Benjamin Moser on the Dutch Masters, Brazil, and Cultural Icons

Hello everyone, this is Tyler Cowen. We want to hear from you about the show. In the show notes, there's a link to a short survey where we want to learn more about you. Why do you listen to the podcast? What do you think is under- or overrated about the show? Is there someone you would just love to hear me interview? Your feedback will help us understand our listeners so we can produce better episodes, as well as future live events and listener meetups. Again, Please find the link at the top of the show notes to fill out the survey. And thank you, we very much appreciate your feedback. Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm very happy to be chatting with Benjamin Moser and Benjamin Moser has no title. He is a writer. He is an author of a very recent book, which I liked very, very much. That book is called The Upside Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters. Benjamin is probably best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Susan Sontag. And he also has the best-known English language biography biography of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, and he has a homepage where he writes on many disparate topics, whatever comes to mind for him. Benjamin, welcome.

Thank you.

Your book on Dutch art. Was Vermeer a Catholic?

He was a Catholic, but not originally.

He converted.

Yeah, apparently he did convert. He was from a Protestant family. But like a lot of families at that time, it wasn't a, there wasn't a clear dividing line because a lot of times you would have people within the same family who would have, some of them would have gone over to the Protestants and some of them wouldn't.

Does he have Catholic paintings?

Yes, he does. And they're, they're his worst paintings actually. There's one in the Met in New York.

You mean Allegory of the Catholic Faith?

For example. Well, that's the big one. It's kind of his—

Why is it a bad painting? Or not a great painting.

I think it's because we like Vermeer's to be indirect, don't we? I mean, we kind of like the suggestion, the kind of the hint of something going on, the sort of sexiness of the glance, the gaze, and not being beaten over your head with all this kind of overwrought symbolism. At least that's my impression.

Isn't The Art of Painting in some ways a Catholic painting? And that's a great painting. It's probably Vermeer's best work.

Which one? The Art of Painting.

Oh, right. You have the map in the background with the 17 provinces from the century before. Isn't that some kind of nostalgia for a distant Catholic past or not?

No, not necessarily. I mean, actually I was, if I can drop a name, I got to go to the Royal Palace in The Hague the other day. I'd never been there before actually. And they had not exactly the same map on the wall, but it was a very close relative of that map. Where the country is kind of on the side. So where you have, where you would be used to having north on the top, you have north on the right side. And it was thrilling to see it in an interior that looks just like that. I don't think it's a Catholic painting. I mean, it's a, it's a painting that has a lot of symbolism and a lot of allusions to, to literature and to art, but it's not necessarily Catholic. I mean, quite a lot of people, Protestants would've done that as well.

How do you account for the fact, as far as I can tell, Vermeer was not extremely well known until the late 19th century. Is that because it was hard to see them or because people didn't get it?

Well, it's always usually a bit of both. I mean, there's only 35 Vermeers. He dies when he is 43, so there's not really— he has 11 or 12 children, so there's not really that much time for him to make that many paintings. They're also bought up mostly by one guy who was his neighbor who had something like 20 of them in his house. So, you know, this was kind of a local favorite. I think that he does get rediscovered, like a lot of the Dutch painters get rediscovered. Actually, there's only two that don't get rediscovered, and that's Rembrandt and Jan Steen. Everybody else has some story about this. And, and, you know, paintings disappeared into people's houses. You didn't have museums, you didn't have public places really except for churches. And in the Netherlands, the churches didn't have very much art because they had whacked it in their Taliban-like movement of iconoclasm in the late 16th century. So yeah, it, and it, it just kind of vanished into the ether.

Did you see the big Vermeer show in Amsterdam last year?

I did. I got to go see it.

What did you learn from it? Yeah, that's great. You've lived there over 20 years. You already were studying Dutch art for the book. What did you learn from the show per se?

Well, I think I learned two things. So I'd seen all the paintings because most of them are, except for one, there's one that's in Japan that's this kind of copy of an Italian painting that I'd never seen. So I think seeing them all together, you see the break in Vermeer. You see he goes from these very big formats at the beginning of his career. They're big, like the one in Dresden or the one in, you know, the, the early kind of heroic Vermeers. So there's this question about Vermeer. Which is what happens to him halfway through his life. He only paints for about 20 years. There's a really big break in the style about halfway through. So he paints these big, very allegorical, mythological, religious paintings, and then all of a sudden they shrink into these little bitty paintings that are the famous Vermeer's, you know, like the Girl with a Pearl Earring or the little scenes of people in a, in a little table with the window. Those paintings look really different. You can see it's the same painter, but it's actually a really big break. It's interesting that during World War II, I tell this story in the book as well, this was a lacuna that invited a clever forger because the question of how do you go from A to B is really interesting in Vermeer. So this forger named Han van Meegeren, who was a kind of Hitler-esque, you know, I mean, Hitler was an art school dropout, you know, he didn't really, wasn't quite talented enough to make it, and he was quite embittered by that. And Han van Meijeren was also, you know, he thought he was just as good as any old master. So he starts painting these fake Vermeers that are supposed to fill in this gap between A and B, and they're tremendously successful. I mean, I think by the end of World War II, he owned something like 15 country estates, and he owns 50-something houses in the center of Amsterdam. I mean, he made Bazillions. And they were all fake. And every, if you see 'em now and you can see them, some of them are still on display in museums. You think you've gotta be kidding me, right? This is just totally ridiculous. But it makes you kind of wonder about what do you actually see when you see a Vermeer, you see a famous name because often you, you see the huge line, the website that crashes, you know, the people who flew in from Bangkok and Rio to see this stuff. And you're already kind of prepared to see something that isn't really there. A similar, if I can go on a, if I know you're a heterodox person, maybe you'll like this comparison, but in Islam, there's a famous cliché that every Muslim will tell you that one of the miracles of the Quran is that it has its, the perfection of its style. It's so beautiful, it's so elegant, it could only have been composed by divine inspiration or by God himself. Now, the thing about this that's really funny is that if you're a Muslim and you grow up hearing the Quran, you're so used to hearing it your entire life, you hear it at every occasion, memorized often. A lot of really pious Muslims will memorize the entire thing. You're prepared to think it's beautiful. And so when you see a Vermeer, you're prepared to think this is the most fabulous thing in the world. This is so rare. There's only 35. It was, you know, it's the only time they've ever left, you know, this collection in France that nobody ever gets to see. You're prepared to see something by this legend and this, this name, and it makes it very hard to actually see it. So when you see the fake Vermeers, you think, come on, that's ridiculous. But if you try to see it without the, Perfume. It becomes a real challenge.

