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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
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book is called the upside down World meetings with Dutch Masters Benjamin is probably best known for his Pitzer prizewinning biography of Susan sag and he also has the best known English language biography of the Brazilian author Clarice Le Spectre and he has a
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homepage where he writes on many disperate topics uh whatever comes to mind for him Benjamin welcome thank you your book on Dutch art was verier a Catholic he was a Catholic but not originally he converted yeah apparently he did convert
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he was from a Protestant family that um but 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
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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 um you mean allegory of the Catholic faith for example well that's the big one um
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a bad painting or not a great painting well it I think it's because we like for mirrors 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 the glance The
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Gaze and not being beaten over your head with uh with all this kind of 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
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work which one the art of painting 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
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got to go to the Royal Palace in the ha the other day and um I'd never been there before actually and um they had 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
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side so where you have where you would be used to having North on the top you have North on the right side um and it was thrilling to see it in a interior that looks just like that but the um the I don't think it's a Catholic painting I
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mean it's a it's a painting that has a lot of symbolism and a lot of um a lot of Illusions to to literature and to Art but it's not necessarily Catholic I mean quite a lot of people Protestants would have done that as well how do you account for the fact as
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far as I can tell vermier was not extremely well known until the late 19th century is that because it was hard to see them or because the people didn't get it well it's always usually a bit of both I mean there's only 35 verir he
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dies when he's 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 um who had something like 20 of
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them in his house and um so you know this was kind of a local favorite and um 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 Yan stain everybody else
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has some story about this and and you know paintings disappeared in the people's houses um 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
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it in their Taliban like movement uh of Aon clasm in the late 16th century so yeah and it just kind of vanished Into The Ether did you see the Big verier Show in Amsterdam last year I did um what did you learn from it yeah it's
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great were already studying you've lived there over 20 years you already were studying Dutch art for the book uh what did you learn from the show per se well I think I learned two things so I've seen all the paintings um because most of them are except for one there's
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one that's in Japan that's this um kind of copy of an Italian painting um that I've never seen so I think seeing them all together you see the break in verier you see he goes from these very big formats at the beginning of his career
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they're big um like the one in Dresden or the one in um um you know the the early kind of heroic verier so there is this question about verier which is what happens to him halfway through his life um he only paints for about 20 years
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and um 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 for
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mirors you know like The Girl With a Pearl Earring or um or the little Steen of people in a in a little table with the window and um those paintings look really different I mean you can see uh you can see it's the same painter but
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it's actually a really big break and um it's interesting that in during World War II um I tell the story in the book as well um this was a a Lacuna that invited a clever forger because the question of how do you go from A to B is really interesting in forier and um so
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this forger named Han who was a kind of hitleresque you know I mean Hitler was an art school dropout you know he didn't really he wasn't quite talented enough to make it and he was quite embittered by that and Han fan was also um you he
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thought he was just as good as any old master so he starts painting these fake verier 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
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something like 15 Country Estates and he owns 50 something houses in the center of Amsterdam I he made bazillions um and they were all fake and every if you see them now and you can see them um some of them are still on display in museums um
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you think you've got to be kidding me right this is just totally ridiculous but um it makes you kind of wonder about what do you actually see when you see a verier you see a famous name because often you you see the huge line the website that
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crashes you know the people who flew in from Bangkok and Rio to see this stuff and you know you're already kind of prepared to see something that isn't really there um a similar if I can go on a if I know you're a heterodox person um maybe
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you'll like this comparison but uh in in Islam there's a famous cliche that every Muslim will tell you that the one of the Miracles of the Quran is that it has it the Perfection of its style so it's so beautiful it's so elegant It could only have been composed by divine
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inspiration or by God himself um now the thing about this it's really funny is that you're if you're a Muslim and you grow up hearing the Quran you're so used to hearing it your entire life um you hear it at every occasion you know you
