00:00:40.000No, basically, we wanted to keep it manageable, and the amount of questions that folks had on Patreon was tremendous, which means that this is going to be a two-parter.
00:00:49.820We're going to do one part in front of the paywall.
00:00:51.720The second one is going to be on the Patreon.
00:00:53.820And as a gift to our Patreon listeners who raked me over the coals for hating on a particular restaurant once,
00:01:02.220we're thinking about recording the second part of it at the Cheesecake Factory,
00:01:05.480which is a joke that someone will only get if they, in fact, follow us on Patreon.
00:01:10.200We're still trying to figure out whether we will order food from there or do takeout or whether...
00:01:14.480No, you have to go to the Cheesecake Factory.
00:03:36.340And so I thought that we would sort of ease into the questions with some very easy ones.
00:03:41.660So as we started out saying, as we always do, I'm Adrian Dobb, you're Maura Donegan, yada, yada, yada.
00:03:47.400The first question we got was about that little exchange.
00:03:51.840A listener writes, this is truly unimportant, but as a listener from Germany, I've been curious for a while why Adrian seems to pronounce his surname wrong.
00:04:01.800Is it not wrong, but maybe your husband's surname? Is there some reason for it?
00:04:05.920These are the things I wonder about every time I tune in, which is very often because I love the show a lot.
00:04:09.600So thank you so much. And yes, indeed, I am. That's not my husband's name. And it's not Dob, it's Dalb. But I have not corrected people about this for a long, long time. And by now, I'm honestly not sure what I would consider the correct pronunciation.
00:04:24.440My family's name is Daub, and when I answer the phone in Germany, that's obviously how I would say it.0.94
00:04:29.400But, you know, I've undergone a process of Americanization, and part of the process of Americanization is, are people going to fuck up your name, right?
00:04:37.520Like, it's happened to my husband, it's happened to me.
00:04:40.300And this is not to say that, like, oh, I feel it's persnickety if people do correct people on their name.
00:07:02.880Because, like, it's the choice between you sound like some charming, like, character from a movie or, like, you sound like a Nazi, you know.0.96
00:07:12.160Yeah, like, the characters in our movies who have that accent are all the bad guys, unfortunately.
00:07:17.060I sound like I'm taking over Nakatomi Plaza, you know?
00:07:53.220It's not that easy, you know, to come up with a good answer why.
00:07:56.240But like it's just one of these things you sort of habituate yourself to and you sort of do over time.
00:08:02.060That's a good biographical question to ask me because I'm like, whoa, yeah, that opens up a lot.
00:08:07.780The second question that came up is I'm curious about what kind of media both Adrian and Moira consume.
00:08:14.520I mean, at this point, I'm pretty sure that Adrian is not a daily reader of the NSAIDs, the Neuzürcher Zeitung, a newspaper I make fun of a lot.
00:08:22.620But anything in the German language, interesting, a lot of German questions here.
00:08:26.940Yeah, what does media we both consume?
00:08:30.100I listen to a lot of audio content, right?
00:08:34.140So, like, I listen to a lot of other podcasts.
00:08:55.020I used to take the subway to work, which was reading time.
00:08:57.900And now I drive to work, which cannot be reading time unless I want to be on the news.
00:09:02.200So I actually started listening to audiobooks.
00:09:05.940Yeah. And I find that I can't do a serious workbook as an audiobook, like something that I really need to know backwards and forwards. I can't do it as an audiobook because I do tune out a little bit.
00:09:19.500It's also hard to take notes. I know that Pat Blanchfield, a friend of the pod, I think has a way of doing that. I've never figured it out. Same here. I do a lot of audiobooks and when I do, I tend to read along on the e-book.
00:09:32.840Yeah, like sometimes I'll have a, like a deadline.
00:09:36.240Like I had to do a book event that I got asked at the very last minute to do.
00:09:41.340And it was like, okay, you have to read this book that's like 400 pages and you have three days to do it.
00:09:46.560And I was like, well, that's not going to happen with just me and the text.
00:09:50.300So I had a copy of the book and then I also downloaded the audio book and I was like doing both.
00:09:54.560And that was actually a really like quick way to get through it.
