Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire | Conversations with Tyler

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I have Dana Joya, and the way I think of Dana is he is the only guest I have ever had who can answer all of my questions. But he does have another biography. At the top of the biography it reads, Dana Joya is an internationally acclaimed poet and writer. He is the former California Poet Laureate. And former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Most notably, he has a new book out. It's a kind of memoir, excellent book. I loved reading it. It's called Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer's Life. Miss Bishop, of course, being Elizabeth Bishop. But Dana has numerous other books, including books of poetry, a book, The Catholic Writer Today. Perhaps his most famous work is "Can Poetry Matter?" Dana is also an accomplished librettist for opera, and he has done much, much more on top of all of that. And Dana, welcome.

I'm glad to be here. Good to see you again. It's been many years.

Correct. First question, a total softball: Why was Jack Benny such an effective spokesperson for Jell-O?

Because he was the most popular radio comedian in the United States.

And why were you such an effective advertising executive for Jell-O?

Because I spent about a year and a half figuring out what was the possible way that we could get people to use more Jell-O, and then I convinced the company, which took another year. But it was really hard work, creativity and research.

So how did older and younger women use Jell-O differently?

Well, we did. What you're referring to is the epic moment in General Foods' life when we invented the Jell-O Jiggler, which was rather than creating an elaborate recipe, which was what we were trying to sell people for, for 40 years, simply a way that you could add water with your kids, put it in the refrigerator, and have it ready as a finger food in 1 hour.

So it's like a platform for Jell-O.

Yeah, it was a way of using 3 times as much Jell-O for an occasion in which people had never used Jell-O, which is sort of to make your own gummy bears. So it became a mom-kid activity, and we sold every box of Jell-O in the United States for several months.

And how was it that you picked out Jell-O to start with in your corporate career?

Because I was— one of the businesses I was running, and it was one of the two most profitable businesses at General Foods. And so it had been declining for 25 years without a break, and we doubled the business overnight.

So Jell-O had been declining.

Jell-O had been declining because all packaged foods had been declining. So working at General Foods, what I was working with was the best food company in the United States in 1950, but I was working at it in the '80s. And so it was a sense of taking these older products and making them relevant to people that weren't using them all the time.

So what was the corporate culture inside you that you brought to General Foods that maybe was missing in a company in decline? And where did you get that individual corporate culture from?

Well, I was a poet, but I needed a job. So I went to business school. I got an MBA. And I ended up in marketing at General Foods, which was a highly analytic company with a very military organization. And so it was absolutely fantastic. Managing existing businesses with the maximum of efficiency. What they were not good at was, in a sense, reconceptualizing a business that was in trouble, because they would simply try to do more or less of what they had done before. My advantage— and it was a dis— when I was an entry-level person, I was really at a disadvantage being a creative person. I was very good at numbers, so I could fake my way through, but With each promotion at General Foods, actually, the particular skills I had, which was in a sense of I'm very good at, I don't know, I mean, reconceptualizing things, taking a solution that people have had, breaking it apart, and creating a new solution. And so I essentially brought creativity that was completely in command of the numbers. If you can understand, that's a very fairly rare combination. And I was able to transform several businesses there.

So given your General Foods success, why do MBA programs so completely neglect the humanities?

Well, it comes from two reasons. One is that the American educational system ignores the humanities, and secondly, the— our larger culture ignores the humanities. So if you go to business school, you are with the most practical people you'll ever hang around with. In fact, I like business school and I like my my colleagues at business school because they were people that just wanted to get things done. They were very down to earth, unlike Harvard Graduate School in comparative literature where I had come from. The problem is they are not people generally with a broad knowledge of history of the humanities, and they're not terribly creative people.

So did your poetry converge or diverge with your work at General Foods and this military organization?

Well, my poetry was transformed by working in business. It probably could have happened at other companies too, but if you think about this, most poets in the United States have been in school since they were 6. At, you know, 65, they're still in school. Their whole vision of the world is of a schoolroom, of a university. I was basically working with very intelligent, non-literary people for 15 years. In the same way, in Washington, D.C., I was working with highly intelligent, highly competitive, but non-literary people. And it changes your sense of language. It changes your sense of the audience. And I think I would have been a worse poet had I not gone to business, into business and business, you know, business school. Another reason why I was probably good is that I suffered in a way because I was working, you know, 10, 12 hours a day doing this other thing. And then I was squeezing my writing into late nights and weekends. And I do believe, as the jazz musicians say, you gotta pay your dues. If your art isn't so good that you're willing to suffer for it, willing to sacrifice for it, you're not getting deeply enough down inside you.

And you left Harvard, what, in 1975?

Yeah, 1975. And I was in business school till '77, and then I was in the corporate world for 15 years. And then I quit. Actually, that's the weird thing is I went, 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. And it was complicated reasons because as you, I think you know, I lost a son and it changes your perspective on what you want to do for life. And so I just walked out and my colleagues were baffled. And so they began because they have to give an explanation that makes sense to them. So apparently what people were telling in the the company was, "Joyah has cancer. He just doesn't wanna tell anybody." Because they couldn't understand why you would walk out of a, you know, when you sort of had made your whole way up, you know, one step from the top. And then I finally had to give them an explanation they could understand. I said, "I'm going to teach," which I wasn't really going to leave to teach, but they all understood that as, "Oh yeah, one of these days I'm gonna quit and teach at Harvard Business School." That was a fantasy that a lot of them had. But, you know, it was just, it was time to reinvent my life.

And the first time when you quit Harvard, what was the straw that broke the camel's back? What was the final thought in your mind where you realized, I need to get out of here?

I realized that the two teachers I'm— I realized I took my best teachers at Harvard and they fell into two camps. They were older men who had served in the military in World War II.. And that had given them a kind of reality index about what the purposes of literature were. And my other two teachers, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald, whom I write about in this book, were people who basically came to teaching very late. They had made their living as writers and it was only when they were sort of old and kind of lacking funds that they ended up teaching. And I realized that Wallace Stevens hadn't been in the university. T.S. Eliot hadn't been in the university. I could make a living as a writer. Writer somehow, some other way. And I just felt that being in the university was making me, as a poet, too self-conscious. I was writing poems to be interpreted rather than to be experienced.

Why is there so little good American poetry about business and the office when business is such a big part of American life?

I think there's two reasons. First of all, people tend to write out of their life experience. And that life experience is nowadays mostly academic. Secondly, business and money are the only two obscene topics left in American poetry. You can write specifically about sexual acts or excrement in American poetry and be praised, but if you, you know, if you write about, about business, you're considered somehow polluted. And so I think even the business people who are poets, and it's been about a dozen, 15 of them that are really quite famous, starting with Stevens and Eliot to people like, you know, Dickey and Eberhardt. And so, those people tend not to write about their experience because they know that it will essentially earn them criticism from their peers.

What do people who work in marketing, what might they understand about your poetry that other people would not?

