00:03:30.260We're on the exact same cultural wavelength.
00:03:32.440this is really cool totally okay so we're going to talk all about the larger realm of what people
00:03:39.180call dark academia but we're also going to talk specifically about your work in relation to it
00:03:44.020and we're going to make our way through we have some excellent listener questions but I think
00:03:49.480first we should talk a little bit about the two of your books that are often shelved under that
00:03:56.020designation of dark academia, or we could say historical fantasy. Babel is set in Oxford and
00:04:03.460I've been practicing. Katabasis is at Cambridge. In my head, I always pronounced it Katabasis,
00:04:10.480like Calabasas or something horrible, but Melody has been coaching me. Katabasis. So when people
00:04:16.480like meet you and they're like, oh, you write books, what are they about? Like, how do you
00:04:21.080describe what these books are about to people in the elevator pitch version of it oh gosh i actually
00:04:28.400have a really hard time answering the question what are your books about because i try i mean
00:04:33.780i try so hard to completely reinvent myself in between genres and projects so um i think some
00:04:40.880people are still shocked that the same person wrote yellow face um i think they don't belong
00:04:46.180anywhere near each other in a bookstore. So I always blank on this question, but I do think
00:04:53.240Babel and Katavasis form a nice little duology because they are both speaking to basically
00:05:02.460everything that is broken about higher education and colleges and universities. And the way I
00:05:10.720think about it is Babel does the big bird's eye view, socio historical critique, that's really
00:05:17.700looking at the long history of universities and their complicity, and not just complicity,
00:05:24.340but active participation in systems of colonialism and slavery and imperialism. So it crosses
00:05:31.500continents, it has a wide cast of characters, and it's really making this structural argument
00:05:36.880about the capitalist and imperialist foundations of the universities that we still idealize.
00:05:45.120And on the flip side, katavasis is an interpersonal critique. So rather than a cast of dozens of
00:05:50.840characters, it's really a triangle between Alice and Peter and Professor Grimes. And it's looking
00:05:57.440at the dynamics, like romantic and otherwise, that form between rival students and students
00:06:05.760and their teachers. So it is like a really zoomed in psychological portrait of just what being in
00:06:14.920that pressure cooker environment does to you, how it draws out the worst in people, but also creates
00:06:21.120opportunities for friendship and more than that. So yeah, one is zoomed out and one is zoomed in,
00:06:30.860But they're all about how doing a PhD is one of the worst decisions you can make.
00:06:38.140I had the pleasure of being able to read them like right after one another and really like see how they build on one another in a duology sense.
00:06:46.000like obviously no no carryover in terms of characters but to me catabasis really hit me
00:06:53.260where it hurt in terms of like touch the sensitive parts like all of the bruised parts in terms of
00:06:58.340like um so much of like the emotional investment in academia and both of them though are so effective
00:07:05.520in like bewitching you and then also turning things on their side like you get drawn into
00:07:11.720like the systems so much like the the rest of academia um we're going to talk about this so
00:07:17.720much more so i would love though before we even start a lot of the questions that we got or that
00:07:23.460we received were before we like specifically said that you are going to be our guest for this
00:07:29.160episode on dark academia so some of them are just thinking about the genre largely like at large
00:07:34.660and it's lack of critique of some of these structures and i love that like we get to be
00:07:40.660Like, oh, actually, there's such great interrogation that's happening.
00:07:44.700But before we get to that, do you think of yourself as someone like, does that feel like a genre home or do you feel more like outside of that?
00:07:56.940I'm happy for other people to classify my books however they want if it brings in an audience that otherwise wouldn't have been interested.
00:08:07.420So I don't mind either way when people call my books dark academia, but I don't think of it as
00:08:12.620a home. And I certainly don't build a literary identity around it, in part because I'm sort of
00:08:18.640confused what dark academia even is. I have a lot of working definitions and we can talk through
00:08:24.140them. And I think some are more useful than others and some are more charitable than others.
00:08:28.880But otherwise, I think the overlap here is that so far, I have tended to write about students in institutions where they don't belong. I write about outsiders navigating power structures where they are at severe disadvantages.
00:08:47.040um and because i think i'm a curious person who likes jumping down rabbit holes i end up writing
00:08:54.200characters who are very passionate about knowledge and research and discovery and i think these are
00:08:59.600all traits of a dark academia book so i'm happy to share that category um yeah as for the term
00:09:06.040with capitals i think that's very fraught and right i know it's much more born of tiktok than
00:09:11.660of like what is actually happening in the book.