00:09:56.840That's also something that I think we do for the pod a lot if there's just a lot to consume, like a little bit of a future episode foreshadowing.
00:10:04.800We're doing an episode, because I decided I wanted to, on Daphne du Maurier.
00:10:09.720That's a pretty voluminous oeuvre, and I wanted to make sure I really did her justice.
00:10:15.020I don't have enough time in the day to sort of sit down with a paper book in order to prepare, you know, as Maura's saying, like five or six novels for a recording in two weeks.
00:10:26.460And at that point, like, yeah, it's going to be an audiobook with an e-book at the same time.
00:10:31.900So I tend to do a lot of my pleasure reading as audiobooks.
00:11:53.000It's this guy who's like allegedly a murderer and a bandit and his neighbors, you know, try to kick him out of their little like key island.
00:12:01.620And when they can't, they decide to collectively get together and murder him.
00:12:06.220And there's a lot of intrigue along the way about competing economic forces down in South Florida at the turn of the century.
00:12:13.880And it's like, it's the kind of thing that I got because I was upstate with all my friends and like a bunch of people were like, yes, my dad loves this book.
00:12:22.520Like, my dad keeps, like, telling me to read this book.
00:12:24.740Or, like, my friend Brooke said that her father had bought her a copy of the book for, like, three consecutive Christmases because he keeps forgetting that he got it for her already, but remembering how much he loves it.
00:13:43.96030 minutes in, and I was like, nah, I'm going to buy the book, you guys.
00:13:47.860I think the longest thing I've ever read, ever listened to as an audiobook is probably either the Laurence Durell Alexandria Quartet or the Mervyn Peake Gormenghast novels.
00:14:00.380Those are pretty hefty and those I did make it through.
00:14:02.960But those are ones where it almost doesn't matter that you retain information.
00:14:06.680It's like it's a vibe more than it is like, oh, I have to pay close attention to the story.
00:14:12.860But yeah, the moment there's a crime that I need to solve, I'm like, I cannot be listening to this.
00:15:36.780But, like, I consume that medium as a way to turn my brain off so I can go to sleep at the end of a long day of thinking about, you know, rape.
00:15:43.860and, like, male domination, and I just don't want to do it.
00:15:48.920I've had something funny happen to me with TV.
00:18:04.140You know what, speaking of like a difficult movie,
00:18:07.940Just last night, I went out to the theater near us, the, like, repertory movie theater, like, close to where Adrian and I live, and I saw Persona.
00:20:03.740It's just not happening for people who have five-year-old children.
00:20:06.740It's true, and I think it's coming back, but there really was a moment when, like, it was just you and a few people.
00:20:12.720It's also, even though I guess they're also, like, really hilarious and really upsetting movie experiences I've had in very empty theaters,
00:23:02.080And it turns out that what happened is that she listened to the podcast, and her, like, brain, her, like, lizard brain was like, I have hung out with Moira.
00:26:04.040It's not an enforceable freedom that way.
00:26:05.720The other thing, though, is I feel like we are not at the level of podcasting.
00:26:10.820We're picking a fight with us will elevate someone's stature.
00:26:14.020But this is something that I think at this point, Jesse Single sort of like alienates Michael Hobbs on purpose because like, yeah, it like elevates his stature.
00:26:23.760Because Michael Hobbs is a lot more successful than Jesse Single.
00:26:27.300And every time Jesse Single like successfully baits Michael Hobbs, it's his name, you know, plastered everywhere.
00:26:33.520So, on the one hand, sometimes I worry about people like Peter Thiel, and then other times I worry about, like, oh, is this the kind of person who would make a huge deal out of this in order to kind of elevate their own stature?
00:26:45.020And that's the other, I think, risk that you run, which is, like, it's not threatening as much as, like, it's just annoying.0.99
00:26:50.940You're like, ugh, now I'm providing free publicity for this asshole.0.98
00:26:53.520Like, why didn't I just not talk about them?0.99
00:26:55.600Well, the solution to that is to not become very successful.
00:27:32.460It has become so central to my thinking, and frankly, it remains, I think, such a good heuristic for understanding how the right organizes itself at this moment, and especially these moments of weird interchangeability where you're like, these people, their styles of masculinity are totally different, and yet they seem to make easy common cause here.