How is Rembrandt so productive?

Well, he got to be quite old. First of all, by the standards of the Dutch, he, he, he was 63 when he died. And as you know, in the book, a lot of these people die in their 20s, 30s, you know, Vermeer dies at 43. So Rembrandt gets a whole extra generation of work. He also though was just one of these obsessive creators and kind of a volcano. It's completely dismaying. When I came to this country and I was a kid and I would see the early Rembrandts in the museums here and I would realize he was younger than I was and he was already painting these incredible masterpieces and I was sitting here trying to write some article that wouldn't get turned down by some terrible magazine I didn't even want to write for and he was painting these canvases that were like the anatomy lesson in the Hague or just these these incredibly famous paintings. You know, I, and I think he does, as I say somewhere in the book, I mean, this is kind of a, we fill it in a little bit, but he basically dies in front of his easel. He goes, he was an obsessive driven creator and, and that's why he died in front of the easel. He also died very poor and, and, and mostly forgotten.

Do you think Rembrandt prints are still underpriced? As you may know, there was a London auction of quite a few of them, a few months ago, and many went for 2x or 3x the estimates.

Yeah.

Why aren't Rembrandt prints just totally unaffordable? They're very good. Many of them. People don't seem to care anymore.

They're unaffordable for me.

I doubt if that's true. I'm not trying to inquire into your personal finances, but some of the lesser priced ones I think you could afford.

Well, you have different states, you know, like, so you have the first, the original prints that are actually made by Rembrandt in his lifetime. And then you have the plates that are kind of done afterwards and, or are later on and they're a little bit fuzzier and they're a little bit, but I think, you know, this was always, people collected Rembrandt for a lot of reasons. The Dutch collected him later really, and there were obsessive Rembrandt collectors who actually would be a good book for someone to write about the collectors of Rembrandt. 'Cause some of them are completely bonkers, you know, and obsessive, like, like, like a lot of collectors. And, you know, now I think I don't know if you followed the auctions this week at Christie's and Sotheby's.

Some of the old master ones I looked at. Yeah.

So the top, top of the top of the top is very, very expensive and it's going for 3 or 4 times the estimate, but half of the paintings are not being sold. So that means that whereas, you know, with these contemporary auctions, you have this totally hideous looking stuff that sells for $50 million and you think like, I mean, for $50 million, you can buy a lot of Dutch paintings. You can buy paintings from the greatest masters. You know, what you see is that the kind of scholarly approach to painting, the kind of what the French call the amateur, you know, the person who does it out of love and who does it out of study and out of historical scholarship and all that, those people are kind of disappearing. And so prints and drawings are the ultimate like nerd thing in the art world. That's for people who really know what they're doing, who are really scholarly. Because you don't really get to hang, like, you know, you can hang a drawing on your wall, but like, it doesn't, it doesn't have the, what I call, I mean, it's not my phrase, but in the book I say wall power. It's not like having a big Picasso on your wall that everybody thinks, wow, you know, you really have to have gone to grad school in art history to really know what all this stuff is. So that stuff is getting, so maybe if, if, if educational standards continue to collapse, By the time I'm a little bit older, the prices will also collapse and I can afford them.

So you think the growing size of homes and walls and sofas has hurt the market value of a lot of Dutch art? It looks better in a small home, right?

Well, I don't know. You know, I was just reading an Edith Wharton story. Don't ask me which one, because I forgot which one. But Edith Wharton refers to Dutch paintings. This is 1900 or something. As kind of a typical show-offy expensive thing that these millionaires on Fifth Avenue would have in their huge mansions. But, you know, so, and you do have a lot of Dutch paintings that are quite massive, but you don't always see them because they're in storage, a lot of them in museums. So maybe if you want to build a huge McMansion somewhere, you know, in suburban Houston or somewhere like that, You can drag something out of the basement.

Who would be a Dutch artist who is good, but when you see them all together in the form of a single artist exhibit, you think, eh, that's actually pretty boring?

Well, that's a sad fact that there's actually more of them than you'd think.

Most of them, I would say. I mean, I like Ruisdael, I like Van Goghian, but if I were to see 50, 60 together, I would start walking rapidly through the rooms, I suspect, and nodding my head and saying, they're all nice.

Well, the thing is, you know, Dutch art is for houses. So coming back to your McMansion that you're building in suburban, you know, Virginia, Dutch, Dutch paintings are for people who have like 10 or 15 paintings on the wall. And they would have different people and different artists and, you know, and maybe a few of the same people, but they weren't really like, I've, it's true. I think I say it in the book that If you go through Dutch galleries and museums, you go through 20 different rooms and actually try to look at all the pictures, you're gonna get completely bored by the end of it because that's just not the way they're meant to be looked at. But you know, for me, when I first came to this country and I started looking at them, the more I looked, the more rewarding it got. And Ruisdael, who you mentioned, that's one I would actually have to, I'd have to stand up for him. Van Gogh, maybe not. But you know, and then you have some of them that are just not everybody gets, not everybody is well served by overexposure. I mean, I think this is true of humans in general, you know, like some people are fun to meet for like dinner once, but you don't wanna marry them. There's a few that you wanna marry. I mean, like, and some of them are just tragic, you know, like Jan Lievens, who was Rembrandt's best friend slash frenemy growing up. If you see too many of his paintings, you actually get almost disgusted by them. It's more than just boring. It's like gross after a while. But if you see one or two of them, you would think, wow, this is great.

Maybe you would challenge the premise, but why does Dutch art become so boring by the early 18th century? Maybe even sooner.