00:09:20.460The Culture Study Podcast is sponsored by Gooder.
00:24:48.960everything clustered around the same subject matter or even things on totally irrelevant
00:24:55.700subject matters, but you just happen to stumble into because you confuse an M for an N. I found
00:25:03.100like so much. No, I always walked out with like far more texts than I thought I needed.
00:25:13.000And that was just part of doing research for me, sitting down, like it was largely
00:25:17.940off the screen, right? I was there with a notebook, taking reading notes and writing down
00:25:24.280citations. And I, you know, I do like Asian literature. So there was also a lot of like
00:25:31.760scratched out translations and flipping through dictionaries and it was so tactile. And as I got
00:25:40.620deeper into my academic career, there were more and more tools that made this unnecessary. First,
00:25:47.360it just became a trend that you can request the book you're looking for and the staff at the
00:25:54.360library will have it for you often within the hour. And I grew like really lazy about this
00:26:00.700in my early years at Yale. Like I was always going to the hold shelves and there are always
00:26:05.840like five, six, seven books like sitting there with my name on it. And I mean, that just saves
00:26:11.640like hours of your time, right? But it also means that you don't know what the belly of the stats
00:26:16.840look like. You're not discovering books by chance anymore. And I think we also grew more reliant on
00:26:23.160online research encyclopedias and dictionaries. And in important ways, like this is good for
00:26:29.220scholarship. It exposes you to a larger range of material. It helps you do your research faster.
00:26:35.060It helps you to be more thorough. I don't think anybody would argue that it was easier back then
00:26:40.380to be a researcher than it is now. But you're also missing out on those special connections
00:26:46.700when when you are off the screen um and and you mentioned like the fantasy of being a total
00:26:55.740floating brain that doesn't have to deal with the baggage of the body or any bulky stuff but
00:27:02.040i also think we're in an era where everybody's realizing like being that floating brain kind of0.53
00:27:07.060sucks totally being online all that time sucks like everybody wants to touch grass now everybody
00:27:12.320has screen fatigue. Everybody is tired of being this disembodied persona with no real human0.99
00:27:18.280connection. So I was talking to some colleagues just yesterday about how no phone policies in
00:27:26.180seminar rooms are much easier now to enforce with undergrads than they were even a couple years ago
00:27:32.580because I think my undergrads are sick and tired of being on their phones all the time. They are
00:27:37.020craving that human connection, they really want that excuse to disengage from the web and just
00:27:43.840sit around the seminar room and, you know, flip pens in their hands and look at one another
00:27:49.140in the face. So I think some of the romanticization of that earlier, like material
00:27:56.460tactile period is not necessarily a fetish for a bad thing. Like it's good to be embodied. It's
00:28:03.340good to wander in the stacks. It's good to slowly flip through a library and discover things you
00:28:09.040didn't know you were looking for. I think about this all the time. My period in my research
00:28:14.940was right before total mass digitization. So a lot of my primary texts were all on microfiche,
00:28:21.480were all in like dusty old magazines that I would order off eBay. Like my research was so much
00:28:27.640stronger because of the random things that I found around flipping through those pages,
00:28:32.720right looking at the ad next to the piece like looking at even like some of the magazines you
00:28:38.680know were owned by teens who like bought a movie magazine in the 1940s like what like what little
00:28:44.480marginalia did they put in there that gives you so much sense of reception oh my gosh and finding
00:28:51.040somebody else's handwriting in a book that you're consulting and thinking about somebody else's
00:28:56.360research project yes i mean i want to talk about as by its possession but something i'd love to
00:29:02.700forever I just made Melody read it I made her read it I was like Melody I've read this book
00:29:08.220five times you should go read it and shoot Melody did you like it the whole time I was reading it
00:29:14.080I was like I may not be smart enough for this and then when I finished it I was like well I can0.81
00:29:18.460understand that that was like a feat and then it was like the next day that I was like that was
00:29:23.660amazing like it just had to kind of like settle in yeah yeah it's gorgeous I would love to write
00:29:30.700book someday that is just comments in the margins traded between two people um talking about some
00:29:39.240central text but speaking of unexpected discoveries I picked up my copy of possession
00:29:44.400um at a used bookstore in New Haven a couple years ago um and it's the sort of bookstore where
