Episode 251: Why Literature Still Matters with Dr. Jason Baxter

Summary

Episode 251: Why Literature Still Matters with Dr. Jason Baxter

Release Date: November 19, 2024

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Introduction

In Episode 251 of The Literary Life Podcast, host Angelina Stanford teams up once again with co-host Thomas Banks and lifelong reader Cindy Rollins to delve deep into the enduring significance of literature. This episode features a special guest, Dr. Jason Baxter, who discusses his newly released book, Why Literature Still Matters. The conversation traverses the realms of literary appreciation, cultural challenges, and the transformative power of storytelling.

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Guest Introduction: Dr. Jason Baxter

Angelina warmly welcomes Dr. Jason Baxter back to the podcast, sharing light-hearted banter that sets a relaxed tone for the discussion. Dr. Baxter introduces his book, Why Literature Still Matters, explaining that it is the culmination of years of interaction with the podcast's community and his reflections on the modern literary landscape.

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Exploring "Why Literature Still Matters"

Dr. Jason Baxter discusses the genesis and core themes of his book.

At [03:22], Dr. Baxter explains how the book materialized from a successful keynote speech at the Literary Life Conference. He emphasizes the importance of having a dedicated audience, stating:

"Anytime that I don't have a concrete group of people that I'm writing for, actually it takes me forever to say anything." [03:28]

The book tackles three primary questions:

1. Why Does Literature Matter?
2. Why Do We Crave It?
3. Why Is It Difficult to Engage with the Depth of Literature in Contemporary Culture?

Dr. Baxter argues that in an age overwhelmed by technology and superficial engagement, literature offers a depth and beauty that is increasingly rare and necessary.

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Commonplace Quotes and Their Significance

The hosts and Dr. Baxter share a series of notable quotes that resonate with the themes of the book.

1. Wendell Berry on Education:

   Dr. Baxter shares a poignant excerpt from Berry's A Consent, highlighting the simplicity and passion of effective teaching:

   "Miss Minnie loved children and she loved books, and she taught merely by introducing the one to the other." [09:02]

   Angelina adds humorously:

   "If you had put a Wendell Berry quote on an application, you would have automatically got the job." [09:13]

2. Esme Wingfield Stratford on the Commercialization of Art:

   Thomas Banks introduces a critical perspective on 19th-century art commercialization:

   "Never before in history had art been so entirely the servant of commerce." [11:27]

3. Harold Goddard on the Purpose of Art:

   Angelina presents a deeply reflective quote that encapsulates the book's spirit:

   "Art is given us to redeem us... it ought to captivate us, carry us out of ourselves and make us over into something more nearly in its own image." [12:31]

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The Struggle to Engage with Literature in Modern Culture

Dr. Baxter articulates the challenges faced by literature enthusiasts in a fast-paced, technology-driven society. He introduces the concept of "museumification," where art and literature are stripped of their original context and relegated to passive consumption in museums or academic settings.

"When we sort of drag things into... the symbolic complex of the academy or the museum... the sort of living nature of the encounter dies." [19:13]

This leads to superficial engagements with literature, where the deep, transformative experiences that great works offer are often lost.

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Reimagining the Reading Experience

The discussion turns to rethinking how we approach reading. Angelina emphasizes the importance of savoring literature rather than consuming it rapidly:

"The highest praise we can give a book right now is that it's a page-turner. But you're suggesting it's actually the opposite..." [40:16]

Dr. Baxter likens reading to gardening, an organic and patient process, contrasting it with the transactional nature of modern digital consumption:

"Reading old books at least is more like gardening... it takes time." [45:34]

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Purpose of Art: Entertainment vs. Transformation

Angelina challenges the contemporary perception of reading as mere entertainment. She underscores the disappointment readers feel when seeking immediate gratification from literature:

"They experience a disappointment. Well, I wasn't instantly entertained." [50:36]

Dr. Baxter agrees, asserting that art and literature demand a deeper engagement that goes beyond surface-level enjoyment. He draws parallels between literature and long-term relationships, suggesting that while both require investment, they offer profound and lasting rewards.

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Personal Anecdotes: Judging Superficial Engagement

In a relatable anecdote, Angelina recounts observing a couple behaving superficially in a bookstore, reflecting on the pervasive culture of staged experiences and shallow engagements:

"They considered going to a bookstore part of an Instagram-worthy life. Shocked me." [59:13]

This story illustrates the disconnect between genuine literary appreciation and the performative consumption encouraged by social media platforms.

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Conclusion and Book Promotion

As the conversation wraps up, Dr. Baxter and the hosts highlight the accessibility and conversational nature of Why Literature Still Matters. Unlike dense academic texts, the book is described as:

"Conversational and extremely accessible." [63:43]

Dr. Baxter announces his accompanying Substack, Beauty Matters, which offers multimedia resources to enrich the reading experience with photography and cultural allusions.

Angelina encourages listeners to pre-order the book at CassiodorusPress.com, emphasizing its suitability for both literature enthusiasts and newcomers seeking to understand the value of literary engagement.

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Final Thoughts

Throughout the episode, the hosts and Dr. Baxter underscore the vital role literature plays in fulfilling our intellectual and spiritual hunger. By advocating for a return to slow, meaningful reading habits, they champion the transformative power of stories to enrich lives and, as Angelina aptly puts it:

"Stories will save the world." [70:31]

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Resources Mentioned

• Book: Why Literature Still Matters by Dr. Jason Baxter
• Substack: Beauty Matters
• Publishing House: Cassiodorus Press
• Webinars and Classes: Available at HouseOfHumaneLetters.com

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Join the Conversation

Listeners are encouraged to engage with the podcast community through the member-only Patreon forum and Facebook discussion group. Supporters can become patrons at patreon.com/theliterarylife to access bonus content and contribute to the ongoing literary conversation.

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Poem Read by Thomas Banks

The episode concludes with Thomas Banks reading William Butler Yeats's The Lake Isle of Innisfree, encapsulating the serene and contemplative spirit that aligns with the podcast's mission.

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Thank you for tuning into The Literary Life Podcast. Continue to cultivate your literary interests and embrace the profound impact of great literature on your life.

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The literary life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and I'm here, well, as always, with my partner in crime, the guy who's got the life sentence.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, yes, your forgettable husband.

[Angelina Stanford]

We have actual stories of going places and no one can remember him. And they only remember me. No.

[Thomas Banks]

When I go out to the store frequently, people will come up and ask, oh, how's your wife? When I don't think necessarily even. All of them have met you.

[Angelina Stanford]

They've never met me. Do you remember when you took me to your favorite local restaurant? Restaurant.

[Thomas Banks]

One exception. One exception. I told you about this recently. I think a guy came up to me at the store and I think his wife is a listener. And he said that he couldn't remember my name, but he says, my wife calls you the time traveler guy.

[Angelina Stanford]

What?

[Thomas Banks]

And yeah, that was. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, you had an actual fan sighting at the grocery store.

[Thomas Banks]

But usually that's the, the you thing that happens.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, we are not here alone. We are here with someone that you guys cannot get enough of. And so he's back. We are here with Jason Baxter. Jason, welcome back to the podcast.

[Jason Baxter]

Hey, thanks so much.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, we're laughing because actually before we press record, we were having a lovely conversation and then we joked about how as soon as you press record, we become all serious and I could have my NPR voice on and welcome.

[Jason Baxter]

Everyone has to be on good behavior.

[Angelina Stanford]

Welcome, welcome, welcome, listeners. I hope you all got your tote bags for the recent drive. No, there's no NPR voice here. So I thought I'd start off with just like a silly story so we could, we could all relax. And that's it. You provided this silly story, Mr. Banks. Thank you. Getting, you know, cited as a time traveler. Yeah. So Jason's here to talk about his brand new book, why Literature Still Matters, which we have both read. Both meaning you and me.

[Thomas Banks]

Indeed, yes. I enjoyed it very much.