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memorized often a lot of you know really Pious Muslims will memorize the entire thing you're prepared to think it's beautiful and so when you see a verier you're prepared to think this is the most fabulous thing in the world this is
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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
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actually see it so when you see the fake fors you think come on that's ridiculous um but if you try to see it without the perfume um it becomes a real challenge how is rembrand and so productive um well he got to be quite old first of all um by the standards of
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the Dutch he he he was 63 when he died as you know in the book um a lot of these people die in their 20s 30s you know vermier dies at 43 so Rembrant gets a whole extra generation of work um he also though was just one of these obsessive creators and
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um a kind of a volcano you know it's it's it's 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 you know he was
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already paintting incredible masterpieces and I was sitting here like trying to write some article that wouldn't get turned down by some terrible magazine I didn't even want to write for you know and he was painting these canvases that were like the
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anatomy lesson in the hay you know these just these these incredible famous paintings um 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
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front of his easel um he goes he was an obsessive driven Creator um and and that's why he died in front of the easel he also died very poor and and and mostly forgotten oh do you think Grand brand Prince are still underpriced as you may know there was a London
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auction of quite a few of them a few months ago and many went for 2x or 3x the estimates yeah why aren't R just totally unaffordable they're very good many of them people don't seem to for me they're what they're unaffordable for me I doubt
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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 are actually made by
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rbrand in his lifetime and then you have the plates that are kind of done afterwards and or or later on and they're a little bit fuzzier and they're a little bit um but I think you know this was always people collected rbr for
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a lot of reasons um the Dutch collected him later really um and there were obsessive rembrand collectors who um actually would be a good book for someone to write about the collectors of FR brand because some of them are
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completely Bonkers you know and um and iive like like like a lot of collectors um and you know now I think I don't know if you followed the auctions this week at Christies and soube some of the old Master ones I at yeah well um so the top top of the top
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of the top is very very expensive and it's going for three or four times the estimate but half of the paintings are not being sold so that means that the whereas you know with these contemporary auctions you have this totally hideous
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looking stuff that sell for $50 million and you think like I mean for $50 million you can buy a lot of Dutch paintings um you can buy paintings from the greatest Masters um and so you know what you see is that the the kind of scholarly approach to painting
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the kind of the what what the French call the amateur you know the person person who does it out of love and who who does it out of study and out of historical scholarship all that those people are kind of Disappearing um and so prints and drawings are the ultimate
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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
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what I call I mean I it's not my phrase but in the book I say wall power um 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
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what all this stuff is so that stuff is getting so maybe if if if educational standards continue to collapse um 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
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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 um Edith Wharton refers to Dutch
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paintings since is 1900 or something as kind of the typical show offy expensive thing that these millionaires on Fifth Avenue would have in their huge mansions um but you know so and you do have a lot of Dutch paintings that are
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quite massive but you don't always see them because they're they're in storage a lot of them um in museums so maybe if you want to build a huge MC mansion somewhere um you know in Suburban Houston or somewhere like that um you can drag something out of the out of the
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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 Ah that's actually pretty boring well that's a sad fact that there's actually more of them than you
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think most of them I would say I mean I like Ru stale I like Fen Goan but if I were to see 5060 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
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art is for houses so coming back to your mcmansion that you're building in Suburban you know Virginia um Dutch Dutch paintings are for people who have like 10 or 15 paintings on the wall and they would have different people and
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different artists and you know maybe a few of the same people but um they weren't really like i' it's true I think I say it in the book that if you go through Dutch Galleries and museums um you go through 20 different rooms and actually try to look at all
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the pictures you're going to get completely bored by the end of it um because that's just not the way they're meant to be looked at and um but but you know for me when I first came to this country and I started looking at them
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the more I looked the more rewarding it got and rousell who you mentioned um that's one I would actually have to I'd have to stand up for him fun and maybe not but um but you know and then you have some of them that are just not everybody
