Speaker 1: Pushkin Hello, Hello everyone, Malcolm Glabell here. You may have
Speaker 1: noticed that Revisionist History looks a little different this season,
Speaker 1: more things in your podcast feed, but I want to
Speaker 1: make clear you're still going to get your annual dose
Speaker 1: of ten scripted revisionist history jewel boxes. It's just that
Speaker 1: people kept coming up to me in the subway and saying,
Speaker 1: why can't we have more revisionist history, And finally I thought,
Speaker 1: like the man said, give the people what they want.
Speaker 1: So coming up this year we have the standard old
Speaker 1: school revisionist history lineup, including some on education, a crazy
Speaker 1: one about mothers, and a bunch of guns. And I'm
Speaker 1: very excited about it. But we're also doing more episodes
Speaker 1: answering your questions or arguing with you with the help
Speaker 1: of our embarrassingly overqualified ombus person, Maria Konikova. You can
Speaker 1: reach us by the way and Maria at info at
Speaker 1: Pushkin dot fm if you have questions or concerns or
Speaker 1: just want a.
Speaker 2: Rant for a while.
Speaker 1: And one of my favorite things we're doing, though, is
Speaker 1: we're bringing you a series of conversations live talks or
Speaker 1: taped live anyway with people I admire, people I want
Speaker 1: to learn something from and who I think you'll enjoy
Speaker 1: as well. We had an amazing reaction to the chat
Speaker 1: with Justin Richmond, and if you haven't heard that yet,
Speaker 1: please go back and listen. This week and next we're
Speaker 1: running a match set of revisionist history live conversations we
Speaker 1: taped at the ninety second Street Y in New York.
Speaker 1: The first Today's episode was with my old friend New
Speaker 1: Yorker magazine colleague, and most crucially fellow Canadian, Adam Gopnik.
Speaker 1: Maybe you know his most famous book, Paris to the Moon,
Speaker 1: or perhaps you saw his cameo in the film Tar,
Speaker 1: where he played himself convincingly How might add Adam is
Speaker 1: a new book, The Real Work on the Mystery of Mastery,
Speaker 1: in which he follows masters of their craft to find
Speaker 1: out just how they do what they do. So here
Speaker 1: we go my conversation with the one and only Adam Gopnick.
Speaker 2: Thank you all for coming, Adam.
Speaker 3: It's a pleasure to see you. Malcolm.
Speaker 4: It's the first time we've been together, certainly since the pandemic.
Speaker 1: Yes, the last time we were on stage together was
Speaker 1: were we not both debating the proposition that cats were
Speaker 1: better than dogs or dogs better than cats.
Speaker 4: We were, and I took the dog's side. I took
Speaker 4: the cat, and you took the cat's side. And I
Speaker 4: ended my puration, my claim by saying that you had
Speaker 4: to understand that not only was it the case that
Speaker 4: on the merrit it's all cats were Republicans and all
Speaker 4: dogs were Democrats, but you also had to understand that
Speaker 4: all cats were Guyish and all dogs were Jewish. And
Speaker 4: somehow we won the debate in the middle of Manhattan.
Speaker 4: It was the dirtiest thing somehow you want to I
Speaker 4: was going to say it was the dirtiest that.
Speaker 1: Is by appealing to Jewish democrats.
Speaker 3: Well, there are so few of them in New York.
Speaker 3: You know that it was. It showed some bravery.
Speaker 1: You were, yes, playing to the crowd. I suspect there'll
Speaker 1: be more than a little of that tonight as well.
Speaker 1: We're here to discuss your book, but as it's always
Speaker 1: the case, we shouldn't really just discuss the book tonight,
Speaker 1: because we want people to read the book. Yes, so
Speaker 1: I thought we'd talk around the book.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, it's a book to talk around.
Speaker 1: And I want to do something very specific. But before
Speaker 1: I introduced the specific thing, I'd like to do. I'd
Speaker 1: like to offer an overly simplistic, highly reductionist theory about
Speaker 1: the difference.
Speaker 3: Between dogs and cats.
Speaker 2: No, no, between you and I? Or is it you
Speaker 2: and me?
Speaker 3: Me? Me?
Speaker 1: Yes, me?
Speaker 3: That would be one of the differences.
Speaker 2: Right, Yes, here's the theory.