[Angelina Stanford]

I presume Jason read it. Did you read it?

[Jason Baxter]

It's a good start. We've got three readers.

[Thomas Banks]

You know, the Sardinian interlude was my favorite part.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, we. We are quite. We're quite. We quite enjoyed it. We quite enjoyed it. I'm joking when I ask you if you've read it, if you're anything like me, by the time you finish a project, you are so sick of it. Like, I can barely get myself to look at it after a certain point.

[Jason Baxter]

I. I know that feeling. I know that feeling. And then it goes out into the world, and a couple months later, someone sends it back to you and says, here's the edited draft, and you've got to go through it one more time. And that's the moment of truth. And so that's what's happening to me right now. We're in the final drafts of it.

[Thomas Banks]

And the return of the prodigal son that you didn't want to return, you know.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, exactly. But I'm happy to say I don't hate it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, okay. That's a relief.

[Jason Baxter]

In fact, I kind of like it. There are some. There are some. Some moments in there, I think.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Like, if you can. If you can get away from it for long enough, when it comes back, hopefully you have the experience. You were like, hey, hey, I don't sound like a complete idiot. I think this is. This might be okay.

[Jason Baxter]

That's right. Well, yeah. Wrote from the heart in the first place, and. And hoped it wasn't. Yeah. And hoped it wasn't inadequate, but. Yeah, no, I'm pretty excited about it, I think. I love my Zuckerberg stuff. I recently sort of test drove that in. In some talks down in Wichita, Kansas, and the Sardinia stuff. And I think those. Those. Those two pieces, I think, make for really exciting companion pieces of basically why beauty matters, why literature matters, but also this incredibly interesting question that if we're the age that has more access to beauty than ever before, why do we have such an ugly culture? And why do we have such a hard time encountering the depth of the beauty of the past? And so that's the. The book is all about those types of things of, first of all, why does it matter? Secondly, why do we love it so much? Or why do we. Why do we crave it? But thirdly, why have we. Why do we live in this culture which is so hard for us to encounter it? So, yeah, we're off to a good start.

[Angelina Stanford]

We are, and we're going to talk about all of those things. But first we're going to start with our commonplace quotes and we're going to find out. Jason, did you bring one?

[Jason Baxter]

I did.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right. Okay, we're good. Now, I should be a very, very good person here because we do not accept any advertising on this show. So I'm going to let my husband say something about his upcoming webinar, because if we're going to keep providing free podcasts, we need to do a couple of things for pay. So you've got an exciting webinar coming up on Dec. Why don't you tell us about it?

[Thomas Banks]

I do. My friend Michael Williams, who's been on our show a number of times, he and I have done a couple of things together. He and I are going to be doing a joint lecture on the late 19th century French saint, Therese of Lesu, and I will be talking somewhat about the social and religious background of her age in France and the Third Republic and how she became one of the most, after her death, one of the most popular, one of the most invoked saints in the history of the church. Even though she was very obscure, her life did not feature any great drama, as we tend to understand great drama. And nonetheless, she is a saint and a doctor of the church.

[Angelina Stanford]

Actually, didn't you subpoena?

[Thomas Banks]

That's another interesting. She's a doctor of the Church who never. Who didn't write very much. I mean, she's not like an Augustine.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I want to say you titled it the Holiness of the Ordinary.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it's a, you know, a very quiet kind of a. Kind of a. A life that you would tend to. A life you could be tempted to dismiss as forgettable and unimportant. So it's sort of like Ruth in.

[Angelina Stanford]

The Bible almost sometimes that a lot solitary can relate to and be interested. She's the little flower, right?

[Jason Baxter]

Correct.

[Thomas Banks]

Correct.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

See, where I'm from, there's actually a Catholic school named.

[Thomas Banks]

Anywhere you have any concentration of French Catholics, there will be things named after her.

[Angelina Stanford]

When I was a kid, I had no idea what the little flower was, and I could not comprehend why this school was named Little Flower.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

So there you go. Well, very good.

[Jason Baxter]

That sounds like you should sign up for the webinar.

[Angelina Stanford]

I should definitely sign up for the. Can I. Can I get a discounted price?

[Thomas Banks]

No, actually, man, you drive a hard.

[Angelina Stanford]

Bargain there, Mr. Banks. All right. Cheapskate you are, man. I don't even get, like, a spouse disc. I'm gonna Take this up with your boss. So that's going to be December 9th. And you can go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and it's right there on the home page. You can click on it and find out you want to know about this upcoming webinar, which should be very interesting. And everything we do is live or later. So if you can't make the live session, you will have the recording there for later. All right, shall we jump in now with some commonplace quotes? Would you like to go first, Jason?

[Jason Baxter]

Sure. I came across this quotation again. I remember I'd heard it for a first time when one of my professors quoted it in a talk. And I spent the next 20 years remembering it but not knowing where it came from. And I've just recently come across it again. And it's from Wendell Berry's short story A Consent. And it describes the little one room school teacher called Ms. Minnie and her philosophy of education. And I think, as it turns out, this is. I've probably failed to get more than one job because I've quoted these lines in my statement of teaching philosophy. But I still think it's the best thing I've ever encountered.

[Angelina Stanford]

I just for the record, want to say, if you had put, you know, if I had made you fill out an application and you had put this on there, you would have automatically got the job. A Wendell Berry quote. They automatically end.

[Jason Baxter]

Well, eventually you find your people, don't you? This is about Ms. Minnie. When she was hardly more than a girl, Miss Minnie had gone away to Teachers College and prepared herself to teach by learning many cunning methods that she never afterward used. For Miss Minnie loved children and she loved books, and she taught merely by introducing the one to the other.

[Angelina Stanford]

You're high.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, that's tremendous.

[Angelina Stanford]

You're hired. That is perfect. That is amazing.

[Jason Baxter]

That's all I've done in my life is that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's exactly it, you know. Okay, now I'm gonna have to pontificate here for a second. So my son is in his second year of teaching and he was homeschooled and he does not have an education degree. He's an English major. And he was telling me how his principal and the other teachers are just raving about what a fantastic job he's doing and that many of them have remarked to him saying, I don't understand how you're so good at this. You were homeschooled and you don't have an education degree, so how do you know what to do in the classroom? And I Said to him, the reason you're so good is because it only takes two things to be a great teacher. You have to love your students and you have to love what you're teaching. And that's it.

[Jason Baxter]

That's it.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's it. What a great quote. All right, Mr. Banks, what do you have for us?

[Thomas Banks]

So mine is from a. Oh, a book, a social history called the Victorian Cycle, which was written back in the 1920s, maybe 1930s, by the English Tory historian Esme Wingfield Stratford. And having said his name, I now realize that I didn't even need to introduce him as the English historian. So, yes, Esme Wingfield Stratford. Remarking on the commercialization of art in the 19th century. The mass production methods brought to bear on everything from decorative figurines to heavy furniture to three volume novels. He says, never before in history had art been so entirely the servant of, excuse me, the handmaid of commerce.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that, that's very apropos for the book we're going to talk about today.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Art is maiden of commerce. Well, I. I felt a lot of pressure to pick a commonplace quote after reading your book. I thought about cheating and just reading something from the book, but I didn't.

[Jason Baxter]

Please.

[Angelina Stanford]

I didn't. I didn't do that. But I found something that is very in keeping with the spirit of it. This is probably my favorite Shakespeare scholar, Harold Goddard. And this is one of my favorite quotes by him. So desperate at times appears the condition of our world that it seems as if only a miracle could save us. We forget that in art we have at hand the perpetual possibility of such a miracle. Art is given us to redeem us. All we are in the habit of asking or expecting of it today is that it should please our teach, whereas it ought to captivate us, carry us out of ourselves and make us over into something more nearly in its own image.

[Jason Baxter]

I love it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thought you'd like that one.

[Thomas Banks]

That was very elegant.