00:27:51.520To me, it really still organizes my thinking, and yeah, we're going to dedicate more episodes to it.
00:27:56.420How about, will we ever get more Wagner content out of Adrian?
00:28:00.440I want, now I'm like on the hunt for Wagner.
00:28:03.000I like want to go see more Wagner operas.
00:30:35.840So the other thing, because people seem to be also interested in how the podcast gets made, one of the reasons classical music is a little bit harder to do is because we're never quite sure how much music we're allowed to play.
00:30:50.400We need to get more of that sweet, sweet Patreon money so that we can hire a lawyer to answer this exact question for us like once and then never call her again.
00:30:58.360I think a Mahler episode would be amazing,
00:31:01.600but because it's not a story-driven and symphonic music,
00:31:27.160Okay, so I was on the East Coast for two weeks. I was hanging out. I went to the Catskills, and I hung out in a bunch of swimming holes. I saw all of my East Coast friends. I went to D.C. for work very briefly for a Supreme Court term and review panel, which was very, very fun. Shout out to Michelle Goodwin of Georgetown Law's O'Neill Center for having me there.
00:33:29.660Another question. As a parent of a soon-to-be college student, I'd love to hear your thoughts on what students can study to counteract the indomiting effects of AI and media mediocrity.
00:33:39.820I mean, I really strongly feel the generative AI use makes us dumber.
00:33:46.500I think it reaffirms our priors and it atrophies the muscles of, you know, trying to articulate a thought, trying to build an argument, trying to, like, consider a counter argument.
00:34:01.800These are all things that, like, social media was already kind of doing and, like, the phones, as they say, were already kind of doing.
00:34:08.540And AI seems like a logical endpoint in which, like, all of creative endeavors are outsourced to machines that just reproduce the same thing over and over and are, like, kind of by design, by definition, by the way that they function, sort of incapable of producing anything new because they're just drawing on everything that is before, right?
00:34:30.100An AI chatbot can never deliver a novel insight.
00:34:33.460So I think that your student probably should resist using AI and instead will themselves to read and write themselves and to develop reading comprehension skills, which are really lacking in a lot of undergraduates, and also like critical thinking skills.
00:34:53.760And that will put them ahead of their peers and also possibly make them kind of lonely.
00:34:59.860The other side to that, though, is that even though AI is, at least in my view of the situation, completely counterproductive to the skills and habits and capacities that we as educators have a responsibility to cultivate in our students, administrators are basically mandating its use in a lot of universities, right?0.99
00:35:18.340So it's like, no, this is a thing that actually makes you stupider. And now university administrations are saying we must use it to teach our students like it's enforced integration of this technology that is like actively counterproductive to the nominal aims of the institution. So that's a trap. And I think it sucks.
00:35:40.200I mean, I fully agree with everything you said. I think that you want sort of practical advice. I would say small majors with small classes, I think, are more immune to the effects that you're describing in your question.0.98
00:35:53.360And I think that, as Mara is saying, disciplines where collective and dialogic exploration of texts, but also of data is central, it's much harder to kind of use a chatbot or some AI service or to even get tempted, you know, at 11 p.m. when an assignment is due or when you know that a big discussion is coming up in seminar to reach for one of these tools.
00:36:23.140Because you're like, well, the kind of thing I would need, this thing cannot do.
00:36:26.900Well, that, you know, leaves you in the same lurch that college students have been in for the last, you know, 2,000 years.1.00
00:36:33.640Where you're like, fuck, I'm just going to cram and I'm going to bullshit.0.99
00:36:36.420And those are all very valuable skills.1.00
00:37:00.720It's good to be able to have a – I'm stammering because I'm looking for a word that's not bullshit.0.97
00:37:08.560Like, bullshit is actually a very useful skill, right?0.95
00:37:10.660Like, let's be like, okay, this is not something I maybe would have done the way an honorable kid would have done or, like, the way the best version of myself would have done it, which is, like,0.98
00:37:21.300You know, you've researched, you outline, you like draft, you edit, you redraft.
00:37:26.880If you're like, okay, I have to get 10 pages typed by the midnight deadline and it's currently 9 p.m., it is a skill in its own right to be able to very quickly reach for something passable.