00:29:50.180everybody departing from campus yeah um like leaves all their books when they go so you find
00:29:55.880like amazing stuff and I opened it and out fell a press clipping from 1996 um which I think is
00:30:04.420the year that the book came out that contained a review of the book so I think that was the first
00:30:09.500no it is the first edition and somebody cared enough to include the review and I was like oh
00:30:14.360my god so that's lovely and that's what's lost and I think about this too with a lot of
00:30:19.500tension that i think undergrads people of all ages are feeling with ai use and how to like what
00:30:28.380what governors can i put on the ability to do as more like to completely optimize the amount of
00:30:35.120work the amount of research that i can incorporate like because i think what we're realizing too is
00:30:40.280that sometimes researching more reading more having access to everything does not necessarily
00:30:45.360produce better research or better thinking it produces more of it more writing but is that
00:30:52.900better writing is like what are the what are the standards in academia become I think like as we've
00:30:58.760accelerated what you can theoretically produce as an academic we've also accelerated what you must
00:31:05.240as an academic produce yeah I mean don't get me started on the AI in the classroom conversation
00:31:11.660it is such a headache. I know, right? I am preparing this keynote that I'm giving in
00:31:18.820Cleveland on Thursday. And the topic is the beauty of writer's block and the magic of writer's
00:31:25.160block. And the whole talk is framed as a response to the promise of AI assisted creative writing
00:31:31.880tools, which is that you just get to dream and do the fun part of writing and the hard part will be
00:31:37.920resolved. And my whole talk is a defense of the hard part. And I'm arguing that it's in those
00:31:44.400gaps when you don't know the right word, you don't know what you think, and you're confused by
00:31:49.800yourself, you're confused by the world. Those are the most generative moments. Those are the moments
00:31:54.320when we reach deep down into ourselves and really drag out the words that we're too scared or
00:32:02.600ashamed or traumatized to admit. And that's often where the strongest writing comes from. So I'm
00:32:10.100for like being at a loss for words and making the wrong argument and struggling as an academic,0.99
00:32:17.320because that's where the interesting thinking happens, as opposed to the slick polish that
00:32:23.280AI promises, because like, nobody wants that. People want us that are messy and human.
00:32:29.540do you use your fiction writing as a way to not like do you switch between modes as a way to kind
00:32:38.980of like get the brain working because I used to find that when I would be writing for a more
00:32:43.360popular audience it would allow me to process some ideas in a more informal way that maybe
00:32:48.640would assist with some of my more formal ideas that I was working through for academic stuff
00:32:53.420But I needed to be able to have like a brief vacation from each thing.
00:33:01.080Yeah, it's very left brain, right brain for me.
00:33:04.240I'm very glad to be able to switch between the modes of writing because sometimes I'm like tired of trying to sound profound and interesting.
00:33:13.000And I just want to write like a very bland, factual statement.
00:33:15.680And sometimes I'm bored of the bland, factual stuff and I want to make dizzying leaps of logic and rhetorical flourishes.
00:33:22.920So I'm lucky that I get to vent both. But I do get in trouble with my advisor, because she continues to think that my academic writing is too flamboyant. And sometimes I say things without backing it up, which is true.
00:33:36.780she's always getting me to slow down and be methodical and really justify every single step
00:33:42.820and I'm like but in my novels I can just like throw like completely disparate fields of discourse
00:33:49.000together and like that'll be a beautiful image and obviously doesn't suit the requirements of
00:33:56.680the dissatisfaction. But you know like a left brain and a right brain make a whole brain
00:34:00.320and I love that like I can read your fiction and I see the signs of the research like and maybe this
00:34:06.620I don't think this is exclusively because I was an academic, but like, even in the preamble,
00:34:11.500I was like, this is a person who is used to people standing up in their conference
00:34:16.060presentation. What about this? Like, where would those scones be? Like, you know, just like clearing
00:34:23.440them table. You're like, here, just want to acknowledge these things. And now we're going.
00:34:27.860But then also, I'm sure in your academic writing, you get those flourishes, you get those leaps.
00:34:33.380And even if your advisor is trying to make you come back and, like, hone, bring it in a little bit, like, you still have that amazing, like, curiosity of spirit there.
00:35:49.520Obviously, I was not timed to say anything authoritative about grieving voice in post-9-11 cinema, but you can't tell a 21-year-old anything.