Oh, well, this is not— see, I would challenge the premise. If you ever want to darken the door of this nation, I can take you to some absolutely beautiful places that were built in the 18th century. With beautiful paintings and beautiful interior design, which isn't always preserved from the 17th century, but there's quite a lot of it and it's very decorative. It's not quite the heroic thing, but by the end of the Golden Age, which is traditionally thought to be 1672, which is when Vermeer has to move in with his mother-in-law and things aren't going very well, the country gets invaded, the economy collapses, and then this whole generation dies. But you know, up to the present day, the Dutch were always good at visual stuff. They're good architects. They're good designers. You know, they make like that weird coffee pot that costs $400 and you're thinking like, why am I spending $400 on a coffee pot? But actually like somebody thought about how to put a screw in there so that the coffee comes out in the exact right way. You know, there's something kind of, they are, they were always visual. And so in the 18th century, they continue. And then the 19th century, there's a series of very great artists culminating with Van Gogh. You know, so it's, there's more continuity than people.

But post-World War II Dutch art, as far as I can tell, seems terrible. Or don't you agree? Not design, right? Not furniture, but actual paintings.

Well, it's not terrible. I mean, it, you know, the Dutch always, they're good at photography. They are good. There are some very good painters. It's not really my thing, so it's not really the thing that I'm going to die on the barricade for this cause. But, you know, and then up to Mondrian into Stijl and Rietveld, those are pretty interesting. Those are pretty interesting artists. I would much rather live in a huge, beautiful 18th century house along one of the rivers than live in a super modernist house. But the Dutch, you know, they were good architects and good designers.

Does Mondrian still look fresh to you, or have you seen it on too many shopping bags, so to speak?

Oh, way too many. But you know, so I live in Utrecht and what I didn't realize, so Mondrian is also, he dies in New York, so he's presented as an American, at least on museum labels. It'll say maybe Dutch-born American painter. And you see him next to all these modernist painters from all over the world, you know, including now, like if you've gone to the MoMA lately and seen the new hang of the modern galleries. So they have like the big names, you know, you have Rothko and Picasso and Mondrian, and now they're next to a lot of Latin Americans and maybe some people from the Middle East and from Eastern Europe. So it's kind of all mixed up. But when you come to Utrecht, you see that Mondrian actually really comes out of this city and that sort of style. It's very typical of a very specific place and time. What I would say is fresh about Mondrian, if you ever get to go to The Hague and get to go to the, it's now called the art museum. It used to be called the Municipal Museum until like last week.

It was called the Gemeinde Museum, is that right?

Yeah, Gemeinde Museum. That's the Municipal Museum.

Yeah, forgive my pronunciation.

And now it's called, it's called the, what, it's Kunstmuseum, like just the art museum, or I hope I'm getting that right. Anyway, it has a new name, but it's an old modern museum and it has all or a lot of the early Mondrians, which are absolutely beautiful. And that is surprising because you would never think that he was going in this direction.

That's one of my favorite museums in the world, and how you see the Expressionism turn into Cubism and then pure abstraction, it's phenomenal. The trees—

you can— it's like an art history textbook that you can actually see. It's like walking through something. You understand how it all— where it comes from.

Why is Dutch fiction so hard to read over time?

Well, I could, I could, I could give you an hour on that.— but I'll try to give you a couple of minutes. There's one thing that is really a characteristic. So we talked about the design and the art, the visual stuff. First of all, the language is not only an unfamiliar language to most foreigners, but it's also a language that has suffered quite a lot of modifications in terms of spelling and vocabulary. So if we read like Henry James or Edith Wharton, it doesn't sound We can tell it's not written last week, you know, but it's— the language is totally transparent. And that's not true in Dutch. And that's one thing that in fact, somebody told me, I hope this isn't true. Speaking of the decline and fall of everybody's civilization, you can't actually assign a book from before World War II to any Dutch high school class because they just won't understand it.

Is there any book you would want to assign?

Right. Well, I mean, well, the classic tradition of this country's language is gone. People just not only don't bother to read it, they're convinced that they can't read it. This is totally not true, by the way. I mean, it is like there are some spelling things and, but you know, if you're a minimally literate person, you can read a book from 1935. It's not, but, but the kids won't read it, you know? So my friends who are professors and And high school teachers of Dutch, you know, really struggle with this.

Besides your partner Arthur Japijn, who else should people read in Dutch fiction? Harry Mulisch or Rieneveld? Forgive all my pronunciations.

I'm glad you mentioned Arthur. He's a great writer. We met actually because he, his first novel, which is called The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, it's actually called The Black Man with the White Heart in Dutch, but that was considered too racially charged in America, even though it was a quote from a 19th century letter. It's about two African princes who are given as a gift to the King of the Netherlands in 1837. I have actually never read Reinefeld, although a friend of mine has translated that. Moelisch is a great writer. He was really somebody that I really enjoyed reading when I first got to this country. In the New York Review Classics, there's a book called, I think it's called Amsterdam Stories. It's by someone called Neskio, which is a pseudonym. It's like 100 pages long and it's basically the only thing he ever wrote. It's just some stories about some kids kind of hanging out in this bad neighborhood in about 1890. And that I thought was one of the best books I'd ever read. It's just one of those miracle things that, that somebody wrote one book. Dutch literature is very rich and it's very old. There's a lot of it and it goes back. All the way into the Middle Ages, deep into the Middle Ages.

What's your favorite Dutch movie?

Well, actually something I think you can see on YouTube that I mentioned in my book, it's called Dutch Light, Holland's Licht, which is a documentary I saw years ago about how filling in the water. So this country is a delta. It's built, the, the, the land is, it's, you know, it's, it's not always, people think it's, it was all dried. It was, you know, drained. It wasn't all necessarily drained, but the thing is it sinks. So you have to kind of keep filling it up so that it doesn't sink into the water, which is not going to go well, by the way, just in parentheses, in a few years, that's going to be over with, with the global warming. But as this land gets filled up more and more, the water that was on the surface, it's very shallow water. It's not deep water. So it's shallow water. And it reflects light onto the clouds. So it's a cloudy country, northern, depressing, gray weather, but it has this amazing light that when you see the old landscape paintings, you really can see. Before, when there was a lot more water, it reflected more light and it was more radiant. And this movie, so again, it's called Dutch Light. I, I'm pretty sure it's on YouTube. It shows how that process went and how how the country was darkened and how this is reflected in the painting. I thought it was fantastic. Um, it was a very kind of wonk sort of subject, but it's true. The country, you know, it has warmed up in my time here, but it's also, if you look at the light in the old paintings, you really notice the difference.

How much do you feel you're living in what is still ultimately a Calvinist country or not?

