today um there have been you know comparisons with him and luigi man joan but what dostoevsky attempts to communicate in the novel is that that is not the answer and that there's also an opportunity for redemption and that there's something deeper that you ought to find in your life beyond just you know i'm depressed i'm gonna go become an incel basically um and i think that that book has changed so many people's lives it also launches an attack on the sort of utilitarian thinking that has become very popular today amongst the DSA socialist crowd.

So I think that's my probably first recommendation, Crime and Punishment.

But isn't Romanticy just the modern iteration of Penny Dreadful? And what makes it uniquely bad? I mean, why is that uniquely bad as opposed to the modern version of the escape fiction?

But I'm sorry.

Yeah.

I mean, so that poem, it's very abstract, I think.

It's maybe something of a meditation on Buddhism and just life, or it's inspired by kind of Buddhist thought.

But he presented that poem to us in the seventh grade, and obviously I'm sure we didn't understand the nuance.

But what he had us do was, you know, as the snowman, it was January, and he had us go outside and just stand in the snow and listen to the snow.

There's this line in the poem that's like, you know, for the listener who listens to the snow and nothing himself beholds.

just a jerk or that woman's just a jerk.

And I'd really like to hear more.

Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, I wanted to go to Columbia specifically because part of the way that they market themselves is that they have this sort of great books program called the Core Curriculum.

And it's they have a course called the Masterpieces of Western Literature and the Masterpieces of Western Art, Masterpieces of Western Music.

So it's Everything that I love about the humanities, which is that kind of art, music, philosophy, literature, they're all interconnected.

Right.

And I think that you can't study one kind of humanistic discipline without understanding the other cultural disciplines.

developments that were happening at the time.

Right.

So he goes to Poseidon and he wants revenge.

Right.

He wants revenge.

And then essentially all of Odysseus' sufferings for the rest of the journey are set in motion because of this moment of grandeur where he felt the need to tell the Cyclops his name.

So that, I think, is a really revealing moment where we need to know that Odysseus has this pride.

And we also need to know what sets all of this into motion.

Nolan sort of paints it as Odysseus has desecrated Troy.

Christopher Nolan has kind of created a whole different, everything is different.

And, you know, how do we bring that literature to our children in a way that can actually allow them to enjoy art and enjoy and want to be part of that world? I think a lot of intelligent kids, my kids included, really smart kids, do not want to go into humanities because they don't want to deal with the bullshit.

Right.

So, I mean, I think, first of all, you don't have to be in the humanities to appreciate the humanities.

And I say this as, you know, someone who has seen my entire family's in STEM.

And I would say that, again, my grandmother, more well-read than any humanities person I've ever met, because what you need to do to appreciate literature is really just to understand the importance of literature to your own life.

So what I always say to people is you can read literature and you should read the literature to better understand how to lead a meaningful life.

I think that in many ways, especially because, you know, we have a very secular culture.

but also there's gatekeepers in the publishing industry right that we need to discuss that absolutely a certain kind of book

So why do you think audiences do connect with him?

Yeah, so there's a couple of things.

Right at the beginning, we have this feeling that he experiences right in chapter one.

So the first thing that happens in the book is he essentially goes to the pawnbroker, who he eventually is going to murder or murders by the end of part one, right? And he comes out of there, and the feeling that he experiences, it's this Russian word that we actually don't have in English, which I'll talk about in a second, but it's a Russian word named taska.

And taska is...

It's a mix of a lot of different things.

I think one of the best ways of describing Tosca is maybe like a spiritual homelessness.

So who is Dostoevsky when he writes this novel? Yeah.

... find to be insane for a course in literature.

[laughs] That's right.

Yeah, I actually still have the, um, the photo of the professor taking off points, so I, I do have photographic evidence of this incident.

I'll put a picture here of feedback I got on one of my exams on A Midsummer Night's Dream where apparently I didn't talk about queer desire so the professor took a point off.

Um, and yeah, so I had this really, really insane professor in college.

And w- we'll, we'll get into this, but it's not just her.

It's not like there was just one insane professor and she ruined everything.

It's like the whole catch 22.