Episode 283: Catching Up with Jason Baxter – Dante, Teacher as Translator, Learning to Read Poetry, and Hot Takes

Summary

Episode Summary: Episode 283 – Catching Up with Jason Baxter

Podcast Information:

• Title: The Literary Life Podcast
• Host/Authors: Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks
• Description: An in-depth conversation about the skill and art of reading well, exploring classic literature through slow reads, discussions with book lovers, and the philosophy that "Stories Will Save the World."

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1. Welcome and Introduction (00:18 – 02:06)

Angelina Stanford opens the episode by reiterating the podcast's mission to delve deep into the art of reading and understanding great literature. She introduces the recurring guest, Jason Baxter, humorously referring to him as the "semi-transparent Jason Baxter" (00:18).

Notable Quote:

Angelina Stanford (00:18): "To be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality."

2. Title Experiment and Light Banter (02:06 – 04:39)

The hosts engage in playful banter about potential podcast episode titles, experimenting with humorous and provocative names like "Jason Baxter Reads the Phone Book." This segment sets a lighthearted tone before delving into more substantive discussions.

Notable Quote:

Thomas Banks (02:30): "Like, how is our audience crazy about."

3. Sharing Commonplace Quotes (04:39 – 06:33)

Before diving into the main conversation, Angelina and Thomas share their current readings and associated quotes. Thomas discusses a passage from D.C. Somervell's Parallel Lives of Disraeli and Gladstone, highlighting the dual perception of Gladstone as both a god-like figure and a pedantic headmaster (05:02).

Notable Quote:

Thomas Banks (05:02): "To some, he was a God, to others, something more like a headmaster."

Jason humorously notes the pedantic nature of Gladstone (05:58).

4. Delving into Dante and Poetry Translation (06:33 – 11:36)

Jason Baxter introduces his work on translating Dante's Purgatory, discussing the encounter between Dante and the minor poet Bono Giunta. He emphasizes the philosophical underpinnings of poetry, symbolizing love and the essence of poetic philosophy through his translation.

Notable Quote:

Jason Baxter (06:33): "In Purgatory 24, Dante meets a minor poet called Bono Giunta... I try to symbolize."

The conversation shifts to the influence of languages, particularly Occitan, on poetry and literary expression.

Notable Quote:

Jason Baxter (08:37): "It's what was spoken in Provence before the unification of France... There are all these dialects."

5. The Loss of Languages and Cultural Perspectives (08:37 – 14:43)

Angelina expresses her passion for lost languages and their impact on perception and reality. Jason elaborates on the significance of ancient languages in shaping literary works and the necessity of understanding them to fully appreciate historical literature.

Notable Quote:

Angelina Stanford (09:24): "I feel a longing there. You talk about in the medieval mind of C.S. Lewis... I have nostalgia for languages."

Thomas introduces a quote from D.W. Robertson Jr.'s Chaucer Studies and Medieval Perspectives, emphasizing the importance of historical context in understanding literature.

Notable Quote:

Thomas Banks (05:02): "The literature of the past may be interesting not because it is modern, but because it is different."

6. Teaching as Translation and Balancing Old and Modern (14:43 – 22:27)

The discussion transitions to the philosophy of teaching literature. Angelina and Jason explore the concept of the teacher as a translator, balancing fidelity to the original text with making it accessible and relevant to modern students. They critique approaches that either overly preserve the past or excessively modernize, advocating for a harmonious blend that respects both.

Notable Quote:

Jason Baxter (19:49): "I think a good teacher like you, like Thomas, remains restless and discontent until he or she can see that everyone in the room says, oh yes."

Angelina adds that successful teaching involves connecting past literature to present understanding without becoming mere museum curators.

Notable Quote:

Angelina Stanford (20:12): "We're not museum curators... the point is to see that it's a living soil."

7. The Challenges of Modern Education and AI (22:27 – 30:42)

Jason expresses concerns about the cultural shift towards seeking quick answers, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence, which might undermine deep literary analysis and the reconstruction of nuanced arguments. He advocates for patience and diligence in teaching literature to foster genuine understanding and appreciation.

Notable Quote:

Jason Baxter (23:01): "In our age of ease, artificial intelligence feels the desire to just get the interesting conclusions delivered to us."

Angelina echoes these sentiments, emphasizing the need for educators to adapt to changing cultural dynamics while maintaining depth in literary teaching.

8. Success of the Podcast and Student Engagement (30:42 – 51:08)

The hosts reflect on the podcast's success as an indicator of the audience's hunger for in-depth literary discussions. They commend their students' enthusiasm and ability to engage deeply with complex texts, showcasing the effectiveness of their teaching methods.

Notable Quote:

Thomas Banks (50:47): "I'm just amazed that 15, 16 year old kids... can do that so very well without prompting."

Jason shares his college experience of taking meticulous notes, underscoring the value of breadth in reading to enhance depth of understanding.

Notable Quote:

Jason Baxter (51:26): "I would go read this... realize that Dante transforms them."

9. Publishing Updates and Upcoming Projects (51:08 – 66:22)

Jason discusses his recent and upcoming publications, including the re-release of his book Falling Inward, which will feature a new introduction and epilogue. He also announces his new translation of Dante's Purgatorio, dedicating the work to his wife, Jody, and describing the arduous yet fulfilling process of translation.

Notable Quote:

Jason Baxter (66:05): "So I have to keep changing... We are stuck in translation."

Angelina highlights the availability of Jason's works on various platforms, encouraging listeners to support his publications through reviews and purchases.

10. Translation Philosophy and Embodying Dante (66:22 – 89:35)

A significant portion of the episode delves into Jason's approach to translating Dante. He aims to recreate the physiological and emotional experience of the original Italian, striving to make Dante's Purgatorio resonate with modern English readers. Jason discusses the complexities of preserving linguistic beauty and the challenges inherent in translating poetic works.

Notable Quote:

Jason Baxter (75:15): "The perfect translator would have to be the ultimate scholar... but also a masterful poet."

Angelina praises Jason's dedication to bringing Dante to life, emphasizing the importance of embodying the author's intent and emotion in translation.

Notable Quote:

Angelina Stanford (78:44): "It sounds like you were very deliberate in trying to embody Dante... the sound of it."

Jason receives positive feedback from readers who have found his translation transformative, igniting a newfound appreciation for Dante's work.

Notable Quote:

Jason Baxter (83:16): "He feels this flesh and blood embodied thing... liberates Dante from the museum."

11. Upcoming Classes: "How to Read a Poem Like C.S. Lewis" and "Plato's Ghost" (89:35 – End)

Jason introduces his upcoming classes hosted by House of Humane Letters. The summer class, "How to Read a Poem Like C.S. Lewis and Fall in Love With Poetry," aims to deepen students' understanding of poetic techniques through C.S. Lewis's perspectives. He outlines topics such as the sonnet's historical context, the relationship between magic and poetry, and the transformation of literary forms over time.

Notable Quote:

Jason Baxter (84:20): "How do I read a painting? How do I read an architectural monument?"

He also previews his fall class, "Plato's Ghost: Plato's Legacy in the History of Classical and Christian Art," which explores the influence of Plato on visual art and architectural monuments from ancient to Baroque periods.

Notable Quote:

Jason Baxter (84:46): "This class is going to be nine weeks in the fall, on Tuesday nights."

Angelina enthusiastically promotes the classes, highlighting their relevance and the unique opportunities they offer for literary and artistic exploration.

Notable Quote:

Angelina Stanford (86:26): "This is going to be a great class... We're supposed to have so many requests for a class like this."

12. Closing Remarks and Final Poem (89:35 – End)

As the episode concludes, Angelina and Thomas encourage listeners to support Jason's work by purchasing and reviewing his books. They invite the audience to join their community through Patreon and other platforms. The episode wraps up with Thomas Banks reading Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Binsey Poplars," providing a poetic close to the insightful conversation.

Notable Quote:

Angelina Stanford (90:51): "Stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast."

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Key Takeaways

• Translation as Embodiment: Jason Baxter emphasizes the importance of embodying the original text's emotional and physiological nuances in translation, striving to make classic works like Dante's Purgatorio resonate deeply with modern readers.

• Teaching Philosophy: The discussion highlights the delicate balance educators must maintain between preserving the integrity of classic literature and making it accessible and relevant to today's students. The role of a teacher as a translator is pivotal in fostering genuine literary appreciation.

• Cultural Shifts in Education: Concerns were raised about the modern cultural inclination towards quick answers and the potential impact of artificial intelligence on deep literary analysis and teaching.

• Upcoming Educational Opportunities: Jason Baxter's upcoming classes offer students unique opportunities to engage with poetry and classical art through the lenses of influential thinkers like C.S. Lewis and Plato, bridging historical contexts with contemporary understanding.

• Support for Independent Publishing: The hosts encourage listeners to support independent authors and publishers by purchasing and reviewing books to help navigate the challenges posed by large platforms like Amazon.

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This episode of The Literary Life Podcast provides a rich exploration of the intersection between classic literature, modern teaching methods, and the art of translation. Through engaging discussions with Jason Baxter, listeners gain insight into the dedication required to bring timeless works to life and the evolving landscape of literary education.

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 science, 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. Welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford, and here with me today is not just the mysterious Mr.

[Thomas Banks]

Banks, though I'm here as well, but.

[Angelina Stanford]

The semi transparent Jason Baxter.

[Jason Baxter]

Much less impressive. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Would you like me to make you the opaque? The opaque Jason Baxter. Is that better?

[Jason Baxter]

The obscure.

[Angelina Stanford]

The obscure, Jason. The obscure. See, I feel like that could. We're. Now we're veering into Hardy. We're 30 seconds into this podcast. We went very dark.

[Jason Baxter]

All right, semi transparent it is.

[Angelina Stanford]

Semi transparent it is. Welcome back, Jason Baxter.

[Jason Baxter]

Thanks. It's great to be back.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, it's good to have you back. You know, I. I was telling you just a minute ago, before we pressed record, that I wasn't even sure what to call this episode. So I just put it on the schedule as, you know, something like catching up with Jason Baxter. And then as soon as we put it on our social media, everybody was like, yay. Let's try this as an experiment next time. I'm gonna call it Jason Baxter Reads the phone Book.