Speaker 1: Right, I start with an idea I'd like to explore,
Speaker 1: search for someone to be kind of window dressing, someone
Speaker 1: appropriate to dress it up, and then pursue it. This
Speaker 1: is the problem with my writing, of course, because the
Speaker 1: reader's senses halfway through that I've chosen the subject the
Speaker 1: person simply as a convenience to advance this agenda of mine.
Speaker 2: I'm going to dispute that, but all right, you do
Speaker 2: the opposite.
Speaker 1: Essentially, all of your writing is about you meet someone,
Speaker 1: you fall in love with him, and then you come
Speaker 1: up with some elaborate theory to justify your affection for
Speaker 1: your character.
Speaker 4: That I will I will accept that as a roughly true.
Speaker 4: I think, though, that there are a lot of people
Speaker 4: in your stuff, Malcolm who live on you.
Speaker 2: We're not discussing me, all right.
Speaker 1: You can only discuss you, don't discuss your half.
Speaker 4: I certainly think it's generally true, and I will say this,
Speaker 4: and I will I will say it with a certain
Speaker 4: amount of vanity that I love getting engaged with people,
Speaker 4: odd people, strange people, interesting people, and I you know,
Speaker 4: John Opdyke once said, you know, someone said what's the
Speaker 4: purpose of life? And he answered instantly to give praise?
Speaker 4: And I always thought that was a beautiful.
Speaker 1: Well, this is exactly what I was going to say next,
Speaker 1: which is the other distinctive feature is of your writing,
Speaker 1: is that all of your real pieces, as opposed to
Speaker 1: your critics pieces, which I don't mean they're not real,
Speaker 1: but I mean all the pieces of some journalists.
Speaker 3: That are not the higher homework.
Speaker 1: Right. Yes, you always like the subject the subject. You're
Speaker 1: never at odds to the subject. And even when you
Speaker 1: are at obbosit of the subject, you've got great pains
Speaker 1: to suggest you're not really at allous.
Speaker 2: That just happens in his book. But we'll get there.
Speaker 4: Yes, Yes, that's interesting you say that, Malcolm. I've never
Speaker 4: quite conceptualized it that way. I think it's true. You know,
Speaker 4: the great kind of transformative moment of my life as
Speaker 4: a writer, my life is a man as a person,
Speaker 4: was when I joined the New Yorker in nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 4: and I was put to work writing the Talk of
Speaker 4: the Town. Back in those days, Talk of the Town
Speaker 4: was beautifully anonymous. That was part of the glory of it,
Speaker 4: because John McPhee would contribute, or John Updyke, and then
Speaker 4: you know, a little schnor like me would be thrown
Speaker 4: into the mix as well. And it was the great
Speaker 4: epiphany of my life because up until that moment I
Speaker 4: had been a graduate student. I mean, my whole life,
Speaker 4: I'd been a graduate student. I was a graduate student
Speaker 4: when I was six years old because I come from
Speaker 4: a like you, I come from an academic family, and
Speaker 4: that was the way I had been raised, you know,
Speaker 4: pursuing a PhD since third grade, and the way you become,
Speaker 4: the way you're trained and taught to think and write
Speaker 4: is argumentative through buts my sister, Allison, brilliant mind still
Speaker 4: works that way, right. Somebody says something and you controvert it,
Speaker 4: you say, but on the other hand, that's not entirely true.
Speaker 4: People say that parenting is the most important thing in
Speaker 4: the world, but in truth, you can't parent.
Speaker 1: Difference between improv and academia, yeah, academia is.
Speaker 4: Yes, but yes, I yes, and and that's what I
Speaker 4: realized when I was thrown out onto the streets to
Speaker 4: go cover table hockey tournaments and Flatbush and wonderful editor
Speaker 4: Chipmograph and you know slack rope walkers lived on houseboats
Speaker 4: in the Hudson is that you couldn't argue with these people.
Speaker 4: You had to illuminate them. You had to caricature them
Speaker 4: at times in a positive sense. You had to draw
Speaker 4: quick portraits of them. But yes, exactly, it was yes,
Speaker 4: and that the only way to write beautifully, the only
Speaker 4: way to write descriptively, evocatively, significantly, was to construct small,
Speaker 4: descriptive sentences connected by Ann's not long contentious sentences.
Speaker 3: Disrupted by butts.
Speaker 4: And that moment of moving from one to the other
Speaker 4: was the great moment in mind.
Speaker 1: You were the first person to come to the New
Speaker 1: Yorker and be forced to dumb it down.