It's a cliché. They always say it. Every time somebody's a little bit uptight or conservative or doesn't, not as fun, they'll say, oh, it's 'cause you're such a Calvinist. I mean, it has a heritage of Calvinism, but don't forget that half the country is Catholic, 50%. It was always about 50/50. So the idea that it's not a purely Protestant country like Scandinavia or something, it was always a very mixed country racially, culturally. It's always been right in the middle of the 3 biggest countries in Europe, and it's managed to keep both open to those, to the world, while also being its own thing. The Calvinist thing, I mean, I just don't, I never even really know what that means. Calvinism is a very dark, very terrifying view of God and the world and mankind. And I don't necessarily feel this is a very dark country.

I see some disparate facts about the Netherlands today, and maybe you can make sense of them for me in a kind of simple unified theory. So drug use and sex work, they're more legal in the Netherlands than in most other places, right? It's a longstanding history of toleration, which you could even say is unparalleled And yet in the latest election, Geert Wilders takes the greatest share of the vote. People claim as of February 2024, if there's no coalition formed and another election were needed, he might take even more of the vote. How does this all fit together? Explain it to me, an outsider.

That's a great question that I need to unpack a little bit to try to maybe explain it. It's true that Wilders won this election. Winning an election in a Dutch system that has gazillions of parties, I mean, I don't even know the names of the parties anymore because everybody, they secede from the party and then they start a new party and then somebody dies and then they get an— I mean, it's really very complicated. But the fact is that Wilders only got about, I think, 16 or 17% of the vote. So that means that 85%, roughly, of the Dutch did not vote for him. I mean, it's a big result, but it's still, you know, it's a minority. The idea of Dutch social tolerance of things like drugs and prostitution and things like that. I mean, this is, I think a lot of countries, including our country, have started to understand that, you know, I mean, first of all, you live, you're in Washington, DC, like how hard is it to get a joint or a hooker in Washington? You know, it's not that hard and it never has been that hard. It's just that, you know, that they, wanted to regulate that. And so it got this reputation for being this very freewheeling place. I think they really just wanted to tax it. And that's, it's, but even, even so, I mean, as I'm sure you also know, the cocaine market in the United States is saturated. So the cartels are pushing a lot of cocaine into Europe right now, particularly through the port of Rotterdam. And so even though we have these laws here that are quite tolerant of the stuff, there is a real terrifying thing happening now where people are even saying that it's becoming a narco-state. I mean, it's true. People are getting killed in a way that didn't happen before. I think every society kind of tries to figure out how to regulate things and how to keep this side of things under control and usually fails in different ways. I mean, the real glory of Holland that is part of the 17th century story is that they were much more religiously and socially tolerant in the 17th century than any place in the world. That doesn't mean it was perfect. I mean, if you read the story of what happens to Spinoza and what happens to a lot of other people, it was not a completely free country by any means. I mean, this was a country in the 17th century where if you denied the existence of the Holy Trinity, you could get beheaded. And that was better than anywhere else. So,, it's the kind of country that, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, they're, they're losing their minds in the same way that everybody else is just a little bit of a delayed reaction politically.

What makes the Eastern Netherlands special? Would you try to talk people into visiting there? Arnhem, Nijmegen?

Eastern Netherlands?

Yeah.

I don't think I'd talk them into going there. I mean, it's nice. It's rural, you know, it's, it's not, I don't think you're, I think the real pretty, I mean, the real fascinating part of the Netherlands is never really the countryside. You know, it, it's, you wouldn't go to Italy and not want to see the hills of Tuscany. You know, you wouldn't want to go to a lot of places and not see the rural landscape, but here it's not so exciting. But there are quite a lot of towns in the eastern Netherlands that are, that are very pretty. I have to say, I'm, I've become a worse tourist and I've been here so long. I used to go get on the train and go visit some you know, nunnery that made special honey or something every weekend. And now I never do anything like that.

If you're trying to sell someone on living in Utrecht, how would you make the case?

It's the perfect city, is what I would say. It's the most ideal place I've ever lived. I've lived here for a long time. It is kind of like Brooklyn. In the sense that it's about the same distance. If you go from Midtown Manhattan to Brooklyn, you have the same distance. You know, it's like 40, 45 minutes with door-to-door, but it's much quieter and smaller, even though you also have everything because it's a university town. And so you have, and you know, this country is small, so physically small, but has a lot of people. So even in the towns like this, you pretty much, there's nothing I, I don't really think there's anything here. I, I don't have, you know, there's not much that I would think if only I have to go to Amsterdam tonight actually for the Frans Hals opening at the Rijksmuseum. I'd love for the Rijksmuseum to be here in town, but the fact is we don't have the tourists, you know, Amsterdam has really been struggling with the tourist question, just like Barcelona and Lisbon and Venice and increasingly so many cities. We don't have that here. It's quite nice.

Brazil. Why are Brazilians harder to interview?

Brazilians harder to interview? They're not for me.

Well, for you, but you said this once that in general, Latins are harder to interview.

Oh, well, I know what I mean by that. Yes. Americans love to talk. It's a, it's a question that you really feel in countries that have had a long tradition of political freedom where you can kind of mouth off and not get into too much trouble, people are much more open to strangers. You know, Edmund White once said that everybody in New York should either be arrested or interviewed. That's kind of— or both, you know, or both. Often it's both. But, um, but, you know, in Latin America where they have a tradition that's not old, I mean, people remember it, it was very recently of dictatorship. Censorship and of the cops knocking down your door to find forbidden books and all that, people don't talk quite as easily about sensitive subjects. So they might be very warm and hospitable, and they often are, but when you interview them about anything sensitive, anything political, anything that they, you know, you have to kind of gain their trust. And so when I started interviewing people in Latin America, you know, which was a long time ago, you know, 25 years ago, I would kind of barge in a little bit too aggressively. I think in retrospect, I wouldn't kind of respect the, isn't it a beautiful day? Oh yes. You know, this is my grandson's, you know, he just went to third grade, like all that kind of stuff that can often in Latin America take a long time. And eventually I figured that it was about kind of seeing if you're an okay person, if you can actually be trusted. Yeah, I mean, every— interviewing people, which is something I've done my whole career basically, is fascinating because you learn how different cultures are and how that gets expressed in just what people will say and what they won't say.