00:37:40.620Precisely because you operationalize, right?0.93
00:37:42.620Like in that moment when you're like, oh, fuck, the paper's due this week, right?0.98
00:37:48.720I always knew when it was due and I delayed anyway.
00:37:51.300I think that there's an element of like, well, what is the absolute minimum I need to do in order to attain some level of mastery, the lowest level of mastery that will keep me on the pass side of pass fail?
00:38:05.640Is that the greatest exercise in the world?
00:38:58.920And I found that that really sort of, it sharpens your instincts for what's a good argument,
00:39:03.600for what's a responsible way of marshalling the evidence.
00:39:07.140What are the things that you should probably check up on, right?
00:39:09.660Like what are the things you should Google before you start writing?
00:39:12.920Are there some things you should really think hard about before you're making that argument?
00:39:17.480Is there something deeply problematic or question-begging about that argument?
00:39:21.560And how do you figure that out before?
00:39:23.580I always think about it like it's the way to assess the ice before you step on it, right?
00:39:27.920Like you can sort of see where the cracks are.
00:39:30.580You can sort of see where you can plant your feet and then sort of plan your next steps.
00:39:34.640And those are all habits of mine that I hold quite dear.
00:39:37.880It's definitely not a writing situation that's ideal.
00:39:40.740It's definitely not one I would wish on anyone, but I found it quite helpful.
00:39:44.600I mean, I'll say that the thing about writing a 10-page paper in three hours is that now when I read a book, the first thought I have is the thought that I could cram out a 10-page paper in three hours on, right?
00:39:57.520And now if I have a little more time because I'm an adult and I've managed my time, you know, marginally better, now I have more luxury to have a second thought or a deeper thought and I can do a little better.
00:40:07.200You know, that 10-page paper of a thought becomes a little deeper, my argument becomes a little more robust, and that's not something I would have gained if I hadn't developed that initial way of reading, right, where I'm like thinking about how to form an idea, how to address a theme, how to integrate what I'm reading with other things that I'm reading or other things that I know.
00:40:30.800Yeah, or the opposite, right? Like a frequent problem that undergraduates can have with 10-page papers is not that they don't understand the kind of thesis they could be having about this text, but they don't understand that this is not a thesis you can have or prove about a text, right?
00:40:48.080You're like, these terms are too wishy-washy.
00:42:54.480And in those days, this was all done with slide projectors.
00:42:58.100Now, fun fact about slide projectors is that they need a darkened room, 9 a.m., darkened room, a professor with a great deal of charisma but a slightly monotonous voice, a slow talker.
00:43:10.220You see where I'm going with this. I was frequently hungover. I was usually asleep.
00:43:14.800And so it turns out the amount of facts about Florentine art you absorb while both potentially still hungover and asleep is limited.
00:43:25.300And so I discovered that I was not well prepared for the exam.
00:43:29.860Luckily, another kid in my class who was high the entire time was in the same situation.
00:43:36.300What I didn't fully grasp at the time is that the reason he was frequently high in class
00:43:39.920and was unprepared for the finals is that he was a huge drug dealer.
00:43:43.780And so he shows up to my dorm room with, we had binders in those days,
00:43:48.960binders of reserve materials for this class and some Adderall.
00:43:54.920And I'm like, what do you do with this?
00:44:19.060Apparently, I finished it in 45 minutes.0.98
00:44:21.560I went home and just passed the fuck out.
00:44:23.840I reproduced a fairly complicated sort of like diagram of like how intention and like material interplay in art from one of our readings.0.95
00:44:37.800I have no recollection of this material today.
00:44:40.620And I was just, yeah, to this day, like whenever I'm in Florence, I feel really, really guilty because I'm like, man, I should know more about this than I do.
00:44:51.220Anyway, so that is my art history story.
00:44:53.280That's pretty funny. But we have one more question. So one listener asks, I have a question I've really been wanting to ask. Is Freud washed?
00:45:03.240As many are asking, essentially I've always had the impression that there wasn't a lot of actual evidence for Freud's theories.
00:45:10.400So I was wondering why Freudianism still seems to be taken quite seriously in some areas of cultural and literary analysis, including in some, not all obviously, feminist theory.