[Angelina Stanford]

One of my favorites. I do like Harold Goddard. My husband always feels really happy that my favorite scholars that I swoon over are all long dead. They're just dust in the ground.

[Thomas Banks]

So it makes me less jealous.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah. Harold Goddard would be a little bit.

[Jason Baxter]

A little bit jealous, but less jealous than you could be.

[Angelina Stanford]

A bit jealous. But you know, he copes with it. He copes with it all right. Well, we are here, as we said, to talk about Jason's new book, why Literature Still Matters. So why don't we start off just telling the story about how this book came to be. I Asked you last year to be the keynote speaker at our Literary Life Conference. And then what happen after that?

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, it was just. It was such a great experience of so, so warmly received by. By Literary Life podcast readers and House of Humane Letters folks and that I thought, I can write for these people. I found that anytime that I don't have a concrete group of people that I'm writing for, actually it takes me forever to say anything. And I, And, And I. I don't do it. I hired an agent once to help me land my manuscript. Important presses in New York. And they asked me, well, what do you want to write on? But because I was imagining this sort of like vague thing and just sort of quantities and numbers, I couldn't. I know it was almost like, you know, Socrates being prevented from doing something by. By his daimon. I just couldn't say anything. So I've tried to write this book before. I've tried to pitch it, but it. As it turned out, it was just. It was incoherent. I had some. I had some stars, but no constellation. But it was giving this piece how to Die in Sardinia and was talking about Lewis and it was talking about why Lewis loved this metaphor of literature as landscape so much that all of a sudden I realized that these stars actually do sort of form a constellation. And these pieces that I've been sort of working on in isolation actually made sense and I could put them together and tell a narrative. But I think that all kind of came together because I. I had this experience of this. Of this audience which was. Which believed in it, right? Which believed that just like in your. Your Goddard quotation, right? That we can ask significant things of art. We can ask for. We can ask for transformation. We can ask, you know, we can ask for a miracle and you know, in a desolate age of. Of hopelessness. And that's why this book is about. That's why this book likes to use the. The metaphor. The apocalypse, right? Reading in the. After the Apocalypse. And the apocal is. Is what various people have called the datification of the soul, right? Or this sort of. This world in which we've rendered our interior lives, rendered our ability to hear the. The spiritual needs of our interior lives almost unintelligible and how literature can. Can play a role in that. And I think, yeah, so talking to. Talking to you guys, our friendship, our sort of emerging friendship, but also this, this wonderful group of readers, I thought these are the people who make sense right now for me to write to. And all of a sudden this Thing which I had spent a year or two trying to put together and completely failed all of a sudden came together really fast within a summer, the pieces all of a sudden made sense because now I knew who I was writing for.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I love that so much. And honestly, I'm relieved to hear you say that because I also, when we first started the podcast, I really struggled because I didn't know who I was talking to, right? Like, who. Who is my audience? I didn't know where to pitch it. Am I pitching too high, too low? I just didn't know who they were. But as we have gotten our community going and our Patreon and our Facebook group and students in the classes now, now I just think about them. I just think about them, you know, hey, guys, this is all the ongoing conversation of all the things we're always talking about. And I hope new people who jump in can sort of, you know, swim along with us. But yeah, people do not talk about that enough. It is impossible to write to an. A fake audience that doesn't exist. Like, like in a writing class. Like I'm just, just, you know, just, just write. Well, write what to whom? Like this is a conversation.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah. Wayne Booth has this incredible little 10 page article called the Rhetorical Stance, in which he says that one of his students was always kind of an uninteresting, boring, dry, arid writer until he. They finally disagreed about something after a class once, and the student went home and wrote this impassioned essay to try to persuade his beloved professor that he had been overlooking the beauty of whatever novel it was. And Booth said that was the first time he had admired this writing. But in some sense what it took, he had to have a concrete audience in mind, in this case, his professor and a concrete topic. But that created a space for a type of pathos to come into it. And without pathos, your logos just seems like your facts, your data, your arguments. Arguments, your opinions are just like those dry bones, right, which haven't yet been put back together and into full living beings.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly.

[Thomas Banks]

Once I. I guess it's not terribly similar, but I once. One of the most successful writing assignments I gave many years ago was to this group of students who. It was a very smart class of students and very docile. There were the very polite set of students who don't like to disagree with the teacher at all about anything. At least that was my impression of them. And I got so tired of reading essays of theirs where they never dared to take any kind of controversial stance that I gave them a List of beliefs and tastes I had, that I myself had, but important ones and not very important ones. And I told them they have to pick something from this list and write against it. And the title of the essay had to be Mr. Banks is wrong to Believe X. And it was actually a pretty fruitful experiment. I think they became more comfortable writers, at least for me, afterwards.

[Angelina Stanford]

Sure.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. No, I mean, I don't mind students disagreeing with me.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Jason Baxter]

Well, there's a phenomenon that art historians call museumification, that somehow, when you heard of this.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Jason Baxter]

When you take a painting, I don't know, like a Rubens painting, which in its original location feels weighty, sort of, you know, one of these big Rubens paintings, like an Antwerp. These things are massive. Right. They're like. They're like 30 by 25ft. You stand over the altar.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah.

[Jason Baxter]

And all these sort of big Rubens bodies, which maybe don't conform to our contemporary American taste for body types. Right. Makes sense. When they're hovering above the altar. Right. These are epic qualities which, with weight, you take this thing and all of a sudden take it out of a situation of worship and you put it behind glass in a museum. People come and they look at it differently. They don't.

[Thomas Banks]

They.

[Jason Baxter]

They look at it for what they're supposed to see and they start learning, like, little facts about it, like, well, it was done in the early 1600s, or it's only changed hands two times, or they. They. They fail to actually look at the thing, to have the qualitative experience of it, and they have the sort of codified experience that the museum gives them in the package. Well, I think that. I think that's also. Walker Percy calls this, you know, this. The symbolic complex. And his wonderful little essay of the loss of the creature. Right. That when we sort of drag things into. I love lecture halls. I really do, but sometimes weird things happen when they're sort of surrounded by the symbolic complex of. Of. Of the academy or the museum or. Or even of. Of the library, that the sort of living nature of the encounter is. Dies in the sort of preference for the download of kilobytes. I gave a lecture just not so long ago to a bunch of undergraduates and I won't say where. And a good. A good university. And to my. I think it was a pretty darn good lecture. It was on Dante. Why you should read Dante. I mean, stuff that House of Humane Letters people have really enjoyed. And I watched as at least 50% of the audience fell asleep. I was Putting my little heart into it, right? I was sweating, I had some interesting slides. I was making Taylor Swift referen, doing everything, you know, and half of the audience fell asleep and the other half, well, the other half listened to me, but if they weren't falling asleep, the. They were. They didn't even make eye contact with me in a whole 60 minute session. But all of a sudden we were sort of in this, you know, this academic space, right, in this lecture hall. And we have this symbolic complex. Oh, this is school. There's no possible way that this guy who's giving me a lecture could say something which sort of reaches, you know, reaches out from his heart to mine. And so I think in a little bit, I think this book is really about that literary culture in which one heart speaks to another, and that oftentimes is through these personal relationships, right? It's when your beloved teacher, your beloved professor says, hey, have you ever read this Wendell Berry poem, how to be a Poet? Or have you ever read this Richard Wilbur poem? And those types of moments shatter the symbolic complex. And all of a sudden these things we've, you know, stuck in museums or behind glass, refuse to stay put and they break out again and they come back into our lives. And that, that is. That is a phenomenon that really excites me is how to get. I don't mind, of course, that literature is in the university classroom. It should be, right? It should be. But how do we. How do we get literature, a literary life, right? How do we get it so that it's not a desiccated, dried, you know, dried up thing, but as all of a sudden refuses to stay put in those museum shelves that we've made for it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely, absolutely. In the, in the opening for the, the show, I say that we're taking story out of the ivory tower and we're putting it in your living room and in your kitchen and in your car and. And that's the idea I'm going for, you know, taking it out of that.