[Jason Baxter]

Oh, right. Like Simon Vance.

[Angelina Stanford]

This is gonna be like the total. The total test. Like, how is our audience crazy about. Could you just come on. Because you read like a menu from some local restaurant, right?

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, right. Peg's Diner in South Bend. Two eggs with a side of. Right. Yeah, well, that would be a scientific control right there.

[Angelina Stanford]

We could just go total, like, you know, postmodern.

[Thomas Banks]

Have you read some really vapid pop lyrics and see if you can make them sound poetic and dignified? Like, oh, I remember. I think it was like Alan Rickman when he was alive. Someone did that to him on a show. They gave him. I don't know what it was like Beyonce lyrics to read aloud. And he did so in that very dry Alan Rickman voice, and it was hilarious.

[Angelina Stanford]

That would be gold. See, but you're only, like, halfway joking. We actually do crazy stuff like that. Do you remember the time we were in that bookstore and I found, for 25 cents, a copy of the Poems of Danielle Steele?

[Jason Baxter]

Oh, boy.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

I could not resist.

[Jason Baxter]

I bought them and I was reading.

[Thomas Banks]

To you as we drove home, and I think you almost crashed the car.

[Angelina Stanford]

And we read them. We read them out loud to each other. And the crazy boy they're gonna come for. How dare you come for Saint Danielle? But the crazy thing was, she started, she wrote, she published that book of poetry before she hit it big as a romance author. So, like, this was.

[Thomas Banks]

You could see where she was going. You could see her. You could chart her literary development.

[Angelina Stanford]

The trop that would, you know, invade her imagination. It was all there in microcosm.

[Thomas Banks]

Maybe a dumb question, but is Danielle Steele one person?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

That's not just a trade name.

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't think so.

[Thomas Banks]

Like Carolyn Keene, was it?

[Angelina Stanford]

Danielle?

[Jason Baxter]

I'd be shocked if that name weren't owned by a corporation. Yeah, a conglomerate.

[Angelina Stanford]

Now I'm getting my romance novelist confused. Was it actually Danielle Steele or was it Jackie Collins?

[Thomas Banks]

It was Daniel Still.

[Angelina Stanford]

It was Daniel Still. Okay. All right. Okay. I was gonna go full, like, 1970s kid and be like, was it Barbara Cartland? I'm really aging myself here.

[Jason Baxter]

That Jodi Picoult.

[Angelina Stanford]

My knowledge of classic romance novels. Not that I've read any. I just. I just know what they are.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, they're hard to avoid. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Cultural phenomenon. Yes. We're going to be all over the place today. We're going to go from the. The heights of Barbara Cartland to the depths of Dante. Do you see what I did there?

[Jason Baxter]

That's right. Yeah, that's.

[Angelina Stanford]

That is where this conversation is going to go today. But before we officially start with catching up with Dr. Baxter, why don't we share some commonplace quotes? Mr. Banks, would you like to go first?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. This is from a book by The English historian D.C. somervell, his parallel Life of Disraeli and Gladstone. And here he's describing the advantages and disadvantages to being a grand old man in whatever your field is. So here he is describing William Ewart Gladstone in his later years. To some, he was a God, to others, something more like a headmaster. It was very inconvenient, for he had not a God's privilege of omniscience. And it is generally supposed that there are many things that a headmaster does not know.

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't know. Being called a British headmaster, I feel like that's really loaded.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. I wouldn't Take that necessarily as yet, a headmasterly air about him.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's like he was grad grind esque.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, maybe it was the square head. I don't know.

[Jason Baxter]

He was pedantic and intolerant.

[Angelina Stanford]

What an amazing combination. And we should say that you are reading that in preparation for your summer. Victorian Lives.

[Thomas Banks]

Victorian Lives. Disraeli, Karl Marx, General Gordon, Florence Nightingale and George Eliot. So, yes.

[Jason Baxter]

Wow.

[Thomas Banks]

Five lives and six lectures.

[Angelina Stanford]

Very good, very good. All right. The opaque Jason Baxter, do you have an opaque quote for us?

[Jason Baxter]

No. This is as transparent as it gets.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so then I was right the first time. Transparent.

[Jason Baxter]

Yes, I think so. I'm afraid so. In Purgatory 24, Dante meets a minor poet called Bono Giunta, and Buono Giunta says, wait, you're Dante. You're the guy who wrote the poem Ladies who have the Intelligence of Love. And Dante replies in a single terzina in which he sums up his whole philosophy of poetry. And I, to him, I am one who notes when love has breathed within, and how he speaks inside, I try to symbolize.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, that's very good.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. Is that from your translation?

[Jason Baxter]

That's from my translation, yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

I was trying to remember what we're talking about shortly. You know the dedication of the wasteland that T.S. eliot dedicated to Ezra Pound, Il Milor Fabro.

[Jason Baxter]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Which is a. I know. That refers to a poet that Dante meets in hell. What poet? Is it because.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, he meets him. Well, he meets him in the Good News. He meets him in purgatory. In Purgatory 26. And it's. It's Guido Guinizelli, the poet from the previous generation. And Dante just loves him. And he has all this kind. He. He loves him as much as Statius loves Virgil. All right, But Guido Guinea Sally says, come on, man. The better craftsman in Mio Fabro is right up there in front of me, and he's referring to Arno Daniel, who was a poet who wrote an Occitan and the previous generation. So you have a kind of Midnight in Paris, you know, Woody Allen phenomenon. Right. Like, come on, come on. In my day, the good old days were already 50 years gone. And then, of course, Dante goes up to arnaud, Danielle, and O'Daniel speaks to him in Occitan. But that's. That's. That's the reference there, which makes sense also with Ezra Pound, because he was really interested in sort of Occitan poetry that he felt has been sort of overlooked and lost. So it makes it Occitan for our.

[Thomas Banks]

Listeners Is a French dialect?

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, yeah. It's. It's. It's what was spoken in. In Provence before the unification of France and sort of imposed Parisian France and everyone. There are all these dialects and a really important one which is still spoken in Provence, but a really important one was Occitan or Provencal.

[Thomas Banks]

All right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, how interesting. I have, like the. I have an almost irrational pain in my soul over lost languages. Like, I. I feel it so deeply. We're going to go on a whole tangent here, because languages are more like. When I was really little, I think I thought other languages were just English with different vocabulary.

[Jason Baxter]

Right. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think. I think every first year language student thinks that. Right. And then they find out very quickly, no, these. These people think about reality entirely differently than I do, so they construct their sentences differently. Right. Like. Like we'll say it's hot, and a French person says it makes hot. Like that's. That's the world of difference. Right. And so when I think about languages being lost, I think about. There's a perspective of reality that has been snuffed out. So I feel. I feel a longing there. You know, you talk about in the medieval mind of C.S. lewis, that. That longing, that nostalgia. So I guess I have nostalgia for languages. I always imagine. Yeah, I know I say, like, a lot of crazy things on this show about what heaven will be. It will definitely be a library with no limit on books checked out. I feel this very strongly. If it's not, I'm gonna have a real dark night of the soul right there on the gates of heaven. That's gonna. That's gonna be rough.

[Jason Baxter]

Well, if there are limits, you might realize you're in the wrong place. Posing is the right one, right?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, exactly. Well, don't be.

[Jason Baxter]

This is purgatory. A lot of questions.

[Angelina Stanford]

A lot of questions.

[Jason Baxter]

One book at a time. Medieval monasticism.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. I also imagined heaven, though, as like this giant reversal of the Tower of Babel. Right. That's Pentecost. And I really believe. I have no theology to support this, so please don't come at me. But I really, I. That's my hope is I'm gonna get to heaven and understand every language and just be able to speak all the languages. That's what I want.

[Thomas Banks]

But you only need to know Latin there.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I'm outnumbered by Roman Catholics, ladies and gentlemen. There will be no comeback for that. I think you only need to know Latin in heaven.

[Thomas Banks]

There's an apocryphal story, or at least I think it is, that in the Counter reformational era, later 16th and 17th centuries at the University of Salamanca.

[Angelina Stanford]

The.

[Thomas Banks]

The final oral examination for someone who is trying to pass their masters of theology included the question what language is spoken in heaven by the angels? And supply so and so many arguments for your answer. Yeah, so, and of course it's Latin. I mean, what language is spoken and why is it Latin?

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, that is actually the final exam question for your Latin 3 course, isn't it?

[Thomas Banks]

Exactly.

[Angelina Stanford]

So, yeah, that's what I thought. Okay, kids, you got a whole year to prepare your essay for that all. My commonplace quote will surprise no one. That requires a backstory to the backstory. I just, I'm not good at common placing. I am reading just an absolutely fantastic book on medieval literature by A dead author, D.W. robertson, Jr. This is a preface to Chaucer studies and Medieval perspectives. Jason, do you know him?

[Jason Baxter]

I do.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so I'm. I'm nuts about this guy. And for our listeners, this is a work from 1960. 1962. And he is fighting the new critics of his day who believe very much that you don't need any kind of historical background to understand a work. And so this entire work is devoted to the premise of you have to have a medieval mind to read medieval literature, which might sound like the title of a book by someone we might know. And so it's just fantastic. I'm underlining like crazy. And I was trying to find something to share for the podcast. And so I've. With Post it Notes, I've patched together a quote from a bunch of different paragraphs. So just imagine there's a lot of ellipses in here, but you'll get, you'll get the idea, you'll see right away why I like this guy. So he starts off saying that there's this myth of an unchanging human nature, but that that's actually not true. If, as professor von Denberg contends, our ancestors were essentially different, we need not assume that they exhibited the same sort of human nature which we take for granted. Their human passions, although not very different from ours biologically, may have been stimulated and elaborated in ways that seem strange to us. And their art, in consequence, may have been appealing in ways that we do not readily understand. These considerations suggest that the literature of the past may be interesting not because it is modern, but because. But for exactly the opposite reason. Because it is different. Perhaps the history of literary expression may be valuable to us not because of a monotonous sameness, but because of a refreshing variety of attitude and Technique. All right. Intellectual perspective makes just as great a difference in what is understood as does visual perspective in what is seen. Everyone is familiar with optical illusions, for example, in photographs of the surface of the moon, wherein surfaces curve away from the observer at first sight, but curve toward him when the image is inverted. In the same way, the mounds and craters of literary art can be properly evaluated only if we can see them, at least in momentary glimpses, as they were seen by their creators. Hence the importance of seeking to reconstruct the perspectives of the past, however imperfectly and in our efforts to understand and evaluate its literature. This guy speaks my language.