00:36:01.580the culture study podcast is sponsored by jones road beauty so the other thing that makes me look
00:36:10.240a little bit shimmery today is that i am wearing my jones road beauty miracle balm it is this
00:36:16.400perfect size it's like the size of a compact you open it up you just like put your fingers in warm
00:36:21.720it up a little bit and then you can wear it anywhere that you want a little bit of color
00:36:26.020just like a little natural color so i put it on my cheeks and it gives me exactly the like
00:36:31.360cool girl effortless natural look that I'm looking for aka sort of like you're wearing like that
00:36:38.320you're put together but that you don't actually spend a lot of time on your makeup. Jones Road
00:36:43.800also just launched a foundation stick for those days when you feel like okay I just want a little
00:36:48.000bit more coverage I just want things to look a little bit more smooth but I don't want to go
00:36:52.960back to like a full complicated makeup routine and also who has time for that. The foundation
00:36:58.300stick is available in 30 shades to match a wide variety of skin tones and it's dermatologist
00:37:03.440tested and packed with skin loving ingredients like ceramides squaloline and sodium hyaluronate
00:37:09.660to nourish while you wear it jones road is modern day makeup that's clean strategic and
00:37:15.760multifunctional for effortless routines for a limited time our listeners are getting a free
00:37:20.660gift on their first purchase when they use code culture at checkout just head to jones road beauty
00:42:24.380and thinking about what my future in academia looks like.
00:42:28.020Because I know I don't want the kind of traditional tenure track job where I'm only interfacing with like undergraduates who had to jump through a lot of hoops to be there.
00:42:40.600And I'm always thinking about public facing knowledge sharing and ways in which the academy can open up its gates.
00:42:50.460And I'm really glad you asked this question.
00:42:52.820But to answer the question more directly, I think the appeal of at least some texts in this genre is precisely that they're told from the perspective of outsiders, people who really don't belong in this world.
00:43:07.720I mean, if you look at the seminal text of this still undefined genre, we're still working without any real definition. Donna Tartt's The Secret History. The protagonist feels kind of lucky that he ended up at this school and he's looking at this click from the outside.
00:43:27.220he desperately wants to belong. He's studying their codes and mannerisms, and he's imitating
00:43:33.920them. And he wants to get through to them and feel included. And I think we all have this
00:43:39.860instinctive desire to be included and acknowledged. And part of it is schadenfreude. And really the
00:43:47.300same kind of schadenfreude you get from watching Gossip Girl. Is this outsider going to fall flat
00:43:52.260on their face when they try to succeed. And part of it, I think, is jealousy and this desire to be
00:43:57.820a part of that society. But again, I have very little patience for the kind of novel where a
00:44:05.480happy ending looks like successful integration into the school's elites, I think. It's telling
00:44:12.720that both of my quote-unquote dark academia novels end with all the protagonists leaving
00:44:18.740the academy, or in fact, the academy leaving the face of this earth. So I'm interested in the
00:44:27.140protagonists who are really, really conflicted about their position there, who have been sold
00:44:31.840this illusion their entire lives that they just have to jump through enough hoops that they
00:44:36.680personally have to prove themselves worthy. And then they get acknowledged and included by the
00:44:43.440wealthy elites. I like to write stories where they're very troubled by this, and they're looking
00:44:48.480for a way out, not just to quit and leave entirely, but to ask, what do alternative
00:44:53.460futures look like? And what do alternate models of the university look like? And I think that's
00:44:58.060a much more interesting question than how do you get the hot, rich guy to look at you?
00:45:04.360I think, you know, there's, we got a lot of questions that were basically like,
00:45:09.160can you set a dark academia plot at a public state institution? And I think so. But I would
00:45:17.460be interested in your thoughts here like do you need because to me like the public institutions
00:45:21.580where I've taught they do reproduce the same class dynamics they're not as legible as like
00:45:28.000this person is paying full tuition this person's grandpa's name is on this building and this person
00:45:34.820is here in full scholarship but they're still there but maybe it's like too muddled to actually
00:45:39.760work if you don't have that starkness I think the specific New England private academy association
00:45:45.820is fascinating to me. And I mean, as a very proud New Englander and Maskell, my first answer is it's
00:45:52.960just because it's the best up here. We have four seasons, we're cold and underfed, and we're good
00:46:00.140at clearing out the snow. So why wouldn't like all fantasy settings be up in chilly Massachusetts?