Does Brasília actually work as a city?

If you want to keep the great unwashed at a sanitary distance, and live in a little colonial island where you don't ever have to interact with the actual country. Yeah. I mean, people like living there. It's a little diplomatic island that's surrounded by this green belt, quote unquote, which is just a bunch of scrub. It's not like any beautiful park or anything. And then at a very, very, very great distance, you have all the poor people, millions of them. And this is really, it's quite disconcerting if you know Brazil, because one of the things about Brazil that makes it both scary in certain moments, but also really dynamic in other moments is that despite massive class differences, which are humongous, of course, and that has a racial component as well. You're always quite, if you've ever been to Rio, you know that like right behind the fancy apartment buildings, you have the slums. Just right there. So it's not— it's segregated in a certain way, but it's not really geographically segregated. So when you go to Brasília and you see, and it looks like some kind of architectural drawing, but nobody's on the streets and nobody's, you know, it's, it's very weird. And I think it's even weirder that people like it, but apparently, you know, people who grow up there—

I like it. I've been twice.

Have you really?

I think it's beautiful.

Robert Hughes said that the only reason anybody likes Brasília is that they've never been there. You're offering a counterexample.

It's not an ambition I share, but it's a monument to a certain kind of ambition that was seen through consistent sense of how things should be. And it's still that way, maybe even more so.

Why did you go there twice? Why did you go there once?

I wanted to see the modernist architecture, which to me is quite interesting. And then I wanted to show some friends. So that makes twice. I wouldn't mind going again.

I don't think I will, but I found that first time I went, I was really excited because I knew all those buildings because I was kind of a Brazil person. I've been in Brazil for a long time. And I'd never been there because it's quite hard to get there. You have to be going there. You're not going to ever be stopping by. And I was so bored after a few hours, actually. But you liked it.

I think it's a wonderful place for 2 days. Let's put it that way.

Okay, well, that's true. I had a week. I think maybe that was the first time I kind of went a little bit stir crazy there.

That's far too much.

Speaking of Dutch novels, a lot of the great Dutch novels actually take place in Indonesia. Which was the Dutch East Indies. And they have a lot of the thing is this colonial life, you know, everybody's sitting around like waiting for tea at 2 and then they're like, somebody's gonna come over at 3:15 and then they're gonna have another cup of tea and then they're gonna like go on a walk for 15 minutes. I mean, they're just really bored and they're in this like little kind of hill station communities. And then there's this like kind of threatening foreign country around them. And my experience in Brasília was often like, I felt that colonial boredom to it, but I, but I didn't have a job. You know, a lot of people who work there, they do have real jobs in the government or in the embassies or—

Isn't it striking to you how much more colonialized Brazil feels than Indonesia?

Well, I mean, because Indonesia got rid of the Dutch and the Dutch also never left their language there. But Indonesia is a colony of the Javanese. I mean, that's, that's something that I feel is not quite seen. You know, when you go to the other island, you realize they really impose themselves on, on these quite different nations, really. So it's a different kind of thing.

Now, as you probably know, at least in broad brush terms, manufacturing used to be about a third of Brazilian GDP, and now it's about a tenth. That's a big drop. So Brazil is deindustrializing. What is the political economy of a future deindustrialized Brazil?

Well, I think you're seeing it now. I mean, I think that the idea of free trade, and I know you're an economist, I mean, so you know more about this than I do, but the idea of free trade is that let's just figure out where it's cheaper to make this. And if we can make this in Guangzhou and ship it over to São Paulo, for cheaper than it would cost to set up something in São Paulo, then let's do it that way. I mean, of course it's caused great, great instability. It's caused the rise in extremism as we've seen in so many countries. It has a slight different tinge there, but it's basically the same problem. I think it's fascinating that in the last 20 years, the main Latin American ideology since World War II, which was import substitution gone. So, you know, you have the market just flooded with cheap shit from all over the place. You know, that offers a seemingly attractive option to consumers, but ultimately, you know, Brazil has, has not done very well in the last couple of generations.

What do you think is the underrated Brazilian city to visit?

Oh, Recife, I think. Have you ever been there?

No, but it seems like such a mess. I'm even a little afraid to go. I've been to Salvador and that was possible, but I always had to have my guard up entirely. I've been to Rio and been shot at and have 11-year-olds chase me. Yeah, shot at, chased me with pointed sticks. I was not shooting, to be clear. Uh, so I love Brazil. It's one of my favorite countries. But I always worry about where I should and should not go there.

But maybe these first— Yeah, but you could be Brazilian. Physically, you could be Brazilian. You don't look like that.

Easily. And people, they come up to me, they speak Portuguese when I'm Brazilian.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could fit in perfectly. I mean, I'm a little bit, I mean, I talk Portuguese, so it's different. No, go to Recife and Olinda. No, it's fantastic. I mean, I always, listen, I've spent so much time in Brazil, I feel almost dishonest that I've never been mugged. But I really haven't. I mean, I feel like I'm not a true Brazilophile until I've like had a kidney removed by some drug lord, but I've always had a great time there. You know, I don't know.

Is Recife the place you go to have that happen to you?

To have a kidney removed by a drug lord?

Or— Yeah.

I mean, I'm telling you, I'm missing out. I'm going, I'm hanging out with the wrong people. I think I need to run with a rougher crowd. I like to run with—

Brazil, the South, even a boring city like Curitiba, I think is very nice and has wonderful food. There's not really anything to do there. Right.

I've only been there once. It's not my favorite. I've been, I mean, I went to Porto Alegre again a couple of years ago where I hadn't been in a long time. It's not, I mean, it's a totally decent, I think to live there, it's sort of easier than it would be to live in the Northeast, but I love the Northeast. I mean, if, if I have to choose. I'll always go up to the Northeast.

Why did modernism so persist in Brazil?

Well, I have a whole long theory about that. I've actually kind of written a book about it in Portuguese, short book.

This is the autoimperialism book.