Speaker 4: Well, yes there's a truth in that, but dumb it
Speaker 4: down all not in the in ultimate sense. To embrace
Speaker 4: a form of if you like, phone naive writing, to
Speaker 4: embrace a form of minimalism, that wonderful New York And
Speaker 4: tradition that extends from you be white and Thurber right
Speaker 4: into my fingers. At least if no one else's, and
Speaker 4: that with many others, but I mean, I esteem it particularly,
Speaker 4: So Yes, I think that's true, and I think it's
Speaker 4: one of the things that makes the New Yorker tradition remarkable,
Speaker 4: is the is its insistence, or it's implied insistence through
Speaker 4: a tradition that the best writing are small, descriptive sentences
Speaker 4: connected by ants.
Speaker 2: Okay, so here's what I want to do.
Speaker 1: Yes, I'm just gonna I'm just going to name names
Speaker 1: from the book, and I would like you to tell
Speaker 1: us something about your relationship with that character. Oh well,
Speaker 1: but how you met them, why you like them, what
Speaker 1: they're like. You don't need to touch on their role
Speaker 1: in the book, but you can get there. But there's
Speaker 1: all these there's a ton of names, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to pick them more or less at random. And then
Speaker 1: some of them I moony picked because I have things
Speaker 1: I want to say about them, just so I can
Speaker 1: be involved in this conversation.
Speaker 2: But let's start with your mother.
Speaker 3: Oh, my mother? Where to begin with my mother?
Speaker 2: Describe your mother?
Speaker 4: Like physically, physically, my mother is a small woman who is,
Speaker 4: among other things, was a professor of linguistic It's a
Speaker 4: very distinguished scientist, instrumental discovering the first gene for grammar
Speaker 4: HOFX and P.
Speaker 3: We all had to learn the name of it when
Speaker 3: we were children. But she's a small one.
Speaker 4: She also designs jewelry, and she wears somewhat eccentric clothing.
Speaker 4: So if you saw her, you'd see this woman with long,
Speaker 4: unkempt hair, looks a little like Streganona, who's wearing all
Speaker 4: of this avant garde jewelry. You can't really approach her
Speaker 4: to hug her because it's too dangerous. The jewelry is
Speaker 4: a little like barbed wire and is an in constant activity,
Speaker 4: constant active. Now I should add that she's, you know,
Speaker 4: a little more subdued now at eighty eight than she
Speaker 4: used to in the book. I go up to bake
Speaker 4: with her because I had never done that. I have
Speaker 4: a complicated relationship with her. I don't mean to be
Speaker 4: sacriine about it at all. You know, we're very much alike.
Speaker 4: And she's a driven person, as am I in lots
Speaker 4: of ways, in every way. But she's an amazing baker,
Speaker 4: and she's an amazingly inventive and impatient person. And I
Speaker 4: thought in this book and in life generally that the
Speaker 4: best way I could connect with her was through a
Speaker 4: shared activity. It's always been the only the best way
Speaker 4: to connect with her. You know, can't really can't really
Speaker 4: talk with her. I mean, of course you can, but
Speaker 4: I have a conversation. But the happiest moments were always
Speaker 4: when we were doing something together. I have this incredibly
Speaker 4: intense memory, which is the book begins with, of when
Speaker 4: I'm really little with my I have many sisters, but
Speaker 4: this is my sister Allison, and she.
Speaker 3: Was unrolling strudle on a table.
Speaker 4: We were living in a housing project at that point,
Speaker 4: and just watching her looking up and watching her unroll
Speaker 4: this rule and make it kind of parchment thin. I thought,
Speaker 4: that's real. That was my first experience of mastery. That's
Speaker 4: my mother.
Speaker 1: Since you're talking about your whether I want to test
Speaker 1: seven ideo. Recently, I have come to believe in the
Speaker 1: asymmetrical theory of parental memories, which is that everyone, when pressed,
Speaker 1: has way more memories of one parent than the other.
Speaker 1: So we all have one not that we one parent
Speaker 1: that we favor, no, but one parent who is who
Speaker 1: is vivid, yes, who consumes all of our kind of stories,
Speaker 1: like in your case, your mother and your work has
Speaker 1: loomed much larger than your father.