[Jason Baxter]

Pithy, too.

[Angelina Stanford]

He speaks my language. I like him. He's got a little bit of snark in here for the new critics. I, I, I enjoy him a lot. And, you know, he was really tracking with CS Lewis, too, because that's, that's something Lewis talks about in, in his oh, hell. About how. And a bunch of essays, he talks about this, but about how we tend to single out things in books in the past that look like our present age. Right. So we think, oh, look, this book was ahead of its time, by which we mean it looks like. It looks like us.

[Thomas Banks]

And the author agrees with me.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, right. And, and Lewis actually talks about this in his review of Robert Fitzgerald's Iliad, which is a fantastic. I really like that essay because he, he, he gives us some very good categories to work with, which I think are still at play right now in conversations about education. He says there's two, two things that a translator can do. One, he can take an old book and make it old when he's translating. Right. So, like, try to recreate Homer's Greece. And then when the reader reads that, he's transported out of the modern age into the past. He said, or a translator can take the ancient book and try to make it seem modern. Try to bring the ancient book to you. And of course, that was his criticism of Fitzgerald.

[Thomas Banks]

I think he gives the example of, you know, modern versions of Virgil or whatever, where the soldiers sound like, you know, drill instructors.

[Angelina Stanford]

He says, this is my paraphrase. But he says, agamemnon sounds like an American bro at a bar. Right, okay. And I just love that distinction so much because I feel like even in circles where you're in agreement with other educators, yes, we should be reading old books. I feel like that's still a big divide. There are people, like I say, us. I put us all in this category. I mean, I sat through your entire Dante class. I know this is what you do where we are trying to take our modern students and give them a whiff of the air of this, you know, old time period, get, get them into the temporary relief out of the crushing weight of modernity and just like breathe this air, look around, you know, see the sights and see what it was like in a different time. And I feel like so many other people, again, who say they love old books are, are doing the opposite. They are bringing the old books into the modern world and sitting around talking about him as a bunch of moderns and saying, oh, look how, look how modern he, oh, he. Homer's just, you see, and I think he's not just like us. And thank God for that.

[Jason Baxter]

Right, Yeah. I mean, if, if there weren't any difference then, then at least Lewis suggests in the, in the epilogue to Experiment and Criticism there would be no escape from the self. Right. And he seems to suggest that's. That's right, that's. Literature's great power, is that it heals the kind of tragic solipsism of being lonely and alone without obliterating individuality. Right. That is, it's, it's participating in, in, in a second thing and as, as I like to say, downloading its qualities to a certain extent. But that doesn't happen if you've, if you've already obliterated the difference. Right. You don't, you don't even sort of, you know, trigger in the mind and the heart and the soul that there's anything sort of worth trying to absorb into, into your being. Yeah. So I, I love, I think, this sort of dual demand of literature. Right. I mean, I used to you perhaps I've even said this before, but you know, I've always thought of my, my obligation as a teacher and increasingly as a writer as a sort of double debt of justice that you owe justice to your students, but you also owe justice to the original. And you can, if you only give justice to the original. You're, you know, this pedantic professor with elbow patches, right. Who is merely sort of like discoursing on the philological niceties of line 17 of book three. Right. And how we can, you know, catch glimpses here of, I don't know, right. Of an anti quintilia or whatever. Right. You could just, one could make this tedious and loathsome, but in a way you could in a sense, overpay your debt of justice to the original. You could also overpay your debt of justice to your contemporary students. And you could turn being a PowerPoint user you could turn everything into a PowerPoint. Right. But in doing so, try to simplify. Try to simplify the original merely to sort of, you know, keep it entertaining. It seems like that what we're talking about and what Lewis sort of identified as a good translator, but also maybe a good teacher, a good reader is one who sort of simultaneously tries to pay both of those debts of justice as a teacher. Right. To my students now, but also to the original. And then it becomes, you know, then it becomes, then it becomes matchmaking. Right. And then it become. Literature becomes meaningful. But I think it has to both retain its difference, but also then, like you're like your wonderful medievalist. Right. There has to be enough of a gesture of overcoming these differences that it's not, you know, it's not, it's not off putting or overwhelming or. Right. Makes us want to quit before we begin.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, exactly, And I agree with you. And that's a proper point that we don't want to pay overly, pay the debt to the past. I mean, that's a point I try to make in my classes. We're not museum curators. We're not just saying, oh, let's look at these curiosities from the past like that. That's not the point. The point is to see that it's a. It's a living soil and it was then and it is now, and we can, we can grow new things out. Out of it.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think your natural tendency to, to remind people of the difference and to remind people of the otherness and even sometimes the difficulty and pay heed to that is a good one because it' of natural trend as a culture to make everything as easy and sort of, you know, common denominator is as possible. And then, but to, but I think so I think sort of working against the current of our natural age is, is valuable and perhaps if we had lived in a different age, you know, like Johnson's, like Ben Johnson's, like disdainful words about Shakespeare, right. And how uneducated he was. Like his Latin wasn't so good and his Greek was even worse. Right. Clearly in that age, right. You have a problem with the sort of, the pedantic and the sort of an elitism, in which case I think the good teacher would be one who was, who was popularizing. But you'd be sort of anchored with your own, with your own age as kind of natural tendencies. But I think that's. I think that's part of just kind of knowing ourselves and knowing exactly the Sort of the general cultural trends of our world and being a force to correct those trends when they're sort of. They're viciously stronger, ignoring other factors that we have to take into account.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, that's absolutely right. And I mean, I'm. I will be starting my 32nd year of teaching in August. I can't believe that. And I mean, even just in my own teaching career, I can see that I've had to change my focus at different times because there are different things happening culturally. My students now are coming to me with a slightly different set of assumptions than the students did 32 years ago. Right. And so I. I love the idea of teacher as translator. That's absolutely how I see myself. So I've got to. I've got to keep keep changing. And, you know, for me, like my. My absolute hill to die on about this and. And why I make such a big deal about it is I think that in the attempts to pull those books out of their time period and say, look how modern they are. I think in the end they're responding to a book that doesn't really exist anywhere but their own minds. Right. Like, you have to actually know what the book meant at the time it was written before. You can know what it means now.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, that's right. And I think you have to be willing to. You have to have enough sort of patience and diligence as a reader that you're willing to stick with a line. I'm doing this right now in preparation for our summer course, for the course on how to read a poem like C.S. lewis. But there was. At least there's one. There's like a stanza in Milton's Lycidas, and it was really exciting to go back to Lycidas. I don't think I've read it in 20 years, but I'm going to make some points about it. And there was going over and over the stanza again and again and again, just asking, sorry, how does he construct the subject, verb, object in this? Right, because he's using this. He's trying to make, of course, his English do stuff that English ought not to do. Right. That he's trying to make his English act like a classical language. Right. When you have a proper inflected language like Latin or Greek, then the word order, of course, is flexible and you can create word art. Well, Milton's trying to give the gift of such word art and flexibility to English itself. But going over and over and over this again, and, you know, even getting my wife and daughter and this like, wait a minute, come here. What is, where is the subject in this? Right? I think, I think that's that kind of patience and discipline, the willingness to spend time with those nitty gritty details is so crucial. And I kind of feel nervous that in our age of ease, in our age of artificial intelligence, that as a culture we sort of feel the desire just to get the interesting conclusions delivered to us. And then when someone wants to us to. When someone wants to reconstruct the steps of the argument and sometimes those even sort of painstaking details, hopefully not boring, right? But, you know, sometimes it just does require as use scriptural language. You have to gird up your loins and be attentive to these, these things that you might not have known you were interested in previously in order to win the vision, right? I sometimes worry that in our sort of, our culture of easy answers, right? In which I don't, I don't care if artificial, where artificial intelligence is getting this. I just want an answer that I can spout off right now that those are. Those are very dangerous. Those are very, I think, dangerous habits that we're going to have to be really careful about because they're going to make us bad readers because we're going to try to move immediately to, to the conclusion, and then we're going to have a. We're going to have an excessive amount of trust and in the conclusions and not be able to reconstruct those arguments of how we got there anyway. So I think it's kind of a cool. It's kind of a cool time maybe 150 years ago. You know, we're talking about the joke about the British schoolmasters, right? If the age, you know, if we needed, you know, the Dead Poet Society or something like that, right? If we needed Robin Williams to liberate us from merely counting foots in, you know, Keats sonnets or something like that. Okay, fine. We'll just say for the sake of argument that that was a sort of a cultural need at the time. I think we're kind of in the exact opposite step. We need the. We need someone to say, okay, let's talk about meters, right? Let's talk about, you know, substitutions. Because, because we need to win those visions for ourselves. We need to, to construct the, the nitty gritty details of how we even get to that poetic atmosphere, which is ultimately what we want. But I think you can only get there by means of the, of the how and the details anyway. So I think it's, it's so Fun. It's so fun to get to do this. To get to do this sort of craft of literature in our day, because I think we've sort of entered in a new time where people are actually hungry for those things that maybe 100 years ago we would have been bored by. Right? We've been so emotive and subjective. And the poor old humanities are just, Just dying, aren't they? Like, they're being deserted. They're. They're closing down in elite universities, right? They're just, they're just disappearing. But people still have hunger for these things. And I think they. They have hunger for, you know, for the real details. And I. So I think it's. It's really cool that we get to do this with people who care.

[Angelina Stanford]

I completely agree with you. And I think that the shocking success of this podcast is an indication that people really, they do want this stuff. They do want the nitty gritty. They. They do want something more than just vapid book chat or political lenses or, you know, all of the things that they could get elsewhere.

