“American Elegy” with author Ed Simon

Summary

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“American Elegy” with Ed Simon — New Books Network (July 11, 2026)

Episode Overview

In this insightful episode of the New Books Network, host Paul Starabin interviews Ed Simon, author of American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Disunited States of America. Ahead of the nation’s 250th anniversary, Simon discusses his idiosyncratic, kaleidoscopic take on the American experience, what unites and divides Americans, and the cultural artifacts—ranging from General Tso’s Chicken to “Kind of Blue”—that illuminate the nation’s complexity. The conversation explores themes of hybridity, urban life, cultural “mixtapes,” and the meanings of unity, contradiction, and celebration in America.

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Main Discussion Points and Insights

Conception and Structure of the Book

• Origin Story & Motivation

  • Simon felt compelled to write an “America book,” a rite of passage for American essayists ([02:57]).
  • The approach: not a linear, chronological history, but “flash criticism” — short, non-chronological vignettes each focusing on a cultural artifact.
  • “The 250th was like, a really convenient excuse to write this book.” ([02:57])
  • Practical advice for writers: use anniversaries as hooks for pitching work.

• Style and Organization

  • The book reads like a “magpie” or “cultural mixtape,” mixing high and low culture, pop and canonical ([04:31]–[06:13]).
  • Simon drew on his college radio background for a jarring, eclectic style: “You go from the Dead Kennedys to Gregorian chants to… the Beastie Boys, to, like, tribal whatever, right?” ([06:13])
  • The non-linear, juxtaposed organization allows readers to draw their own connections.

Thematic Choices & What Makes Something “American”

• Juxtaposition as Metaphor for America

  • The variety and contradiction in the nation’s history are well-served by this “kaleidoscopic” presentation ([08:55]).
  • Simon sees the U.S. as shaped by “frenetic reality…with all these disparate cultural sources.” ([08:55])

• Anti-Reductionism

  • Simon pushes back against reductive framings of U.S. history, referencing the 1619 Project debate ([09:33]).

Cultural Artifacts: The Example of General Tso’s Chicken

• Why General Tso’s Chicken?

  • Chosen as an emblem of American hybrid culture—a food invented by immigrants, with “founding myths” as complicated as the nation’s own ([11:33]).
  • “There’s a particular genius of American food that is born out of the hybridized, multicultural aspect of the country.” ([12:30])
  • Hyphenated cuisines (like Italian-American, Tex-Mex) are distinctly American, embodying both mixture and invention ([13:50]).

• Defending Hybridity

  • Simon points out the importance of defending cultural hybridization from both anti-immigrant and overly strict anti-appropriation stances.
  • “A beef bulgogi taco is incredible. And that’s a distinctly American thing. It takes something from Korea, something from Mexico, and comes up with something new. And I thought that’s the sort of thing worth celebrating about America.” ([14:50])

Political Context and Intention

• Title & Politics

  • The title “American Elegy” is a conscious allusion—“an obvious echo of the current vice president’s book” (i.e., J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy) ([15:32]).
  • Simon’s aim: not a work of partisan politics, but one where politics arises organically from the artifacts.
  • He wanted the book “not to be political in the sense of a kind of, like, partisan book…only of its moment. And then not read in the future.” ([16:35])

• Subtitled “Disunited States”

  • Simon expresses ambivalence about the subtitle ([17:32]), preferring to think about American contradiction as collage, “fractured in the way that a collage is fractured,” rather than partisan animosity.
  • “I'm interested in kind of the contradictions of America in a generative or creative kind of way and sort of like the sense of like, negative capability ... fruitful contradictions.” ([18:08])

Case Study: Jane Jacobs and American Cities

• Why Jane Jacobs?
  • Her book represents a vision of American urban vitality, countering the romantic, pastoral “real America” trope ([19:40]–[20:13]).
  • Jacobs’ activism against Robert Moses stands as a model for “energy and vitality…possible in cities that aren’t overly planned.”
  • Simon highlights a passage about “hearing the higher melodies behind the beautiful discord” ([23:17]), suggesting that seeming disorder (diversity, hybridization) produces American strengths.

Optimism in the “Elegy”

• Eulogy or Celebration?
  • Although “elegy” suggests mourning, Simon considers the book “more of an encomium…than an elegy,” a celebration of grassroots, pluralistic American culture ([25:12]).
  • “Everything…that I think is worth being proud of comes out of that kind of tremendous wealth of different experience.” ([25:12])
  • “Diversity is absolutely our strength. Of course it's our strength. The American story is written in millions of these different sorts of tales and stories and experiences.” ([25:12])

The Local, the Communal, and the Everyday

• Simon and Starabin reflect on small-town July 4th celebrations versus top-down mega-events ([31:04–31:44]).
  • Simon: Pittsburgh as a city of neighborhoods—90 semi-autonomous communities divided by valleys and rivers ([31:44]).