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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 want to marry them and um there's a few that you want to
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marry and um I mean like and some of them are just tragic you know like Jan Levens who is Rembrandt's best friend SL FR of me growing up um if you see too many of his paintings you actually get almost disgusted by them um it's it's
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it's it's um 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
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sooner oh well this is not see I would challenge the premise um if you ever want to darken the door of this nation um I can take you to some absolutely beautiful places that were built in the 18th century um with beautiful paintings
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and beautiful interior design which isn't always preserved from the 17th century but there's quite a lot of it and um it's very decorative it's not quite the heroic thing um but you know by the end of the Golden Age which is traditionally thought to be 1672 which
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is when you know verier has to move in with his mother-in-law and you know things aren't going very well the country gets invaded um the the economy collapses and and you know and then this whole generation dies but you know um up to the present day
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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 cost $400 and you're thinking like why am I spending $400 on a coffee pot but actually like
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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 uh they they are they were always Visual and so in the 18th century they continue and then the 19th century there's a series of
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very great artists culminating with Fang go um you know so it's there's more continuity than people think but po 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
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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
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barricade for this cause but um but you know and then up to mrea and style and Reed Feld um those are pretty interesting uh those are pretty interesting artists I would much rather live in a huge beautiful 18th Century House along one of the rivers than um
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than live in a super modernist house but the Dutch you know they were good Architects and good designers does mandrian 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
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live in ut and um what I didn't realize so mandre is also he dies in New York so he's presented as an American um at least on museum labels it'll say maybe Dutch born American painter um and you see him next to all these modernist
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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 rotho Ando and mandre and now they're next to a lot of Latin Americans and
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maybe some people from the Middle East and from Easter Europe so it's kind of all mixed up but when you come to UT you see that monan actually really comes out of this city um and that sort of style uh is very uh it's very typical of a
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very specific place and time what I would say is fresh about mundon if you ever get to go to the hag and get to go to the uh it's now called the art museum it used to be called this Municipal museum museum you mean last
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week what it it's called the G museum is that right yeah Kain Museum that's the municipal Museum and now it's called it's called the what it's K Museum like just the art museum or I hope I'm getting that right anyway um it has a new name but it's an old
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Modern Museum and it has all or a lot of the early MRE 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
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cubism and then pure abstraction it's phenomenal the trees it's a you can it's like an AR 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
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so hard to read over time um well I could I could I could give you an hour on that but I'll try to give you a couple minutes there's one thing that is really a characteristic so we talked about the design and the art um the visual stuff first of all the language
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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
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like 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 um in fact somebody told me I hope this isn't true speaking of the decline and fall of
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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
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classic tradition of this country's language is gone um 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
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and but you know if you're a minimally literate person you can read a book from 1935 it's not um but but the kids won't read it you know so my friends who are professors and um and high school teachers of Dutch you know really struggle with
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this besides your partner Arthur jpen uh who else should people read in Dutch fiction Harry Mish or Reena Feld forgive all my pronunciations um I'm glad you mentioned Arthur um he's a great writer and um um we met actually because he his first
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novel which is called the two hearts of Quasi Bachi um it's actually called the black man with the white heart in in Dutch but that was considered to um racially charged in America even though it was a quote from a 19th century letter um
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it's about two African princes who are given as a gift to the king of the nether ones in 1837 and um there I mean uh I have actually never read reld although um a friend of minus is has translated that and um mulish is a great writer um
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you know he was really somebody that 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 nesio which is a pseudonym it's like a 100
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pages long and it's basically the only thing he ever wrote um it's just some stories about some kids kind of hanging out in this bad neighborhood and about 1890 and that I thought was one of the best books I'd ever read it's just one of those