[Thomas Banks]

And actually knowing that, you know, you can find out what a sistina is still, and find out that there are other people who might want to know what a sistina is, is. Yeah. Kind of a relief that that sort of interest is still alive.

[Angelina Stanford]

It is a relief. And I want to circle back to something you said, because it can't be said enough that each group of teachers, educational reformers, whatever, they're all responding to the particular problems of their age. And I think sometimes our listeners forget that. And so I might say something like, you know, or you might say, it's very important to know the meter, and then they'll find a quote from a hundred years ago. But so and so said, we shouldn't be spending all our time looking at the meter. Well, because so and so is putting it in the context of all they're doing is looking at meter and the parts, and they've missed the hole. And so they're offering the corrective of we need the hole. Right? And now we're in an age, just like you said, that that has the other issue and needs the correction of, hey, your subjective experience might need to be tied to what's actually the words on the page.

[Jason Baxter]

That's right, yeah. I mean, I've got just example. I mean, Fussell in his book Poetic Meter, or Rhythm and Poetic form, whatever it's called, which I'm going to be referring to a little bit in the, in the summer class, says exactly that. He says, look, we have to remember that a poem is more than its metrics and its rhythm, Right? It's more than its rhyme scheme, it's more than the formal properties. But I think he himself is sort of responding to his age. Hey, it's also meaning, right? And it's also ideas. And you could have a formally perfect sonnet, but it could be really boring and trite in terms of ideas. The magic, of course, is when these things come together, right? The ideas, the vision, and then the form as well. And. But I think, you know, Fussell is trying to. To, you know, to. To rescue the ideas. But if in some sense we're only interested in ideas. Well, and really only interested in our own ideas. Right, Correct. How well does this author, you know, argue DEI types of things? Right. I'm not interested in his. In his discussions of repentance and sin and virtue in cosmology. I just want to know what he thinks about gender relations. Right. So anyway, so I think we're definitely in an age in which are some historical work, but also some attentiveness to some of the formal features. Again, in a non tedious way. But I think that could recreate the brilliance of the original poems, which we rightly admire and feel that they demand of us a response.

[Thomas Banks]

I wanted to backtrack just a little bit. Dr. Baxter, you referred to Fussell. Are you talking about Paul Fussell who wrote the Great War in Modern Memory? Is that the same?

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, his. His little 100 page introduction to Poetic Stanzas, Forms, Meters? Yeah, same. Same fellow.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay, I did. I had never heard of that title of his. I'll have to look it up now.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

[Jason Baxter]

It's compact. He doesn't waste a word. He's a modern man already writing for moderns who say, okay, I'll give you 180 seconds. Prove to me it's worth my time. And he does it for 100 pages.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Evidently he could recite the entirety of long Samuel Johnson poems without missing a word. Like the Whole of London or the Vanity of Human Wishes and. Yeah, really an amazing kind of scholar whose work bridged different disciplines, you know, history and literature and. Yeah, we don't really have his like anymore.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm honestly so exhilarated by this conversation that I could spend like the next four hours talking about this.

[Jason Baxter]

But actually, I'm so glad you mentioned it because I was reading the Pied Piper to the kids the other day and Browning's Pied Piper, and they love it. And we have this wonderful sort of, you know, late 19th century illustration of it. It's very beautiful, very kind of classical illustrations. But the kids, even before they can understand it, love the music of it. And I've been thinking. I once had a professor in Canada who memorized the whole poem in order to recite it to his kids. And I've started to think, all right, that's what I'm going to do this fall. I'm going to memorize the Pied Piper. Right. I do a lot of, of course, writing about literature and a lot of analysis, but I think that's. That's something I used to love when I was. When I was younger and had nothing but time walking around on college campuses and libraries and so forth. But I think it's. I think it's something that it's time for me to bring. Bring back. So maybe I. Why am I saying this on air now? I'm like, essentially signing a contract and I will never get picked up again on Literary Life.

[Angelina Stanford]

You said the Unbreakable Vow. You said it on air. It's. It's on the Internet now. Oh, no. Getting out of it.

[Thomas Banks]

I haven't read it.

[Jason Baxter]

Hopefully I'll edit it out.

[Thomas Banks]

I haven't read that poem in probably five or 10 years. But doesn't he begin it with rats? Exclamation point? Is that the Pied Piper of Hamlet?

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

I think that's a daring beginning for a poem.

[Angelina Stanford]

That is a daring beginning.

[Jason Baxter]

Well, I don't know.

[Angelina Stanford]

I have to bet. Could you write a poem about rats?

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, I know if it's the very, very beginning. But he does have a moment in which all of a sudden there's is an incursion of the rats and they come and invade everywhere and. Yeah, he does exactly that. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay. Yeah, it's been a while. I should read it again.

[Angelina Stanford]

So while we're talking about poetry and people's desire to understand poetry, that was a lot of the impetus behind the summer class you're teaching for us because we get a lot of requests for more stuff on poetry. I think it's very. Like you said, it's an interesting time to live in, because I can't believe in my own life I'm experiencing people saying things like, I'm really convinced intellectually that I should love poetry, but I don't know how to teach me. Like, what an amazing position for us. And so you've got. You've got a summer class where you're going to attempt to do just that. So tell us a little bit about this upcoming Class?

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah. Well, I mean. I mean, I've. I have loved lyric poetry for a long, long time, but never really had. I've never had a professional expertise in it. Right. Never publish an article on Keats or, you know, Wordsworth or something like that. And so it's been an interest of mine for a long time. But I've also just been kind of. And so I've read about it. I've read, you know, of course, read lyric poetry. I've wanted to. I just. I felt sort of called to try to say something about it. Right. And by that, I mean, it's kind of what we were saying just a little bit earlier, right? You read some of these poems and you think that's significant, that matters, that does something, it performs something, it changes something, it demands something. But then trying to. Trying to talk about how that's the case or to make sure that other people see it, that's what I've been sort of nervous about doing. So I wanted to do it. Then all of a sudden, in the middle of the summer, well, you know, the end of the semester when my brain gets all creative, right. As I finish up, you know, my assignments for the spring, I started thinking, oh, I should just do this class, but sort of do what I've done before, rely on C.S. lewis to do some of the heavy lifting. So how to read a poem like C.S. lewis. And this course could do a number of really cool things. One, it could try to find moments in which C.S. lewis mentions poems or oftentimes quotes them, sometimes very often, actually, without even reference. Right. He thinks in poetry, and very often, you know, it's just quick quotation marks. So to try to pull out some of those moments, maybe even to try to develop an anthology of Lewis's favorite poems or something like that, that would be fun, right? But then he also has very interesting things to say about, as we sort of talked about sort of recreating these historical context. For example, why is the sonnet the gold standard of poetry? Where does that come from? This bizarre sort of 14 lines, right? It's not invented by Shakespeare. It's not invented by Petrarch. It's even older, right? What is it doing? Why 14 lines? And why this, what scholars call the Volta or that sort of turn in which there's a problem announced and then some sort of response to it. Lewis has interesting things to say about that, right? He has interesting things to say about the Romantic poets in the 19th century, that is when Milton is writing in the early 1800s in a world that's, you know, increasingly, you know, mechanized in its thinking. Wordsworth says Milton, england hath need of thee in this hour, 200 years after the scientific revolution begins. The thing that. That Wordsworth thinks England needs the most is the poetry of Milton. So I think there are all kinds of kind of interesting, fun questions. And so we can tell a story, we can tell a narrative about poetry, including a really fun moment of CS Lewis talking about how close Renaissance poetry and Renaissance magic are. So to have a little bit of a digression on the Renaissance mage, Right. And the world of. The strange world of Renaissance white magic and what they thought they were doing helps us then understand the poets who are using a lot of these. Even. Even pious George Herbert, right. He's talking about the philosopher's stone and talking about alchemy and talking about poetry as being something analogous to what the magician does. Right. Also something with important differences. But for Lewis, of course, you know, it was science, it was magic, and it was poetry in the 17th century. And they were sort of, you know, these cousins born in different neighborhoods who, looked at that point, looked so much alike it was hard to distinguish them. And of course, magic dies off and science becomes the large.

[Thomas Banks]

The large cousin, the robust one that lived.

[Jason Baxter]

That's right. Who gets the, you know, the D1 offer from an SEC school. Right. And poor old poetry, Right? Yeah, we know what happened to poor old poetry. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

If I remember rightly, Lewis makes the observation that if you read Christopher Marlowe's Faustus, where Faustus is speaking about all of his intellectual acquisitions and the power this gives him over nature, and you know, how he's going to use this to acquire, you know, guns and gold and women and all that kind of thing.

[Jason Baxter]

That's right. And guns, golden girls, says Louis.