[Jason Baxter]

That's right. And in the heart and in the veins and in the pulses, Right?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I suppose we should say that what happened then is you gave a fantastic talk in the spring on C.S. lewis and literature. It was fantastic and a few. You caught me quite off guard and said, hey, I think this talk is actually a book and would you be interested in publishing this with me? And what you didn't know, of course, is that that had been something we had been talking about behind the scenes, that we were going to launch a publishing House and I have so much on my plate. It just kept getting pushed off and pushed off and pushed off. And when you sent me the message, I was like, this is it. This is the sign from Guy. It's time to do it. Let's do it. And. And we did. And it almost killed me this summer, but we did it. There was so much ridiculous paperwork involved. You would think a publishing house. Yeah. Like the government was so interested in everything we were doing. There was so much paperwork, but I survived.

[Jason Baxter]

Well, maybe it'll be valuable for the government.

[Angelina Stanford]

It will be valuable. I should have put that in.

[Jason Baxter]

Glad the government's so interested.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is a public service. We should be a non profit. Yeah, exactly. But we did, we launched it. We launched Cassiodorus Press. We have a new website with all kinds of great new artwork and we're very proud of it. We're proud of the mission of it. We're so, so proud and excited for this to be our, our first book. And like I said, Thomas and I have both read it and, and loved it. I've been giving little teases in my class. Everybody's chomping at the bit and ready, ready to get their hands on this book and it's going to be out very, very quickly. If you're listening now, you can just pause the podcast and go to cassiodoruspress.com and pre order. And I'm told that the more you order, the better deal you get on the shipping. So I mean, I'm not saying you should order cases and cases for Christmas, but you should definitely order cases and cases of this book for Christmas. Because we were all thinking, and the whole editorial staff that read the book was thinking the same thing. Like, this is a great volume to give to somebody who's new to literature and the literary life, who, who doesn't see the value in it. I mean, is that. But I mean, yes, you absolutely did write it for our audience. And our people are going to eat this with a spoon. This is going to be dessert. It's amazing. But yeah, I also, we had a few people ask us, like, is this the kind of book you'd give to somebody who doesn't get why we love literature and, and you're trying to help them and, and I think the answer is yes. What do you think about that? How do you think somebody like, completely new to this would, would handle this book?

[Jason Baxter]

Yes, yes, absolutely. And I think, I mean, I love the, the Sardinia piece and the, and the Lewis of literature because in some sense that's that's me being positive and optimistic and. And kind of giving, you know, kind of giving an homage to these poets that I've loved and got some fresh material in there from even when we did the talk. I've been able to say some things, pay. Pay Homer the compliment that he deserves. And. And so that's me at my best and my most optimistic. But the Zuckerberg piece, I think in my. In my talks, when I've been sort of working out, working out some of the ideas. You recently gave that to a group of undergraduates. Now, this is a very different phenomenon in which the undergraduates sort of begin, kind of lean back in their chairs, kind of uninterested at first, thinking, oh, boy, here comes another talk. And I sort of talk about that, but I think it's because it's so close to us and because I use his open letter to his daughter Max, and then contrast it with Yates is a poem for my. A prayer for my daughter. So what I do for that is sort of begin what. Where they. Where they are and what they're feeling and the expectations for their lives. And of course, we know from Jonathan Haidt that there's a lot of anxiety these ages. And I read this letter with my students, and they always feel there's something off here. There's something strange, but yet it's so cliched and it's such a part of our culture and our cultural expectations that it's very difficult for someone who hasn't spent a long time reading literature to kind of put on the. On your finger on why this sounds. Why this feels so off. So I've. I've begun with that and then contrast it with. With the Yates stuff. And I've seen people move from the back of their chairs to the front of their chairs on that and seen even some people sort of, you know, look at their phone with disgust and shove it into a backpack so they can pay attention. So I. I do that this. I do think that this book is a cool opportunity for people who. Because what I've discovered is that a lot of our. You know, a lot of us feel kind of discontent with the. With the vacuous entertainment and the. And the notifications, the constant disturbances that our technological corporate overlords have given us. But it's hard to. It's hard because we. Because we very often can't articulate what the alternative is. We feel just sort of trapped by it. And so I think by giving an alternative, it's really exhilarated. Some students and given them a sense of hope.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. To go back to the Zuckerberg letter that you sort of introduced the book with while I was reading that. And I had never read that particular piece of correspondence before, but it wasn't a reaction of. Of deep visceral horror that I felt. But there was something. Something eerily uncomfortable about it. Sort of that emotion that the Germans have. A very specific word, the unheimlicheit, if I'm saying that correctly. The usually translated as the uncanny, but where you encounter something that seems. Seems unthreatening and almost human, but not quite in a way that makes it. You feel this odd sense of sort of quiet repulsion towards it.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah. It's not evil, it's just banal.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Baxter]

And, and, and the remarkable thing is that even by sort of describing the ability to amplify our access to entertainment and our access to pleasure, Zuckerberg meditates. Can you experience 100 times more than we can today even that? You would think that would be exhilarating, but actually seems kind of onerous. And my analysis is that this is viewing the world in a two dimensional reality. Right. This is just the XY axis. And Zuckerberg has completely forgotten that. Not just Zuckerberg, but really our culture. I just use this as a sort of thermometer to get a reading on the fever that we're running. Have lost this Z axis, this element of depth. Which particular? Older books, but some of our newer books that still have their roots in old things preserve this sort of Z axis. But really it takes that kind of, I think, fun comparison. It takes that big sort of collision between Zuckerberg and a poet who's writing a century and a half ago, to open our eyes to the relevance of this, as we already said, to shatter the symbolic complex. To suggest this is not a book for English majors. This is not a book for mere cultural historians. I love English English majors and I love cultural historians. But ultimately we don't want it to be sort of trapped in the museum behind the glass.

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely. That is the entire premise behind this podcast. The literary life is for. It's for everyone. You know, the only reason that a podcast like this needs to exist is because we've lost our way. We have forgotten how to read books, we need help and guidance. But it is for everyone. It's. It's, you know, it's the air we breathe. And I think that it's very easy to get sort of bombarded by cultural waves. And we're in such a cultural wave and one of the things that I thought was so great about your. Your book was, you do a couple things, and I could totally see how the kids you're describing would react to it. First of all, you named it, Right. Like, this is what is happening to you. This is why you feel this way. And I think it's very easy to just think, well, this is. This is. Is the state of things. This is just how it is to be alive. This dull ache that I have, this boredom, this sense of I'm rushing, rushing, rushing from thing to thing, but, you know, nothing's. Nothing's fun even.