Culture and Music: Miles Davis & “Cool”

• Miles Davis and “Cool”

  • Simon uses Davis (and the album Kind of Blue) to discuss “cool” as an American aesthetic and survival mode, drawing on critic John Leland’s Hip: The History ([32:36]).
    • “Hip represents the dream of America at its best. It imagines the racial fluidity of pop culture as the real America, the one we are to become.” (John Leland, quoted by Simon at [35:14]).
  • “Much of…particularly American culture is, at its core, African American culture. It comes specifically out of the black American experience.… it's also about…an emancipatory joy in the face of that same trauma.” ([35:45])

• The Banjo as a Metaphor

  • Simon notes the banjo’s African roots, often mis-imagined as a “white” folk instrument ([35:45]).

Poetic Dichotomies: Whitman and Dickinson

• Simon pairs Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as the lodestars of American poetry ([40:56]).
  • “After… the mid 19th century, every American poet is either kind of in the camp of Walter, the camp of Emily…. They speak in a very particular kind of American vernacular and they're fully American poets.”
  • Whitman is “genuinely a poet of democracy…democracy as a spiritual value.” ([44:48])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Book’s Structure:

  • “Like a crow looking for shiny objects.” (Ed Simon, [05:20])
  • “My editor let me get away with it.” ([07:27])

• On American Food:

  • “A beef bulgogi taco is incredible. And that’s a distinctly American thing. It takes something from Korea, something from Mexico, and comes up with something new.… That’s the sort of thing worth celebrating about America.” (Ed Simon, [14:50])

• On Fragmentation and Collage:

  • “I think of it more as, like, fractured in the way that a collage is fractured.” (Ed Simon, [18:01])
  • “I see that kind of… fruitful contradictions.” ([18:08])

• On Optimism & American Strength:

  • “Diversity is our strength. Of course it’s our strength. The American story is written in millions of these different sorts of tales and stories and experiences…. It’s the country of both punk music and bluegrass. And that’s incredible, I think.” (Ed Simon, [25:12])

• On American Music & Culture:

  • “Hip represents the dream of America at its best. It imagines the racial fluidity of pop culture as the real America, the one we are to become." (John Leland, quoted by Ed Simon, [35:14])
  • “So much of what we think about as particularly American culture is, at its core, African American culture.… It’s also about…an emancipatory joy in the face of that same trauma.” (Ed Simon, [35:45])

• On American Poetry:

  • “They are not similar. And I think that's why, you know, it's so easy to kind of divide post Whitman and post Dickinson poets between the two of them.… Whitman is kind of the antidote to [Churchill]; democracy in and of itself is about a kind of spiritual equality with your neighbors and fellow citizens.” (Ed Simon, [40:56]–[44:48])

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Key Timestamps & Sections

• [02:57] Book conception; “flash criticism” and non-linear structure
• [06:13] The “magpie” approach; mixtape juxtaposition
• [08:55] Non-chronological history as metaphor for America’s complexities
• [11:33] Why General Tso’s Chicken? Food, hybridity, and American identity
• [15:32] The intention behind the title, politics, and not writing a partisan book
• [17:32] The meaning of “Disunited States” and collage as metaphor
• [19:40] Jane Jacobs, cities, and the vitality of the urban experience
• [23:17] “Higher melodies behind the beautiful discord” (Jane Jacobs section)
• [25:12] Optimism, diversity as national strength, and what’s worth celebrating in America
• [32:36] Miles Davis, “cool,” and American aesthetics
• [35:14] Quoting John Leland on “hip” as the dream of America
• [35:45] African-American culture as foundational to American identity
• [40:56] Whitman and Dickinson as the two poles of American poetry
• [44:48] Whitman’s democratic vision as “spiritual equality”

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Tone and Style

• The conversation is erudite yet warm and candid, mixing serious reflections with humorous asides.
• Simon’s language is both literary and colloquial (“magpie,” “cultural mixtape”), matching his book’s playful eclecticism.
• Major passages read as both critical and celebratory, highlighting contradiction and creativity as central American themes.

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Takeaways for Listeners

For those who haven’t listened, this episode offers a spirited, wide-ranging exploration of what makes “America” American. Simon’s reflections—through food, music, cities, and poetry—suggest that the country’s power comes from its messy, generative contradictions rather than from uniform identity. Both the episode and Simon’s book invite readers to celebrate the country’s pluralism, its “collage” of histories, and the everyday creativity of its citizenry.

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Transcript

[Paul Starabin]

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[Ed Simon]

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[Ed Simon]

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[Ed Simon]

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[Paul Starabin]

Hello everyone, I'm Paul Starabin and welcome to American beyond on the New Books Network. My guest today is Ed Simon, who is author of American Reflections on 250 Years of the Disunited States of America. And we'll be talking about that. Ed is the author of over a dozen books, books, essays appearing in a wide variety of publications, the Atlantic, Washington Post, the New Republic, and so forth. He's also a Public Humanities special faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University and the founding editor of the Pittsburgh Review of Books. Welcome, Ed, to America and beyond.

[Ed Simon]

Thanks so much for having me on.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, we're speaking just a couple days before July 4th and talk a little bit about, I guess just the conception of the book reflections on the 250 years. We're hearing a lot of those reflections right now in our kind of public conversation. How did you sort of think of this book as a contribution, in a sense, to that ongoing conversation?