[Thomas Banks]

Guns, golden girls. Yeah. And he says, yeah. And he says, compare that to the sort of prospectus that Bacon lays out in the New Atlantis, and they sound eerily similar, like real life, father of the modern empirical, you know, scientific method and a man who sold his soul to the devil. And anyway.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So I was to sort of tease out all those kind of. Again, to accept Lewis's invitation to tease out some of those things. Right. How does poetry relate to magic? How does poetry relate to science? Because that's. So I guess you could say in the 17th century, you know, the world of. Of Vaughan and Crashaw and then a little bit early the 16th century, Sidney and Spencer. Right. Milton. Right. In this whole world, you could say that poetry is trying to think about what it does and what it means with respect to magic. But after the scientific revolution, when you get to the Romantics in the early 1800s, right, Wordsworth and Keats and Coleridge and Shelley, right, In England, at least, they're thinking about the relationship of poetry to science. And so anyway, to get to tell this story in which we can do some historical contextualization, then I think it wins, just as we were talking about, then it sort of, you know, wins the. The right to worry about some of those details. Okay, I've told you how the sonnet is related to Platonic cosmology, so. But how do the details actually work in promoting that? Or we've talked about, you know, we've talked about the metrical scheme, but now we're looking for substitutions in Henry Vaughan's poem the Tempest, right? How does that work and how do you find them? And what does that mean in terms of how the poet is thinking about what his poetry does, which is both like and unlike magic? So that's the kind of fun thing. But then I'm going to allow myself a little bit of liberty because, you know, Lewis himself was such a funny formalist, right? And he had almost no time whatsoever for modern poetry of his age. So I'm going to. He called us, you know, either we were modern barbarians, which I suppose Angelina would have zero problem agreeing with, right? We were either modern barbarians, or he also said that we lived in a drab age, which interestingly enough, is something. He also described the age before Spencer and before Sidney. They were also a drab age. But I'm going to allow myself a little bit of liberty in this class and try to illustrate one of Lewis's principles, which I've just recently written about in two secrets of how to read literature, like C.S. lewis and my substack, right? But one of the, you know, one of the points that I sort of derive, one of the laws of literature, quote unquote, that I derive from Lewis is that breadth helps with depth, right? And this is something that these, these listeners, right, who, thanks to you two, adore Northrop Fry, right? Adore CS Lewis. Get and understand, right? The more literature I read in terms of breadth helps me understand any particular text. Why? Because now I understand why the author is foregrounding certain types of techniques or why the author, he or she is confining himself or herself to, you know, realist fiction, or why Hardy is trying to insert lyric again, even in the midst of. Of realist fiction, what's trying to recover Anyway, we can, when we understand the sort of broad literary scope of literature, we can. Our, our ears become highly attuned to individual choices by an author. So I'm going to allow this dictum of Lewis, this law of reading literature, to also shape how I do it. And I want to kind of give this big picture in which we situate some of the highly formal, highly, I'm going to call it baroque, right? Baroque like fugues in words of Milton and Spencer and Krashaw and Vaughan, right, the so called metaphysical poets, right? And then set that over against our world of what one scholar, Helen Vendler, calls our maximal minimalism, right? Our Billy Collins, our Wendell Berry, our Anthony Hex, right? And sort of use, sort of allow, take Lewis's dictum to sort of explore trying to create these different poetic textures. Because my feeling is you, for most part, right? You hand someone a Milton poem and just say, all right, read that. It's going to be a discouraging process just because it's so difficult and so naughty. But if we could contextualize it in this bigger picture, then we could, we could get back to appreciating Milton as doing something for language and his generation, what Bach was doing for, with, you know, musical cadences and scales and chords. Then we can, we can, we can win appreciation. So anyway, that's a, that's a snapshot of, of Mondays in July.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, that is seriously fantastic. This is gonna be a fantastic class. And we will link in the show notes the substack article you wrote about Lewis's poetry as well as the link for the class. So of course, everything we DO [e-mail] and this class is called how to Read a poem like C.S. lewis and Fall in Love With Poetry. And as he said, this is Mondays in July. Now if you're somebody who found this podcast episode after the class has already started, fear not everything is recorded and just it's once a week. So very easy to, to catch up, watch the videos and jump back into the live classes. So don't let that discourage you if you happen upon this episode a little bit later. You know, so speaking about what an exciting time it is to be a literature teacher, and I really mean that. And I did not, I did not know I was going to ever get to a point in my life where I was going to say it's an exciting time to be an English. It's really funny too, because today that we're recording is actually our wedding anniversary.

[Jason Baxter]

Hey, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Crowd cheers Yay. And the first conversation I ever had with his dad. So this is, you know, a few moons ago and I was telling him what I did and that I taught online. And he was very like, but can you make a living at that? Like, are. I remember him looking at me very. And his, his dad's a great reader and lover of literature. Wasn't that he wasn't skeptical because he was like grad grinding. He was, he was like, are there enough people in the world that want to read literature that you could actually make a living? And I'm just so thrilled that I can say, yes, there are. And not only can I make a living, you can make a living, Mr. Mexican. Our faculty is expanding to try to keep up with the demand. I think it's an incredibly exciting time to be an English teacher, a literature, I should say literature teacher, because we teach other things in English. So I correct myself there, but you just finished your first year Long House of Humane Letters class with us. Your amazing class on Dante, which the kids, man, the kids really, really enjoyed that. And I think you enjoyed them. And I did. You said something in passing at the ending, which I can't even, I can't even tell you how much it meant to me. Like I have quoted it to everybody. I even quoted it to other professors, just so you know, like, hey, here's what we've got going on. But you, you told the students what the class had meant to you and you said for the first time in my entire teaching career, I did not have to self censor and that, that meant everything to me. Like what can you tell our audience what you meant by that?

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, I mean, I, I didn't necessarily mean political stuff.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right.

[Jason Baxter]

Even though I certainly have been in that situation as well in a large Catholic research university in the Midwest. And I did have to feel, I felt I was being risky and just beginning class with prayer when I was at that place very close to Lake Michigan. But I think I meant mainly that I think I found especially over the past couple of years that I have to limit my vocabulary, that I have to. I mean, I, everything I try to say, I try to say clearly. But there are some moments, right, it seems like if you, if you've won the right, you can, you can use an especially exuberant rhetoric. I mean, you can, you can use those, you can use those vocabulary words when they come with precision and power in part because you can assume that people in general, maybe they're not experts or specialists in medieval literature or whatever you happen to be teaching, but they care about language and they're willing to do, you know, they're willing to do the difficult legwork of developing a vocabulary and caring about the details of language. That's something that I've just found that increasingly I can't assume anymore and that if I use certain types of words, or even worse, we're saying this a little bit earlier, I found that my students love when I give a lecture on something like I have to get kind of like internety, right? When I teach and say 17 things, that 17 hot takes from Lewis, they love that, right? And they're really kind of interesting things. And what I'm just doing is sort of like pulling out bits and pieces from an essay perhaps that we read from Lewis or something like that. And it's fun and the students get into it. But if I try to get in, if I try to explain how Lewis arrives at that argument, or if I try to illustrate it by means of a sort of step by step walkthrough of a piece of literature, that I find that they get bored. And thus I find myself self censoring in just giving them the conclusions, the opinions, the hot takes, which are fun. Everyone loves those, right? But they don't want to be, they want to be apprentices to the craft. They don't want to be able to do what I can do. They just want me like I'm, like I'm perplexity or I'm, you know, you know, I'm Alexa or something like that, right? Alexa, give me 17 hot takes from Lewis's experiment and criticism, right? I'm horrified and I'll, I can do that. But I think that in terms of the apprenticeship of the literary craft, right? That's something that there's not an expectation of that. And so, yeah, last semester I kept having this, this kind of learned habituated response, like, you know, I would say something kind of fun and hot take, kind of, you know, you know, like comparing Dante to, you know, to my imaginary version of Taylor Swift, you know, and say, look, hey, Dante was in pursuit of the perfect poem. Now my new sort of habituated response would be just to leave it at that, right? But I found that the folks in the class not only didn't mind if I went back and analyzed a particular Dante poem by which I arrived at the conclusion, but actually preferred it, like, no, no, no, go through the step by step, the Boethius poem, right? Three, nine, and show us in what ways Dante both departs from that and echoes it, right? And thus I felt, I think I became a better teacher because I had, I had students who cared about, who cared about the details and who cared about the craft and who didn't want just to be told what the conclusion was, but wanted to walk through it so that they experience it and taste it for themselves. And thus, as I was preparing my lectures on a weekly, on a weekly basis, I could walk in with that type of confidence. Okay, well, great. Then we will analyze this section of this poem that in other types of classes, I might have just left out because I'd be afraid that it would bore the students and they'd start taking huge number of bathroom breaks. But yeah, with this group, I could assume the interest and the passion and number of people who had notebooks out there writing and then asking follow up, you know, follow up questions. Right. So in the third stanza of Boethius's great hymn. Right. It was, it was wonderful. And I think that was, that was a great experience that just felt really uplifting to me. And I felt, yeah, I felt that I was kind of empowered as a teacher and didn't have to self censor in that way.

[Angelina Stanford]

Gosh, I want to cry. I'm just so proud of those kids. I, I don't want to say I didn't enjoy your class. I did enjoy your class, but I also just really enjoyed watching them enjoy your class and watching them in the chat box and watching how they came alive and watching the experience you got to have that every time you mentioned some obscure text, Natalia Testa had found it online in about 25 seconds, had put it in the chat box. Everybody's like, thank you, we're gonna read this now. They would read it.

[Thomas Banks]

I'm. Yeah, I would second that very much because I'm always blown away by how well our students are able to, I mean, not just, you know, assimilate what we teach them about, you know, Boethius or Dante, but also on their own, you know, start finding out and who were the authors that Dante read.

[Jason Baxter]

Right.

[Thomas Banks]

For those, you know, the authors he was associated with what was sort of, you know, the, the common sources of fermentation in literary Florence in the, you know, late 13th, early 14th century. This, I mean, I'm just amazed that 15, 16 year old kids, sometimes even younger, can do that so very well without prompting, necessarily.

[Angelina Stanford]

Without prompting. Without prompting.

[Jason Baxter]

Right. Well, I mean, that, I mean, that was, that was my college experience as well, was, you know, I'd have one sort of column of writing notes of what the professor would be saying about some Particular thing. And then in the margin, I would. I would write all the specific text that that particular professor had mentioned that day. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Did the same thing. I still.

[Jason Baxter]

And then you could go to the library and then just track those things down and then just at least taste it. Right. Read it, see what it felt like. And that sort of led you. I guess I was sort of accidentally inflicting on myself this very law of reading literature that Lewis talks about, that this breadth helps with depth. Right. And you bump into all these very strange and interesting things. But at least one of the things that it helps you do is it helps you appreciate. It helps you appreciate the genius of the great books. I love the great books. I've spent my whole life teaching the great books. I think the one problem with the great books is that if you only read the great books, if you only read, you know, Dante and Milton and Shakespeare, you sometimes. You sometimes begin to get this funny sort of trick of perspective and think that all old literature is good. Yes. Sometimes you have to go read this silver stuff or this bronze stuff. Right. And then you realize that. That what Dante takes of these. Of these authors who are interesting in terms of their ideas, but not as interesting in terms of the execution of the literary worlds they create. Then you realize that when Dante comes along and transforms them, that something incredibly magical happened. And of course, he sort of survived his age and outlived and sort of entered into this, you know, this perpetual canon. But anyway, so I think to see these students who took the class as interested in reading John of Garland or Alan of Lille or Bernardo Silvestris Macrobius, I remember issuing on a number of occasions, no, please, please don't go read this. It's super boring.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, they're reading Macrobius in Latin, a certain group of them, just so you know.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah. At some point I just.