[Jason Baxter]

I'm living my life on the periphery of my being.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly, exactly. So you named it and then you said, and it doesn't have to be like this. This is not how you're made to be. And so I, I think the book is very hopeful. I also laughed several times because I kept thinking, oh, we've been reading all the same books. So you mentioned Jonathan Hate's book. Yes, Anxious, which I've been telling all of my students they must go out and read immediately. But, yeah, I think there's a lot of attention being given right now to what our machine age is doing to us. And I love that your lens here is the way that literature can help us.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah. Yeah. And so hopefully just some, just enough sort of diagnosis and analysis to. Yes. Just to make this all feel acute. But of course, what I've dedicated my life to. And what you've dedicated your life to is, Is not just the diagnosis, and I think that's really useful. And I'm glad we have sociolog and psychologists who are starting to put their finger on what we all know anecdotally. Right. I'm glad about that. But I'm, I, I guess I'm even more excited that this is, this is an exhortation, this is an invitation. This is an introduction to rich and nourishing things which could actually provide nourishment once. We just need to. We just need to be awakened to the fact that we're really, really hungry spiritually and intellectually. And then I think, but the very fact that there's. That there is literature and there are all these old things is the exciting sort of positive, positive news. And for me, I think the book concludes with looking at J.D. salinger's story of Franny. And I just think that's such a great. It's such a great story because Franny is. Has everything that a girl, you know, in mid 20th century America should hope to have. Right. She's Got a boyfriend who goes to an elite school and he's got a fancy car and he takes her to a nice restaurant. They're going to do all the right things in all the right order. They're going to go to the right game, they're going to go to the right parties, they're going to drink the right drinks, they're going to go to the right restaurant. And yet she's having this massive spiritual crisis which she doesn't really particularly want. She doesn't want to be discontent with the affluent world of materialism which she now has access to. But unfortunately she's been reading and she's come across this ancient book, the Way of a Pilgrim, and she can't suppress the whispering voice anymore and has this sort of huge spiritual crisis when she really ought not to be. She'd just be an ordinary person in an ordinary world. And why can't she just be content with an endless bottomless scrolling of medio entertainment? But she's not. She has this voice and it, the voice forces her to recognize this. The soul hunger at the depth. And so that for me is just the whole. Is the whole. I mean, it's really kind of my life story as well, but it's the whole sort of premise of the book is that I know something. I know something about you because I know something about myself. And is that we have this type of quiet whispering which wants more because we're creatures made with an infinite capacity. We want, we want the absolute and we want the infinite. And the literary life, believe it or not, is this way of beginning to get that vertical dimension that those aspects of depth into my life?

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely. So I'm. I was reading your book alongside. Now hear me out. This is going to sound crazy, but hear me out. It's not gonna sound crazy to you because you, you hear me talking about Jonathan Swift all the time. But I'm, I'm. I'm teaching Gulliver's Travels right now for the. I don't know how many time, but we just finished up part three. And so I, I had my own words about part three in my head while I was reading, reading your book. And so much of what Jonathan Swift is pushing against in part three of Gulliver's Travels is the idea that problems caused by technology are solved by technology. He keeps saying, no, no, that, that's not how you solve it. And of course my students saw that. This is exactly the conundrum we're trapped in right now. We realize that there are problems being caused by technology. But we think the answer is more technology. And Jonathan Swift keeps showing that the answer is actually very counterintuitive. Right. The answer is go outside.

[Jason Baxter]

We download apps to help regulate our usage. Hours of apps.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's the exact example I gave in my class. Addicted to your phone. Download this app. Like that's how we think. And so, so, you know, the antidote to being overcome by the machine age is counterintuitive. And I love how much you brought that into the book. You said how what has happened to us with this, you know, high speed, frantic, surface level life that we live is when we actually see something like a Rubens painting or hear a symphony or pick up an old book, it seems too slow and dull by comparison.

[Jason Baxter]

And now I'm the one bringing the mania with us.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. It's us. That's right. And so I want to talk about that. I want to talk about how the machine age has shaped us to have the wrong sort of expectations when we sit down with a book. Because what I, what I discover is because someone discovers us in the podcast, they're excited, they jump into books and takes no time at all before we get a Facebook post like this. I'm trying to read Charles Dickens. It's too long, too many words, too slow, it's going to take forever. And it's like, it's like they don't even realize that they have imbibed the, the idea that they are supposed to consume things quick. I got to consume this book quickly. And so it's too slow and it's too long. And Charles Dickens, why are you making this so hard for me? To consume you quickly and have a life changing experience immediately?

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, that's right. I, I love that. And that's something that being a teacher of the great books, I've really been interested in diagnosing over the past 15 years of teaching the great books is that, well, I mean, we believe that these things harbor beauty, potentially transformative beauty within them. Then why doesn't happen more often? I mean, if we, you know, if, you know, fairly minimal investment for a couple hundred books, we could purchase a library that our ancest spent fortunes for. Why don't we have more transformative experiences? And yeah, I think that, you know, I think there is, there is a sort of training that we need to do. Our vocabularies are really wimpy and our abilities to decipher complicated thoughts is really sort of diminished as a culture. And, and those are, those are things that we can work on, right. Those are. Those are like muscles that we can get better. But I think the. The first thing I think is sort of comforting for people is just to recognize how these expectations of speed and productivity I call us. And F equals M times a culture, right, that force equals mass times acceleration is the sort of Newtonian world and what we measure as important, or maybe we should even put it this way, what we feel as important in the marrow of our bones are the impact and the radical sort of the ability to displace matter. And we've been sort of. We've been inculcated so long by means of our machines into this kind of long scientific revolution that we forgot that there was an alternative, a qualitative alternative to the world of quantification. And in part, as. As Lewis says. And to point this out, right, precisely because we spend more time around our machines than we do around the natural. These have replaced in our minds our metaphors and thus our feelings. Perh. You feel about this world. So it is a little bit of a difficulty, right? It is a little bit. You know, these are. These are strong medicines. But I think to. The most important thing is, is. Is that if, if, if we have desire, if we hunger for these things, then we're willing to slow down, then we're willing to try, then we're willing to sort of take these things on as almost kind of therapeutic. Therapeutic opportunities, right. To get better at this. I think the difficulty is when you just hand these things to a student who doesn't know what's being inflicted on him and say, here, read this. And they say it doesn't help me achieve any of the goals I've been taught that I should pursue. I think the sort of. Part of the reason I'm excited about the book is that it kind of does this deeper level of diagnosis and hopefully creates the hunger. Hunger. And then I think once we have the hunger, then we'll have students and readers who will be ready to do the difficult work of adjusting themselves to these older and slower patterns.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's exactly right. And you talked about having to read these books slowly. And I kept thinking the highest praise we can give of a book right now is that it's quote, a page turner.

[Jason Baxter]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

And you're suggesting it's actually the opposite of that. That a really good book. Book forces you to read it slowly, to savor, to contemplate, you know, and to use your. Your hunger metaphor. It's like. It's like we're starving to death and you're in danger. Of dying. If you're starving to death and you just start gorging on food, you gotta take it very, very slowly. But again, I. I don't. I don't. This is not a criticism of the people who join the group and post those comments. It. Those comments are illustrative to me of the culture we're in, not of their personal flaws. You know, And I see so many examples where I think, okay, okay, this is something else. I'm going to have to address Lewis in his talk that he gives, and it's in Latin, the name of it, and I'm going to blow. You know his talk at Cambridge, he talks about how to learn how to read old books. You don't just need. Need a guide to help you through the books, which you do. But he says you also have to unlearn all of the habits of modern reading that you've picked up. And that I see as a real challenge for people because you have to be patient with yourself. You don't even realize you've picked up all these habits. There was. There was a Facebook post today where it had a sentence, like, in the first page of whatever book they were reading. It was like, help me to understand this sentence. And I came in, I said, okay, look, this is my advice. Don't read a novel like a textbook, where you think you have to master every sentence. Like, that's not how to read literature. You're going to drive yourself crazy. You're never going to get through this book. You just have to let it wash over you. But I kept thinking about that post all day, about how somewhere along the way, we have picked up the idea that we read everything like a textbook. Everything has been reduced to us. And so we think, think, okay, I have to master every sentence because I'm only being given, you know, the instruction manual, and I've got to get step B before I get Step C kind of idea.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah. And maybe, you know, maybe the. The metaphor lurking behind a textbook, right? It's kind of like a user's manual for a machine, right? We almost sort of expect these little gadgets, something. Almost thinking of the famous scene in I Love Lucy or maybe in Modern times, right. Of the. Of the belt, bringing along these little gizmos which we have to attach a doohickey and a gadget to, right? And then our reading should be like that. Our reading should, you know, just be downloading these bits, these bits and these bytes. I think maybe if we're looking for a different metaphor, maybe reading, reading old books at Least is more like gardening. And we put something in and we care for it, we cultivate it, and it begins to grow. But it takes time or. Or, you know. Yeah, either. Either, you know. Yeah. Some sort of organic process in which. In which, you know, the growth of a tree. And I think in my research for this book, I think one of the more exciting things that it came across was the change of a single word. That is both before the scientific revolution, our pre modern ancestors, and after the scientific revolution, we both love this word amplification. And it's kind of a compliment. You know, it has a technical, scientific meaning in our contemporary culture, but also has, you know, all kinds of positive metaphors. Right. Like to be amped up. Right. To amp up my life, or that's an amped up experience. And then. Right. But essentially it's a temporal experience. Right. It means it's, you know, it's more bang within the time. It's more. It's more of explosion, it's more force. Right. Our ancestors meant it, though. In terms of spaciousness, amplification meant something like the ample. And what they meant was the attempt to overcome the constant flow of time by making time more like eternity, making it slower, making it richer, making it denser, making more memorable, making it more spacious, making it more ample in this sense. And that seemingly explains the hugely different ways in which we both produce things to read, but also the expectations that we have by which to read them. That if you go to Spenser's Epithalamium, one of Lewis's favorite poems, you should think of it maybe more like learning a piece of music. If you sit down and open up a Chopin piece and start to try to play the chord and say, you know what? I'm not playing it at the speed that I ought to, you'll quit. But if you realize that this is I. I will learn these chords and these scales over the course of time, and I'll put them together slowly. If you think about the individual vocabulary words and the lines and, you know, the. The rhetorical devices in which Spencer flips. Right. Inverses the syntax, but that's okay. This stuff will come together slowly, and eventually you'll be able to play this like a piece of music. Music. But then it will have all the satisfaction of being able to place a piece of. Play a piece of music that you've mastered because you've gone through those vocabulary words, you've gone through those chords and scales.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, that's something I've been thinking a whole lot about, because I think a lot about the feedback we get from our student body about, about our classes, and we have a fantastic student body. And one of the students told me that to, when she started taking Latin and our Latin courses are very vigorous, that at first she felt a little discouraged, like, why am I not getting this right away? Why is this hard? Why is it taking time?