[Ed Simon]

I'd heard it said that every American essayist has to have their America book in them, that you have to do one book that kind of grapples with American identity. I had a book that I thought had done that, but I don't think anyone read that first book. So I thought, I'll try another one. And I consciously. I always had this idea in mind of writing something that's kind of like a curated list of the various cultural artifacts that I find to be the most interesting in American culture. And I knew that I wanted it to be this kind of, like, collection of flash criticism. These, like, short little essays on each individual artifact. And I wanted it to be sort of unusually organized and not structured in a chronological kind of way. The 250th was like, a really convenient excuse to write this book. And that's the other part of this is I oftentimes give workshops for academics about writing for a wider audience. And I recommend trying to pitch editors based around anniversaries. That's a way that you can kind of get your foot in the door. And I was asking the gathering that I had, well, what are some big anniversaries coming up? And one of them said, well, the 250th is next year. And I thought, oh, I should write a book about the 250th because of that. So I think that that was kind of maybe the more practical, straightforward reason why I wanted to kind of take that moment to try and contribute something.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah. So let's just give the listeners a sense of just how. I don't want to say jumbled. Perhaps the word is idiosyncratic, but in any event, non linear. The book is as it proceeds. And as you say. What did you say? Sort of flash, flash writing somebody for another book.

[Ed Simon]

I wrote, somebody on Twitter, when I was still on Twitter, called it flash criticism because each, like, chapter is basically like a thousand words, give or take.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah.

[Ed Simon]

And I thought, oh, flash criticism. I like that. I'm gonna. So I didn't come up with it. Somebody. I honestly don't remember who it was. But that describes this.

[Paul Starabin]

Well, that's okay if you didn't go. I mean, you know, that's. In a way, that's part of the theme that we're all, you know, everything is going to. Kind of getting smuggled in like a.

[Ed Simon]

Like a crow looking for shiny objects. And I put it in the mat.

[Paul Starabin]

There we go. A Little bit of the magpie. So we start with letters from American Farmer. We have Moby Dick on the whale. I'm just kind of skipping and mixing and matching the Gettysburg. You know, the Gettysburg Address is followed by General Xiao's Chicken. Definitely want to talk about General Xiao's Chicken. We have Martha's Vineyard sign length, Language Shaker Furniture, kind of blue, which I liked on Miles Davis, the Federal Aid highway act, and on and on John Brown's Provisional Constitution, Muppets. So, yeah, this kind of magpie, is that sort of the sensibility that you like to occupy? I'm kind of trying to imagine you're sort of reading life.

[Ed Simon]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it definitely is. And I think that I. One of the things I've always enjoyed, if you're assembling something like this, is to do things in that kind of jumbled way, because I think there's something fascinating about putting unusual things next to each other in juxtaposition and kind of allowing that to either suggest an argument or maybe people will kind of derive their own argument from it. I mean, it's. I think I've never curated an exhibition, but I feel like it's a very similar kind of principle. Maybe for me, some of it comes out of work I did when I was working in college radio, which, like, you know, shockingly, I was a college radio kind of left of the dial guy, and I had a show called Everything Else. And in true college radio fashion, you know, it would be something like, you go from the Dead Kennedys to Gregorian chants to, like, you know, the Beastie Boys, to, like, tribal whatever, right? And I liked, you know, I like the kind of jarring back and forth that people would have with that. And that's sort of the sense I wanted to get out of this book. I mean, sometimes it's interesting, the process in terms of structuring it, because sometimes there's a logic and sometimes I'm just kind of like, oh, I liked having this thing here after this thing, right? So maybe you'll have sort of a more pop cultural thing following a more canonical thing, or maybe there'll be some sort of political suggestion of relationship or what have you. The thing that I really enjoyed with this is that my editor let me get away with it. And I tried to do this with a book that I wrote five years ago called An Alternative History of Pittsburgh. And that was like a series very similar kind of vignettes that were, like, tied to historical events. And I wanted that to be similarly asynchronous. But My editor probably wisely thought that for a book like that, it would be a little bit too eccentric. So that ended up being in just chronological order. But I'm really glad with this one, which isn't a history in the same kind of way that I was able to preserve that kind of cultural mixtape sensibility, which is really what I wanted to convey.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah. So let's go deeper into that. I mean, is that your kind of movie projector sense of America that, you know, is this a case of the sort of. The style, kind of reflecting, you know, your sort of take on the society, the culture?

[Ed Simon]

I think that's a fair way to put it. I mean, I think that the United States has such a strange and contradictory and complicated history to it that there's something to be said for presenting it in a kind of kaleidoscopic way. And it's certainly not exhaustive. Right? There's nothing exhaustive. This is a short book, all things considered. But I do think the kind of frenetic reality of being an American with all these disparate cultural sources is, at least in one sense, well conveyed by this sort of method.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I feel like this thought is actually just occurring to me. But that's okay. That we're kind of living in this age of reductionism, which to some degree is reflected in our politics, but also in our, you know, our literature, sort of using that word broadly. I mean, the New York Times, the magazine, got a lot of attention and a fair degree of pushback when it kind of framed America's founding as the. What was it, the year?