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Miracle things that that somebody wrote one book um yeah but I mean um Dutch literature is very rich and it's very old there's a lot of it um and it goes back all the way into the Middle Ages deep into the Middle Ages what's your favorite Dutch movie
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um well actually something I think you can see on YouTube that I mentioned in my book is called Dutch light Holland's L um which is a documentary I saw years ago about how filling in the water so this country is a Delta and um it's
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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
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doesn't sink into the water and um which is not going to go well by the way just in parenthesis in a few years that's going to be over with with global warming but um but as this land gets filled up more and more uh the water that was on the surface it's very
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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
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can see and um 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 um I'm pretty sure it's on YouTube um it shows how that process went and how um how the
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country was darkened and how this is reflected in the painting I thought it was fantastic um it was very kind of wonk sort of subject but it's true the country um you know it has warmed up in my time here but it's also if you look
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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 um it's a cliche like they always say it like every time somebody's a little bit
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uptight or conservative or doesn't not as fun they'll say oh it's because you're such a calvinist um I mean it it has a Heritage of of of Calvinism but don't forget that half the country is Catholic um 50% was always about 50/50 um so the idea that it it's not a purely
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Protestant country like Scandinavia or something um it was always a very mixed country uh racially culturally it's always been right in the middle of the three biggest countries in Europe um and it's managed to keep both open to those
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to the world while also being its own thing the cidence thing I mean I just don't I never even really know what that means is a very dark very um uh terrifying view of of God and the world and Mankind and I don't necessarily feel
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this is a very dark country I see some disperate 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
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right it's a long-standing history of Toleration which you could even say is unparalleled and yet in the latest election gear ters takes the greatest share of the vote people claim as of February 2024 if there's no Coalition
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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 um that's a great question that that I need to unpack a little bit to get to to try to maybe explain it um
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it's true that Wilders won this election um winning an election in a Dutch system that has gazillions of party I mean I don't even know the names of the parties anymore because everybody like they seced from the party and then they start
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a new party and then somebody dies and then they get 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 D did not vote for him um that I mean it's a big result but
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it's still you know it's a minority and um the idea of that social tolerance of um things like drugs and uh prostitution and things like that I mean this is I think a lot of countries including our country have started to understand that
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you know I mean first of all you 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 a uh you know that they wanted to regulate that
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and so it got this reputation from it's very freewheeling place um I think they really just wanted to tax it and um 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 and um so the cartels are pushing a lot
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of cocaine into Europe right now particularly through the port of water and so even though we have these laws here that are quite tolerant of this stuff there is a real terrifying thing happening now where people are even saying that it's becoming a narco State
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I mean it's true people are getting killed in a way that didn't happen before um so I think every society kind of tries to figure out how to regulate things and how to keep the side of things under control and usually fails
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in different ways but um the fact is I mean the real glory of of Holland that um that is part of the 17th century story is that um they were much more religiously and socially tolerant in the 17th century than any place in the world
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um that doesn't mean it was perfect I mean if you read the story of what happens to Spinosa and what happens to a lot of other people um you know it was not a completely free country by any means I mean you know this was a country in the 17th century
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where like if you denied the existence of the Holy Trinity you could get beheaded you know I mean it's not like and that was better than anywhere else so it's a kind of country that um yeah I mean I think they I think they you know they're they're losing
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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 arnam NE Eastern Netherlands
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yeah I won think I'd talk him into G 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
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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 um but there are quite a lot of towns in the Eastern
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Netherlands that are that are very pretty um I have to say I'm I've become a worst 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
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I never do anything like that if you're trying to sell someone on living in ut 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 um I've lived here for a long time it is kind of like