That's right, which I wrote a few years ago and I thought I was going to finish writing it and make it a real book in English and I never did. Maybe I will sometime, but Brazil desperately wanted to be modern. It desperately wanted to join the modern world. It desperately wanted to project itself into the world. There's a great sense of inferiority among Brazilian intellectuals that goes back really to the 19th century. They always write about this. Actually, all these books back here, this is all Brazilian literature behind me. And Brazilians found, I think, in art and especially in architecture, a way to, to create a new identity for themselves. And, and that's my problem, I think, with Brasília, the city, is that it creates a new look for something that doesn't require changing any social structures. So this was a great subject on the left, the Brazilian left forever, is that, you know, Brazil is actually an incredibly conservative country always. And the great frustration was that incremental change of the sort of, you know, kind that we would associate with, with maybe Franklin Roosevelt, was just impossible. And so I think a lot of that energy— I mean, this is just my bullshit theory. I don't know if it's true, but I think a lot of that energy gets subsumed into things that you can do. I mean, you can design a building, you know, you can do these things. And, but in Brasília, you see that actually this modern design is actually the outward appearance of an incredibly authoritarian and very repressive state. So those things could go together. That was Niemeyer's big discovery.

If you were trying to sell a reader on Clarice Lispector who had never read any Lispector before, how would you make the case and where should they start?

I would first of all not make the case. I would say to read The Hour of the Star, which is her last book, which was the first book of hers that I ever read when I was in college. And if you love it, then it'll be one of the great things that ever happens to you in your life. And if you don't love it, then move on, read something else. Because it's so— I once read this story about this Canadian sex toy, just to diverge for a moment here. And it was this toy for women that was so big that it had to be brought over in a van. And set up— don't ask me where I saw this, this was a long time ago. I wish I could find this article, but apparently it was so complex, this thing, that it would either give these women these incredible orgasms that would last for weeks, you know, it would be the greatest experience of their life. Or if it was just like the, the, the, the, the radio signal was a little bit off, you'd feel absolutely nothing. And I always think about this Canadian sex toy because there's some sorts of art that just really, you know, it can be the same art, it can be the same frequency that will blow someone's mind. Somebody else just won't feel it. And I've known a lot of Brazilians who actually are quite troubled by their failure to appreciate Clarice Lispector. Because they feel dumb. You know, she's this great national and international icon. You know, she's this incredible figure. It's just, it's, you know, you feel stupid. It's like not getting Shakespeare or something. But I do think it's, it's so specific and it's a specific kind of person. And I think if you read The Hour of the Star, it'll take you an hour, 80 pages long. If you feel the, the frequency, then it'll be one of the great things that you've ever read. And if you don't, then it's okay. Everybody's different.

You once wrote about Susan Sontag, and I quote, "So much of Sontag's best work concerns the ways we try and fail to see," unquote. Please explain.

Well, I mean, this is what On Photography is about. This is what Against Interpretation is about in Sontag's work. And of course, you know, in my new book, The Upside Down World, I talk about how I'm not really great at seeing particularly. I'm not that visual. Like, I'm a person, I'm a reader. I'm a bookworm. Often when I've looked at paintings, I've realized how little I actually see. I mean, I really, sometimes I do feel embarrassed by it. Like, you'll read the label and it'll be like 3 sentences and it'll say like a man with a dog. And you're like, oh, like I didn't even see the dog. You know what I mean? Like, I just, like on these very basic levels, I just think, oh, like if I don't, if someone doesn't point it out to me, I really don't see. And I think that that was one of the fascinating things about Sontag, is that she was not only not really able to see, but she was actually quite terrible at seeing. And this was especially true in her relationships. She was very bad at seeing what other people were thinking and feeling. And I think because she was aware of that, she tried very hard to remedy it. It's not something you can force, you know. I mean, you, you can't force yourself to like certain music or to like certain tastes that you might not actually like.

What was Sontag most right about or most insightful about?

I think, you know, this question of images and what images do and photography and how representations, metaphors can pervert things. He had a very deep repulsion to photography. I mean, she really hated photography and this is why a lot of photographers kind of hated her because they felt this, even though she doesn't really say it, she really didn't trust it. She really thought it was kind of wicked. And at the same time, for somebody who had a deficit, I guess you could say, in seeing, she really relied on it to kind of understand the world. And so I think that tension is very instructive for us because now, I mean, she already says 50 years ago, there's all these images. We don't know what to do with them. We don't know how to process them. I mean, forget AI, forget Russian trolls on Twitter. I mean, it, it's such a— uses this word I really like, hygiene, a lot. She talks about like mental hygiene, how you can kind of clean the, the rusty pipes in your brain. That's why I think reading her helps me at least to understand a lot of what I'm seeing in the world.

Do you think she will simply end up forgotten? So in my view, Against Interpretation is one of the great books. Many of the essays in there are amazing, but I don't see it resonating with most people anymore. And will it just disappear? So as you mentioned in your book, she spent, what, 7 years collecting Antonine Artaud into some kind of volume. And he did theater and he's forgotten. And she must have thought he was quite important, right? Will she just meet the same fate?

Well, I think— doesn't everyone?

I mean, it's very New York stuff, right? And New York is not really the cultural center of the world or even the United States anymore.

Well, I'll tell you, I can tell you a lot about that. I have many thoughts about that. I'll try to give you a couple. The first one is that I'm from Texas. So I knew exactly that. I mean, I, I'm a New Yorker by, you know, some sort of, in the way that most New Yorkers are, you know, the valedictorian from Boise. I knew that people in Houston have heard of her, but they don't read her. And I know that everybody in New York is obsessed with her. And they thought this is, you know, and I can tell you like the sales of my Sontag book. I mean, it was reviewed everywhere. It was, you know, it won. This prize, all that kind of stuff. But you know, it didn't sell that much. It, it, because it sold to like, you know, a few groups of people who care very passionately about her. That's not to say it shouldn't. I think that her legacy is very uncomfortable. It's very spiny. It's kind of cactusy. It's like chewing the cactus with no, without removing the exterior. Demands a lot of the reader. I mean, I was saying about Dutch literature that you can't read anything before World War II, and I don't think it's much different. I mean, you're— do you still teach?

Sure, of course.

I mean, is this— does this sound unfamiliar to you in terms of— I mean, all my professor friends say that the kids have read a whole lot less than they had 15 or 20 years ago.

I think that's true, but what I do find is there are certain superstar figures— Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Tolkien, who are probably read more. Overall reading is probably down. Diversity of reading past the superstars is definitely down. That's my impression.