00:45:20.720I work in STEM, so I fully admit I might just be a Philistine who has been too taken in by the epistemic authority of these fields.
00:45:32.240Yeah, this is a debate I have with many friends and colleagues as well, right?
00:45:37.600Like, this is kind of an awkward thing that, like, Freud's theories are induced to explain things in psychology, and yet in psychology departments there's very little Freud these days.
00:45:47.420And yet in literature departments, we're, like, still referring to it as though it's, like, somehow established science.
00:45:55.760Well, this brings me to the distinction I think we have to make about Freud, which is that as a clinical practice, psychoanalysis doesn't yield empirical measures of improved clinical outcomes.
00:46:12.320If you are mentally suffering and you want to alleviate your mental suffering or you want to change behaviors, psychoanalysis is probably not the best option for you.
00:46:25.260That doesn't mean it's not a workable or legitimate option, but it's also, you know, three to five days a week at $250 an hour.
00:46:32.420So it's not it's not really an accessible option for most people anyway.
00:46:36.040But like it does not deliver empirically measurable clinical improvements the way something like DBT does.
00:46:50.840If you want to understand a text, I think he's more useful.
00:46:54.380And this is because, like, Freud, you know, we talk about Freud as a intervener who sort of, like, came as if down from the mountain with this new knowledge.
00:47:05.900And what he was actually doing was, I think, like, articulating stuff other people had talked about, right?
00:47:09.840Like, the ancients had a concept of the unconscious.
00:47:12.700He was a good recognizer of patterns, and therefore he provides a good framework for talking about, like, thematic patterns.
00:47:20.240And what he is not going to do, which I think some people would really like him to do, which is like sort of unlock this esoteric world of knowledge when everybody's, you know, behaviors can be predicted and their motivations decoded and you can understand people who annoy or trouble or threaten you better than they understand themselves.
00:47:38.540I don't think it works that way very well.
00:47:40.440I think what it does is provide a really good framework for articulating political themes.
00:47:49.340You, Adrian, as a serious academic who's been in these departments for a very long time, might have a, like, more in-depth perspective.
00:47:57.220No, I mean, I think that's definitely right.
00:47:59.820So I've lectured on Freud and I've taught classes on Freud.
00:48:03.160And I think, to me, his utility as a theorist has always been things that he has in common with other people.
00:48:11.400As you say, it's not that this is uniquely Freudian.
00:48:14.060But I do find, for instance, very helpful this kind of clinical practice and interpretive practice that remains with the signifier and doesn't sort of ask or even brackets the question of the signified.
00:48:30.080Not the question, like, is this true, which is a question that I find very important and very central to ask sometimes.
00:48:37.540But sometimes it's worth just saying, like, well, let's bracket whether it's true or not.
00:49:18.860Freud allows you to go to a place where that's not a contradiction and be like, okay, how is that resolved?
00:49:24.780What are the mental processes by which these things are not in fact contradictory to a particular psyche, right?
00:49:32.060That's something that makes Freud actually extremely generative to me.
00:49:35.280But as Moira was saying, this is something that makes empirical measurability very difficult
00:49:41.060Because it's always about these moments of ambiguity or what Freud calls overdetermination, right, where two things or more things at once are happening.
00:49:47.900That makes it very difficult to measure because in some way you have to take my word for it.
00:49:51.680It's like, well, these two things are going on at the same time and here's what I imagine must be true in order for them not to be contradictory.
00:49:58.760I think that's an extremely powerful interpretive move, especially, I think, at a moment when we found that the power of just pointing out that something is illogical is extremely limited, right?
00:50:12.840We've learned that we can debunk until the cows come home, and it's not going to change the fact that it works for people.
00:50:20.840And, like, that is the central observation of Freudian psychoanalysis.
00:50:25.680The question isn't, how does this make sense?
00:50:28.760It obviously doesn't. The Freudian psyche is a messed up, weird place, but it works, right? Somehow people manage to function this way, manage to make it all coherent to a personality, make it coherent to a biography, into a life. How? What are the forces that allow that to happen?
00:50:46.860At its most useful, Freud is great for asking those questions as sort of an invitation to ask his questions.