[Jason Baxter]

Why do I have to practice chords and scales before I play the piano?

[Angelina Stanford]

She said she realized that it was like learning to play the piano because she, she plays music. And she said once she, once she just accepted, oh, it's like an instrument. I've just got to keep practicing and then it'll come, you know, then, then she had the light bulb moment. And that was the, the perfect way to think about it. But I think about how our cult keeps teaching us to expect the hack, right? We can hack this.

[Thomas Banks]

It's true that I'm supposed come to hate that expression.

[Angelina Stanford]

Me too, me too. But there's the expectation that we're doing it wrong if we haven't figured out how to hack it, make it easier, make it shorter, make it faster, right?

[Jason Baxter]

But in some sense, the marketers have helped provide the expectation that it has to be instantaneous so that when we go about and try to do it with craft and care and get discouraged, there will be the instant, the instant fix available. Right? I mean, well, the Greeks, the Greeks had a phrase, beautiful things are difficult. They said kala patakala. The beautiful things are difficult.

[Angelina Stanford]

We need a bumper sticker of that.

[Jason Baxter]

And, but I, I, but I don't know. I mean, you know, I think despite all the, just critiques, right? We, no one expects to be a good athlete complete without investing a massive amount of time, right. In the world of stem, no one goes into the field of mechanical engineering without knowing that differential equations is going to be a difficult class and you have to have got through calculus 4 before you get to it, right? We're, we understand that some things will take a lot of work and a lot of investment, right? We're okay with that. With athletics, in fact, we worship our, you know, athletes as, as, you know, know, celebrities because of, because of how much time they put in. We get that, right? We get that. The STEM fields, right? If you want to be a neuroscientist or a physician, we get that that's an investment with care, right. At one point, we also had our cultural expectations that humanistic things, you could get good at them and you might not. No one's going to step into a Cal 4 class and be instantly good at it. You got to. You got to work toward it, right? And ultimately what you get is, you know, is. Is valuable. Right. I think in a. In a sort of similar way, if we have an expectation that it's okay not to already be good at reading poetry, that these things take time. It's like learning an instrument or becoming an athlete or studying the stems and. And we have practices for these, right? And this is what a whole educational system used to have, a component in which it realized this and wanted to empower people to be good at it. But I think maybe we have a little bit of the myth of the romantic genius lurking in the background, right? That if you're not Mozart composing at five, then you're probably a. You probably have no business to compose, right? Or if you're not Michelangelo and sketching something in chalk by nine, then you have no business to be an artist. And we have this kind of. We don't realize that most artists, maybe there are a couple of brilliant exceptions. Most artists, most poets have gone through this long apprenticeship of craft. And analogously, as readers, we can go through an apprenticeship and we can get better at this and. And develop our muscles and become more powerful and thus capable of experience this more. This. These more ample experiences.

[Angelina Stanford]

We really struggle with knowing what is the purpose of art.

[Jason Baxter]

Art.

[Angelina Stanford]

So we. And you talk about this in the book. We think that reading is, quote, entertainment, right? I'm supposed to be entertained. It's. It's just another version of Netflix and chill, right? I'll spend an afternoon binging a show, or I can spend an afternoon reading a novel. But that's the level of engagement we expect. And I think what happens when people read a more artfully done book that requires something more I. They. They experience, like, a disappointment. Well, I wasn't instantly entertained. Paint. I was not instantly drawn in. And. And again, we get those Facebook posts all the time. Should I keep going? This didn't instantly grab me, but that's not how art works. It's not going to be instant. It's not entertaining. It's going to require something of you. But then I think when we make the case for that, that the second part of that is we are. So. We breathe the air of utilitarianism, right? We think that it's got to be useful. It needs to be immediately useful. Useful. And so if it's not entertainment, because a lot of times I feel like people are saying, okay, you want me to work to be entertained? Why would I do that? There are easier Ways to be entertained, right. So.

[Jason Baxter]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

They don't know what use it has. And, and for people who have had the kinds of experiences you're describing in the book, right, all of a sudden you breathe Narnia air and you're different. It's, it's honestly not possible to explain to somebody what it was at the book gate. Me?

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, my, my mind just had a multiplied multiplication of all kinds of, of metaphors. But it seems like if you, you know, time traveling, if you just sort of chose a random moment of, you know, of a dating couple's experience, you know, maybe in the first couple of dates and dropped in and lived an hour of their life at, you know, a fancy dinner when they're dating. And then if you dropped in, been a random moment in a married couple's life and they experienced that, chances are the day the dating experience would seem like the, the more entertaining, the more fun. Right? But I think people who have been married and been married for some time know that it's, it's this richer, more ennobling, ennobled experience in which yes, there is fun in it and yes, there is sort of joy, but there are all these sort of deeper currents, right? And this, this deeper, this deeper connection which is not possible in the early stages of the dating relationship. It seems to me like that maybe the analogy is the Netflix is just, it's just your whole life in a series of one off dates, right? Netflix is just a, you know, your, your one night stand every single weekend after the other, right? But literature is marriage, right? Literature has I think ultimately incorporated into, to it. It does have, it does get fun and it does even feel entertaining. But after, in some sense you've gone through the, the process of ennoblement and I think it, I think you're right. Initially there is a type of investment, right? I mean it's easy to go onto an app and find someone who wants to go out on a date with you, right. At a diner, right? And maybe it'll be fun, but it's more, everyone would know it'd be more satisfying over the course of a lifetime to have a spouse commit to a joint project and to have a whole ecosystems of love, which is not possible on that, on that one night stand. And so I think, you know, that's kind of how I think about literature that yeah, it's going to, it's going to come slowly at first, particularly as we, as we build our powers, right, of the sense of ennoblement. But I mean it's you know, it's easier to. To watch an NFL game than to. To be an athlete yourself. And. And we get that, and we understand that there are certain types of. So maybe one of the goods that the book could do is create a real hunger, a real desire and a thirst for. Despite the difficulties, you know, there are some. Right. But a desire to actually To. To be nourished in that type of way, to seek that type of ennoblement. Because over the course of time, I think that joy. That. I mean, what we might even call fun. Right. Again, I mean, in my sort of dating, relationship, marriage and analogy, if you ask a married person, do you think that your marriage is fun? I think a married person would just be sort of perplexed by it. It's not that it's not fun, but it's just that the. The sort of, like, the level. The. The level of joy makes a word like fun seem kind of sick and sallow in comparison. And so you might say, yeah, I guess it's fun. I mean, that's a component of it. Right? I have some fun. I think analogously, sort of like, is literature entertaining? And once you get good at it. Yeah. Is it enjoyable?