Well, I think that, you know, you see this with a lot of things all over the place. You know, the big brand does really well. You know, CVS is doing really well, but maybe all the shops that used to make up the rest of the city have been decimated. They're not there anymore. They're all replaced by chains. So you have a few chain brands. I mean, I think that's true in clothing. It's true in media. It's true in literature. But that's not to say, I mean, Sontag is, I don't love reading Susan Sontag. I mean, it's not what I want to read if I pick up a, if I have an hour to kill and I'm sort of sitting on my couch, she's not the writer that I would want to pick up. That said, I've learned more from Susan Sontag than just about anybody else I've ever read, because she really— I think if you like, if you're the kind of boot camp reader, you know, that I always was, like, I always really liked difficult books. I liked studying things that were kind of hard because I felt that there was something in there that I could maybe learn from them. So there's a kind of masochism to it, but at the same time I would hate to think of my life without Sontag. I think I would be stupider. I think I would be less able to cope with the reality of, of the world. I have huge gratitude for having read all that stuff. When you read it all together, it's not all so great. You know, it's— she's, she's quite prolific actually. She writes a lot. You know, people read a couple of books or a couple of essays, But you know, there's a whole lot of Sontag to read. I think if you look in the Library of America, you know, they have a lot of it in those two volumes now. It, it's just majestic altogether. Beautiful.

Why didn't Camille Paglia become the next Susan Sontag?

That's a great question. She denies that she wanted to be. When I spoke to her—

But she clearly did.

Yeah, she clearly did. I mean, I think she He had an identity though for, I mean, Camille is a complex subject of her own, but she had, she has an idea of herself that she needed to stay in the academy because she felt that teaching and interacting with actual humans was a way of preventing the kind of aristocratic excesses of people like Susan Sontag, which I think is absolutely fair enough. I mean, I don't, I can't imagine Sontag as a professor. I think that would've, it was just, That's just not who she was. But I think that Camille also, as much as she, the reason she's a fascinating person, I think, is that she both satirizes a lot of the aspects of the celebrity culture that Sontag was a part of and a very successful part of, while also having quite a lot of excesses of her own. I mean, I don't know if you saw when Sinead O'Connor died a few months ago, a few weeks ago, there was this clip going around the internet of Camille saying, If I were Nate O'Connor, I would hate myself too, and I would want to kill myself. And you know, it was something that was just like, this was before the internet, you know, when now if you say something like that, you're putting yourself, you're, you're putting yourself out there as a kind of, I'm an obnoxious person on the internet. But this was, you know, 30 or 40 years ago. And in fact, you know, Sinead does kill herself and does have this very miserable life and was, Abused and all this. So, I mean, I think Camille is, is a— I'm not going to write a book about her, but I think that there is a book to write about her because she does— she both criticizes and also embodies a lot of these questions.

I once did a podcast with her, and I think of all the guests we've ever had, she produced the greatest number of words and greatest number of words per minute.

Oh my God. No, I remember I had to type down the first time I talked to her. The first thing she said to me, which I thought was hilarious, I said, is this on the record? You know, do you? And she said, everything I say is on the record, which I thought was hilarious because so many people would kind of whisper in the corridors and sort of try to make themselves interesting. And she's, you know, she owns it.

Yeah.

She talks really fast.

Now to our final segment on the Benjamin Moser production function. What did you learn from V.S. Naipaul?

Oh, oh, you've been looking at my Instagram.

Oh, I don't know where I saw that, but you mentioned it somewhere.

Oh, I mentioned him in the book as well. V.S. Naipaul is my absolute— he's probably the most symbolic figure in my head. He's the person that occupies the most space of all the people I've known, he, he is a kind of almost edible figure for me, a father figure, someone that I knew very well when I was younger. I venerated him and I think I became a writer because of him. And I also stopped reading him because I wanted to be a writer because his influence was so overwhelming on me. And the sense of never being able to measure up to him was so depressing that I had to find my own way in the world, to use the title of one of his novels. Having that as an example, that integrity and that, that self-immolating, self-sacrificed belief in the importance of literature and writing, I had to go away from it. I started reading him again about 4 or 5 years ago, and I thought Actually, you know, when I won the Pulitzer Prize, that's when I thought, now I can read him again, rather than diminishing him in a sense. Sometimes like the writers that make a huge impression of you in adolescence or as a young person, you know, you come back to them 20 years later and it's just not as much, not as important. And he was in fact even better than I remembered. I just, again, I had to stop reading him. Because the impression that he makes on an impressionable young person is, is too overwhelming.

When I read A Turn in the South, I greatly enjoyed it, but over time I somehow grew not to like the book, especially after I spent more time in the South. What's the correct stance on that one? He strikes me in part as just, he was a grump, but in a way that infected his writing and he disliked groups. So same about A Million Mutineers, quite an interesting book. But ultimately not willing to understand what makes India work.

I don't think he thought India worked.

It's done relatively well since he wrote A Million Mutinies. I think better than almost anyone had predicted in some ways.

Well, A Million Mutinies is a book about positive change, right? I mean, that's a book about how these, the mutinies are the, the people who instead of being imprisoned in their caste function, have liberated themselves of the son of the railway conductor becomes a dentist. It's that story of mobility. But I mean, India is of course an increasingly repressive and increasingly dictatorial country, which Vidya did not see coming quite as much and to a certain extent supported. I think if you— when did you last read him?

Not recently. Not in the last 10 years.

Yeah, go back. I mean, go back to those, even those early novels he writes in his early 20s are so incredibly good, like Miguel Street. I mean, I just, A Way in the World is one of the great books.

In a Free State is fantastic. House for Mr. Duss. Fabulous.

Well, and there's so many of them. I mean, he writes these books. I'm sitting here like trying very hard to write. If I can write a page a day, I feel like it's I can take the rest of the week off. He wrote books of a quality and of a penetration that I find— I wonder if he's read much anymore. He's been canceled every which way for all sorts of reasons.

I don't think he's read much anymore.

Do people read him?

Not that I hear about.

You don't?

Maybe some people my age, but I never hear about him from younger people.