Well, I don't think that people in marketing would understand my poetry better or worse than other people. What I do think, and I know this, it's not a speculation, it's a deeply rooted observation. My poetry is written for people with broad life experience. The older the audience, the better the audience. The more diverse the audience, the better the audience. And rather than writing for people who essentially are working in a code. I mean, you know the tribe of economists. The tribe of economists have certain rituals. They get around the fire, they do their economist dance, they offer their economist sacrifices, they sing their economist chants. Poets are the same way. And I'm not really interested in talking to them exclusively. My desire has always been to write a poem that my fellow poets will say, "Gee, that's really well made. That's really a nice work." But is really registered to speak to a broad mix of humanity. And there's a spec— an assumption in the university that the common reader, the average person, is stupid. And I hate to say this in public, but the center of human intelligence, the epicenter of human intellectuality, is not the English department. The English department has bright people, it has dumb people. You know, it is a reflection of humanity in general. And I meet intelligent people in every profession I go to, including people that are in manual labor. I mean, I meet extremely reflective and intelligent people that that's the life that they have found themselves in. And I know that because I am the first person in my family to go to college. I was raised around working-class people, many of whom did not speak English as their native language, and my family on both sides was full of really intelligent people, and I do not want to exclude those people from the work that I write.

Do you, like Auden, crave a social function for poetry?

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. And it does that essentially by, on an individual level, a work of art awakens you. It awakens you to the possibilities of your own potential. It takes that potential, it enlarges it, it refines it. And each art does it in different ways. Music appeals to the auditory sense, a kind of organizational formal structure in the mind. Painting is visual. Sculpture is visual and tactile. In the old days, people always would feel sculptures. Poetry is to our language and our emotional functions. They awaken emotions and awaken our ability to articulate them. Now, that's on an individual basis. When you do that on a social level, what you create Over time, if you have the arts there, are people who are better aware of who they are, how they feel, are able to articulate it and recognize that empathetically in other people. So I would say that a purpose of poetry on a social level is to enlarge our empathy and understanding of one another.

What are the prospects for a culture that no longer understands poetry, and might that be ours?

I think we see it everywhere around us. We see a coarsening, a stupefaction of language. We live in clichés, we live in news bites. I mean, if you look at just the size of an article in a newspaper, you know, it's probably one-third of what it was when I was in college. The New Yorker even probably has one-quarter as many words. That we're not as comfortable working with words. And where you see it most clearly— I did a lot of work at the NEA in terms of American literacy, and I had never understood how we measure literacy, but it's a very simple thing, and I can explain it in about a minute. In a test that measures high levels of literacy, I say, "Tyler says that coffee is good." Dana says coffee is bad. And the question is, is coffee good? Is coffee bad? Is there a disagreement? And most people will check good or bad. They cannot, because of their, in a sense, inadequate linguistic training, they cannot recognize contradictory statements in a larger, large logical structure, which means that we've lost our ability to make even basic distinctions and refinements in terms of thought. So I feel that— now there's another whole thing which is different from this that I'll be happy to go into, but I don't want to talk too, too long on this.

Will there be ever a great long poem again?

There might be, but it will take a very different form.

And why did they stop appearing? So Harry Potter is a long book, or the series of them is long. You put them all together. Lord of the Rings, the 3 volumes, they're fairly long. Why aren't poems long anymore?

Well, what was interesting in the modern movement, and I'm talking about maybe 1914 to the Second World War, there was a huge transformation in all the arts— music, sculpture, painting, literature— and art became in every form more abstract. More conceptual, more formal, not in the sense of rhyme and meter or whatever, but in terms of these kind of structural designs. As part of that, there was a general bias against narrative. Putting a story in was somehow condescending to a stupid audience. But the fact is, humanity needs stories. People lead their individual life as a story. And one of the reasons you need lots of stories is that in every life, your story comes to an impact. Pass. You have to, in a sense, revise the narrative of your own life. And so, what fiction does, what poetry does, what narrative does is give you a wealth of narrative possibilities so you can recognize that no matter how bad your life is right now, that there's an escape, there's a rescue, there might even, in the Greek sense, be a deus ex machina, you know, an intervention which saves you. I believe that the suicide epidemic in the United States, the opioid epidemic in the United States, especially among young people, is among people who cannot, in a sense, get control of the stories of their own lives. So, 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.

Is rap music simply the new poetry? It's very popular. It is poetic in some broader notion of the term?

Rap, hip-hop, without any question, is poetry. It is rhythmically structured words, you know, moving through time. Now, so you have in the invention of rap— rap is interesting because, once again, if I go back to 1975 when I was leaving Harvard, I was told by the world experts in poetry that what? Rhyme and meter were dead. Narrative was dead in poetry. Poetry would become ever more complex, which meant that it could only appeal to an elite audience. And finally, that the African-American voice in poetry rejected form, rejected these European things, and would take this experimental form. So what the intellectuals in the United States did was we took poetry away from common people. We took rhyme away, we took narrative away, we took the ballad away, and the common people reinvented it. The greatest one of these was Kool Herc in the South Bronx, who invented what we now think of as rap and hip-hop. And within about 10 years, it went from non-existing to being the most widely purchased form of popular music. So we saw in our own lifetime something akin to Homer, the reinvention of popular oral poetry. There were parallels in it, the revival of slam poetry, cowboy poetry, and new formalism. So at every little social group, people from the ground up reinvented poetry because the intellectuals had taken it away from them.

Why is Elizabeth Bishop a more radical poet than Ginsberg or Ferlinghetti?

Well, she's radical in that she went back to the roots of poetry. And she did, she kept rhythm, she usually kept rhyme, and she understood that poetry wasn't simply a formal structure, it was a form of wisdom literature. I mean, when I review books of poetry, I ask myself 3 questions: What is the writer doing? What's the writer trying to do? Secondly, how well does the writer do this? But then there's the third question, and this is where Elizabeth Bishop really wins: how worthwhile was the thing that they wanted to do and they did? And sometimes you see people do marvelous jobs of something that's not really worth the effort. What Bishop tried to do was to explain in her poetry— and this is what great poets do— what it is like to live in a particular life in a particular moment and make you feel the pain, the joy, the illumination, the doubt with the absolute intensity as if it were happening to you.

Now, as you must know, in the main Bishop biography, it suggested she was not such a popular professor at Harvard. Yet you loved studying with her. What accounts for that difference in perspective?

Yeah, well, I think actually it was my memoir that really brought this to light, is that nobody wanted to take her classes. So, she was not a popular poet. She was not prestigious. And Harvard students are absolute barometers of prestige. You know, they can feel it and they gravitate towards it. I liked her. She was a bad teacher. There's no question about it. She was a bad teacher. But you were in a room with a great poet who had no pretensions at all. She says, I am a bad teacher, and you would just talk about poems. You would look at them, you'd feel the material. And there is no substitute for a young artist to the experience of being in the presence of a master. You know, my brother Ted, who's a famous jazz historian, jazz critic, he played piano you know, with Stan Getz. Stan was a very difficult guy, but it was one of the great jazz geniuses, uh, in, you know, in the last half century. And just seeing how Getz worked, how Getz performed, how Getz conceived of things was like a university degree. And the same thing for me with Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald. I was with two of the greatest craftsmen poets of their generation. And on it, you know, sometimes twice a week, and it was transformative to me. It's much better than an organized lecturer.