Speaker 4: Yes, although even though in fact I'm extremely close to
Speaker 4: my father and admire him limitlessly, dedicated the book on
Speaker 4: Liberalism to him because he had taught me all of
Speaker 4: those things. But my father is, in his nature a
Speaker 4: more recessive person than my mother. There is one chapter
Speaker 4: that's very much about my father in this and it's
Speaker 4: the first time I've ever really written about him about
Speaker 4: learning to drive, because when I was learning to drive
Speaker 4: in my fifties, with my son Luke getting we got
Speaker 4: our licenses on the same day. I believe that's the
Speaker 4: only time that's ever happened. And my father was haunting
Speaker 4: me the whole time. Because my father is the most
Speaker 4: gently competent human being you will meet. And one of
Speaker 4: the things was he had been driving since he was fourteen,
Speaker 4: and he was the sort of person who thought nothing.
Speaker 4: You know, he has six kids and twenty grandchildren of
Speaker 4: driving to a grandchild in Baltimore from rural Ontario where
Speaker 4: they live for nineteen hours, and we just would do
Speaker 4: things like that.
Speaker 3: He was an utterly competent man.
Speaker 4: And I think we all make ourselves a little bit
Speaker 4: in the shadow of our father's accomplishments, but also by
Speaker 4: bending away from the shadow into our own sunshine. So
Speaker 4: my father was so super competent in all those ways
Speaker 4: that I made myself notably incompetent in the little tasks
Speaker 4: of life. So my wife Martha did all the driving
Speaker 4: in our family, and I was the one in the
Speaker 4: as my daughter Olivia, who's here someplace? And I would
Speaker 4: pint out the gendered seat, which we usually assigned to
Speaker 4: women in our culture, where I'm the one passing out
Speaker 4: the cookies and saying, hey, kids, kids, got to be quiet.
Speaker 4: Mom's trying to find the exit. Now, you know when
Speaker 4: we would be that will be there soon. I promise
Speaker 4: you will be there soon. Let mom concentrate. And I
Speaker 4: was in that seat for decades, and then I wanted
Speaker 4: to just nudge over to the other seat a bit.
Speaker 4: And so that was very much about my father, But
Speaker 4: absolutely my mother is the vivid person.
Speaker 1: All right, all right, next name on the list. None
Speaker 1: of us knew him, but both of us are fascinated
Speaker 1: by him. Bud Schulberg. Oh, can we do a Bud
Speaker 1: Schulberg shout out?
Speaker 3: We should definitely do a Bud Sholdberg shout out.
Speaker 4: We're better than at the Why I've been trying to
Speaker 4: get the Library of America to put Bud Schulberg in print,
Speaker 4: you know, for a while, and maybe I still can't.
Speaker 4: Bud Schulberg, as all of you will know, was a writer,
Speaker 4: a journalist, most famous as a screenwriter. Wrote the screenplay
Speaker 4: for On the Waterfront and other things. But he wrote
Speaker 4: one of the most beautiful and forgotten novels in American English,
Speaker 4: called The Disenchanted, about his bizarre adventures writing a screenplay
Speaker 4: with the then on the brink of death Scott Fitzgerald.
Speaker 4: And it's the most beautiful portrait of Scott Fitzgerald that
Speaker 4: we have, and the remarkable guy and his stuff should
Speaker 4: be back in print. And I suspect quick parenthetical that
Speaker 4: his name hurt him. One of my pet theories is
Speaker 4: that writers are very dependent on their names. Right, there's
Speaker 4: a moment there was a doctor Johnson said someplace that
Speaker 4: there was a poet laureate an England named Elkana Settle,
Speaker 4: and no one could ever believe that he could write
Speaker 4: a good poem with a name like el Conna Settle.
Speaker 4: And I have struggled with this my whole life because
Speaker 4: Gopnik has got to be the single ugliest, most non
Speaker 4: euphonious name there is. And Bud Shoulberg, right, it sounds
Speaker 4: like a guy who runs a store, right, Whereas you know, J. D.
Speaker 4: Salinger is clearly a writer of you, so that's something
Speaker 4: we all say.
Speaker 2: It should be a version of Elis Island for writers.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, exactly.
Speaker 4: That's the whole story there about why the name Gotic
Speaker 4: didn't get changed to Elis Island.
Speaker 3: But I'll spare you for the moment.
Speaker 4: Jamie Swiss, Oh, Jamie Swiss is a different I just
Speaker 4: was texting with him. Jamie is the most gifted and
Speaker 4: most irascible magician there's ever been. He's a true intellectual
Speaker 4: of the magic world, and he is a truly contentious person.