[Ed Simon]

1619.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah. Was it 1619? Yeah, yeah. You know, and that. That was. I can't remember exactly how they phrased it, but, you know, sort of the essence of our founding, which I guess I would say you could think you could talk about that quite a bit, but it certainly does strike me as a kind of reductionist conception of the country. In any case, your book, I know you don't contend specifically with that, but what you just described sounds like. I don't know whether it's entropy or whatever the opposite is. Centrifugal versus centripetal or something like that, but, you know, spewing out General Shao's chicken and others. But actually talk about that one, because I think we want to give more of the flavor, no pun intended. How in the world did you arrive? With a little reflection on General Xiao's chicken, which I. Which, by the way, I used to consume all the time, you know, When I was living in Harvard Square for after college, it was just, you know, it seemed like almost every other day for lunch, I was eating General Shao's chicken, and, man, did I like it.

[Ed Simon]

Well, it's sort of like, you know, there were certain themes I knew that I wanted to hit. So obviously you have, like, the big, like, literature and politics and culture and whatever. Then there's, like, specifically kind of American things. I thought if you're writing a book like this, you got to have them in there, so you have to have, like, baseball and you have to have jazz, and you have to have comic books. And I wanted each one of these capsules or meditations or vignettes or whatever you call them to kind of have an entry point through one particular thing, but then be about the wider issue in a kind of more abstract sense. And so I knew that I wanted to write about American food in particular, and I specifically wanted to write about kind of hyphenated food, to write about the way in which there's a particular genius of American food that is born out of the hybridized, multicultural aspect of the country. And so I wanted to think about, like, what would be a good representative food to express that, you know, you can think of Mission District burritos or pizza or the California roll or whatever. And I settled on, so chicken. Because the story behind it is so interesting in terms of what is it exactly, Right? Like, it may or may not be based on a traditional Szechuan dish, but as it is in the United States, it doesn't really bear much similarity at all to, quote, unquote, authentic Chinese cuisine, but was invented by Chinese immigrants. You get this great story about competing myths about who actually came up with it. So that kind of fits in with that American idea of, like, we have founding myths, and what are they? What are they worth? Is it okay if they're not actually real, but they tell a good story, and that story conveys a certain kind of meaning? And that particular chapter then gave me an opportunity to kind of name check those other examples of distinctly American cuisine that are born out of the immigrant experience for me. And I only mention it briefly in there because, of course, you have to talk about things like pizza or spaghetti and meatballs or whatever. But I'm Italian American.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah.

[Ed Simon]

And I always have this kind of like. I mean, not that I, you know, go to Italy all the time and hang out with, like, quote, unquote, real Italians, but you'll see online and stuff, there's a kind of like, oh, Italian Americans think they have real Italian food, but they don't really. Like, we don't have wedding soup or, you know, stromboli or whatever in Italy. And I always think, but nobody here actually claims that that is like what you get in Milan or Florence or something. It's Italian American food, which is like, it's a thing in the same way that Chinese American food or Tex Mex or whatever is its own thing. And so I, for that particular chapter, I hoped that it would be, like, a nice way to kind of write a defense of American hyphenated immigrant culture, kind of against both, obviously, people on the right who are especially now, particularly anti immigrant and have a particular view of what Americans are supposed to be. But also that kind of. You don't hear it less often now, but that sort of argument that, like, any kind of mixture of things is cultural appropriation and that, like, nobody can, you know, authentically enjoy someone else's culture. And I think about how, you know, in Los Angeles, you can go and get Korean tacos at a taco stand or whatever. Taco truck. That's amazing. Like a beef bulgogi taco is incredible. And that's. That's a distinctly American thing. It takes something from Korea, something from Mexico, and comes up with something new. And I thought that's the sort of thing worth celebrating about America.

[Paul Starabin]

Did you feel that you were consciously or wanting to write into a political context?

[Ed Simon]

Oh, yeah, very much so. With this book, I think, which I joke, part of why I think I got the contract, in addition to it being like, the anniversary, and they probably wanted to publish something about the anniversary, was that the title I came up with with American Elegy was such an obvious echo of the current vice president's book. And I didn't want it to be like. I was like, I'm not writing a book about J.D. vance. I don't want to, like, talk much about it. And I do in the introduction to an extent. But then the rest of the book, I wanted the politics to kind of more organically rise. You know, it's funny because as you know, like, normally an author has no say over a title. And this was the title was the same one I came up with, which was always a working title. And I kind of pushed it a little bit, but I was happy with the title as it. As it finally came out, I think. But I really didn't want it to be political in the sense of a kind of, like, partisan book that is very much of its own, only of its Moment.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah.

[Ed Simon]

And then not read in the future.

[Paul Starabin]

No, no. I just say as the, you know, for the spoiler alert, because I do recommend people, you know, read it themselves and decide what they want.

[Ed Simon]

Of course. Buy multiple copies.

[Paul Starabin]

Multiple copies. This isn't of the moment, you know, I mean, it is and it isn't, but it's very much, you know, as I, you know, whether it's General Chao's chicken or the Gettysburg Address or Thomas Jefferson's plans from the University of Virginia, we're certainly, you know, Casablanca reaching, you know, well, deeper into. Into sort of the well of American experience. But talk about the subtitle, in particular the word Disunited States of America. How much do you want to insist on that?