00:46:07.540But I have a like historical theory, which is just that the earliest academies were in New England,
00:46:13.080Our oldest universities, which were, and I give this spiel all the time when I'm explaining the inspirations for Babel. These were colleges built by slave owners for the express purposes of kidnapping Native American children and converting them and holding them hostage.0.78
00:46:29.660That was not just the unfortunate byproduct, but the stated aim of Harvard and Princeton and the College of William and Mary. So that very ugly history that stretches back to the founding of America that is specifically rooted in New England, which is to deny lots of shady stuff was happening in California as well.
00:46:54.460Um, I think also as a genre matter, um, well, so one quick anecdote here is I, when I was deciding between PhD programs, I visited Stanford and it was the first time that I'd ever stepped foot on that campus.
00:47:12.160And I was like, this feels like, like Disneyland, like it's too warm, people are walking, like people are moving in rollerblades and short shorts. And I was very angry about it. I was like, this is not a place for serious people. This is a place where research gets done. Research gets done in a place where you don't want to be outside and you can't see the sun.
00:47:33.160So I think we have those associations that like, like in a Logan Roy voice, frankly, like the West Coast are not serious people. I'm joking. Obviously, amazing stuff.
00:47:46.440No, but I do think that, like, I would love to see a dark academia-like novel set at, like, Vanderbilt or Ole Miss or SMU, which you're familiar with from being from Dallas.
00:48:03.000Like, those are schools where you get also these, like, incredibly rigid understandings of performance of gender and then, like, even more, like, I think noxious and still very present racial dynamics that, like, people pretend don't exist.
00:48:24.780or even like UT like I mean there's been so much subtext made text in white people suing to get
00:48:31.440into UT or like suing basically reverse discrimination by not being able to get into
00:48:36.600UT and that sort of thing but I think like that touches too close and we got to like we'll get to
00:48:42.700a question a little bit here about like why actually this is a great way to tee up this
00:48:47.020next question about why you've set your books in the past specifically not yellow face obviously
00:48:52.940but in the past so let's actually read that and that'll allow us to to segue i have one more thing1.00
00:48:57.940to say on the yeah yeah new england west coast divide um i i was thinking about legally blonde
00:49:05.480and like the really jarring contrast in between uh i ucla someplace like ucla where l is doing
00:49:13.840her undergrad degree and then harvard for serious people um but i i couldn't agree more i think that
00:49:19.660there's amazing material to be plumbed at, at state schools and on, you know, other parts of
00:49:25.620America that I must acknowledge do exist. I think Olive E. Blake's work is actually pretty good on
00:49:32.200this. There's a lot of critiques of the Greek system in dark academia, but I noticed not many
00:49:38.420people write books about sororities. And she's just put out a book called Girl Dinner, which is
00:49:43.040a cannibalism horror in a sorority. It was tons of fun. I think it's a state school as well.
00:49:49.020So, yeah, I think dark academia outside of Boston could be fascinating.
00:49:55.540I haven't heard of it, but it could be fascinating.
00:50:00.000Okay, let's do the second question from Abby.
00:50:03.380I love Babel and Catawba Seas, and I'm really curious why you set both in the past when they seem to me to be very much about the dynamics in academia now.
00:50:16.020now. I'm an academic myself, and I'd say I've seen versions of all the abuse and misconduct
00:50:25.760in Katabasis happen in real life to people that I know, at least all of the non-magical stuff.0.57
00:50:33.640And a lot of what happens in Babel also feels more like the academic toxicity of the 21st
00:50:42.060century than necessarily the 19th century. So I'm wondering, is dark academia a genre that just
00:50:50.380needs to be set in the past in order to not be a huge bummer? Or would it not work in the present
00:50:56.340for aesthetic reasons? Oh, I can't wait for your thoughts on this. You can also disagree with the
00:51:01.160premise of the question. We've established that. So I really got in trouble with my editor when I
00:51:07.580said I really wanted to write a book set in the 80s because I love period pieces and he was like
00:51:15.540shut up um so I'm always reminding myself that the 80s is not distant history for everybody in fact
00:51:22.540that's just when they grew up um but I mean it's true I I love a good historical fantasy um and I
00:51:31.440was fascinated by the 80s in particular, because I have done so much research into the Cold War
00:51:40.000and in the shifting dynamics right after America kind of emerges on top as the imperialist power.