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Brooklyn um 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 too um but it's much quieter and smaller even though you also have everything
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because it's a university town and so you have um and and you know this country is small so physically small but has a lot of people so even in this towns like this um you pretty much there's nothing I I don't really think there's anything here I I don't have you
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know there's not much that I would think if only I have to go to Amsterdam tonight um actually for the France Halls opening at the reiches Museum but um I I'd love for the reiches museum to be here in town but the fact is we don't
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have the tourists you know Amsterdam has really been struggling with the tourist question just like Barcelona and Lisbon and Venice and you know increasingly so many cities um we don't have that here it's quite nice Brazil why are Brazilians harder to
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interview Brazilian harder interview they're not for me well for you but you said this one in general Latins are harder to interview oh well I know what I mean by that um yes um Americans love to talk it's a it's a question that you really
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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 um um you know Edmund white once said that everybody in New York should either
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be arrested or interviewed and um that's kind of you know or both often it's both but um but you know um in Latin America where they have a tradition that's not old I mean people remember it it was very recently of dictatorship and of
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censorship and of the cops knocking down your door to find forbidden books and all that um people don't talk quite as easily about sensitive subjects so they might be very warm and hospitable and they often are um but when you interview them about
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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 um I would kind of barge in a little
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bit too aggressively I think in retrospect I would I would 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
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that can often in Latin americ take a long time um and eventually I figured that it was about kind of seeing if you're an okay person if you can actually be trusted and um yeah I mean every interviewing people which is something I've done my whole
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career basically um is fascinating because you learn how different cultures are and how that gets expressed in just what people will say and they won't say does Brazilia actually work as a city uh if you want to keep the great
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unwashed at a sanitary distance and live in a little Colonial um Island where you don't ever have to inter interact with the actual country um yeah I mean people like living there um it's a little diplomatic Island that's surrounded by
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um 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 uh millions of them and this is really um you know it's it's it's it's quite
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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 the massive class differences um which are humongous of
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course and that's has a racial component as well um 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
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certain way but it's not really geographically segregated and um so when you go to bra Ila 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
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um and I think it's even weirder that people like it but apparently you know I like grow up there I've been twice have you really I think it's beautiful you know um Robert Hughes said that the only reason anybody likes Brazilia that they've never been
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there so you are um you're offering a counter example 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
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so why did you go there twice why did you go there once I wanted to see the modernist architecture which to me is 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
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um first time I went I was really excited um 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
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be stopping by um and I was so bored after a few hours actually but you liked it I think it's a wonderful place for two days let's put it that way I wouldn't live there okay well that's true I had a week I think maybe that was the first
38:37
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
38:51
life you know everybody's sitting around like waiting for tea at 2: and then they like somebody's going to come over at 3:15 and then they're going to have another cup of tea and then they're going to like go on a walk for 15 minutes and
39:02
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 Brazilia was often like I felt that Colonial boredom to it but I but I
39:20
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 striking to you how much more colonialized Brazil feels than Indonesia well I mean because Indonesia
39:36
got rid of the Dutch and the Dutch also never left their language there you know Indonesia but Indonesia is a colony of the Javanese I mean that's um that's something that I feel is not quite seen you know when you go to the
39:51
other Islands you realize they really impose themselves on um on these quite different nations really um 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
40:11
now it's about a tenth that's a big drop so Brazil is de-industrializing what is the political economy of a future de-industrialized Brazil um well I think you're seeing it now I mean I think that you know the the the idea of free trade and I know you're
40:31
you're an economist I mean so you know more about this than I do but the idea of free trade is that like let's just figure out where it's cheaper to make this and if we can make this in guangju and ship it over to Sal Pao or cheaper
40:43
than it would cost to set up something in Sal Hollow then let's do it that way um I mean of course it's caused great great instability um it's caused a rise in extremism um as we've seen um in so many countries it has a slight
40:59