[Thomas Banks]

God bless them.

[Jason Baxter]

I stopped trying to protect from themselves.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, I. I have all kinds of theories about why. Why that's true, but mostly I think it's because they have gotten a taste of real things, that they are not interested in cotton candy anymore. I think they would. They don't have any use for the hot takes because they know something else exists and they know that that's satisfying. And my husband knows how much I absolutely despise lists and hot takes. And we will never, ever, ever. And people sometimes ask, you know, for a podcast episode like that, it will never happen. It will never happen.

[Thomas Banks]

Ten novels have to read before you die.

[Angelina Stanford]

I have the backstory to I can't even say a commonplace quote without having a 15 minute talk about its context. Like, how am I going to do a hot take list? I'm not capable of it. I'm not interested in that because I feel like people need to know the thinking to where. You know, how did I arrive here? And I, I recently entered substack and I can't even tell you how much I don't like it because it's just. Just your stuff is good. I should say Dr. Phillips stuff is good, but there's so much hot takes and lists and 15 books to read before you die. And I'm like, but you don't even know me, so how do you know these are the books? Like, you have to tell me your rationale for choosing them so I can know if I agree with your list. Yeah, I'm getting worked up now. That's my hot take on hot takes.

[Jason Baxter]

That's true. Well, I have to admit a weakness for them. Jason.

[Thomas Banks]

No.

[Jason Baxter]

I'd love to hear a podcast from you guys. 10 novels before to read before you die. It's my weakness. But we can't. I can't be virtuous in every possible way.

[Thomas Banks]

I would happily do that. I would happily do that only if I knew my list was not going to be the same as every other list out there. Because I mean, you don't need another person to tell you that. You should read War and Peace or David Copperfield or Don Quixote. I would probably go for books that I consider great and that have a personal attraction to for one reason or another and I think are objectively good, but you wouldn't necessarily encounter in a college reading course. So like the Leopard, I think that would probably make my 10 books to read before you die.

[Angelina Stanford]

You're the king of reading the minor stuff, though. You're absolutely the king.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Anyway, I wanted to ask you, do you like that novel the Leopard by Lampedusa?

[Jason Baxter]

You know, I haven't got to it yet, sadly.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, really? I haven't either. I don't even know what you're talking about.

[Thomas Banks]

I was just rereading some pages of it not too long ago and I was thinking this, this is a book that Jason Baxter would love. I mean, it's Italian, set during the risorgimento, and you probably know some of this already.

[Jason Baxter]

I do, yeah. I've started it more than once in Italian, but it's kind of an old fashioned Italian and it's really tricky and the reading is really slow going and so I got myself busy or Distracted or discouraged and then quit. So it's kind of one of these things which. Oh, no. Now that we're live on air, I'm going to find myself here in 60 seconds committing myself to reading it by the end of the summer. Right. But my wife loves it. I haven't got to it myself.

[Thomas Banks]

It's a. It's a lovely book. Sad. It's haunting. It's noble. It's.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, it's.

[Thomas Banks]

It's told by a. From the point of view of a Sicilian nobleman during the time of the resurgamento, when Italy is being, you know, sort of forcibly reunited by liberalizing republican forces. And he realizes that the old Italy, of which he is a representative, is coming to an end, and he's kind of the last of his line. It's a great sort of elegiac book. Everyone should read it once.

[Jason Baxter]

I feel like I'm bride's head dipped Sicilian oil.

[Angelina Stanford]

I feel like I'm getting bullied into doing a Hot Takes episode. I would only do it if I would deconstruct the Hot takes. Like, I would just have to, like, take apart the whole concept of a Hot take and reject it and then rewrite.

[Jason Baxter]

I think you could do that. Here's my justification of list.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right. List. See, now you're not giving me a Hot Take. You're giving me the reasoning behind your Hot Take, and I'm here for that. Give it to me.

[Jason Baxter]

I just. I mean, the number of times I've. I think that probably, you know, the listeners of this or of this podcast are just very different. They. A lot of them, you know, have a lot of learning. You know, I've graduate degrees and, you know, and I've spent years and years with literature, and so they're ready for this depth. But I know also a lot of my. A lot of my audiences to whom I've spoken, oftentimes, by the time I'm done talking, are delighted and surprised by that. The old books feel so relevant, that these things feel so urgent. And for those who are surprised, they say, where do I even begin? Right? So I think I love those list, at least for that. Where do I even begin? Because I think, of course, you know, what we have is this tremendous access to information, but what 99% of it, and that percentage is probably increasing is garbage. Right? I think. And then the more of. We just sort of use our artificial intelligence to slightly recast the mediocre thoughts we've already spoken. Like, the. The number, of, of course, real resources are out there, but I mean, for someone to come along and say, you know what, of the 25 scholarly books I've read on this subject, this one is really worth your time. That's, that's absolute gold. Right? I mean, because in some sense that's savings of, of hundreds of hours. And so I think, I think, you know, in part that's, I think that's what you're looking for in. That's what I was always looking for in my beloved, you know, college professors. Right. Is in that way, it's kind of beautiful too. It's not just downloading kilobytes from one brain to another, but it's like we've said, this apprenticeship process in which the, there's an element of trust and admiration. And then when your favorite professor, right, who's achieved this level of eloquence, who cares about the, who cares about the text, but also cares about people, who wants to lead a good life when that professor makes a recommendation, you know, of the five scholarly books I've read, I mean, I think those are absolutely precious. And so anyway, at some point I'd like to properly. And this is my hope for actually concluding our Cassiodorus re release of Falling Inward. My hope is to have the epilogue, a new epilogue for that book being Where Do I Go From Here? In which I want to try to map the reading that I think has sort of shaped me as a reader and as a scholar of literature. And if I could approach a 19 year old version of myself and say, okay, you know, here's your, here's your reading list for a long fall. That's, that's what, that's what I'm hoping to do for a re release.

[Angelina Stanford]

I am grinning because that is not what I would define as a hot take. I would see, I would read an article like that. I would, what you're describing, I would read that. I wouldn't be upset about that. I guess I'm thinking more like the hot take.

[Jason Baxter]

Maybe I'm just so old fashioned that that's my version of.

[Angelina Stanford]

Exactly.

[Jason Baxter]

A hot take is something, it's a summative, summative conclusion that you can make after 20 years of reading. I thought that's what hot takes were.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, right. Yeah. Those are not the articles I'm running across. Like, hot take 50 books to read before you die. And they were all published in the last five years. Like, like that's, that's my annoying thing. But all right, since you, since you brought up Falling Inward, I should say that your first book, that you published with us. So if you're new to this podcast, we did launch a publishing wing, Cassiodorus Press, and you could find [e-mail] and Dr. Baxter wrote a book for us called why Literature Still Matters, which has been a smash success. It's in its second printing, I should say. And we finally have it available internationally. So if you've been waiting on that, we have a Canadian distributor. You can also order it directly from us and we'll send it to Canada. It's also on Amazon. And so you can get that in the United States. You can get that in Canada. We also, if you're somewhere I know our Australian readers like, but it costs a house payment to ship it to Australia, and. I'm sorry. I know, I know. We do have. We do have it available as an ebook, and so you can get that, too. Actually, one of the things that really amuses me is to see on our Patreon forum how many people from other countries are convincing Americans to buy it for them and ship it in a lower option than we can't. We can't get very good shipping deals as a small publisher. But that's available as an ebook from our website. You can get it, you can download it comes with several files. The PDF, the ePub, the Kindle, all that. And it's also available in the Kindle Store. And I should also say that you recorded the audiobook for this, and this is going live on Audible. And you're reading it. You're the narrator.

[Jason Baxter]

I am, yes. Yeah, it's. Yeah. I'm really excited. It was a really fun summer project to do and just reread it and. Yeah, the. It. Yeah, it should be available. It should be available in July.

[Angelina Stanford]

It should be available in July. The fine print, with Amazon, you never, you know, they. The fine print is always, P.S. we can legally take our sweet time. So, like.

[Jason Baxter]

Right. Yeah, exactly.

[Angelina Stanford]

They have it in hand. So theoretically, I'm excited about that. When I read the manuscript, I thought this would make a great audiobook.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah. And I think from the time that I finished the book and the time that I read it for the audiobook, there was enough time that had elapsed where when I went back to it, I was sort of excited. It was almost something like new. But also, just as I wasn't writing anymore, I was performing was kind of a fun experience. Like, yeah, that's a good art. Oh, yeah. That was my argument. Right. But I think it was. It was. It was a really fun experience. To, to do and to, to, to recall the, the different emotions that, that went into the composition that ultimately led to it. But yeah, I'm excited about it. It's, we've got a great sound engineer and, and it, it's, it's almost here.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm excited about that. I think that's great. And so bouncing off of the success of that first book, which guys, if you haven't read it, you should totally read it. And I, somebody recently asked me, is this something high schoolers would read? No, I, I would say, well, our high school students have loved it and I, I totally think a teenager could read this.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, I know. I, and I've got, I've got some beautiful emails from, from high school students. A lot of, you know, a lot of young men as well as young women. But you know, young women are in general better readers than young men. And so when a young man writes to you and says, I didn't know, you know, I was taking calculus 3 and you know, AP biochemistry and didn't really have much time for literature, but I spent, I stayed up all night reading your book and I thought, oh my goodness, this is what I've been missing. And so yeah, I think, for sure, I think 18, 19 year olds are, can get a hold of it and I think for the first time go, oh wow, that's what literature is about.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, it's such a good book. And I say that not just as your publisher, it really is just a good book. And you know, I'm making an exception here because you're still breathing.