[Ed Simon]

You know, it's funny, I. The subtitle, I gotta tell you, I'm. I'm a little ambivalent about not to like. And that that's the less. I think my. My contribution to it. I think it's good. It's a catchy subtitle. But I. I wasn't necessarily. I don't want it to be disunited in the sense of, like, team blue and team red and kind of American.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, right.

[Ed Simon]

Yeah. I think of it more as, like, fractured in the way that a collage is fractured. Right.

[Paul Starabin]

I see.

[Ed Simon]

And so I think that. Because I see that kind of. I mean, disunited is such a. Has a certain connotation to it that it's. Whereas I'm interested in kind of the contradictions of America in a generative or creative kind of way and sort of like the sense of like, negative capability, like they write in poetry. Right. Is that you have the kind of fruitful contradictions. Yeah, in a lot of ways.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah. Yeah. For some reason, I'm thinking about a Robert Rauschenberg painting, something like that.

[Ed Simon]

Yeah, for sure.

[Paul Starabin]

For sure. Stuff kind of gets. It doesn't always seem. Seem to make sense.

[New Books Network Announcer]

No.

[Ed Simon]

It's kind of a non. Linear, non rational, in a good way kind of collection. Right.

[Paul Starabin]

Well, you know, I have to admit I like that answer because I felt this is just, you know, reader's reaction that I was having trouble with the disunited part based on readings in the book. So, for example, one that I've kind of circled here is. And you could set me up on this, but on the Life and Death of Great American Cities, 1961. So that's this great book that Jane Jacobs wrote and just remind what the sort of. The content. What led her to write that.

[Ed Simon]

Yeah. So it's. You Know each one of these, my kind of like weird eccentric canon or syllabus or whatever. And I want each one of these entries to kind of, as I said earlier, kind of be about a larger thing. So I chose the Jane Jacobs book because it's such a great way to write about American cities. And I think it's important in a book like this, and it's my own sensibility, obviously, to kind of have a celebration of the urban and not just the kind of like pastoral, rustic, oftentimes associated with, you know, the real America or whatever.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, Walt Whitman.

[Ed Simon]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was a great, a great Brooklynite and lived in Dan Jacobs neighborhood.

[Paul Starabin]

Very true. Yeah.

[Ed Simon]

So she. The immediate context of it was she had moved to New York like all true New Yorkers. There were many true New Yorkers, I should say, before I get in trouble. And she lived in Greenwich Village right at the time that Robert Moses was involved with really redesigning the infrastructure and the architecture of the city. And the immediate circumstances of her writing this book was there was a plan to write to build an expressway basically through Lower Manhattan between Jersey into. Into Brooklyn that would completely demolish Greenwich Village. It would have gone straight through like Washington Square park and the, you know, I don't know if they were quite shovel ready, but this was definitely like, you know, headed in that direction. And she is an activist, along with others, was very much involved with beating Robert Moses on this. And he was not a man who was used to being beaten at Phoenix. And I believe out of those experiences, the life and death of American cities was an argument that she made for the kind of energy and vitality that is possible in cities that aren't overly planned in some ways. And it's interesting because she's writing at a time obviously when New York could still credibly be called a working class city, which has probably not been the case for like 40 years. And especially Greenwich Village today is basically just NYU's campus. But at the time, you're talking about the folk movement there and the beat movement and all sorts of the American bohemia is basically headquartered in the Village. But it also is where green grocers live and little kids are playing in the street. And it's a rich, in terms of experience kind of neighborhood. And Jacobs is interesting cause her politically, you know, she kind of is like a lowercase L, libertarian in some ways, because she kind of trusts people to organize themselves in ways that are endlessly creative. Though I don't think that like, in the broader sense, I would use that particular adjective to Describe her and Moses, who's kind of, for I think, understandable reasons, has been come down. You know, we see him as a bit of a villain in a lot of ways. They'd have this kind of utopian streak about, like, planning and making things more efficient and making things more modern. And so it's an interesting kind of small political allegory that is ambiguous and doesn't easily map on to what we might expect necessarily. And it was a way for me to talk about, like, the Village at its height too. What was like, so powerful about this one tiny neighborhood that kind of had such an outside influence on American culture and life.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, that elegiac theme. I mean, you write now. I wanted to read this sort of the bottom of page. It is the bottom of page 53. Jacobs heard something different in the yelling of street corner fruit stands, the laughing of children playing jump rope, the frenetic sermonizing of a street corner pre the squalog of a sidewalk jazz busker. There are two types of utopians, those who, with anal retentive exactitude, plan out the details of some imagined perfection, and the visionaries and mystics able to detect paradise within the very human interactions who hear the higher melodies behind the beautiful discord. So when I read that higher melodies behind the uniform beautiful discord, I thought to myself that this actually didn't sound like the Disunited States of America and that you were articulating a different theme. And that led me to circle some other things where. Yeah, well, I wrote a note to myself that the title is maybe more pessimistic than some of the reflections and possibly even undermines the disunited word. And that as much as you're eager to be in some ways a critic of the culture, it also feels like you're celebrating something. And that's also true of the General Shao's chicken Statue of Liberty. Then you get into this idea where you're kind of going after J.D. vance, where you say that America, it's marked not by blood or soil, but the United States is most of all in agreement covenant. So anyway, that all felt, hey, this is July 4th, kind of more positive to me.