different tinge there but it's basically the same problem I think um it's fascinating that in the last 20 years the main Latin American ideology since World War II which was import substitution gone and so um so you know you have the market just
41:21
flooded with cheap from all over the place and um you know um that offers a seemingly attractive option to Consumers But ultimately um you know Brazil has has not done very well in the last couple of generations what do you think is the
41:44
underrated Brazilian City to visit oh reif I think if 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
42:00
I've been to Rio and been shot at and have like 11year old yeah shot at Chase 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 I always worry about where I shouldn't
42:15
should not go there but make the case for a rece yeah but you could be Brazilian physically you could be Brazilian easily and people they come up to me they speak Portuguese when I'm Brazil yeah yeah yeah you could fit in perfectly I I'm a little bit I mean I
42:29
talk Portuguese so it's different but um no go to rean Olinda no it's fantastic I mean I always I've 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
42:46
true Brazil aile until I've like had a kidney removed by some drug lord but I've always had a great time there is the place you go to have that happen to you to have a kidney removed by drug lord or yeah I mean I'm telling you I'm missing
43:04
out I'm going I'm hanging out with the wrong people I think I need to run with a rougher crowd I like the South I tend to run with like evening City like CBA I think is very nice and has wonderful food there's not really anything to do
43:19
there right I've only been there once it's not my favorite I've been I mean I went to Puerto algra again a couple years ago where it hadn't been a long time it's not I mean it's a totally decent I think to live there it's sort of easier than
43:33
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 um well I have a whole long theory about that I've actually kind of
43:49
written a book about it in portuges but um this is the auto imperialism 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 um Brazil desperately
44:06
wanted to be modern um it desperately wanted to join the modern world it desperately wanted to um project itself into the world there's a great sense of inferiority among uh Brazilian intellectuals that goes back really to the 19 century they always write about
44:22
this actually all these books back here this is all Brazilian literature behind me um and Brazilians um found I think in art and especially in architecture a way to uh to create a new identity for themselves and and that's my problem I
44:42
think with Brazilia the city is that it creates a new look for something that doesn't require changing any social structures so um this is a great subject on the left the Brazilian left forever is that um you know Brazil is actually an incredibly
45:04
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 um was just impossible and so I think a lot of that energy I this is just my
45:20
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 um and but in in Brazilia you see that actually
45:35
this modern design is actually the the outward appearance of an incredibly authoritarian and very repressive state so those things could go together that was neer's big Discovery if you were trying to sell a reader on Clarice Spectre who had never
45:57
read any Le Spectre before how would you make the case and where should they start well I would um 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 um which was the first book of hers that I
46:16
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 uh I once read this story about this
46:36
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
46:56
complex this thing that it would either give these women these incredible orgasms that would last for weeks you know would be the greatest experience of their life or if it was just like the the the this the radio signal was a
47:10
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
47:27
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 claresa Spectre because they feel dumb you know she's this great National and international icon you know she's this incredible
47:45
figure and um it's just it's you know you feel stupid it's like not getting Shakespeare or something you just are like um 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 start it'll take you an hour it's
48:02
80 pages long um 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 sag and I quote so much of sag's best work
48:19
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 a against interpretation is about in sag's work um and of course you know in my new book um the upside down world I talk about how
48:40
I'm not really great at seeing particularly I'm not that visual like I'm a person I'm a reader um I'm I'm I'm a bookworm and um often when I've looked at paintings I've realized how little I actually I mean I really sometimes I do feel
48:58
embarrassed by it like you'll read the the the label and it'll be like three 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 on these very basic
49:10
levels I just think oh like if I don't if someone doesn't point it out to me I really don't see um and I think that that was one of the fascinating things about sag is that she was not only um not really able to see but she's actually
49:27
quite um terrible at seeing and this was especially true in her relationship she was very bad at seeing what other people were thinking and feeling um and I think because she was aware of that he tried very hard to remedy it but
49:45
that's it's just not something you can um 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 have really like what was sag most right about or most insightful
50:06
about I think you know this question of images and what images do and photography and how um it representations metaphors can pervert things um she had a very deep repulsion to photography I mean she really hated photography and
50:28
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 um and at the same time for somebody who had a deficit I guess you could say in seeing
50:44
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 Imes we don't know what to do with them we don't know how to process them I mean forget
51:00
AI forget Russian trolls on Twitter I mean it it's such a um uses this word I really like um hygiene a lot so she talks about like mental hygiene and um how you can kind of clean the the rusty pipes in your brain and um that's why I
51:21
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
51:39
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 seven years collecting Anton Oro into some kind of volume and he did theater and he's forgotten and she must
51:55
have thought he was quite important right will she just meet the same fate it's not 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
52:15