Speaker 4: And what I love about Jamie's is he's a magnificent
Speaker 4: sleight of handman, a great teacher. He taught my son
Speaker 4: Luke card magic, and he was the most exacting, demanding
Speaker 4: and rewarding, replenishing teacher you could possibly have. But Jamie's
Speaker 4: just a beautifully irascible person who cannot take anything lightly.
Speaker 4: You know, as you know I say in the book someplace,
Speaker 4: you know that people don't take magicians seriously, right, And
Speaker 4: they go up to the magicians say oh, I know
Speaker 4: how you did that, which is like going up to
Speaker 4: yo yo ma and saying, oh, I know how you
Speaker 4: did that. You just scraped that thing along the strings,
Speaker 4: didn't you. I know how you did that. I have
Speaker 4: an uncle who does the same thing all the time.
Speaker 4: And most magicians just kind of bite their lips and say,
Speaker 4: oh good.
Speaker 3: And I'm glad to hear that.
Speaker 4: And Jamie is the one who says, you have no idea,
Speaker 4: idea how the fuck I did that. You have no
Speaker 4: fucking idea how I did that, So don't tell me
Speaker 4: you do. And he's a contentious magician and it's wonderful
Speaker 4: and he's brilliant. He's one of my dearest friends. And
Speaker 4: I love him exactly because he takes magic at the
Speaker 4: most serious and conceivable level and won't allow it to
Speaker 4: be minimized or condescended to though he did say to
Speaker 4: me once the only reason mimes exists is so the
Speaker 4: magicians have someone to patronize.
Speaker 1: What I love about your best way. The chapter of
Speaker 1: this book on magic is magic. It's the thing that
Speaker 1: I never really understood about magic until you wrote about it,
Speaker 1: and I could never tell whether this is true of
Speaker 1: magic or just true of you on magic, which is
Speaker 1: that all these magicians, at least the ones you write about,
Speaker 1: have thought so deeply and beautifully and profoundly about their
Speaker 1: craft in a way that no other you know, I've
Speaker 1: just spent, for pat of reasons the last couple of
Speaker 1: weeks months really interviewing one trauma surgeon after another. Huh,
Speaker 1: And trauma surgents are incredibly interesting. The work they do
Speaker 1: is really really, really really hard. The technology changes every
Speaker 1: and technique changes every ten minutes.
Speaker 2: But they don't.
Speaker 1: They're not talking about it on a philosophical level. It's
Speaker 1: they've taken something that's beautifully powerfully complicated and they have
Speaker 1: made it intensely practical.
Speaker 4: And they talk about it well. Shop talk is the
Speaker 4: most beautiful talk that there is. One of the reasons
Speaker 4: writers are so occupationally miserable. It's because we have no
Speaker 4: shop talk really to talk about, right, talk about keyboards, computers,
Speaker 4: advances and publishers, and then that's it, right, we don't.
Speaker 3: Magicians have the most beautiful.
Speaker 4: And rapturous shop talk of anyone because they can only
Speaker 4: talk about it to other magicians. They have a high
Speaker 4: level of trauma surgeon like technique, but they can't tell
Speaker 4: you or me about it. They can only talk about
Speaker 4: it to other magicians. There's an intensity, an intellectual intensity
Speaker 4: to what they do. I will add as well, of course,
Speaker 4: and this is the implicit, if tenderly loving accusation you're making.
Speaker 4: I seek out the intellectual magicians, and they seek and
Speaker 4: they choose to speak to me.
Speaker 1: What is it that drew you to magic? Was it
Speaker 1: that did Luke discovered? Or did you Luke?
Speaker 4: It was simultaneously that my son Luke discovered magic and
Speaker 4: found that he gave him far more meaning, accomplishment, significance
Speaker 4: than anything he was studying in school. So I was
Speaker 4: drawn into it through Luke's obsessive interest in magic. But
Speaker 4: then I loved it too, once I started going to
Speaker 4: Monday Night Magic and other things too, because it seemed
Speaker 4: like such a.
Speaker 3: Model of art of a very modest kind.
Speaker 4: You know, magicians aren't because they feel oppressed all the time.
Speaker 3: But the idea that you would have a profound.
Speaker 4: Technique that you kept to yourself, the idea that your
Speaker 4: primary impulse was to entertain rather than to impress or
Speaker 4: to intimidate, that that would be that you would have
Speaker 4: all of these skills, but you would use them for
Speaker 4: the purposes of delight. That spoke somehow to my ideals
Speaker 4: for writing and my ideals for art generally. And I
Speaker 4: was very taken, instantly taken by the company of magicians.