Is memorizing poetry a good way to learn it?

Memorizing poetry is the only way to learn poetry. Who is the mother of the Muses? Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Poets, you don't understand poetry until you learn it by heart. Think of the metaphor of learning it by heart, putting it into the very center of your being and making it part of you. And that's when, and only when, you understand how most of poetry's meaning is indirect, is intuitive, even physical.

What do you think of learning every single character in a long epic poem?

I thought it was hard work because, you know, Robert Fitzgerald made us learn every character in every long poem, and we're talking about hundreds hundreds of people with Greek names or Italian names. But what it does do is show you that every moment in a great work of art contributes to the total effect, that none of these things are accidental. Everything has meaning.

Putting yourself aside, where are the conservative poets today? Why is there not a modern, say, T.S. Eliot or Cummings?

Well, there are, you know, poets, I mean, there's 3 ways of saying conservative. Is it conservative politics? Is it conservative aesthetics? Is it a conservative cultural vision? There was an avant-garde composer named Lou Harrison, and he had his motto, which was, consider conserv, create. And the whole notion seems to me of art is of conservation, of looking at all the achievements of the past and figuring out what it is we save and what it is that we need to add to move forward. The trouble with that in terms of the academic culture is that there, you know, 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, you know, real deeper cultural values. So, the really great, as it were, poets who are conserving culture, I mean, one of the greatest ones just died, a fellow named Richard Wilbur, you know, Well, you felt with Wilbur when you were reading these wonderful poems that everything that was worthwhile and usable in the past somehow found a place, you know, in these poems. And I think that's what it is. In the same way, you would not in mathematics or science or economics throw out everything before you. You would take it and you would build on it to make something that was meaningful for the moment.

Eliot had suggested that Virgil was the first poet. To, in some aesthetic sense, actually belong to the Christian world. Do you agree?

Well, you can't understand early Christianity, oddly, without understanding Virgil. Virgil, in one of his Eclogues, claimed that there was a king being born in the East who would save the world. Now, he was talking about, apparently, a possible heir to Augustus. But the Christians took this as essentially a prophecy, and they developed a view of Virgil and of classical culture which, which I think saved Christianity. I'm a Catholic. I think this is fundamental to Catholicism, which says that there is the supernatural inspiration, but there is also a kind of natural prophecy, a natural inspiration. And so, they, using Virgil, they were able to save the entire classical tradition as an alternate way of thinking about the world, articulating in the world, and they assumed this. They consumed and digested this to form Catholicism, which is why Catholicism has such a strong philosophical, theological, and artistic tradition.

Now, Hermann Broch, as you know, he wrote the famous novel The Death of Virgil. He was a Catholic. Is that coincidence, accident?

Well, you know, fundamental? Broch is one of these fascinating characters, and he takes a single moment in Virgil's life, the very last moment. Virgil, like Kafka, at the end of his life felt that he had failed as an artist. He had not finished certain things in the Aeneid, so he requested that his great epic— and you have to think of this, the Aeneas, the Aeneid is the central poem of Western literature. People forget this now because, you know, we go back to Homer, we have Dante, we have everything else, but it was the— the Aeneid was what formed essentially the imagination of Christian Europe, and that he's going to burn this. And so Brooke takes him and turns him into an existential hero having an existential crisis, which indeed might have been true Luckily, Kafka's friend Max Brod and Virgil's friends refused to follow the poet's wishes.

Toward the end of that novel, he has a dialogue with Augustus, right, the emperor. So let's say you're that poet, you're on or near your deathbed, and you're having a dialogue with Augustus. What do you tell Augustus?

Thank God you were here and not killing you. I mean, you know, I mean, Augustus is that brief moment where you think that the Roman imperial system might work. And Augustus, much more than the, our rulers today, understood the cultural power of art. Now, postmodernists, they, they defame Augustus, they defame Virgil, Horace, saying 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. And a culture, in order to keep together, an empire, an empire, a nation, in order to keep together, has to have certain common myths that express, convey the values, not in intellectual terms, but in terms of story, emotion, image.

Now, I know you're a big admirer of Auden as a poet and a writer. He once said, and I quote, "Opera is the last refuge of the high style in poetry." True or false?

True, with a vengeance. I mean, I am not invited to come in and rewrite TV shows. You know, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese don't call me to work on their screenplays., but in opera, they still need the poet because they need language and stories that are elevated, concise, and lyrical.

How good are Auden's libretti? So we did one for Stravinsky, one for Henze, right? For Ramey, you did Paul Bunyan.

Well, here's the thing you learn from Auden. 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. What Auden did is, as he went forward, the libretti became less poetically distinguished and more dramatically powerful. So I think, you know, his greatest libretti are probably— I think his best two are the two that he wrote for Hans Werner Henze, the Elegy for Young Lovers and the Bacchae, the Bassaritz. Unfortunately, in the Elegy for a Young Lover, Hans Werner Henze was in his 12-tone period, and the opera is unlistenable, but the libretto is a truly great libretto. The Bassovitz, the Bacchai is a great opera. It's one of the 3 or 4 best operas of the last 50 years.

So having studied opera librettos and written quite a few of them yourself, how is it you feel you have a deeper appreciation of Auden?

Well, I— Auden has always been a good role model because, you know, Auden did— I mean, we think of it— Auden understood that if you were in the 18th century and you were a poet, you were writing, you know, lyric poems, ballads, verse epistles, satires, you were writing plays, you were writing song lyrics, uh, you were writing all of these things. And he did not allow himself as a poet to become hyper-specialized, where most poets today all they write are pieces of typography that are roughly one page long. Now, you can write great poems that way, but I did not want to have a poetic life that was restricted to a narrow genre of the lyric poem written to be read silently on the page. And so, Auden gave me the permission, as it were, to write libretti, to write song lyrics, to work with jazz musicians, to do translations, to do long poems. And to also, and this is what Bishop did too, to work in any style I wanted to. I mean, you see this assumption right now that a poet finds a voice, a style, and they just keep working in that same vein their whole career, where I think that you should, you know, be open to any possibility of genre, of style, of form.

So when you write a libretto for Nosferatu, as you've done, Is that German Expressionism? Is that an American poetic style? Is that Catholic? Or how do you place your own libretto?