[Angelina Stanford]

Would.

[Jason Baxter]

Who wouldn't if it were. If it were easy, who wouldn't, you know, close her eyes and play from memory one of Chopin's like, posthumous, you know, waltzes? We'd all do it if we could.

[Thomas Banks]

I'm gonna expose myself, actually, as a dullard here. Here.

[Angelina Stanford]

But what you were going to say as somebody who has a dating app. We're about to have some trouble here.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, no, that'll come later.

[Jason Baxter]

But.

[Thomas Banks]

But I. I've actually come to question the conceptual legitimacy of fun because I. I mean, and not to say that it doesn't exist, but that I think it should at least give a hint to us that this is something we spend far too much time pursuing. When this is an emotion which I don't think people express at any time before, like, probably the 19th century, if not the 20th.

[Jason Baxter]

That's a hot take.

[Thomas Banks]

Can you think of anyone had fun before? You're something. Yeah. Something of a linguist yourself, but joy. I mean, joy.

[Jason Baxter]

But.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, but I think that's. There's a depth in joy that there is not. And there's something. There's something essentially superficial about fun and funness. So I wish we had our Oxford English Dictionary. I wonder if, like, we could find a equivalent of fun in any language, Language on planet Earth that has ever been spoken.

[Angelina Stanford]

There is no comparatively modern.

[Thomas Banks]

Definitely there's no word for fun in Latin.

[Jason Baxter]

Well, you know what's really interesting? I mean, I think we could. I don't want to add another chapter to the book. Thanks to your inspiration. Wait, too late. But I.

[Angelina Stanford]

The sequel.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But I. I think just looking at the history of that word would probably tell a very interesting story. Story that I know in the equivalent in Italian, you will find the word. You'll find the word used in Franciscan poets to describe the joy, bliss, the ebullient rhapsodic ecstasy that they have when. When they finally come back into tune with the world. That word will eventually sort of, in the contemporary world, will be fun.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, right.

[Jason Baxter]

But I think. I think you're right. I think there's. There's. We've probably seen what. And Lewis would. Would love this, right. With his studies on words, that we've probably seen a radical reduction of it. That for us now, fun means like the. The. The synthetic chemical, right. Injected into the bloodstream, which has now replaced sort of a deeper quality like contentment, tranquility, joy. Joy, Right. These sort of habitual attitudes in which I have. Yeah. Have this. Have this worshipful and grateful response to.

[Angelina Stanford]

The world and fun. It doesn't last. That's why we're always seeking for the new.

[Thomas Banks]

No, it's forgettable.

[Angelina Stanford]

The new fun thing.

[Thomas Banks]

It's a transitory pleasure.

[Jason Baxter]

Sometimes it's even not very fun when you think that you're supposed to be having it. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

That is the worst organized fun.

[Angelina Stanford]

You're not having fun and you feel like.

[Jason Baxter]

Supposed to be enjoying this summer camp fun.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Like we. So many people are in your chapter that you had on the selfies. You know, we're. We're staging moments of our life that we aren't even actually enjoying. You know, Thomas and I were in Savannah, Georgia, at our favorite used bookstore, and. And this couple walked in.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, my goodness.

[Jason Baxter]

This.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. This story. I will confess. This is going to show my ugly heart to the world here. I will confess. I judged them when they came in. They came in and they were wearing matching tank tops and matching what I would describe as pajama pants bottoms. Okay? They looked like they rolled right out of the Instagram. And they walked in, and my instant thought was, what are you doing in here? Okay. Like, you don't belong in here.

[Jason Baxter]

I would.

[Angelina Stanford]

I judged it. I confess it. See, I will go to my priest. I will confess. And then I instantly caught myself, and I said, you know what, Angelina? Don't judge them because they're in a bookstore. If they're in a bookstore, they're. They're readers and, you know, you can't judge them. And so they came up onto the same aisle where I was, and I was like, look at that, look at that. They're going to look at books of poetry too. Angela, you're a horrible person. You judged them. And.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, see?

[Angelina Stanford]

And then I watched this couple. The girl stood behind him. She pulled a camera out of her bag. Bag. And she filmed him standing there, reaching forward, pulling a book off the shelf. She filmed it and then stopped the filming. And he put it back on. And the two of them walked out. And the. The whole thing was an Instagram setup. And I was just shocked. I was shocked on so many levels. I was shocked, first of all, that.

[Thomas Banks]

They were wearing pajamas in a public place, that there's like noon.

[Angelina Stanford]

Probably that's what you thought was the most shocking part. But I was shocked that they considered going to a bookstore part of an Instagram worthy life. Shocked me. But then I was also. I mean, he didn't even pull the book off the shelf and looked at.

[Jason Baxter]

The whole dark academic core.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, the whole thing was just staged. I couldn't stop thinking about them, about having a life that was so contrived and staged. And I wanted to say to them, look, if you don't like books, that's fine, but why are you pretending to.

[Thomas Banks]

Like their existence was like a more pixelated version of the land of the lotus eaters.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yes. And then we were. We were outside. We were waiting for our friend to check out. So Thomas and I were standing outside and they came back, and then they staged themselves fake walking into the bookstore and filmed that too.

[Thomas Banks]

It reminded me of Oscar Wilde's statement that most. Most people's lives are other people's lives. Their emotions a. Their emotions a theft, their passions a quotation.

[Angelina Stanford]

But the point is, and you bring this out in your book like we just live these superficial lives that we're not even engaging in our own life very deeply.

[Jason Baxter]

Right. But I guess I don't want to take away your right to judge these poor people.

[Angelina Stanford]

I felt vindicated, by the way.

[Jason Baxter]

Absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly.

[Jason Baxter]

I'm not going to judge your judgment, but it seems like. Okay, I do think. Of course, of course, of course. We've devoted our whole lives to this sort of z access of depth. Right. I think that's a superficial response. And yet, yet. And yet the very fact that there's this desire to post these things, there's this desire to look deep, even if it's a, even if it's a fever, at the very least it's a symptom, right? Of. There's, There's a symptom. There's a symptom of a, Of a spiritual need deeper down. And so I think, you know, and that's, that's also in, in the whole sort of selfie section that I do, of course, you know, suggest that this is kind of a superficial response. And yet their desire, what they desire is what we desire too. It's to close the gap between what is beautiful out there and who I am in here. And the tragedy, of course, is that they have the right desires. They're, they're. They're moved by the same longings that we are. Are. But this infinite desire is done through bottomless scrolling that goes on and on and on and on. And Byung Chua Han says that we don't take selfies because we're vain or we need to see ourselves all the time. We take selfies because we're starving, right? And what. But we're starving for this, this infinite reality. But we sort of translate it into this infinite production, this bottomless scrolling of images of self and self and self and self. But nevertheless, to me, it's kind of, it's kind of strange. It's like. It's like a physician who finds, you know, you know, finds the symptom because then at least you can diagnose it, right? But they're hungry for a similar thing that is to close the gap between themselves, between themselves and what they see out there. They're just using the wrong means. And unfortunately, the wrong means are very, very profitable. And so they hire all the right people to make it as difficult to not use those wrong means as possible. Right. The cognitive psychologist, right, who are also working on, on pornography websites and casinos are also designing our apps, right? And this was difficult. They want to. In our attention economy, they want to, they want to retain hold of their, of their possessions, of their consumers. And so it was. So we're up against a lot, of course, but nevertheless, I think it's still kind of beautiful and assuring to me that ultimately human beings hunger for the same thing, even if there's an old technology, a slow technology called poetry. And then. Which is. Which I think satisfies that appetite to a certain degree. And the new technology doesn't, even though we hunger for the same thing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. Yeah, I would agree. I have a lot more thoughts where we're getting in on an hour here, so we should probably wrap it up. Otherwise we'll just end up talking about the whole book. And we don't want to do that. We just want to tease people. People so that they will go and. And buy this book. And I want to make sure I say this before anybody who's listening and saying, I don't know. This guy's a college professor. Is this some kind of academic tome?