[Ed Simon]

Maybe I should think of it as a kind of bait and switch, like people are getting ready to be bombed out. And then the book's actually far more kind of patriotic in its own cracked way than they might expect. Definitely part of it is. And I do think, on the whole, the book is. I don't know if optimistic is the right word, but it's celebratory that's when I said earlier about, like, wanting to have my America book. I wanted this to be an encomium almost more than an elegy. And I think that the elegiac part is kind of this incredible depression about how this history is being handled by the official kind of mechanisms of power, as opposed to what I think is actually worth celebrating. Right. So in the introduction, I quote Vance and Eric Schmidt, the senator from Missouri, who have, in my view, this very kind of myopic understanding of, like, well, you're an American. If you're, like, basically a white Anglo Saxon Protestant or a white Anglo Saxon Protestant stock. If you can trace yourself back to the Mayflower, you're good. And everyone else is just kind of visiting. And for me, I'm like, no, no, no, no. That is such a limited and small and provincial understanding of Americanness, because I love this idea that America is the country of General Sow's chicken or of Greenwich Village or of Miles Davis or whatever. Like, everything, you know, that I think is worth being proud of comes out of that kind of tremendous wealth of different experience. And you know that old saying where people say, diversity is our strength? And I know a lot of extreme right wingers mock that sentiment. And I think now diversity is absolutely our strength. Of course it's our strength. The American story is written in millions of these different sorts of tales and stories and experiences. You know, it's the country of both punk music and bluegrass. And that's incredible, I think. And so that's a lot of. My kind of wanting to write this for the 250th is like, I would like to make a testament to what it is that I love about America that's not just like red, white and blue kind of nationalistic boosterism, which I don't find to really evidence love of America so much as a love of power, I think, which is very different.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah. I mean, I don't know how much you're following it, but we're also talking while the World cup is being played here in America along with Canada and Mexico. And I'm just. You know, I have to admit, it's not that I'm some huge, you know, soccer or quote, unquote, football fan, but I am fine. And, you know, the tartan. The Scott and tartan army basically invaded Boston and let's drunk it dry, which is really saying something.

[Ed Simon]

I know. It's impressive.

[Paul Starabin]

It's impressive.

[Ed Simon]

Both Boston and Glasgow, though, it makes sense to me. Yeah.

[Paul Starabin]

But there seemed to me, I don't know, something kind of in the spirit of what you're, you know, writing about and now talking about. And, you know, they, they, you know, the Tartan army and others, you know, they're singing, you know, John Denver's song home. Take Me Home, Country Road. Take Me Home, West Virginia somehow seems to fit or reflect this kind of jumbled, you know, culture and spirit that you're writing.

[Ed Simon]

I think so. I think. I don't know if you saw the story about the Algerian national team, I guess, is staying in some small town near Kansas City and, like, the town has just, like, super adopted them. Like, I guess they really like the players and they. They're, like, kind of rooting for the team. And you have these photos of, like, very middle American looking, stereotypical, kind of quote, unquote, flyover state kind of folks with, like, the Algerian flag with the big crescent on it and stuff. There's something, I think, charming if not moving about that kind of thing.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, it feels sweet. Kind of sweet. Yeah.

[Ed Simon]

And I think that I've been. I've been watching the World cup, too, and I'm like, you. You know, I've never been, like, a huge soccer fan like most Americans, I guess. So I've had to kind of like, crash course into Wikipedia to understand how it works, and I've taken to it.

[Paul Starabin]

The red cards.

[Ed Simon]

Yeah, exact. I have on my phone right now on my calendar, save the Cabo Verde versus Argentina. I want to watch that. I want to see what happens. I'm into it.

[Paul Starabin]

That sounds pretty hardcore.

[Ed Simon]

I know, but it does feel like it's kind of like the world coming here. I mean, I think the United States oftentimes contains so many multitudes in it. It doesn't historically look as outward as it should, obviously to tremendous detriment, or when it does look outward, it looks outward in a very bad way for other folks around the world.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah.

[Ed Simon]

And so I think that this kind of. I don't know, there's something that is, you know, not to be too kind of maudlin about FIFA or anything, but I think that there's. There's like, a positivity to it that is unexpected that I see more with the World cup than I do with the 250th right now, honestly.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, that's another subject. I mean, because the 250th is. I don't know, my sense is it just seems to be appropriated by our president and, you know, we're having this kind of mega, I guess, Taylor Swift event and all I Mean, but I. This is just me. I live in a kind of small town now in Massachusetts, and I kind of like the more local. I don't really do the mega events.

[Ed Simon]

No. No.