Tyler, it's all of them, because what you do— what I did with Nosferatu, I— somebody wanted me— Alva Henderson wanted to write an opera with me, but I couldn't— you know, he had an idea and I just didn't like the idea. So I said, let me come up with an idea. And then I happened to meet a film historian. He died a few years ago. Wonderful guy named Gilberto Perez. He was a Cuban, and he had gone back to the original cut of Nosferatu, which was about half an hour longer than the one anybody, you know, people see. And when I saw it, I said, gee, this reminds me of a 19th century opera, because it's not about the vampire, it's about the suffering of this woman who's trapped in this tragic drama. And what is opera except the suffering of people with high voices? And so I was able to take the Murnau film, which he had stolen from Bram Stoker. He couldn't get the copyright, so he borrowed it, but then he overlaid Wagner. And so I took that and I overlaid my own concerns. So the opera is a kind of expressionist opera, but which uses a lot of bel canto conventions, and it's deeply, deeply Catholic. I didn't intend it to be Catholic, but somehow when you're talking about the nature of evil, your theological assumptions come to the fore. I was mostly wanted it to be dark and sexy and, and fascinating in its sinister quality.

What is the most difficult or most scarce skill in writing opera librettos?

Taking it seriously. I can't tell you how bad most libretti are, most contemporary libretti, because there's this assumption which is that, well, you know, you just write something and the composer does all the work. That's not true. An opera needs to be as well written as a Broadway musical, you know, and if you go to a Broadway musical, you know, if you go to a Cole Porter musical or a Stephen Sondheim musical, much of the pleasure is in the language. And I've had this experience again and again when they produce the operas I've written the libretti for. The singers come up to me and they go, "Your lyrics are so good!" Now, what does that mean? I think it means this: when I was writing a poem for the page, all it had to do was to work on the page. But 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. But there's a third thing that I had never considered. The singer has to become your words for the duration of the performance. When the soprano walks on, she has to know who she is, who she was, what she wants. She has to inhabit your words. And that's what I think I got to be very good at, creating beautiful language that a singer could inhabit. In the way that they can inhabit a great pop song.

What do you think of the libretto for Jerome Kern's Showboat?

Well, I think if you go to these classic musicals like Showboat, they have tremendously fine lyrics. And Annie Get Your Gun, I mean, you know, who wouldn't have wanted to write the lyrics for that show? I don't find that as much in contemporary musicals, and I don't find it hardly at all in contemporary operas. You know, the opera is what Wagner called a Gesamtkunstwerk, a, you know, a combined artwork. It combines stagecraft, poetry, music, acting, etc., etc. And if you have one element of that combination that doesn't work, the whole doesn't work. In the same way that if you have a singer with a bad voice, opera doesn't work. So I think that writing great lyrics is what makes a lot of musical theater, from opera, you know, to cabaret, either excellent or lousy.

Was Joseph Kerman correct to suggest that Tristan was Wagner's greatest, most integrated work as a whole, in part because of the synthesis of ideas, music, lyrics, history?

In abstract, I agree with him. I do think that there was a problem with Wagner. You know, I've always wanted to write an essay, I've never written it, called Slow Time Versus Fast Time. And I would take Verdi's Rigoletto, where he just rushes through this thing and it puts you in an emotional frenzy. And Rigoletto is about as long as one act of Tristan. Where Wagner slowed down time to give you a very different, almost hypnotic effect of the music. So, one's emotional excitation, the other is a kind of hypnotic trance. And I feel that that hypnotic trance, it goes too slow in Parsifal. But, you know, for me, I think something like Die Walküre, and, you know, even these early operas like The Flying Dutchman, Der fliegende Holländer, or Lohengrin do it in a time frame that I find, you know, more natural to my own body rhythms. That being said, Tristan and Isolde is a masterpiece.

Is it plausible to believe that Verdi's Otello is a greater work, even dramatically, than Shakespeare's Othello?

It's certainly the equal of Shakespeare's play, and it has things that Shakespeare does. It has a thing called the Credo, where Iago comes in and does a a blasphemous parody of the Catholic Credo, which is "I believe in one God," and he believes in a god of evil. And this is a moment, a theatrical moment, that just staggers you in the same way the, uh, her Ave Maria, uh, you know, Desdemona's Ave Maria, uh, staggers you. So I think it's an equal work. It's hard to compare across genres, but, uh, Othello, I think, is the greatest of all the many distinguished Shakespearean operas, Falstaff being a close second. Falstaff also being a gerontologist's miracle. I mean, you know, this opera that Verdi does when he's 80, uh, you know, is a masterpiece, and it is different from his earlier operas.

Clearly.

And it is clearly better than The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Yes, exactly.

I mean, there's no— I mean, you don't even, you know, Not even a comparison in that case.

How good a lyricist is Brian Wilson?

Pretty good for what he did. Now, you know, the Wilson family is from my hometown of Hawthorne, and in fact, my Uncle Giacomo many years ago was called in for a carpentry assignment that he thought was ridiculous. He came and he said, I had the stupidest thing I've ever seen today. There's this guy, he made me pull out his rug and build a sandbox for his living room. The guy's crazy. And we said, what's his name? He says, oh, Wilson. And that was, you know, so I, you know, I have that. But I think, I think the Beach Boys' greatest songs from that, you know, the almost a decade, are among the high points of American popular music. And they are at this moment especially valuable because they are the, in some ways, the purest expressions of a kind of personal and collective optimism that America had about, in a sense, the goodness of life. And we've lost that to our detriment.

For me, a lot of those songs are quite tragic and melancholic, and that's what I enjoy about them, that there's the shiny surface, but underneath, my goodness.

Yeah, but every— anything that reflects life, I mean, you know, there's a Latin phrase which is et in Arcadio ego, even in Eden, in paradise, in Arcadia, I am, which means death. So these Renaissance painters would do these beautiful landscapes but put a little skull, you know, under a bush somewhere that you could see. And so I think that all great happy art has an undercut of sadness. And any artist has to, in a sense, reconcile the sorrows, the sadness of it. Now, in Brian Wilson's case, that becomes an increasing theme, and I think eventually a kind of paralyzing theme for him, quite literally.

Is Brian Wilson still great in the 1970 to '73 period, say from Sunflower to Love You, or do you think by then he's fallen apart?

He's become a different kind of artist, uh, and I think that you— if you love an artist, you are interested in everything they do. But I don't think that the late work— that, that later work is the entry point into Brian Wilson, uh, you know, versus his transformation of, of the popular song and his creation of, of a kind of genre, uh, also, you know he did as much as any artist in terms of creating a vision of California, which is to say a vision of California as the American dream. This is what the great historian Kevin Starr did in a 7-volume history of California explaining that. And I asked Kevin why he never did the last volume because he ends, you know, in the early '60s, and he says, "Be didn't have the heart." to have the dream fall apart.

Were the Jews—

As a Californian, I guarantee you has happened, alas.

You still live there, right?

Well, you know, this is where I'm from. You know, I'm like, you know, I'm one of these, you know, I'm the last Jew to leave Nazi Germany. You know, I mean, it's, you know, this is my home. And I do not— this is where I know every tree. I know every bird where I'm part of the history of it. And so, it's still a wonderful place to live. I mean, don't get me wrong, but the detrimental aspects of California economically, culturally, educationally have been so extreme in the last 15, 20 years. It's heartbreaking for people here.

