other / likes
Buster Keaton
“[laughs] I still rather — I’ll watch 15–20 minutes of The Three Stooges every time I can, but I prefer Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy.”
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Published podcast speaker
Books, apps, and tools
other / likes
“[laughs] I still rather — I’ll watch 15–20 minutes of The Three Stooges every time I can, but I prefer Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy.”
book / uses
“I’ve read Inside Enderby, the Enderby novels, three times and they never failed to amuse me.”
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30 transcript-backed records
01 / recommendation
“I’ve read Inside Enderby, the Enderby novels, three times and they never failed to amuse me.”
02 / recommendation
“[laughs] I still rather — I’ll watch 15–20 minutes of The Three Stooges every time I can, but I prefer Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy.”
03 / belief
“I think of him as a kind of brilliant eccentric artist, and the Catholicism gives a certain weight to his art, but he would not be on my shortlist of great artists of the 20th century.”
04 / belief
“I think of it as Jungian and what it is doing is creating the archetypal journey of the young hero towards discovering his own strengths part of which is finding his anima and his animus.”
05 / belief
“I believe that people should fund things in their own communities and they should become very actively involved.”
06 / belief
“The deprivation of narrative of stories, the cheapening of narratives in our mass culture, I think has had tremendous human cost, both in the loss of creativity, loss of productivity, and also, at its worst in terms of suicide, drug use, and death.”
07 / belief
“Death of Ivan Ilyich, which, I think — First of all, if you asked me who was the greatest fiction writer who ever lived, I would say Tolstoy.”
08 / belief
“We’re doing these things and he believes and I believe he’s one that goads me to do this is that we need to find a way of speaking about poetry in our culture.”
09 / belief
“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.”
10 / belief
“I think that literary studies in the university reached this point maybe 50 years ago, where, in creating internal cohesion and internal structure, they had less and less to do with literature and almost nothing to do with the human purposes of literature.”
11 / belief
“” The first question we have to ask, are they an unfallen race? I think generally we’ve looked at the Martians as an unfallen race.”
12 / belief
“Postmodernists, they defame Augustus, they defame Virgil, Horace, think that they were pawns into imperial power, but I think Augustus had a broader vision as did Virgil which is to say, if you can give people a common story, it unifies them.”
13 / belief
“What it did with Undset in a sense brought her back to pre-Protestant Scandinavian culture, which I think she was able to be both medieval and modern.”
14 / belief
“I think what the Vatican should do, is to take their Pinacoteca, which is their gallery, and probably their classical collection, and create a new museum outside of the Vatican.”
15 / belief
“We have several really fine Catholic novelists right now. Tobias Wolff, Ron Hansen, Alice McDermott are the three best ones, I think.”
16 / belief
“Ray Bradbury for 10 years wrote a series of books almost at the rate of one per year that transformed not only American science fiction, but American popular culture, including two tremendously interesting novels, Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles. I think his greatness, however, is in his short stories.”
17 / belief
“I think my wife just rolls her eyes because if there’s the W. C. Fields movie on, I’ll watch it till the end.”
18 / belief
“I think actually, it was my memoir that really brought this to light because nobody wanted to take her classes.”
19 / belief
“For me I think something like Die Walküre and even these early operas like The Flying Dutchman, Fliegende Holländer, or Lohengrin do it in a timeframe that I find more natural to my own body rhythms.”
20 / belief
“I think poetry has a social function but it’s a relatively complicated and subtle one, which is to say, the reason that we have art is, in a sense, to increase human happiness.”
21 / evaluation
“” I have that, but I think the Beach Boys’ greatest songs from almost a decade are among the high points of American popular music. They are at this moment especially valuable because they are in some ways the purest expressions of a personal and collective optimism that America had about, in a sense, the goodness of life, and we’ve lost that to our detriment.”
22 / evaluation
“His greatest libretto in terms of poetry is his first one called Paul Bunyan, which made an absolutely terrible opera because it was so well written, you couldn’t do anything with it.”
23 / evaluation
“The trouble with that in terms of academic culture is that there’s one or two trendy ways that they think are important because they generate work that validates you for promotion and for tenure versus having real deeper cultural values.”
24 / evaluation
“I think that writing great lyrics is what makes a lot of musical theater from opera to cabaret either excellent or lousy.”
25 / preference
“When I write lyrics for an opera libretto, it has to work as a poem, it has to work as something that the composer can set to music, which means it has to be tight enough to have a form but not so tight that the composer can’t get into it.”
26 / evaluation
“I think that perhaps Earthly Powers was his great novel because he takes the form of a Somerset Maugham novel, and he overlays a mafia novel, a religious novel, a Bildungsroman all in that.”
27 / preference
“Poe, I know pretty darn well, Samuel Johnson, and Wordsworth because I think, in my own work, both as a prose writer and as a creative writer, I can learn from them and my main goal right now is to finish a long poem that I started a few years ago, which stopped about a third of the way through so I can finish that.”
28 / evaluation
“The arts world was very angry about that, but that is the best thing that I did in my chairmanship, was to make this institution, which reflected America.”
29 / preference
“I like business school and I like my colleagues at business school because they were people that just wanted to get things done.”
30 / evaluation
“Actually, that’s the weird thing is, I worked all the way up to the top, and just when I would have made some good money, I just said, “I’ve only got one life to lead.” It was complicated reasons because I think you know, I lost a son.”