[Jason Baxter]

I know you've been gracious to me the past couple of years and tolerating my heartbeat and living status.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, the pure effrontery you have of being alive. But we actually recorded a podcast interview with you when that book dropped and people can find that and we can put the link to that in the show notes as well. And so anyway, on the back of that, on the success of that, you have decided to republish with us the book that you once called the cult classic.

[Jason Baxter]

That's right. Yeah. Maybe we can take away that title, that epithet. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

But your book Falling Invert is going to be re released with us with a new introduction and a new epilogue and like you were saying, a kind of where to go from here.

[Jason Baxter]

That's right. And then. And one entirely new chapter called the Nine Billion Names of God. Yeah, no, it's, I'm really excited about that. I think I did want to re release needed a good editing. It needed. But yeah, just. I think it. But it. I didn't want to do it until I had something. Yeah. Something new to say. Something which would make it fresh. I also knew that I couldn't go back and rewrite those essays because they're just from a certain period of my life. And I said what I had to say. But. Yeah. So again, this summer, this. This is the sort of thing that happens to you in. In late April or early May. You find yourself writing all your colleagues and say, ooh, ooh, ooh, could we do this? Could we do this? And yeah. Anyway, so, yeah, we're gonna. We're gonna do a new. A fresh release of following N Word. And I want to write something about the experience of beauty and conclude with where do we go from here? And then include the new essay.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I should say that the reason you find yourself finally able to breathe and put your head above water is because you finished Purgatory. You're out of Purgatory, Jason. Congratulations. You finished it. So your brand new translation of Dante's Purgatory is out. It is live.

[Jason Baxter]

It is. It's out. It's live. Yes. In. In the end, I mean, for me, as my. My poor wife knows who's. Who's mentioned in the. In the acknowledgments, I said, however, I'd like to dedicate this book to my wife, Jody, more than ever. She deserves it. Even as I typed these words, we were sitting around late at night in the library up in Hesburgh on Notre Dame. We literally were like all the undergraduates were studying for their final exams. And we were up there from like midnight to 2. I think they were sort of suspicious of us because we don't look like undergraduates anymore now that we're in our 40s. But we didn't know. We didn't know we weren't undergraduate. We were sitting around late at night in the library, across the table from one another, and she had a huge stack of hand edited pages and was keying in all her corrections. I forgot that we weren't still undergraduates. Without her, I would have collapsed on almost every single stage of this most fatiguing ascent. Piu non poso, which is what the. The prideful say, sir, carrying the stones. Any more of this I cannot handle. Piu non poso. But we did it. And I owe that to you. Yes. So as she knows, this was an incredibly fatiguing process. And just the whole. I suppose it's like this with almost every book I've. I've written Interestingly, with the exception of falling inward, and with the exception of why literature still matters, those are just. They were weirdly easy to write. I think it's because I didn't have to limit any of the dimensions of my personality in writing those things. But in all my scholarly endeavors, you kind of have to show up and, you know, with a tie on and on, good behavior, with good posture and so forth. And I think it's, yeah, it, it creates, you know, this kind of, this sense of tension. But anyway, for me, the, you know, the experience is just a roller coaster ride of emotions where you have a breakthrough moment and you think, wait a minute, this is actually not just good. This could actually be really important. And you think, oh, I've got something to say. People need to hear this, and you feel on top of the world. But then you sort of crash into these, you know, these deep lows and think, you know, you encounter something in which you're like, this is actually not very good. In fact, this is as, as my two year old says, this is garbage. Right? This is, this is. If I publish this, people, I'm going to humiliate myself and my family. Right? And you kind of go up and down through these, through these roller coaster, this roller coaster ride of emotions. But we did get through that. Maybe that's why I'm feeling so good, is because in the end I'm actually really proud of it. I think that the Purgatorio turned out to, to really do what it needed to do. I wrote Inferno, or translated Inferno with the expectation that it would have such linguistic power that it would be gripping, it would be physically, sensuously registered in the body, that it would lead to what Dante would have called the fear of the Lord. And you could feel it physiologically, the goal of Purgatorio. And it was wonderful to sort of, you know, to actually discover this even in the midst of the process, was to demonstrate on the very acoustic level what Dante meant when he says in Purgatorio 9, hey, reader, my subject is literally elevating. As I climb this mountain, watch my style do the same. What did Dante mean by that? And can you actually register that in terms of a soundscape that we catch in English that we feel as English readers? And, and that's, that's what I endeavored to do. And the people who have read it have said as much, which is really exciting. And yeah, so in the end, it turned out to be something I was, I was, I was really proud of. And yeah, it feels, it feels Like Dante. It feels like Dante.

[Angelina Stanford]

That is just an incredible feat. I mean, I can imagine. It literally feels like you went through hell and have. Turning to ascend. Like, just what a. What a. What a wonderful process. But hard work. A lot of hard work.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, it was. I mean, I don't know why I was surprised by this, but it was absolutely psychologically fatiguing. It took everything out of me. Then I think it's, you know, just because Dante's riding on all these different sort of registers, and you could choose one of those things and emphasize it, and maybe that would be easier, or you could just, you know, say what Dante says. But to try to create the soundscape that is. It's almost like my goal was read it in Italian and hook myself up to an EKG and measure my pulse. Right. And pupil dilation and release of, you know, warmth from skin and all these sort of. What does it feel like to read this in Italian? Right. What is the flavor of this reading? Now go and find a way not just to say what Dante says, but to try to recreate that very physiological experience and map it into English according to our contemporary lexicon. But something which is what, you know, Dante does. And, yeah, that was, come to find out, a really fatiguing process.

[Angelina Stanford]

Gosh, I. I can't even imagine. I mean, so it's everything we talked about in terms of trying to help the modern reader, you know, breathe Italian air, Renaissance Italian air, but also to get them to have the ear to hear the sound of the Italian. That's a real. That's a real challenge. But I think that's exactly what a translator should do. That's fantastic. You know, I know you were recently on Cindy's podcast, the New Mason Jar, talking about your translation. And, guys, if you want to find out more about that, she's got a whole episode where she's talking about that with him, and you should check that out. But it was funny because she messaged me to say that she had started reading your purgatory in her Sindhi way. She said, oh, I just like him so much. I put down the book and immediately signed up for his summer class.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, I think it was a work of love. And there's some passages that I'm particularly excited about. I think on Cindy's podcast, I read the end of Purgatorio 27, but there are these. The moments that I like the most are the moments in which Dante encounters angels and the moment in which Dante looks at the art that God made with his own finger. Because, of course, the art that God made becomes the paradigm for Dante's human art. Now, the interesting thing about this art is that, first of all, it's full of paradoxes, because when he steps onto the terrace of the prideful, of course, on the floor, in the lowest possible places are the images of the prideful. The haughty have been cast down and now find themselves being stepped upon by the bare toes of the prideful as they inch their way around, right? The humble images of the lowly have now been exalted and they're put on the wall. So it's full of these incredible paradoxes, but it's not just the ideas, but it's on the very linguistic level. Dante has fused these registers that, you know, my favorite example is when he talks about the Emperor Trajan, who's going off to an, you know, an important war, but is interrupted by. Dante doesn't just say a widow, he says, a little widow, a vedovela, not a vedova, but a vedo vella, using that little diminutive, right? And she sort of, you know, wants to talk about her local concerns. And at first, all the courtiers of Trajan are like, what on earth. I mean, we have international politics, we have global summits to attend to and issues of world importance, but Trajan gets off his horse and takes the concerns of this quote, unquote, nobody seriously. Well, what Dante's doing, at the exact same time, he has this sort of this swelling crescendo of these lovely, sonorous, lyrical words, the things that he said you should carefully cultivate. But then he's got the little words, the itty bitty words that he had said in an earlier period of his life. You should leave out, if you're trying to create the perfect sounding poem. And thus he mixes these, he mixes these linguistic registers together and creates a type of. The types of poetry that I jokingly call. It's like an urban bird's nest, right? You have the straw, but then you have the. The plastic Coke bottles and the shoestrings and all these things sort of woven together and Dante's sort of poetical texture. In part, it's so magical because it's so complicated and you can feel these individual strands. So that's what I tried to do throughout this, this translation.

[Angelina Stanford]

This might be just a terrible question for me to ask because it might be like, well, it takes me three hours to answer this, but is English capable of giving us that kind of beauty, do you think?

[Jason Baxter]

I think so. I think I Think, in a way, it's kind of like you have to. You have to re. Capitulate the beauties of another language within the beauties of your own. And that's the tricky part, I suppose. I mean, the perfect translator. And there's no such. There can't be any such thing as a perfect translator, right? But the perfect translator would have to be the ultimate scholar in which he or she knew how every single. What every single word meant. I mean, so, for example, this is some silly things. A lot of these words, it seems, Dante's are coinages from Dante. Dante's the first one to use them. But just because we don't have any other literary sources, we don't know. Is Dante the first one to use them? Is he the first one? Are these coinages? Is he just one, the first one to write them down? In other words, you'd have to have so much scholarly knowledge, you'd have to spend, you know, 200 years to research every single one of these words, which is impossible. But at the same time, the perfect translator would also have to be, you know, Aden or, you know, or Yates. Within his own language. He'd have to. To be a masterful poet who could sort of, you know, pluck the. The lute strings of the heart and create a type of music just by sound associations, right? And so all of us are, to a certain extent, failures because we just. You can't do all of that in a single mortal life. But I think that's the goal, at least, right? Is to be both scholar and poet. And the scholar feels what it feels like, and the poet closes his eyes and then reaches down in there and tries to find a language which recreates the same types of. The same types of sensations. So I think it would be analogous to, say, can the violin reproduce the beauties of the piano? And you'd say, yeah, yeah, but you'd have to do it within the musical vocabulary of the new instrument. And so. Right. Trying to find, you know, hopefully we've done that to a certain extent. And my readers are saying that they feel this way about it, which is amazing. Right? But I think maybe if that is indeed true, just the process of, over the past two decades as a teacher, teaching aloud and sort of recognizing what types of rhetorical cadences and what types of uses of language stir up an audience and how. I think it's kind of given me a living repertoire of language through experience which has touched people's hearts. And so then I go and read Dante and say, okay, is There an English equivalent to that. Right. And there's certain types of techniques and certain types of sounds. If Dante's. I don't know, in general, you could say if Dante's Italian sounds operatic and lyrical and musical in terms of the vowels for us, of course, in English. Right. It's the consonants which really have that power. And so you might find yourself sort of reproducing according to some of the English's strengths, something analogous to Italian's strengths. But I do think you have to. You have to recreate it in a new medium, and that's part of the magic. And it's also why I walked around like a zombie for nine months.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I can't even imagine. But, you know, this. This connects back to the very beginning of our conversation, that we live in an age, I think, that really treats literature. They disembody it. Right. We're gonna. We're gonna extract this abstract idea, quote unquote, from the text, and we're gonna pull that out, and that's what we're gonna look at under the magn. And it sounds like you were very deliberate in trying to embody Dante, not just give us the ideas of purgatory, but the texture of it, the flavor of it, the sound of it.