Were the Three Stooges funny?

They certainly were when I was a kid. You know, in fact, I still rather, you know, I'll watch, uh, 15-20 minutes of the Three Stooges every time I, I can, but I prefer, uh, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy.

W.C. Fields or not?

I adore W.C. Fields.

Bank Dick is a great movie.

I, I watch— I think my wife, you know, just rolls her eyes because if there's a W.C. Fields movie on, I'll watch it till the end. I mean, what's the one, uh, it's a gift, you know, where the— he's trying to sleep on the balcony and the salesman goes, "Is Carl Lafong here? Capital L, small e, capital F, small o, small n, small g." And, uh, you know, W.C. Fields milks that, that thing for about 5 minutes, and it's wonderful. But I didn't understand when I was young that both Laurel and Hardy and W.C. Fields The fundamental comic idea under them is how thwarted we are getting through the ordinary business of our day. You know, when I was young, I just saw the jokes, the slapdash elements of it, but now I understand there's a kind of existential humor under this where W.C. Fields can't get a cup of coffee without trouble, can't take a nap without trouble.

Which is the most underrated art museum in the world?

Oh, it's a hard one. I think it's probably the Hermitage because you can never see two-thirds of the art, and so, and there's usually some huge portion that's out on loan somewhere, so who can actually assess, you know, how magnificent it is even after they, you know, they sold it to Lisbon and Washington, D.C. in large quantities. It's this great unknowable museum. The finest really small museum, and that's perhaps what you ask, I mean, the museum that nobody goes to, is this weird gallery at Bob Jones Jr. University. Bob Jones for years simply bought Old Masters when they were $700, and he has this incredible collection— or he had, he's dead now— the university has this incredible collection of Italian Baroque art, which they don't really want people to come in and see. And in fact, when you go there, they have a warning sign that's saying, you know, you, you have to understand that these paintings, uh, exhibit some of the heresies of the Catholic Church, or have, you know, these terrible Catholic tendencies. But, but you go there and it's just chock-a-block with this stuff, and No one's ever seen, you know, I mean, very few people get it. It took me a long time just to be able to get into it. I've never been able to get into their chapel to see the art there.

Now, we were together in Paris, I think it was 2005, and the topic of Hieronymus Bosch came up, and you knew off the top of your head the location of each fully intact Bosch painting in the world. It took you about 5 seconds to realize the final one was in Lisbon, right? Temptation of Saint Anthony, as you may recall. How was it that you knew that?

Well, as a kid— I still know this weird stuff— as a kid, I was hungry for beauty, and so I went to the Hawthorne Public Library, which is a monument to the good effects of political graft. Somebody was on the take, and so they built an enormous library, and they put 10 times as many books as as Hawthorne needed, and I read and studied everyone in art. And so, I would go there and I would make lists of these things, and I am still to this day, you know, most of my trips are to see art museums. And I see them again and again and again and again. When I went to Madrid, the last trip I took internationally was with Madrid, and I took my kids there as well as a nephew. And they thought I was crazy. Every day I was in the Prado or I was in the Baron Tyson von Bornemisza, day after day after day. And I said, you know, I mean, there's not that much else I want to see there, but I want to see the Bosch's. I want to see the Bosch's again and again, the Velázquez's. And so to me, it's my pleasure. And I like, I love going to these forgotten museums that have one or two great paintings. And I— one of the things I really want to do is I want to go back to Detroit to see their Museum of Fine Arts, which is one of the greatest collections in America. And usually when you go there, half of it's closed. It's like the Hermitage. And so you have to go there a couple of times to be able to see. And they also have, you know, they have one of the great Bruegels there. But anyway, so I, I love this, and I feel that I'm a verbal artist, but there is an extraordinary intellectual, emotional, and spiritual power that the greatest paintings have. And so, and you can, if you put themselves in their presence, they unlock and awaken things inside of you. Let me give you one other fine museum people don't know about, which is the It's in Balboa Park, which is arguably the most beautiful public space in California. There's this ugly modernist building, tiny, awful little thing in this awful little moat that is a blemish on the entire park. It's the Timken Gallery, which is only 6 rooms, and every room is full of Fantastic paintings. And when I'm there, there's usually 3 or 4 other people there. People don't know about it.

You know, I thought you might say—

And there's a Bosch! There's a Bosch there too.

The Huntington, I thought you might say, the Gulbenkian in Lisbon. Do you know the Nicholas Rorick Museum in New York City?

I love the Rorick. I guess that's technically a museum. We used to do a reading series in the Rorick Museum, and I loved it because you were surrounded by the paintings of this Russian mystic, and it almost looked as if you were doing a production meeting for Lost Horizons in terms of describing Shangri-La. The Huntington is the, you know, is the greatest collection of English paintings outside of England, and it's on 200 acres of gardens, so it's, you know, it's wonderful, but it's pretty well known.

A lot of people have never been there because it's not in downtown Los Angeles, right? If you're a tourist, it's a bit of effort to get to it.

It's certainly crowded when I go there. You know, I have a house in South Pasadena now, so when we're there, my wife and I, who are members of the Huntington, and as you probably know, I have donated my archive to the Huntington Library, which is one of the great American institutions, also one of the most great stories of American culture. I've given them my archive, but we go there walking in the mornings., and, uh, it's extraordinarily beautiful. Also great for bird watching, and all the, all the plants and flowers pretty much, if you find it, are labeled. So you'll see thousands of plants and flowers.

Putting aside whatever one might think of contemporary art, take that as a separate issue, but what is the main thing wrong with Western art museums today?

Well, right now American art museums, Western art museums are going through a destructive period of self-doubt. Now, if you think of what a museum is, a museum is a conservation technology. I mean, the museum is a relatively modern creation. It really happens only after the French Revolution when they decide that that when they grab the emperor's urban palace, which is the Louvre, that they will bring all of the art that they've taken from the aristocracy and the royalty and put it there and allow people to come in. They also created the earliest version of the NEA because they took the upper apartments and they gave— made that free rent for artists. After a number of years, they realized that was a bad idea. That's a whole separate topic. And then because of that, The Habsburg Emperor in Vienna said, well, I should let my people come in and see my collection. And then it happened, you know, began to happen at the Uffizi in Florence and in Madrid. But we have this creation. So you look at this, it's really only slightly more than 200 years old. And what we're trying to do is to preserve the best of the past and let people into it. Museums today now say, well, we are vehicles of cultural change. We don't want to be hemmed down by the past and things like this. I think it's a misunderstanding of their basic function. There are things, there are art spaces for this. There are exhibitions, there are galleries, there are Kunsthalls in German. It's a wonderful term, an art hall. No collection, but we exhibit art there. That's where that should happen. And it breaks my heart to see museums sell their best paintings to raise money to, first of all, cover the deficits of their own bad management. And this has happened, you know, the Albright-Knox in Buffalo did this shamefully ahead of everybody else. You know, the Berkshire Museum did it shamefully, but now it's universal because they need money and to buy works that are more socially proactive. And so, I think that if they wanna buy socially proactive works, have their board buy them. Don't sell your existing collection because these places will never be able to get them back.