00:51:47.740And I was thinking about the transition from the 60s to the 80s, where you have the civil rights
00:51:55.640era you have this era of the third world united front you have this like really brief hopeful
00:52:02.580moment of international solidarity and all of these decolonial movements and a time in which
00:52:10.020it seemed like self-determination was really possible where a lot of former colonies were
00:52:15.560throwing off those yokes and establishing their own governments and um international socialism
00:52:21.320actually seemed like a viable future. And all of that progress and all those dreams were just then
00:52:27.360violently crushed by the Cold War and the transition into the Reagan era and the rise
00:52:33.540of neoliberalism in American culture where everyone really buys into this, pull yourself
00:52:39.800up by your bootstraps. You are the sole author of your future. You can't blame any structural
00:52:45.900forces. You can't blame discrimination. If you fail, it's not because you're a woman or a
00:52:51.060minority. It's because you just weren't good enough. And I wanted to see how that shift0.94
00:52:56.040happened and how it was reflected in a young woman navigating the academy. So that's why I
00:53:02.380set Katavasis in 1985. But I think you could easily apply all those same arguments to today.
00:53:11.520It's just that I had just done a very contemporary novel and yellow faces. I think it's really hard
00:53:17.880to write about the 2020s without a text being extremely online. And Yellowface was so much1.00
00:53:25.300about really how the grammar of social media destroys our ability to relate to each other
00:53:32.400and kind of destroys our ability to think. And I wanted to think for a bit. I wanted
00:53:37.360to go analog for a bit. I still really prefer the analog space. So that's why I avoided
00:53:44.700a contemporary frame and then early 19th century britain like i i know you moved a couple of events
00:53:53.240around to work for the storyline but like isn't like victoria coronated during the text like it's
00:54:01.260just such an interesting moment and also like using silver as this magical force that actually
00:54:08.880functions as like a really beautiful stand-in for both technological advancement
00:54:13.460also just like extraction broadly um but now i think we can like also think of other things
00:54:22.600that are serving that function now like the best stuff about our past like also allows us to reflect
00:54:27.540on our future i love that yeah that's true i i also picked the 1830s because i was feeling
00:54:36.280really cheeky after I finished the popular trilogy. And I just wanted to insert myself
00:54:41.700in a canon where I really didn't belong, or I felt there was no space for me. And it seemed like
00:54:46.960the whitest, stalest space was the Victorians and Victorian pastiche. And it turns out our
00:54:55.720popular reimagining of early Victorian London is way more white than it was in reality. I mean,0.84
00:55:04.080And if you walked along the docks of London in 1832, you would have heard like a dozen different languages and you would have encountered people from all over the world.
00:55:13.400It was an incredibly cosmopolitan, diverse and changing city.
00:55:18.400But you watch a period film and like all of that gets erased.
00:55:23.160So I wanted to juxtapose like real history with our like popular frame of that era and also see like how much elbow room I could create for people who looked like Robin and Remy and Victoire.
00:55:36.980with your new book i know you i think you told um hua su for the new yorker profile who by the way
00:55:47.320i was on a panel with him a billion years ago at mla and he was one of the first people who showed
00:55:52.680me what like writing for a popular audience while also being an academic could look like
00:55:57.660um this is when he was still teaching full-time and he was just kind of like writing for the
00:56:02.600new yorker on the side so watching his career has just been incredibly inspirational but um i think
00:56:08.900that i'm remembering that you said that your the new book is influenced by patricia lockwood oh yes
00:56:16.180and she to me does she's one of the only people that i think can do contemporary really really
00:56:22.020really well i mean she's a hero to me in a lot of ways um we've been talking about how dark academia
00:56:31.720is so elitist and it's a world in which the gates are closed but her background um and the way that
00:56:41.180she does literary criticism she's one of my favorite critics alive because the way that
00:56:46.800she thinks about the text is so capacious and curious and it's not um it's not like
00:56:53.780that she's dumbing down anything in order to invite the reader in but it's just the total
00:57:00.220opposite of a form of criticism that I see more and more of now that really turns me off where
00:57:05.200it's about like it's really about comparing like who is the best snob like who has the most
00:57:12.480rarefied opinion on who has the most rarefied and coolest opinion on like increasingly like
00:57:18.160minute issues and she will take a text and turn it over from all different perspectives and
00:57:23.760situated in like a very large body of sometimes like totally surprising comparisons that just
00:57:30.180get you excited to read not only the text, but everything in this insane cluster of ideas that
00:57:35.640she's built around it. And that is such a great example of a public intellectual that really cares
00:57:41.180about bringing people in and widening a conversation as opposed to keeping people out.