thoughts about that I'll try to give you a couple the first one is that um 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 validator from Boise
52:35
but um 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 um and they thought this is you know and I can tell you like the sales of my sag book I mean it was
52:49
reviewed everywhere it was you know it won this prize all that kind of stuff but you know it didn't sell that much um it it because it sold to like you know a few groups of people who care very passionately about her um that's not to
53:04
say it shouldn't I mean I think that it was um I think that her Legacy is very uncomfortable it's very spiny it's kind of cactusyack I mean I was saying about Dutch literature that you can't read anything before World War II and I I don't think
53:32
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
53:46
15 or 20 years ago I think that's true but what I do find is there are certain Superstar figures Shakespeare Jane Austin Tolkien right who are probably read more more overall reading is probably down diversity of reading past the superstars is definitely down that's
54:03
my impression well I think that you know you see this with a lot of things uh 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
54:21
have been decimated they're not there they're all replaced by Chain 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 um but that's not to say I mean sag is I don't love reading Susan
54:39
sag 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 in on my couch she's not the the writer that I would want to pick up that said I've learned more from Susan sag than just about
54:54
anybody else I've ever read she really uh 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
55:13
that there was something in there that I could maybe learn from them and so there's a kind of masochism to it but at the same time um I would hate to think of my life without sag um I think I would be stupider I think I would be less able to cope with the reality of
55:34
of the world um I don't know I have huge um 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
55:56
of books or a couple of essays but you know there's whole lot of sag 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 um it it it's just Majestic altogether beautiful why didn't Camille Paglia
56:16
become the next Susan sag that's a great question um she denies that she wanted to be but she clearly did when I spoke to her yeah she clearly did yeah um I mean I think she she had an identity though for I mean Camille is a complex subject of her own
56:37
but um 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
56:52
Sant uh which I think is absolutely fair enough I mean I don't um I can't imagine sag as a professor I think that would have it was just that's just not who she was but um but I think that Camille also um as much as the reason she's a
57:08
fascinating person I think is that she both stat rizes uh a lot of the aspects of the celebrity culture that stag was a part of and a very successful part of um while also having quite a lot of excesses of her I mean I don't know if
57:26
you saw when Shen Connor died a few months ago few weeks ago um there was this clip going around the internet of Camille saying if I were natoc Conor I would hate myself too and I would want to do kill myself and you know it was something that was just like this was
57:44
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 um
57:58
and in fact you know chenade does kill herself and does have this very miserable life and was abused and all this and um 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
58:13
write about her because she does um she both criticizes and also embodies a lot of these questions I once did a podcast with her and I think of of all the guests we've ever had she produced the greatest number of words and greatest number of words per
58:33
minute we oh my God no I remember I had to um I had to type down the first time I talked to her and um the first thing she said to me which I thought was hilarious I said um I said is this on the record you know and she said everything I say is on the
58:54
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 and um um yeah she talks really fast now to our final segment on the
59:13
Benjamin Moser production function what did you learn from vs neol oh oh you've been looking at my Instagram oh I don't know where I saw that but you mention it somewhere oh I mentioned him in the book as well vs nighta is my absolute
59:36
um 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 um he he is a kind of almost edible figure for me a father figure um someone that I knew very well when I was younger
1:00:02
uh and I was absolutely I venerated him and I went 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
1:00:24
measure up to him was so depressing that um I had to find my own way in the world to use the title of one of his novels and um having that as an example that integrity and that that self ulating self-sacrificed belief in the importance of literature and
1:00:47
writing um I had to go away from it I started reading him again about four or five 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 and um rather than diminishing him in a
1:01:05
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
1:01:19
better than I remembered and um 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
1:01:36
I somehow grew not to like the book especially after I spent more time in the South uh what's the correct stance on that one he strikes me in part it's just he was a grump but in a way that infected his writing and he disliked groups so same about a million mutinies
1:01:52
quite an interesting book but ultimately not willing to understand what makes India work well I don't think he thought India worked it's done relatively well since he rode million mutinies I think better than almost anyone had predicted in some
1:02:11
ways well a million mutinies is a book about positive change right I mean that's a book about how these the mutinies or the the people who instead of being imprisoned in their cast function have liberated themselves of you know the
1:02:26
the son of the Railway conductor becomes a dentist you know it's that story of Mobility um but I mean India is of course an increasingly repressive and increasingly dictatorial uh country which viia did not see coming quite as much and and to
1:02:43
a certain extent supported I think if you when did you last read him not recently not in the last 10 years yeah I go back I mean go back to those even those early novels he writes in his early 20s they're so incredibly good like Miguel Street I mean I just um in
1:03:03
the world is one of the great books um in a free state is fantastic how for 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 you
1:03:23
know I can take the rest of the week off um he wrote books of a quality and of a penetration that I find maybe he's I mean I wonder if he's read Much Anymore he's been cancelled Every Which Way for all sorts of reasons I don't think much anymore not