We'll see. I mean, I think it's a body of work that's produced in one lifetime that I think particularly probably in India and the Caribbean will perdure. I mean, I just read The Mask of Africa about a year ago, which had made no impression on me at the time it came out. I kind of thought, you know, he was old and he was kind of grumping around Gabon or whatever. He was obsessed with this idea of animal sacrifice and human sacrifice, which, and I knew, you know, Vidya, one of my main commitments socially and ethically is for vegetarianism. And I knew that he was a, he was always thought of as a vegetarian, but he wasn't actually a vegetarian. This is kind of funny. I don't know why. I think it was the British thought, oh wow, he's Indian. You know, But there was sometimes meat in his house, which I always found quite shocking actually. But he had a Hindu sense of the uncleanness of meat, not just the sinfulness of killing, but the, the, the meat was dirty. And he goes to Africa and he goes all over the place and he is only really talking about this idea of that, that, that power can be taken from the organ of a slaughtered animal or human. This is something that I know exists in Africa, but in this book, he ties these ideas of sacrifice, of power, but also with this extremely fucking view of environmental destruction and what it means to kill animals and to destroy the forest. I put that book down with a chill in a way that, you know, I'd missed it the first time I read it. I just didn't. I thought, eh, it was kind of boring.

What do you think of the biography Servitia? I'm sure you know it.

Patrick French's biography?

Oh, I think that's who wrote it.

Oh no, you mean Paul Theroux.

Theroux, Theroux, yeah, yeah.

Servitia's Shadow.

Yeah. It has different titles I think in US and UK.

Well, no, there's a Patrick French biography called The World Is What It Is. Patrick French who just died.

Yeah. But I meant the Theroux one.

And there's Paul Theroux's book.

Yeah.

Servitia's Shadow.

That's right.

That book is 100% accurate if you knew him, 100% accurate, and yet totally wrong. I mean, he was one of these people that if you want to put him through the kind of cancel culture filter and say this was obnoxious thing to say about women, this was an obnoxious thing to say about Black people, this was an obnoxious thing to say about gay people, it's all there, it's all fair. And you know, he was a provocateur. He loved getting a rise out of people and he And he was funny, you know, he was kind of bitchy. He was fun to talk to. I'll never forget, I had like, I, I'm from America, so I don't understand cricket. And we were in England, I was at his house and he started, he was watching cricket. He said, Benji, must watch the cricket. And I said, okay. I was like, but forgive my American ignorance, but I still don't get cricket. He sat there and he was so patient and he spent like 2 or 3 hours because, you know, those cricket matches last forever, explaining everything. I have, I retained zero of it. When I see cricket, I still have no idea, you know, what's happening. But he was very kind to me. He was very encouraging to me when I was young. God knows why. He was a wonderful man.

Why does Houston produce so few intellectuals? Or perhaps you will challenge the premise of that question.

I'm from Houston and I'm something of an intellectual, but I won't challenge the premise of the question. I think that when I was growing up, Houston's changed a lot since I was growing up. Houston is so much bigger than it was. It's so much more diverse. I mean, it's so huge, huge and fascinating city of which I know absolutely nothing anymore. I think it's Calvin Coolidge said the business of America is business. The business of Houston is business. I mean, it's a business place. It's a place where you go to ship 500,000 tons of crude from Equatorial Guinea to be delivered in Shanghai on Tuesday at 11:15 AM. And everybody I knew growing up, my parents' friends and my teachers and all those people that were adults, I always thought that if you're good at math, you became a doctor. And if you're good at English, you became a lawyer. And that sounds almost like an exaggeration, but like, I didn't really know about all these other professions that people could have. The idea of culture was sort of an imported phenomenon. I mean, it's not now, it's quite different now. I didn't, I mean, and my parents were pretty, you know, well-connected people in the art world, literary world. My mother had a bookstore. She actually had two bookstores. One for children and one for adults. My father was a lawyer. I mean, I, I knew I had a pretty good introduction to the interesting people around, but if I hadn't gone away— my mother said she wouldn't pay for me to go to college if I stayed in Texas. I mean, you know, her parents sent her to college in Texas, and, you know, I think she would have loved to have gone somewhere else. But that was, that was back in those times, those different times. I'm fascinated by this question. I think it's a really good question. I think that places are so— they get a character impressed on them very early and it doesn't really change, you know, because I guess I think they just attract a certain kind of people. I don't know. I think I would be pretty lonely in Houston intellectually in a way that I'm not here because even though this city. I'm talking about Utrecht here. I wouldn't say I have this incredibly intellectual existence here at all. I mean, I write books, but that's me in my house. It's not like some idea of Paris with Sartre at the next table or something. And it's not like that at all. Like, I could get my dry cleaning every week and I go to the grocery store. I don't really have a social life like that. And yet to think of being in Houston and trying to do this would somehow feel harder. I don't know why.

Before my last question, let me just present your book again. It is The Upside Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters by Benjamin Moser. Very last question. What will you do next?

Well, this is a secret. Is to be revealed very soon. I, for reasons dealing with my agent, I cannot tell you. Is that mysterious and sexy?

That's mysterious and sexy, but then I need a different final question. The new project aside, what is it you will next seek to learn about?

Well, because of Sontag, I spent a lot of time in the Balkans, in Bosnia especially, and then in Serbia and Croatia. And so I am now learning the language that is the only language that has two alphabets and has four, at least four different names, which used to be called Serbo-Croatian in the old days. It's now called Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. It's all the same language, but I've been studying that for the last couple of years and I feel like I'm really too old to learn another language, especially one that I don't really have any. And like, if I had learned it 5, 10 years ago, it would've been useful for this book. But now I, I'm just like obsessively studying Serbo-Croatian and I have to say, I, I kind of love it. Who knows if it you learn so many things that have no point to them and then they, their point is kind of veiled in mystery. And then, and then eventually sometimes they come in handy. You know, I studied Swedish in college, which was another story because I liked the professor of Swedish who was the wife of a professor I knew and said you should take Swedish. And I didn't have anything else to do in that afternoon, so I went. Swedish has never once in 30 years been of any use to me whatsoever. Whereas Portuguese, which I also studied in college, also completely by accident, has been one of the most important things in my life. So I think that when you study languages, you kind of, you open up that possibility. Swedish, I mean, it's still, I'm still waiting for the moment that's going to come in handy. It hasn't happened yet. It's not going to be today.

You'll still be waiting. Maybe you'll understand all the rules of cricket first. Benjamin Moser, thank you very much.

Thanks so much.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.