[Paul Starabin]

It's a reflection of my ages. Well. But I expect I'll go to the 4th of July, our little parade. Not so little. Maybe tomorrow. And it'll be fairly small scale, but it'll be local people and all that stuff. So I like that. I think your book captures that as well as we've talked about it. And it's not just a rural thing or semi rural. I mean, in cities as well. You know, many great cities are cities of neighborhoods. Probably Pittsburgh. I don't know Pittsburgh that well very much.

[Ed Simon]

It's. What do they say? It's like 90 neighborhoods or something. But it's so crisscrossed by valleys and rivers. Like, it's kind of hard to get from one to the other. So they do become kind of semi autonomous in a way.

[Botox Side Effects Narrator]

Yeah.

[Paul Starabin]

So maybe that aspect of the doom and gloomism about the clock ticking on the American century and this theme of decadence, that what happened to Rome is what will happen to us is. Well, I mean, who knows? But it does sound like you're sounding some notes there that are different. And speaking of notes. So the. The whole Miles Davis. Yeah. How does that kind of fit into the. Into the project?

[Ed Simon]

So I'm my, You know, my father was a huge jazz fan, and he was in his youth, he was a jazz musician to the point that he actually was in the musicians union. But he, you know, I grew up in stories of him talking about driving from Reading in eastern Pennsylvania, where he grew up, to the Village and going to like, you know, the Blue Note or whatever, and hearing these great jazz musicians play. And so I kind of grew up around listening to, like, Coltrane and Miles Davis and Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and all of these sorts of guys. And even though I was like, very much like rock music kid, I had a kind of jazz music education. I've always loved it. And so I knew I had to have a jazz chapter or multiple jazz chapters. But the chapter in Miles Davis is about. It's about music, of course, and it's obviously about Kind of Blue and so what the great first track off of that album. But then it's also an introduction to the idea of cool. And I write about coolness as a particular American aesthetic. And in this regard, I'm in large part drawing from a critic named John Leland, who wrote a great book called Hip A History that came out maybe like 20 years ago now. And he basically argues that hipness beyond just meaning, like what's fashionable or not, which. It can kind of mean that. But more than that, it's a particular way of American being, a kind of pose or an attitude that is then reflected in the arts and culture of the American avant garde. And he says it comes from a lot of different sources. It's kind of like where European ways meant African ways. And you kind of had this new culture developed. But you see coolness in all kinds of figures. Andy Warhol is cool. Lou Reed is cool. The kind of vaguely disinterested, kind of unflappable approach to whatever may happen. And some of it is kind of a survival mechanism to a certain extent. And Miles Davis is, of course, the perfect exemplar of. I mean, no one in the world is cooler ever than Miles Davis. I mean, he's kind of the pinnacle of coolness. So he was, I think, always the obvious way to begin any sort of chapter that would talk about cool and to a lesser extent, hip as particular American modes.

[Paul Starabin]

And, yeah, I'm reading. I'm looking now again at the essay where you write. You're quoting John Leland in Hip the History, where he says, hip represents the dream of America at its best. It imagines the racial fluidity of pop culture as the real America, the one we are to become. Its gaze is the knowing, raised eyebrow. So there's this kind of racial aspect of it as well.

[Ed Simon]

Oh, for sure. And I mean, that's one of the interesting things is how much of the sort of terminology even comes directly from West Africa. So, like, hip from, like, hepi, which is a Wolof word from West Africa. So it kind of refers basically to a not being flappable, like kind of a certain type of demeanor or perspective on the world. Right. Leland argues that a lot of what we think of as cool and hip, you know, obviously, historically comes from African American sources, which is, like, not, I think, news to anyone at all in a lot of ways. Right. And I think that, you know, in a particular American idiom, it comes from this kind of hybridization or this synthesis of these kinds of disparate sources together. One of the things that very much motivated the writing of the book, too, was an acknowledgement that so much of what we think about as particularly American culture is, at its core, African American culture. It comes specifically out of the black American experience. And then that is sort of something that is sometimes appropriated by. Sometimes just shared in lovingly by other people. As well. Right. So that was. I have a chapter in there on the banjo, which, if you think, you know, the banjos, like, is there any instrument whiter than a banjo? Right. But it's a West African instrument originally. And you have a tremendous history of black string bands, particularly in, like, the Piedmont and the Carolinas, that played music that very much to, like, you know, my untrained ear sounds like country music. So, you know, when you're thinking American music is the great example of how much of American culture really comes from black culture. As we talk about the blues and jazz, obviously, but then soul and R and B and rock and roll and rock and country. Right. All of these sorts of things come out of that particular experience, much of which is traumatic, but it's also about kind of, I think, an emancipatory joy in the face of that same trauma.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah. I mean, I'm also thinking, as you're saying this, that. And not to make this too much about New York City, but it's almost unimaginable that figures like Norman Mailer, Tom Wolf, I'm thinking now on the Black Panthers, Lenny Bernstein and Norman Podhorets, that these writers. It's almost unimaginable that they would have been different had they not been in this urban context in New York, which was powerfully informed by the presence of black Americans, African Americans, who just very much an integral part of that city's mosaic and at times, tremendous tensions between elements and including sort of blacks and Jews and so forth. I mean, James Baldwin, you know, wrote about that as well. Right. With his, you know, Harlem, the Jews and so forth. So. Yeah, that. That came to mind. As you were. You were talking as well. You do mention Mailer in the. In the appropriate. The kind of hip.