00:50:53.120I would be remiss, I think, if I didn't point out that, like, in his own life and in the structure of some of his theories, he didn't just sort of, like, bracket the question of whether a complaint was, like, factually true, right?
00:51:05.000And this brings us, of course, to the abandonment of the seduction theory.
00:51:08.580So, like, early in Freud's career in Vienna, he was treating a lot of women who had been diagnosed with hysteria.
00:51:14.520And he found that frequently his patients, or I think he said like basically in, you know, uniformly his patients complained of sexual violence, of having experienced sexual violence.
00:51:26.140And they often cited this as like the, in their opinion, this is often where their symptoms originated.
00:51:33.920That today looks a lot like what we would call like a PTSD diagnosis, right?
00:51:39.680Like, just the clinical, like, one-to-one.
00:51:42.180It's a little different in some of these hysteria cases that he's talking about.
00:51:44.880But Freud's initial interpretation was what he called the seduction theory.
00:52:02.800He wrote a very compassionate, like really beautiful, lucid book that he got to basically by listening to these women with tremendous attention.
00:52:13.200And in his book, he said that sexual violence by men against women was very, very pervasive, including among, you know, bourgeois Vienna, where he was working and treating patients and where he was, you know, trying to build a practice and inhabit a social world.
00:52:58.840early book, Studies on Hysteria, that took a very compassionate view towards sexual violence victims
00:53:05.480was received poorly in Vienna society because of its political implications, right?
00:53:11.600Because of what it implied about women's claims over their own body,
00:53:16.340women's accounts of their own past, and over, you know, men's behavior, right?
00:53:21.060These were things that were offensive to Vienna society and remain offensive to a lot of people today.
00:53:27.700Let's be real. This is still not a popular thing to say. And Freud made the decision in light of that resistance to abandon his patients, to betray them, and to say that these experiences of sexual violence were, in his word, fantasies.
00:53:47.700fantasy doesn't always necessarily mean desire you do get the sense reading his account you know
00:53:53.580his text in which he is you know sort of recanting his past sympathy with sexual violence victims
00:53:58.920you do get the sense sometimes that he means desire right this was something they wanted to0.96
00:54:03.240happen and that is a scientific or scientif-ish legitimization of a really putrid misogynist0.93
00:54:12.920idea. It is a, like, frankly, a fantasy core to the male psyche that women desire rape.0.99
00:54:18.440It is a ideological fiction that has inflicted a tremendous amount of violence. And that moment,0.89
00:54:25.000that abandonment of the seduction theory is still cited by psychoanalysts and their ilk
00:54:30.020as a moment of great pride. They say, this is the moment that psychoanalysis was invented,
00:54:35.980this moment when we abandoned women, this moment when we became rape apologists and rape denialists.
00:54:40.700And that is what I don't forgive him for, and it's why I'm always a little, you know, I just have my hackles up when people are like, oh, I'm a Freudian.
00:54:48.440I'm like, oh, cool, I don't totally trust you, you know.
00:54:51.300It's like, all right, well, like, show me the goods, right?
00:54:53.740Like, prove that you're not a rape apologist before I decide to hang out again.
00:54:57.980Well, it is, I mean, it is objectively the beginning of the Freudian project to assume that these reports are not factual, but in fact an expression of the unconscious, yeah.
00:55:06.840And I mean, just to add to that, of course, he does eventually kind of discover PTSD for himself and sort of does start thinking about trauma.
00:55:16.480He does it after World War I in the case of male war veterans.
00:55:25.920And I will say what Freud says about women like throughout his career is hateful.
00:55:31.920It's like condescending. It's dismissive. It's hateful.
00:55:34.440He has one moment of sympathy with women early in his career, and he experiences very slight pushback for it, and he abandons it immediately and commits pretty hard in the other direction.
00:55:46.900Although, frankly, even the stuff he writes about his wife is, like, often really kind of just gross.
00:55:51.800This woman who, like, completely ruined her own life for Freud.
00:56:13.380If you're ever in London, it's this, like, crazy house where there's a neighbor's, like, truly enormous cat named Zeus who's always hanging out in Freud's backyard with a big tag around his neck that says, I am not lost.