If you walk to the men's room in most museums, there's a lot of blank white space on the wall. Should they be putting pictures out there?

It's a cultural question. I think, you know, probably not. And I think First of all, because it's not honorable, rightly or wrongly, but secondly, it's nice to have white space in the museum to give your eyes a break.

How would you restructure the Vatican Museum?

Oh God, talk about the Hermitage being inaccessible. You know, no one sees the Raphael rooms, the Raphael Stanze. 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. The, the physical structure of the Vatican cannot support the millions of people that visit there. Because if you think about this, in most years, Rome is the most widely visited tourist location in the world., and the Vatican is the number one attraction in Rome. And so it makes it— makes Saint Peter's and everything else inaccessible. But I do think that they should build a new museum for the core of their collection, and you know, they could raise a lot of money that and take better care of the art.

Is Andy Warhol an effective Catholic artist?

It depends on what you mean by a Catholic artist. He is a Catholic artist in that he recognizes the power of the iconic image and the incarnational quality of art. That being said, if you ask, you know, how, you know, that last thing about what he does so well, is it worth doing? I'm not sure a lot of it is. So I think of him as a kind of eccentric, brilliant eccentric artist, and the Catholicism gives a certain weight, to his art, but he would not be among— on my short list of great artists of the 20th century.

What is the most significant work by Ray Bradbury?

I think 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 Martian Chronicles. I think his greatness, however, is in his short stories. If you took his 10 best short stories, things like Sound of Thunder, Pedestrian, and they are extraordinary. They create a kind of sensibility that then became encoded in our culture through The Twilight Zone that expanded the possibilities of American literature.

What do Martians have to do to seek redemption? That's a question Bradbury asked, right? The Illustrated Man, fire balloons.

Well, we asked—

Pure energy. So what can they do?

We asked our 8th grade nun if there were people on the other planets would they have to get baptized and would they go to heaven and hell? And she answered the question brilliantly, I thought. She says, well, if there are people on other planets, if they fell the way Adam and Eve did, they would need redemption and God would need to redeem them. So the first question we have to ask, are them— have the Martians— are they an unfallen race? And I think generally we've looked at the Martians as an unfallen race. They are the noble savage. They are the Edenic creatures, except in H.G. Wells.

What do you view as the implicit theology of the original Star Trek series? Is it in fact secular as it pretends to be, or not?

I think of it as Jungian, and you know, 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. And so, and what, you know, Darth Vader is, is clear. I mean, the most, it's almost, it has Jung, you know, on his uniform. He is the shadow of the hero's personality, and the hero has to confront and eventually control, or even, you know, his shadow. So I think it's a Jungian work rather than a Christian work.

Why is Olaf Stapleton an important writer?

That's an interesting— that's not a question I expected.

How could you not expect that?

Well, I don't know. Well, you know, it's— 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 the Last Men. Olef Stapleton did was, I think he was the, the first really great science fiction writer to think in absolutely cosmic terms beyond human conceptions of time and space. And that essentially created, uh, the, the mature science fiction sensibility. I mean, if you go even watch a show like Expanse now, It's about Stapletonian concerns.

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.

Well, you know who, Michael Lind, the political writer and historian, is, you know, Stapleton is one of his formative writers. And so, you know, he's, but you know, I think, well, Star Maker is kind of an evolution of First and Last Men. Odd John is kind of the odd, you know, the first great mutant novel.

Did Anthony Burgess ever write a truly great book or was he always falling short in some sense?

That's a real good question. I love Anthony Burgess. I, when I interviewed Burgess in about 1978, '77, I think, '77, no, no, about '79, I told him, I said, "I've read 19 of your books," and he said, "That's too many." And what you have with Burgess is you always feel he's on the verge of his great novel. 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 buildings roman, all in that. And I think it works. I think it works from the first page to the last page. I think, isn't the first sentence something like, "I was in bed with my katamite when the papal nuncio rang." For me, it's the memoir that I think is best, which strikingly is not a novel. No, it—

I think he would have been better off had he not been a novelist and done something else and written.

Anthony Burgess is like D.H. Lawrence. D.H. Lawrence is without question a great writer. The question is, did he ever write a great novel? He wrote great short stories, but most of the novels have problems. And Burgess is the same way. But the fact about Burgess is that almost every page is alive. And I've read Enderby, Inside Enderby, the Enderby novels 3 times, and they never failed to sort of amuse me. Clockwork Orange I've read maybe 3 times. But I think you're right. But I think Earthly Powers may be a good thing. His biography is stunning in his self-criticism and his self-discovery, plus the interestingness of his life.

Is György Lukács an interesting thinker?

Wait, whom?

L-U-K-A-C-S.

ACS.

Maybe I'm not saying the Hungarian correctly.

Lukács? Lukács. Oh yeah, Lukács is the, to me, the most interesting Marxist critic except, you know, for Marx. And what Lukács understood was— Lukács wrote a book which I think has one of the dullest titles you can imagine called History and Class Consciousness. And in History and Class Consciousness, Lukács gave a kind of an analysis of institutional history that fundamentally is one of my, uh, one of my basic concepts in understanding the world. He says that humans create an institution. You can say it's the legal system for a social use called justice. And as the legal system develops and develops, and begins to find a way of becoming internally consistent, it has less and less to do with justice. Because it's more concerned in a sense about being a self-contained rational enterprise. And I think the literary studies in the university reached this point maybe 50 years ago where in creating internal cohesion and eternal— internal structure, they had less and less to do with literature and almost nothing to do with the human purposes of literature. So for that, and also Lukács's analysis of the 19th century novel is fantastic. I reread him a few weeks ago in his discussion of Tolstói and Balzac, and I found it absolutely illuminating. His piece on Dostoevsky too.

What's your favorite Tolstói short story or short fiction?

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which I think— well, first of all, if you asked me who was the greatest fiction writer who ever lived, I would say Tolstoy. And his short stories are full of masterpieces, but The Death of Ivan Ilyich is simply one of the greatest considerations of human mortality and human limitation that I've ever read and reread and reread again.

I might say Haji Murad though, because Iliyech is such a linear tale and Haji Murad is the satire going on. It's all about historical construction of reputation, deflating egos.

Yeah, it's a masterpiece and no one's— not no one, but very few people have read it. But Master and Man is another one, but My family does a thing every year where we pick a book and we all read it together. And we did Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. Right now we're reading Cousin Beth by Balzac. We did The Red and the Black. We did Catch-22. But we all agree that the greatest thing we've ever read together was Anna Karenina. And it just— nothing else can hold its own against the greatness of that novel.

I have a few questions about Catholicism. Why is singing less central to Catholic worship?