1:03:44
not that I hear about maybe some people my age but I never hear about him from younger people well um we'll see I mean I think it's it's it's it's a it's a body of work that's produced in one lifetime that I think particularly probably in India and the
1:04:04
Caribbean um will Purdue 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 gabone or whatever and um he was
1:04:26
obsessed with this idea of animal sacrifice and Human Sacrifice which and I knew you know Vidia one of my main commitments socially and ethically is is is for vegetarianism and I knew that he was a he was always thought of as a vegetarian
1:04:46
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 um but there was some kind of meat in his house which I always found quite shocking actually but
1:04:58
um but he had a Hindu sense of um the uncleanness of meat not just the sinfulness of killing but the that meat was dirty um and he goes to Africa and he goes all over the place and he is only really talking about this idea of that that the
1:05:19
power can be taken from the organ of a slaughtered animal or human and um this is something that I know exists in Africa um but in this book um he ties these ideas of sacrifice of power but also with this extremely fing view of um environmental
1:05:45
destruction and what it means to kill animals and to destroy the forest and um I I I I I put that book down with a chill in a way that um you know I'd missed it the first time I read it I just didn't I thought H was kind of
1:06:02
boring what do you think of the biography cidia I'm sure you know it Patrick fren's biography oh I I think that's who wrote oh no you mean Paul through thorough th yeah thid Shadow yeah it is different titles I think in us and UK well no there's a Patrick
1:06:20
French biography called the world is what it is um Patrick French who just died yeah but I me book yeah sir viia Shadow that's right that book is 100% accurate if you knew him um 100% accurate and yet totally wrong I mean he was one of these people that if
1:06:42
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 an obnoxious thing to say about gay people it's all there it's
1:06:52
all fair but um and you know was a provocator he loved getting a rise out of people and he and he was funny you know he was kind of um he was fun to talk to um I'll never forget I had like I I I'm from America so I don't understand Cricut and we were in England
1:07:13
I was at his house and he started he was watching Cricket he said Benji I must watch the cricket um and I said okay I was like but forgive my americ American ignorance but I still don't get cricket and um he sat there and he was
1:07:33
so patient and he spent like two or three hours because you know those cricket matches last forever um explaining everything I have I I retained zero of it when I see Cricket I still have no idea you know what's happening but
1:07:49
um but he was very kind to me he was very encouraging to me when I was young God knows why he was wonderful man why does Houston produce so few intellectuals or perhaps you will challenge the premise of that question well um I'm from Houston and
1:08:07
I'm something of an intellectual but I won't challenge the premise of the question um I think that when I was growing up and 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
1:08:23
um huge huge fascinating city of which I know absolutely nothing anymore um but it's a you know the I think it's Calvin kulage said the business of America is business and um the business of Houston is business I mean it's a business place
1:08:41
it's a place where you go to you know ship 500,000 tons of crude from Equatorial Guinea to be delivered in Shanghai on Tuesday at 11:15 a.m. and you know everybody I knew growing up my parents friends um and my teachers and all those people that were adults you
1:09:00
know I always thought that if you're good at math you became a doctor and if you're good at like English you became a lawyer and that sounds almost like an exaggeration but like I didn't really know about all these other professions
1:09:12
that people could have I didn't really it was a pretty you know the idea of the idea of culture was sort of an import phenomenon I mean it's not now it's it's quite different now but um I didn't I mean and my parents were pretty you know um
1:09:34
well-connected people in in the art World literary world my mother had a bookstore she actually had two bookstores one for children and one for adults um my father was a lawyer I mean I I I knew I had a pretty good introduction to the interesting people
1:09:52
around but if I hadn't gone away my mother said she wouldn't pay for me to go to college if if I stayed in Texas which I think was her I mean you know her parents sent her to college in Texas and you know I think she would have loved to have gone
1:10:11
somewhere else but that was that was back in in those times as different times and um I I 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
1:10:26
them very early um and it doesn't really change you know um CU I that's I think they just attract a certain kind of people I don't know but um I I don't I think I would be pretty lonely in Houston intellectually in a way that I'm
1:10:42
not here because even though this city I'm talking about UT here um 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 um it's not like I'm it's not like some idea of Paris with sarra at the next
1:11:01
table or something and it's not like that at all like I go 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
1:11:14
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
1:11:34
revealed very soon I for um 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
1:11:54
about um um well because of sag I spent a lot of time in the Balkans and um 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
1:12:15
four different names which used to be called serbo Croatian in the old days it's now called Serbian Croatian Bosnian and monten nran it's all the same language but I've been studying that uh for the last couple of years and I feel
1:12:30
like I'm really too old to learn another language especially one that I don't really have any um and like if I had learned it five 10 years ago it would have been useful for this book but now I I'm just like obsessively studying CBO Croatian and I have to say I I kind of
1:12:46
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 um and then eventually Sometimes they come in handy you know I studied Swedish in college
1:13:05
which was another story um 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 that afternoon so I went and um Swedish has never once in 30 years been of any use to me
1:13:23
whatsoever um 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
1:13:39
I mean it's still I'm still waiting for the moment that's going to come in handy 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