[Ed Simon]

Yeah, yeah. In the Wheaton Grove there.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah.

[Ed Simon]

Bonkers essay in the way that, like, Mailer only could be. I think Mailer shows up, too, in the Vietnam chapter as well. I read about Armies of the Night there. But I think, Yeah, I mean, you know, the. The observation about New York is actually spot on. I mean, you have. New York, I always think, is almost the most American city. In some ways. That is me being contrary, you know, to the kind of national discourse.

[Paul Starabin]

No,

[Ed Simon]

I feel like I'm allowed to do it because I'm not in New York, too.

[Paul Starabin]

Like, you're allowed.

[Ed Simon]

If a New Yorker said it, I'd be so pissed off by it. But I kind of like, you know, if you take, like, a borough like Queens, it's one. It's the most Ethnically and linguistically diverse, density of that size on Earth. Right. I mean, you have people speaking Papua New guinea and pigeon languages and parts of Queens. I mean, it is tremendously, vibrantly, unimaginably diverse. And with some irony, of course, it is also where the current president comes from. So it is. You know, there's a complexity there, I think.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I wanted to. I think we're getting close to the time when we're going to wrap up, but I wanted to get to number 30, leaves of grass and the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, which I find an interesting juxtaposition, consistent with the themes we're talking about, the jump. So how. Why that pairing?

[Ed Simon]

I always. My kind of. You know, this is maybe dangerous for an academic where you have to be so kind of anal retentive with your sources and your arguments. But I love the grand sweeping, declarative. And I'm like, in a very Whitman esque way. And it's like, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, whatever. I just. I want to be interesting more than anything. But my grand declaration has always been after kind of the American Renaissance, after the mid 19th century, every American poet is either kind of in the camp of Walter, the camp of Emily, Right. That they're the kind of like lodestars of American poetry. I mean, before them, it's all, you know, kind of like fireside poets and annoying rhyming couplets and whatever. And then there are these kind of like, boom. These like big bangs that alter things, but in totally different ways. Right. They are not similar. And I think that's why, you know, it's so easy to kind of divide post Whitman and post Dickinson poets between the two of them in some way. Right. And I think that they speak in a very particular kind of American vernacular and they're fully American poets in a way that like a Longfellow or a Poe even really aren't, that they're kind of like Europeans that happen to be here in some ways. And so I knew that I naturally wanted to put them together in that way. And it's interesting because, like, you know, Whitman had no idea, I don't think he would, of who Dickinson is. She'd only publish like a handful of poems in some, like, regional newspapers at that point. Most of her work was like, posthumously kind of resuscitated. And Dickinson did know who Whitman was, but was not particularly impressed. They kind of thought he was like a profane kind of dirty old man, which is not entirely unfair in some circumstances. But I Wanted that chapter, too, to be kind of like a celebration of an American way of speaking, which I think you see in both of them in opposite ways again. I mean, Dickinson has these, like, kind of hermetic, odd, gnomic, almost gnostic pronouncements that she makes. I always think she's one of the most surprising poets. We're in such an economy of phrasing. You can be in one place and end up in a totally different place. Like, four lines later. She's almost. Then in that way, it's incredible. And then Whitman, of course, with those long, looping litanies and the kind of contradictory things put together. I think if any poet has expressed the diversity of America and also its fundamental contradictions, it's really someone like Whitman. And the thing that, you know, I've. I'm such a. A lover of Whitman is that I think he's genuinely a poet of democracy. And the thing that's powerful with Whitman is, is he sees democracy not just as a means into an end, but an end in and of itself. That there is something to be said for democracy as a spiritual value. And I think that that's very counterintuitive to people for good reason. But you always hear the Winston Churchill quote where he's like, democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others, which is very funny and very British. But I think Whitman is kind of the antidote to that, where democracy in and of itself is about a kind of, like, spiritual equality with your neighbors and fellow citizens. And that's why you have those, like, beautiful things about him loping along through the piers and the prairies and wherever, kind of meeting all of these different people as people and not just as, you know, somebody that you have to share a country with for a little bit of time.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah. Oh, I agree. I think there's an element of communion there. And I think he also attaches an. A step. Aesthetic value to this diversity in the way that he describes it, which would fit with what you're saying about how it's, in a way, an end in itself. I mean, just to be admits that diversity. And he, I guess, in some ways exemplify that in his own life. I mean, he was, what, a volunteer nurse during the.

[Ed Simon]

In Washington, D.C. in Civil War. Journalist for the Brooklyn Eagles.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah, yeah, journalist. So he kind of. Right. Personified that.

[Ed Simon]

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.

[Paul Starabin]

Yeah. Well, we're going to end on that positive note. Thank you, Ed Simon, for joining us today. Again, the book is American Reflections on 250 Years of the Disunited States of America. And yeah, everyone, go out and read it. This is Paul Starabin for America and Beyond.

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