Well, Catholic worship— this is a limitation— was really about chant originally. It was about the people who were performing the rites of the sacrifices chanting, and the people around them chanting. It was in Latin, which became increasingly distant from the Vulgate of the various populations. And so, by the time that the Reformation came around, there was this great gap between, in a sense, a sacramental religion and what the Protestants invented, which was a charismatic religion. Catholicism has never really caught up with that. If Catholics suffer for their sins by going to Mass and hearing the music.

How has that shaped Catholic poetry, that different musical tradition?

Well, Catholic poetry is completely shaped by the sacraments, and the sacraments are outward signs that symbolize inward changes or inward turns of grace. Which means that a Catholic sees everything that happens in two ways: in a physical way and a metaphysical way, in a temporal way and an eternal way, with all of the mysterious connections between that. And we even, uh, even up to my generation and even some of the younger ones, we were raised with Latin, which means that we hear when we speak English The echoes of an ancient language. And so there was a continuity in Hawthorne, California, hometown of both Dana Gioia and Brian Wilson, when I was growing up, between a working-class kid there and the court of Augustus Caesar and Virgil and Horace. The language spoken by the Roman legions in Palestine was not particularly different from what was being, you know, recited and sung in hymns in Hawthorne, California. That was a cultural gift that was at least as good for me as getting a Stanford BA and a Harvard MA.

What is the strongest presence of Catholicism in the American fine arts today or recently?

Movies. The Italian-American filmmakers like Coppola, Scorsese, Cimino, in a sense, brought a Catholic worldview, you know, a dark Catholic worldview into American popular culture. You know, things like Mean Streets, The Godfather, The Deer Hunter.

How about Catholic Asian cinema? So John Woo, right? The films in the '90s, highly Catholic, very successful.

They're— I find them interesting, but they don't speak to me in theological terms.

How about Park Chan-wook, right? Oldboy? Sin, redemption, suffering.

Well, they are, but the question is, is when you begin and you locate your films in hell, How do you get out of it? And I don't necessarily find those films having convincing redemptions, you know, and I don't think we're redeemed by the blood that we ourselves spill.

The Sopranos, Catholic TV show or not? The characters are Catholic, but that's not the same thing, right?

It's slightly— when I saw The Sopranos and I saw the guy was named David Chase, I said, how can this happen? This guy knows Italians from the inside. Then I saw his name was, you know, was it Chiasa or something originally? He's an Italian, actually went to Stanford. I find them very— absolutely 99.9% on the mark of Italian Americans, but most of the religion is scrubbed away. In the early, the first season, when the mother was still alive, you sort of saw the darker side of Catholicism in her, but after a while, it becomes a very Italian-American film with the emphasis of a series with un-American, the way Italians have changed in America.

But Tony meeting the end he does, visiting the therapist is like going to confession. Isn't there Catholic symbolism throughout it for what, all 7 seasons?

Yeah, but it's— yeah, but no, it is— I mean, it's not— it is Catholic, but he is going to a psychoanalyst with whom he has a sexual attraction, and so it becomes Americanized in that way, you know, versus Mean Streets is Catholicism straight up. The Deer Hunter is Catholicism straight up. The Godfather, you know, the you know, first, you know, Godfather 1 and 2, even in number 3 he tries it, it doesn't work very well. These are fundamentally sacramental works of art.

In fiction—

I think The Godfather is psychoanalytic rather than sacramental.

In fiction, has America outsourced its Catholicism to other nations such as Elena Ferrante, Hulda Beck? Knausgaard is Lutheran, not Catholic, but it's still quite a confession.

We have a tremendous Catholic culture in American fiction that was largely done by converts or people that were sympathetic. Willa Cather, who was not Catholic, wrote, you know, Death Comes for the Archbishop, maybe the best Catholic novel in American literature. But you have Flannery O'Connor, you have Walker Percy, you have John Kennedy Toole, You have these people that are largely Southerners, so they were the part of Catholicism that was a minority, in some ways a discriminated minority against the South, or you have converts. We have several really fine Catholic novelists right now. Tobias Wolfe, Ron Hanson, Alice McDermott, you know, are the 3 best ones, I think. But there's a kind of reinvention of this, but we are not a mainstream cultural voice yet. And astonishingly, you know, we even have a revival of the Protestant novel, which I sort of thought had died with Updike and Cheever, with Marilynne Robinson, who just is an extra— who would have thought you'd have a Calvinist, a series of Calvinist masterpieces?

How did Catholicism shape the work of Sigrid Undset?

Well, once again, I think it's a Scandinavian Catholic is in the minority, and what it did with Undset is in a sense brought her back to pre-Protestant Scandinavian culture, which I think was— she was able to be both ancient and modern, medieval and modern, and so I think she was able to bring more of the Scandinavian character together in her novels that way. An interesting one that you mentioned though is Houellebecq. Houellebecq is— and because he is— all of his novels essentially take place in a kind of hell, a secular hell of modern Europe which has eradicated its roots And you see him in the recent work trying to get out of it. And the only way he can is in a sense by a leap of faith.

You know, I think in a funny way, it's Islam that he admires for standing up to the system and saying no.

Yeah, no, it is. I mean, the novels are novels of existential despair. So it's not surprising then they become novels of existential resistance. I mean, he is our version of Camus. I find him a fascinating novelist. You know, I'd always heard nothing but terrible things about him. Oh, he was the most— it was the most awful writer in Europe today. And I, you know, then I read a novel of his and I just said, it's like once again, it's D.H. Lawrence. It's not a great novel, but there's a great vision in this. There's tremendous energy in this, and they are intellectually enlivening books. And so I now have read everything. And I also like to— I love to see him interviewed because he is a wonderful interviewer. I mean, he just play— when you see him play with the BBC and reduce the BBC into a shivering mass of, excuse me, Jell-O.

How has being a Catholic influenced your management style?

Well, Catholicism gives you a very sensible piece of advice. You must love everyone, but that doesn't mean that everyone's perfect. And so you have to, in a sense, manage love, community, togetherness, shared responsibility, with an ability to criticize people so they can transcend them, their current state, and become better versions of themselves.

With a background that is both Mexican and Sicilian, do you feel closer to those varieties of Catholicism? And if so, does the American version of Catholicism leave you a little disappointed?

Yes and yes. I'm still a working-class guy. You know, my Catholicism had been, you know, I've gone through a lot of stuff, and when I came to Washington as an appointee, I was living downtown in the Landsberg. I had renting a room and I began to go to mass at St. Patrick's. And I was in a church where one-third of the people were homeless, one-third were like me, overeducated guys, and one-third were the hotel service workers that were Latin Americans. And when I was there, I, it was, truly a religious reawakening for me that yes, we were all together in this society and in this life. And so I belong to two parishes, one in South Pasadena, which my wife prefers, which is upper middle class, highly educated, very prosperous, and the one in Santa Rosa, which I prefer, which is complete shambles. It's working class, lower middle class people, very Mexican, very Filipino. And those are my people. And so I like sort of ground-level Catholicism, and I believe that my church is the church of the poor, the church of the immigrant.