[Thomas Banks]

He almost dies in one part of it. It's. It's an exciting book.

[Jason Baxter]

Thanks, guys.

[Angelina Stanford]

It is, I would say, and this is not me, the public.

[Jason Baxter]

Fun and entertaining. Right? This is.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is me and the reader talking. Okay. Just because I'm smart enough to publish books, I actually want to read. I mean, you can't blame me for that. But this is Angelina's the Reader Review. It is. It is very well written. It is very conversational. It's not written like an academic tome. It's very convers. It's almost like part travel book, part diary, part literature book. So it's very conversational and it's very accessible. No one reading this is going to be like, well, this guy's too hoity toity. I'm not going to, you know, it's extremely accessible. And I think. I think anyone would read this and really enjoy it. I know our people are going to go nuts and really, really enjoy, enjoy it. But I absolutely think it's the kind of book you could hand to somebody and say, if you want to know why I listen to this podcast, why I'm reading books and doing all this weird stuff and taking webinars on my weekends, this book will help you to explain what it is. What it is.

[Jason Baxter]

It's the attempt to shatter the museum glass to get the object back from the museumification and restore it to our lives. That's. That's great. I think that's the best possible review I could get.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, good. Okay, so any, Any final comments here? I had actually more notes, but I'm just. I'm like, nope, nope. This was it.

[Thomas Banks]

The book, actually. I have no idea if you have ever had this aspiration, but it got me thinking that you could. You could write a travel book. I thought the Sardinian section. I was thinking this is like. It was like if Rick Steves looked into the belly of the beast or something for a bit. It's like there were a bit of darkness to a Rick Steves travelogue. Something I've always. I've always kind of. That, that thing of that aspect of his show is always slightly annoyed me. It's Always a little bit too sunny and optimistic.

[Jason Baxter]

He's got to sell it.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, there was some, Some. Some depth and. Yeah. Danger, you know.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I, I really enjoy reading. This is fantastic.

[Jason Baxter]

This is. This is what I've. I've wanted to be a travel writer for a long time. And then I discovered that for me, the experience of travel and literary landscape is so tied up in literature and art that it can't be a proper travel writer. And the only way I can do it is just to put the two into dialogue. And so I had to just be content. You know what? This is the sort of travel literature I can do. My, My. My travel literature uses landscapes and experiences of my own travel to talk about. To talk about books and art. And that's what I was able to do. But you said is if there anything. I have, I am launching a substack which will be the sort of like, electronic companion to this book. I have. I have some photography of Sardinia and some of the other. My Iceland. I have some photography and then I make tons and tons of hopefully really useful cultural illusions. Right. You know, I mentioned some things like Mendelson's Overture to the Hebrides and John Adams Fast Ride. What was it? Short Ride on a Long ma. Long Machine, something like that. I can't remember off the top of my head, but I have. I have lots of allusions to these types. Things. And so I wanted to build a kind of hyperlinked, sort of hyperlinked footnotes. And that'll be available through my substack. So if you come along and you think, huh, that piece of music sounds really interesting, then there will be resources available on my substack, which is called Beauty Matters. You can find it on my website too, Jason mbaxter.com in which our readers can go to that and they can find links to the music that I was listening to while I was writing some of these passages, messages. And they'll be able to see visual images of some of the paintings that I'm describing. In the Sardinia section, I'm gonna. I'm gonna put a bunch of. A bunch of photographs of it and all of my sort of original photography of different types of things. So that's been something I've been really excited about too, is create this kind of multimedia, amplified, bulky experience. Because maybe some people will also, like you said, Angelina, some people just go through with highlighter and hanging hand and say, okay, I'm persuaded. This is something I want to do. And they'll just highlight every poem and every piece of music and every work of art and every novel that seems. That seems like a recommendation is worthy of their time. And then I'll have these. I'll have these links where they won't feel lost. They won't feel that they have to hire a professor just to tell them where to find this stuff. But I'll. I'll kind of build that out. So I'm kind of excited about. That's something that you and I talked about, too. I'm kind of excited about providing that supplementary piece.

[Angelina Stanford]

Piece that sounds awesome. And that is right up our people's alley. We will make sure we have a link to that in the show notes and. Well, it's not live yet, but it will be. And we'll also make sure we link it on the Casador Press website as well with the book description. That, that sounds fantastic. And we've seen some of Jason's photography in different slideshows here or there. You've. You've got an eye. I mean, and you very much enjoy putting together a nice PowerPoint. I think that is like, you know, everybody looks forward to that in your Dante class. Like, what's he going to come up with? Boy, the bar is so high. I was just telling. We don't. Thomas and I don't do PowerPoints. I was just telling him the other day. I was like, are we going to be forced to do PowerPoints to keep up with so this people?

[Jason Baxter]

No, no, that's because with your beauty, you guys can get away with a lot. I have to do the PowerPoint.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, something like that. All right, so just a reminder, you can go to cassiodorus press.com and you can pre order Jason's book right now, as I said, case by the caseload. And you can go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find out about Mr. Banks's upcoming webinar. And of course, Jason's got a whole back catalog at House of Humane Letters, too, if you want to dig around over there. We've got that conference talk we mentioned, which was in the 2024 Lit Life Conference bundle. You can find that in our store. His Dante webinar is in our store. And of course, course, you know, you could always jump into his Dante class that he's teaching right now, too, which is fantastic. Can't say enough good things about that as well. All right, well, Jason, thank you so much for coming back. As always, a pleasure and quite enjoyable. And I'm just over here, like, what else can we collaborate on? What else can We.

[Jason Baxter]

I know. The awful thing is, I'm thinking the same thing.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, well, good. As long as we're on the same page. Excellent.

[Jason Baxter]

Thomas and my wife need to get together to come up with a counterpart scheme like. No, no.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, indeed.

[Jason Baxter]

No more plants.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, you know, I have. I'm can't believe I'm going to say this on the air. Get ready, everybody. Angelina's gonna say something crazy. Every time I talk to you, Jason, I walk away thinking Jason might be the male version of me, and then I find myself thinking, is his wife the female version of Thomas Banks? I'm so curious. I have to meet her. I have to know.

[Jason Baxter]

Gorgeous. Profound. Virtuous. Absolutely. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's it.

[Jason Baxter]

Absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's what it is. Same thing.

[Jason Baxter]

Same thing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Same thing. Nailed it. All right, well, guys, we'll be back next week starting our series on Oscar Wilde's play An Ideal Husband. We are going to end the year with that, and I'm quite looking forward to it. So you guys can read Act 1 and join us here next week for that and until next time. Once again, Jason, thank you, everybody at home. Keep crafting your literary life, because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[Thomas Banks]

The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats. I will arise and go now and go to Innisfree, and a small cabin build there of clay and wattles made Nine bean rows will I have there a hive for the honey bee, and live alone in the bee loud glade, and I shall have some peace there. For peace comes dropping slow, dropping from the vales of the morning to where the cricket sings there midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow. An evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore While I stand on the road, roadway or on the pavements gray I hear it in the deep heart's core.