00:57:46.400So that like, she's like such a role model for me. But yes, the way that she writes about the
00:57:51.620internet uh no one is talking about this is one of my favorite books she's so funny she's so i mean
00:57:57.860she nails it every time um so with taipei story i was really just trying to get like a fraction
00:58:04.100of her humor i i love how like just in the span of three words right she'll twist the knife
00:58:11.460and then this whole paragraph um you'll see in a new light and it'll seem hilarious um
00:58:17.020and i was trying to do something similar so yeah she is endlessly funny and also i love that like
00:58:24.560the some of the language the hilarious like it can be vulgar it can be made up words like whatever
00:58:30.760that she uses also like to see it in the london review of books like that to me is just like a
00:58:36.500triumph right to like an institution that you associate with a more stodgy or more
00:58:41.320traditional form of criticism to have it live there it's just really lovely
00:58:47.860Our last question, we have just a little bit of time, but I really wanted to get to this one because I think it's something that you've talked about a bit.
00:58:53.900And I'm also super interested to see how you put the new book in Taipei Story into this larger schema.
00:59:01.380So this question comes from Micah and Melody's going to read it.
00:59:04.460Dark academia and fantasy at large often explore the same themes as lit fic, but gets marketed as narrow genre fiction.
00:59:11.700Is it frustrating to see the discrepancy between how Babel is received, marketed, and reviewed versus a book like Yellowface, where the lit fic seems to be considered the more serious work?
00:59:23.620So there's a section in the New Yorker profile where Tochi Onobuchi describes the two of you as like fantasy writers, the type of fantasy writers who also read like Brothers Karamazov, right?
00:59:35.080And he says something along the lines of like, the Hugo is nice.
00:59:41.700but what about the booker and he says he predicts that like the booker is in your future
00:59:47.580and to me that was such an interesting like what do we aspire to what does like excellence look
00:59:54.480like but then also within that profile you talked about how like winning doesn't mean anything to
01:00:00.260you or that it like once you win something it loses i don't just you have a complicated
01:00:05.620relationship with winning or mastery. So how do you think about this with the genre as well?
01:00:14.360Look, everybody loves to win things. But I mean, the way I think about awards is this.
01:00:21.640The Alfie Awards, which is George R.R. Martin's personal awards ceremony that he puts on,
01:00:27.940just like really for shits and gigs. It's like a really lovely thing. And he hosted a version of0.91
01:00:33.340the Alfie Awards for people who had been excluded from I think the 2023 I want to say Hugo Slate
01:00:41.920for weird censoring reasons and he said all an award is is a group of people got in a room and
01:00:47.460said hey you did this really cool thing and that's how I think about awards you know it is like it's
01:00:52.620absolutely no statement on books relative quality or worth to one another it's just a bunch of
01:01:00.260people saying hey you did a cool thing um yes so you know i don't winner them i lose them i don't
01:01:05.320really mind um but as to like the lit fig fantasy categories i'm again a genre agnostic i'll take
01:01:13.460whatever label will get somebody interested in a text um and i've seen this cut both ways um i think
01:01:21.000yes people do still take fantasy less seriously though i think that is changing um there's also
01:01:27.980this really weird contradiction where when Kazuo Ishiguro writes what is clearly fantasy
01:01:35.580and science fiction, that's literary fiction. Jorge Luis Borges, Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel
01:01:41.360Garcia Marquez, like they're all doing the exact same stuff that like Susanna Clark is
01:01:46.520doing, right? And one of them is writing fantasy and one of them is writing literary fiction.