00:57:44.520As a scholar of German literature, the number of unproblematic faves of mine is pretty small.
00:57:52.460Likewise, as a scholar who was trained on sort of romanticism in 19th century literature, the number of books that are unproblematic from a gender perspective, pretty small, right?
00:58:05.340So in some way, I've always taken the good with the bad.0.92
00:58:08.680I've always sort of been like, well, this is pretty awful.
00:58:12.080And I should also say that, like, there's that book by David Halberstam, How to Be Gay.
00:58:16.640I also think that like as, you know, not to get into identity politics here, but like I think gay consumers have always, right, that's the big thesis of the cellular closet, have had to get their kicks from media that kind of talked down to them or made fun of them or even vilified them, right?
00:58:37.300Years ago, I watched the Castro Theater here around the corner used to show Vertigo once a year, which is, as far as gender goes, one of the most problematic movies ever.
00:58:51.480And the entire audience, which was mostly, you know, queer people, trans people, a couple of drag queens, etc., etc., would just hoot at every misogynistic moment.
00:59:02.820And that's the best way to experience that movie. It is both a terrifically scary psychological thriller and a movie in which you can holler and joke and laugh at the misogyny. And so I think that LGBT viewership and readership and listenership tends to have its own kind of logic of reading against the grain or like picking out the things that you find useful and sort of using them for yourself.
00:59:30.500and being like, well, I don't care about the whole, right?0.71
01:00:20.020I mean, like Adrienne, I am somebody who spends a lot of time reading dead people.
01:00:25.000And I spend a lot of time reading, like, first and second wave feminists.
01:00:28.180And like part of this thesis of my career with regard to that subject matter is like, okay, no, there's redeemable points here. There is worthwhile intellectual work being done and even like moral work being done in the writings of these women.
01:00:46.060But the previous waves of feminism, the first and second waves of American feminism, they have those reputations of being like racist, homophobic, class blind, like weirdly religious in ways that definitely read badly now and weren't like amazing at the time either.1.00
01:01:02.960Like they have those reputations for a reason.1.00
01:01:29.100And there were also people at the time making the points that are now being made as, like, gotchas of this whole era, right?
01:01:34.220Like, the other thing is, like, when you talk about, you know, you're talking about, like, okay, all 19th century Germans, they're all kind of problematic.0.61
01:01:40.980I'm imagining a lot of them are problematic in different ways and in different directions.1.00
01:01:43.700Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like every now and then you read something. I'm like, OK, why is Elizabeth Cady Stanson being woke here? Right. And they are not as simple as received wisdom. But I do think like all of my faves are a little problematic. And that's like part of my approach is to try and be generous without being credulous, you know?
01:02:05.240But also, I don't know, I'm also thinking of like Michael Jackson. I love Michael Jackson's music. And it's harder for me to enjoy it now because he took it away from me with his actions. You know, that's also just like the grief of having your pleasure and delight in a piece of art or writing or thinking, whatever, sort of mitigated by the bad actions of the person who made it. I think that is a real grief that's hard to articulate and not always like super safe to talk about in every, you know, sphere.
01:02:33.460That to me is actually one of the few, you know, I've spent the last five years of my career making fun of people complaining about cancel culture.
01:02:41.620And the one bit of pathos that I'll allot to that discourse where I think like it's putting its finger on something is that grief.
01:03:34.360So there is on the one hand, like the passage of time, but there's also the fact that like it could have been so easily otherwise, right?1.00
01:03:39.980Like if this person hadn't been a piece of shit, I could just scream along with this, right?0.99
01:03:44.480Like, I, you know, I hope, pray to God that I'm accurate in saying this, but like the fact that David Byrne is just kind of a good guy, right?1.00
01:04:25.340They're really well-crafted, except for the, like, you know, like Cho Chang, et cetera.
01:04:29.740Like, there's nothing there, but they were really immersive and joyful, and I don't want to just, like, mock the people who feel like their childhood was betrayed or their memories of childhood are now tainted.
01:04:40.760You know, it's, like, it's genuinely sad.
01:04:43.580No, I came across a copy of one of the earlier books at my parents' house, and I was like, this might be the moment when I could read it to River.
01:04:50.980And I'm like, I'm not gonna, you know?