[Jason Baxter]

Yes, absolutely. I guess it's probably too bad that there weren't some moments in which I could have filmed myself lying on my bed with my computer reading it aloud. Like, no, do it again. Like a drill yelling at myself, like a drill sergeant. Rewrite it. It doesn't feel good.

[Angelina Stanford]

It doesn't sound right now.

[Jason Baxter]

Exactly. Do it again. Do it again. Right, But I think, you know, the. Yeah, I think the. The beauty of it is that absolutely everything of this has been read aloud multiple times. And not just until. Not just until I felt like, yep, that's what Dante said. But until, yes, that's as perfect as I can make English act. That's the. That was the. That was the neurotic standard. Right. And. Well, I don't. I can't. The proverbs say, let another man's mouth praise you, not your own. But that was at least what I was aiming for. And I was restlessly, neurotically pursuing this end until I at least felt comfortable with it. And I thought, yep, yep, that's right. That's what it is. But it does seem to be sort of influencing. Well, first of all, our class, who got lots of passages inflicted on them and thus got into the acknowledgments, but also does seem to be influencing Readers. I've had a number of people, including some old time professors, say. My friend at Notre Dame in philosophy says, Jason, I never really got into Dante until I read your translation. And now he's, he's all excited about Dante and he wants to start writing about Dante. And he said that, that the translation for him liberated Dante from, from the museum, freed Dante from the mere kind of lecture hall. And all of a sudden he felt this flesh and blood embodied thing, this restless thing that has a heartbeat and. Right. And a breathing rate. Something that he could sort of feel the poetic presence of. Right, exactly. So like you said, a literary embodiment.

[Angelina Stanford]

You made it a living thing. That's, I mean, gosh, that, that might really just be the point. Right. And if you can do something to. I mean, I'm not a translator, but I'm a translator as a teacher, as we were talking about earlier.

[Jason Baxter]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

For me, that is, that is the highest praise when somebody says, I love this author now.

[Jason Baxter]

That's right. Well, I think, I think a good teacher like you, like Thomas, Right, is remains restless and discontent until he or she can see that everyone in the room says, oh yes, like, and the, the, you know, the teacher will be sort of, you know, restless and discontent until that happens. Until. And, and I think as you teach, you know, over the, over the course of decades, I think you become literally, physiologically in tune with people's very bodies. Right. I mean, we know for a fact that when people move from certain types of, you know, passive thinking to active thinking, all kinds of things in, you know, in their bodies and their faces and they're in the, like, the very dilation of the people change. I think good teachers are tuned into that and well, that's at least one of the things that's probably going to, you know, that is certainly missing in our, in our age in which AI is going to be doing a lot of our teaching for us, it's not going to be in tune with that.

[Angelina Stanford]

It won't. Absolutely not. Like one of my favorite Northrop Fry quotes is teaching is the transfer of energy from the teacher to the student.

[Jason Baxter]

That's right. And knowledge is the necessary means for doing it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And so a computer could possibly replicate, you know, downloading facts in my brain, but it cannot accomplish the transfer of energy. The transfer of energy accomplish what you were talking about of you made Dante alive. For me, a computer cannot do that because it's not alive.

[Jason Baxter]

That's right.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's just more of this disembodied education that we're talking about.

[Jason Baxter]

That's right. That's right. And which is sort of a double tragedy for literature, which exists precisely as this non abstract mode. Right? This, this. Yeah, this embodied way of. Of thinking about truth in terms of wholeness, not in terms of mere cognition.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, yeah, no, absolutely. And so speaking of your teaching, before we let you go, you're also teaching a pretty exciting fall class for us nine weeks in the fall called Plato's Ghost. You. You have a knack with the naming. I'll give you this, Jason. I feel like I'm a lame namer of. All of my classes are like another class by Angelina, exactly the same, but different this time. Like that's. That's my language.

[Jason Baxter]

But you're Angelina, class two.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, exactly. Your names are so good. This is Plato's Ghost, Plato's legacy in the history of classical and Christian art. So this is going to be nine weeks in the fall, on Tuesday nights. Tell us a little bit about what this is going to be about.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, well, I think everyone feels the need and the desire to read a sonnet or a lyrical poem with understanding, but as we mentioned, might feel intimidated by it. Analogously, everyone really wants to be able to listen to a symphony or a sonata with understanding, which is not something I can do. But your faculty is doing it like Kadita.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right.

[Jason Baxter]

This class is. Well, how do I read a painting? How do I. How do I read an architectural monument? Right? What do I do if I'm in Italy, if I'm in Rome, if I'm in Athens, right? And I'm looking on these great works, what do I do after I say, oh, wow, I'm really here? What do you do with that? What does it mean? How does it mean, is there a way to read it? And so anyway, I'm using, just like I'm using Lewis to kind of set the story or the narrative to. To create an ability to read individual poems. I want to talk about the. The spiritual legacy of. Of Plato as a way of helping us get into read paintings and to read architectural monuments to understand why there's sometimes shifts in styles. Right. Why does a Byzantine icon look the way that it looks? Right. Why does the Hagia Sophia look the way it looks, as opposed to the Parthenon or the Pantheon, and then hopefully get all the way up into these wonderful Baroque sculptures and paintings. The Caravaggios and the Beninis, having passed through that. And Plato's legacy, right, haunts this whole period really from, you know, from his own age Right. With the, you know, 3002 B.C. until the Baroque period. Through the Baroque period. And then after that things begin to change. I mean, Plato continues to show up, but I'm really looking for, I guess you could say this is the discarded image. Right. This is the pre modern world, but not as it presents itself in literature, but as it presents itself in visual forms.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I love that you. We have had so many requests over the years for a class like this. And you remember it? Oh yes, Mr. Banks, when we were, we were kind of brainstorming with you about possible classes and you didn't know that this was on our list. Like we really have to find somebody to teach an art class. And, and you said, well, my wife and I were kind of talking about like, maybe I should do something with art. Like we both jumped out of our chairs.

[Jason Baxter]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Sold. I'm, I'm excited about this class. This is going to be a great class. And again, this is on Tuesday nights in the fall for nine weeks. So you can find out about both of his classes with us at our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com the summer class will be under the webinars and mini class tab. And the Plato's Ghost class will be under the year long classes tab. And of course you can find his [e-mail] at Amazon.com where can they find their copy of Purgatory? What's the website for that? Word of Fire.

[Jason Baxter]

No, this is Angelico. Yes. So it's Angelico's website. I have copies on my website if people want to get a signed copy. But it's also on Amazon too. It's a little. Yeah, I have to. I almost feel kind of nervous, sort of trying to militarize the listenership. But I need people who literary life folks who have read it to go review it on Amazon because right now Amazon's trying to bury it under the rubble and go and leave a review.

[Angelina Stanford]

For why literature still matters while you're at it.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. You don't have. You could buy it from the other places. But an Amazon review would really, would really help with our beloved algorithms. But it's, it is on Amazon as well. It's on my website. It's on Angelico's website. Obviously better to get it off Angelico's website than, than Amazon because Amazon takes huge bite out of everything.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, they do. Also from cassiodoruspress.com yeah, like, well, you know, Amazon is what it is and.

[Jason Baxter]

It is what it is.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, you kind of have to be there. And boy, they. They. Not that authors make anything anyway. And Amazon make sure you make even less.

[Jason Baxter]

That's right. Yeah. Well, yeah, they. They keep authors hungry so the authors can continue to write. So that's. I guess that's a good problem.

[Angelina Stanford]

Jason, this has been a wonderful conversation. People, of course, can find you at your substack as well, which is just Jason Baxter substack.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, it's. It's. The substack is called Beauty Matters. And yeah, on. On Beauty Matters, we have.

[Angelina Stanford]

All your hot takes.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, all my hot takes. The semi transparent hot takes. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, this. This has been a delight. Seriously, as always. Yes, it's always fun to talk to you. I just need to start, like, writing down, you know, hot takes that I can talk with Jason about.

[Jason Baxter]

Just. Yeah, maybe you feel liberated now. Yeah, I do remember, a hot take is a summative conclusion of 20 years of reading.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. With that definition, I'm 100% on board with.

[Jason Baxter]

Yeah, okay, good. Well, I'm. Yeah, we've empowered you.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, well, Jason, thanks so much, guys. Thanks for listening again. You can find [e-mail] stick around to the end. Mr. Banks has got a special poem for us. Shout out to our Patreon, and if you want to join the conversation over there or support the podcast, you can go to patreon.com backslash the literary life. And until next time, 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 Cindy at Morning Time for moms. And 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]

Binsey Poplars by Gerard Manley Hopkins. My Aspen's deer whose airy cages quelled, quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun all felled, felled are all felled Of a fresh and following folded rank not spared, not one that dandled a sandaled shadow that swam or sank on meadow and river and wind Wandering weed, winding bank O. If we but knew what we do when we delve or hew Hack and rack the growing green since country is so tender to touch her being so slender that like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all where we even where we mean to mend her we end her when we hew or delve after comers cannot guess the beauty bin 10 or 12 only 10 or 12 strokes of havoc unselve the sweet especial scene Rural scene A rural scene Sweet especial rural scene.