01:01:51.280And some of that I think has to do with actually quite deliberate marketing decisions made by
01:01:56.900publishers, what imprint you're at, what target audience they're appealing to. And I'm not going
01:02:03.080to get into weeds with book design. Oh, my gosh. I mean, really, literally, what imprint are you
01:02:10.580published by? Because there are some imprints that will just never be taken seriously as
01:02:15.400literary fiction, no matter how amazing the book is. So I find that deeply annoying. On the other
01:02:21.860hand um yellow face it is marketed as literary fiction but also sometimes it gets slotted into
01:02:29.280this chick lit or like women's literature like genre um so people who liked babble or like that
01:02:36.480sort of book like will take yellow face a lot less seriously um so at the end of the day i think like
01:02:41.920all genre value judgments are i mean it's just like cultural sociology 101 right it is just
01:02:49.840critics inflating their own value by putting down some books and like artificially praising other
01:02:56.140books and it's all just sort of a nonsense game of influence and clout. But like I read across
01:03:02.280all genres and I'm influenced by all genres and a good book is a good book. Yes. Can I just suggest
01:03:09.160I so I went to a college that had one of the like top debate programs that those debaters
01:03:16.840were down the hall from me because I also went back and taught there and their like little
01:03:20.760cloister was down the hall from me so I could hear them practicing all the time and this was
01:03:25.760a small liberal arts college so like you you knew everyone in your class but no one knew the
01:03:31.440debaters because the debaters spent all of their time together they had all of their drama together
01:03:37.260you could recognize them on campus because they were always carrying their little like like I
01:03:42.580don't know, like suitcase rollies that had all of their research. They dressed the same. They
01:03:46.620traveled all the time. Like, what about a dark academia or an academic novel about debate? Have
01:03:53.960you thought about this? I would love to write a campus novel about debaters. It is like one of
01:04:01.260my back burner projects because that was such a crazy and fun and strange experience to have.
01:04:08.540Like that defined my adolescence. I was living and breathing debate. And if there's any high school experience that comes close to like the magical boarding school story, it really is debate because you are with your team all the time. Like you have rivalries with other teams. You would like die for your teammates. You know, the scene in Riverdale where Archie's like, you haven't known the highs and lows of high school football.
01:04:34.440most people have not known the highs and lows of high school debate when i was writing the poppy
01:04:43.980war there is a scene early on where there there's this martial arts tournament that's part of their
01:04:49.580first year exams um and those big feelings around the tournament when people are cheering for one
01:04:55.460person or another or when people get like knocked down in the ring like all of that is just projected
01:05:01.160from emotions I had during debate it was like the single most defining experience of my life I
01:05:08.040still keep up with former debaters and I still have debate nightmares but I think it's very rare
01:05:13.420there's not a lot of opportunities if you're not very athletic to be like fighting for your life
01:05:19.500every weekend and to have the chance to be the best at something in the country so
01:05:25.720yeah, such a strange and sort of inexplicable world. But I think that would make for a really
01:05:32.340funny campus novel. Well, and also just like the rhetorical style, like Lincoln Douglas style is
01:05:39.620just so fascinating. Like there would just be so much to like, there's so many places to go. So
01:05:46.700if you ever take that off the back burner, I would love to read it. If people want to find
01:05:51.660more about you and connect to your work, your books, where can they find your stuff on the
01:05:57.420internet? Where would you direct them? I'm at rfkwong.com and I send out updates through my
01:06:02.960newsletter and I'm very happy to not have a big social media footprint outside of that.
01:06:07.380Thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's just been such a pleasure. I can't,
01:06:11.900I can't thank you enough. Thank you for having me. I had so much fun.
01:06:15.120thanks for listening to the culture study podcast today paid subscribers got a bonus conversation
01:06:24.720very detailed between melody and me about how we think about our book collections what we buy what
01:06:30.660we loan out what we borrow if you want to support the show and be sure to always get that bonus
01:06:35.240content head to patreon.com slash culture study it's just five bucks a month or 50 a year and
01:06:41.800you'll get ad-free episodes, that exclusive weekly advice time segment, and a weekly discussion
01:06:47.340thread for each episode. Also, be sure to follow the show wherever you get your podcasts. We have
01:06:53.400so many great episodes in the works and I promise you don't want to miss any of them. So if you want
01:06:58.440to suggest a topic, ask a question about the culture that surrounds you, or submit a question
01:07:02.920for our subscriber-only advice time segment, go to our Google forum at tinyurl.com slash
01:07:09.140culturestudypod or check the show notes for a link. The Culture Study Podcast is produced by
01:07:14.080me, Anne Helen Peterson, and Melody Rowell. Our music is by Pontington Bear. You can find me on
01:07:19.120Instagram at Anne Helen Peterson, Melody at Melodious47, and the show at Culture Study Pod.