Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire (Ep. 119) | Conversations with Tyler.
I love the economic way in which this story by @migold & @choire is written: quick, dense sentences, short paragraphs, lots of links, informative but also opinionated. Reminds me of Suck.
Shot by Australia’s first camel
The first camel in Australia shot its owner, the English explorer John Horrocks.
“What gets him up in the morning?” Kepesh wonders. “What gets him through each day?” Soska responds, “Kafka, of course.” This dialogue is likely a close recreation of real conversations with Klíma, who told Roth that Kafka was rightly regarded as dangerous by the communist regime, not just for his threatening critiques of power and bureaucracy in The Trial and The Castle, but because his work was that of a man whose soul refused to be colonized. In 1963, Kafka actually became a catalyst for subversive activity, when the Czechoslovak Writers Union organized a congress and discussed the writer’s work for the first time since it was banned as “decadent anti-realism” in the 1950s. The event would christen the ship of the Prague Spring, as the absence of state retaliation imbued these writers with new confidence to test the apparatchiks. This may be the only time in history that an academic conference about Kafka could be called “revolutionary.”
My Conversation with the excellent Dana Gioia
Here is the audio, transcript, and video. As I mention in the beginning, Dana is the (only?) CWT guest who can answer all of my questions. Here is part of the summary:
Dana and Tyler discuss his latest book and more, including how he transformed several businesses as a corporate executive, why going to business school made him a better poet, the only two obscene topics left in American poetry, why narrative is necessary for coping with life’s hardships, how Virgil influenced Catholic traditions, what Augustus understood about the cultural power of art, the reasons most libretti are so bad, the optimism of the Beach Boys, the best art museum you’ve never heard of, the Jungianism of Star Trek, his favorite Tolstoy work, depictions of Catholicism in American pop culture, what he finds fascinating about Houellebecq, why we stopped building cathedrals, how he was able to effectively lead the National Endowment for the Arts, the aesthetic differences between him and his brother Ted, his advice for young people who want to cultivate their minds, and what he wants to learn next.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why is Olaf Stapledon an important writer?
GIOIA: It’s not a question I expected.
COWEN: How could you not expect that?
GIOIA: Well, first of all, I hope people know who Olaf Stapleton was. Tremendously influential, rather clumsy, visionary, early science fiction writer who wrote novels like Odd John and the First and Last Man. What Olaf Stapleton did was I think he was the first really great science fiction writer to think in absolutely cosmic terms, beyond human conceptions of time and space. That, essentially, created the mature science fiction sensibility. If you go even watch a show like Expanse now, it’s about Stapledonian concerns.
COWEN: He was also a Hegelian philosopher, as you know. My friend Dan Wang thinks Last and First Men is better than Star Maker. Though virtually all critics prefer Star Maker.
GIOIA: Michael Lind, the political writer, and historian, Stapledon is one of his formative writers. Star Maker is kind of an evolution of the Last and First Men. Odd John is kind of the odd, the first great mutant novel.
Definitely recommended. And I am very happy to recommend Dana’s latest book (and indeed all of his books) Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life.
This is a festival underpinned by a sense of hope.
Counterintuitive, maybe. After all, any reader – of journalism, of current affairs, of anything about the state of the planet – might struggle with the idea of hope right now. Let’s face it, hope has felt pretty far off over the past year. We’ve been so far apart – both physically and culturally. But isolated in our bubbles, hope mattered more than ever.
And we reached for it through our art form of choice: words. Beautiful, glorious, stupid and serious words. There is no more powerful machine for killing distance than a book. Literature brings us closer to worlds, ideas and voices beyond our own. We walk city streets and have access to conversations that are far outside our daily experience.
This Festival is about celebrating the voices that extended our world when it felt small. It’s about the books that defeated the distance. It’s also a celebration of coming back together as a community. Rejoining one another in the same room for a shared passion: to hear and tell and challenge stories. And that’s what a festival is. It’s there in the name. A celebration. A party, even.
Our theme this year, Within Reach, highlights the astonishing writers who are shaping Australian literature right now. It recognises those authors who show us an Australia that is not monolithic or static but varied, curious and challenging. We have gathered the many diverse and exciting writers who are right here, within our reach – asking questions, raising their voices and defining this culture.
We are no longer subject to the tyranny of distance. The conversation starts here.
Law and Authors: A Legal Handbook for Writers (Introduction)
Lipton, Jacqueline Deborah, Law and Authors: A Legal Handbook for Writers (Introduction) (February 24, 2021). In Law and Authors: A Legal Handbook for Writers, Jacqueline D. Lipton, University of California Press, 2020, U. of Pittsburgh Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2021-06, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3792186
“Drawing on a wealth of experience in legal scholarship and publishing, Professor Jacqueline D. Lipton provides a useful legal guide for writers whatever their levels of expertise or categories of work (fiction, nonfiction, academic, journalism, freelance content development). This introductory chapter outlines the key legal and business issues authors are likely to face during the course of their careers, and emphasizes that most legal problems have solutions so law should never be an excuse to avoid writing something that an author feels strongly about creating. The larger work draws from case studies and hypothetical examples to address issues of copyright law, including explanations of fair use and the public domain; trademark and branding concerns for those embarking on a publishing career; laws that impact the ways that authors might use social media and marketing promotions; and privacy and defamation questions that writers may face. Although the book focuses on American law, it highlights key areas where laws in other countries differ from those in the United States. The purpose of the book is to explain to those in the publishing industry, or contemplating venturing into the industry, the nuts and bolts of the law as it applies to authors.”