Where are we still building great cathedrals?

No.

Why not?

I guess we can blame Mies van der Rohe, but you know, modernist architecture created this notion of functionality. Form follows function. And so you see, the United States is full of dreadful churches, but the function of a church is different than what architects think. I know many people who have come to Catholicism because they were in France, they walked into Chartres, uh, Mont-Saint-Michel, and something happened in them that they did not understand. They felt something happening inside this space that was not happening in the outer world, and that is the purpose of a cathedral. A purpose of a cathedral is to bring you into a space in which spiritual contemplation experience is possible. Transformation is possible inside those walls that are not going to happen generally outside. And now we simply have functional things that they're comfortable seating, comfortable lighting, and we, you know, we might as well be in the Elk's Lodge.

Now, you were chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts for what, 6, 7 years?

7 years.

7 years. What is it you think you understand about Congress that maybe outsiders would not, given all that experience? Because one thing you were very successful at doing was appealing to Congress for what you wanted to get done.

Well, when I was appointed to this job, people said, "Go there and fight, you know, fight the good fight." And everybody used to tell me, "Just go there and fight. Don't give up." And I knew instinctively that fighting was the wrong metaphor, that my job was to reconcile. And so they would say, how can you deal with so-and-so? He's such an awful, evil person. And I said, there are— that I believe everyone in Congress is the valid elected official. They are the person that their people have sent to represent them in a democratic republic.. And therefore they deserve the respect that the system itself deserves. So I met with everybody. In fact, I took meetings with people who only took the meeting so they could yell and scream at me. And I said, you know, I had the people that supported me, uh, the people that wanted to support me, but weren't, and the people that I would convince to support me. And within a year, because I traveled every week with people back to their districts, to their states, I had created a bipartisan bicameral majority, and it was because I also changed the NEA so that we were representing for the first time in the history of the agency all of America. We were reaching every community, every population, versus an institution that was largely serving the artistic elite. The arts world was very angry about that, but that is the best thing that, uh, that I did in my chairmanship was to make this institution which reflected America.

Should we send 40% of the NEA budget to the state arts agencies?

Yes.

Can't you all spend it better?

Um, the right person under the right circumstances might spend it better once. But generally, you're better off getting it closer to the people, to people that are— and also you've got 53 state arts agencies, which means you've got 53 different strategies. And you start to see the advantages of the federal system where different people try different things and then they learn from each other.

How can we make arts funding less bureaucratic, whether public or private sector?

I think the best arts funding is from the private sector, and it's where people give money while they're still alive so they, they can measure the results of what they're doing. I believe that people should fund things in their own communities, and they should become act very, you know, actively involved. If you think about this, the people who create wealth have skills. Now, they aren't artistic skills, don't get me wrong, but they have organizational skills. They can also recognize when something's working and what's not working. If we could take some of that energy and bring it into local arts organizations, we wouldn't have the number of symphonies and museums and opera companies and theaters that are going bankrupt right now. But I don't— I see a lot of people who have a lot of money not willing to give their time or not willing to give their money. Well, I'll give it when I die. You know, I'll create a little foundation when I die. I just finished rereading a book on Henry E. Huntington, who, like Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, did it while they were alive. They oversaw the things and they created, in the case of Carnegie, hundreds, thousands of institutions. But in terms of Mellon and Huntington, institutions of absolute world quality that transformed the cultural landscape of their region. And we don't see that much anymore. And when people do this, they tend to do it in medicine or science, not in the arts.

I have just a few basic questions to close. First, if someone wants to pursue Dana Joya as a poet, what should they actually go out and do? What's the first act they should take?

The first act they should take is learn how to spell my name, you know, which is not self-explanatory in the Anglophonic world. And then I think just go to DanaJoya.com, which is my website, or even better yet, just go to YouTube, put in Dana Joya poems or Dana Joya, and there's, uh, my son, one of my sons is a filmmaker. I've done about 20 short films with him. I mean, some are only 1 or 2 minutes long. You can hear my poetry, you can Here are some lectures. Yesterday, in fact, I put up an 11-minute lecture on Robert Frost. So 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. It's not happening in the universities, it's not happening in the mass media, so to do really good short films on poetry I think has a tremendous cultural value.

So just do that. I've done one of these podcasts with your brother Ted. Obviously, you know Ted.

He's the smart Jew. Yeah.

If you had to explain in as few dimensions as possible how your aesthetic outlook differs from his, what would you boil it down to?

The sad thing is it's almost identical. I think I've had some— I don't believe that. I discover some new thing, I talk to him and he's discovering at the same time. I think, you know, he is interested in popular culture. I'm most interested in high culture. And so, I think that leads us into different things. The art forms that he's interested in are hardly more than 100 years old. The art forms that I'm interested in are as old as humanity itself. And so, chronologically, we're listening. So, you think about his view of culture, it tends to be horizontal. 'Cause he's looking at, you know, maybe 20 years in terms of hip-hop or something like this across a thing, where mine is more vertical. I'm going all the way back to Virgil, to Homer, to Horace, to Dante.

Now I've sometimes described you to my friends as being an information billionaire. Now these questions and answers, we didn't prepare any of them in advance, did we?

No, no. In fact, you know, I was delighted. They were such good questions. I'm usually asked, the same 10 questions, and you did not ask one of them. And that was a relief.

So if there's someone young and bright and they want to also become an information billionaire, what non-obvious advice would you offer? Yes, read a lot of books, go to art museums. Yes, of course. But what's the non-obvious insight you have into this process?

Well, you know, it's— I don't think you can give people advice to this that don't have the inclination. But I think part of it is to pay attention to what interests you, not into this kind of novelty-driven commercial culture we're in. I mean, my students— and I would ask them, how many, how long do you spend each day looking at tweets? And they say about 90 minutes, about this. Plug yourself out of the daily ephemeral culture and immerse yourself into things that are going to be, still there 10 years later, 100 years later. And so I think the distractions for younger people today are so extreme that they learn very little, uh, about the past, and therefore they learn very little about the present, because you can't understand anything unless you have a point by which to judge it, a point of perspective.

Very last question: What do you seek to learn next?

If I were young, it would be Russian. You know, what I'm doing right now is actually to go back and to relearn a lot of things that I had before. I just finished writing a 14,000-word essay on Charles Baudelaire that's going to be the introduction to a new edition of The Flowers of Evil. I knew Baudelaire's work, but spending several months re-reading absolutely everything was to me illuminating and joyful. So I plan to do this for a couple of other people: Poe, who I know pretty darn well, Samuel Johnson, and Wordsworth. Because I think I can, as 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 sort of stopped about a third of the way through, so I can finish that.

Again, everyone, the new book is Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer's Life by Dana Gioia, G-I-O-I-A. Dana Gioia, thank you very much. It's been a real pleasure.

Tyler, this was fun!