Speaker 4: I loved the company of magicians. The people I most
Speaker 4: have enjoyed hanging out with in life are magicians and cooks,
Speaker 4: and they have a great deal in common.
Speaker 3: They both.
Speaker 4: There's an artisanal basis to everything they do. They are
Speaker 4: expert at doing something. But there and there tend to
Speaker 4: be very temperamental people who have very difficult lives. Nothing
Speaker 4: is harder than running a restaurant, except running a magic show.
Speaker 4: And yet the whole purpose of their existence is to delight.
Speaker 4: And I find that I find this something sort of
Speaker 4: noble and even saintly about that.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: There's no high theory attached to the cook chef.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, there is.
Speaker 4: If you get chefs talking that, you know, I don't
Speaker 4: have it as much in this book. But you get
Speaker 4: chefs talking about the ethics of seasonality, or what counts
Speaker 4: as local and what doesn't, or you even get them
Speaker 4: talking about whether you have tarragon leaves or tarragon stems
Speaker 4: in a Brene sauce.
Speaker 3: They'll go on forever. You know. They have the same
Speaker 3: kind of passionate chop talk, which I love to hear.
Speaker 1: More from the real work on the mystery of Mastery
Speaker 1: in a moment. Now back to my conversation on Mastery
Speaker 1: with Adam Gopnik at the ninety second Street Y in
Speaker 1: New York. George Plimpton. I bring him up only because
Speaker 1: in this book Adam goes in a series of quests
Speaker 1: to master certain activities baking, boxing, magic, et cetera. Driving, drawing,
Speaker 1: Drawing is the first one, and I'm wondering, is it
Speaker 1: an echo of George Plimpton? And how do you feel
Speaker 1: about George.
Speaker 4: Primpton's That's that's such an acute question, because I deliberately
Speaker 4: dropped George Plimpton's name in the opening chapter, thinking no
Speaker 4: one will pick up on my little homage to Plimpton
Speaker 4: in the opening chapter because it goes by very quickly.
Speaker 4: But I put that there exactly for that reason. George
Speaker 4: Plimpton did these wonderful books Paper Lion, mad Ducks and
Speaker 4: Bears about his own engagement as an amateur would go
Speaker 4: and he would box with Archie Moore, or he would
Speaker 4: play quarterback for the Detroit Lions, and so on, And
Speaker 4: so there's certainly an element of plymptoness in this. His
Speaker 4: book Mad Ducks and Bears is one of the most
Speaker 4: entertaining sports books ever written. So I greatly admire his
Speaker 4: prose writing. But it isn't the Plimpton like book in
Speaker 4: the sense that Plimpton's comedy came out of his incapacity
Speaker 4: to do it. You know, if Plimpton was making it
Speaker 4: was had He was a wonderful writer, but he had
Speaker 4: kind of one joke to tell, right, I attempt to
Speaker 4: do this thing, I learn a lot, and then I
Speaker 4: fail at it. And I wanted to tell two jokes.
Speaker 4: I attempt to do this thing and I enter into
Speaker 4: the world of the people who do it.
Speaker 3: Well, Plimpton did that too, I guess.
Speaker 4: But yes, certainly Plympton is one of the ghosts who's
Speaker 4: someplace in the back of the book. And I put
Speaker 4: him in one sentence and you caught it.
Speaker 1: But he But I want you to talk a little
Speaker 1: bit more about the difference. So both of you are
Speaker 1: beginning in the same spirit, Yes, which is there are
Speaker 1: worlds outside your own experience that fascinates you, and you
Speaker 1: would like to you would like to bear witness to them,
Speaker 1: to experience.
Speaker 4: I guess, and I say this in there's every reason
Speaker 4: to prefer Plimpton's approach, which is more amateur to my own.
Speaker 4: But I can't resist being a bit of a generalizer,
Speaker 4: a theory producer about it. And the book is full
Speaker 4: of my generalizations, my guesses, my attempts to find the
Speaker 4: commonality across all of these dimensions, boxing and dancing. What
Speaker 4: do they have in common? What's similar about the way
Speaker 4: we learn them? I can't I can't not be my
Speaker 4: mother's son in that way. My mother was a professor,
Speaker 4: my father was a professor. All of my brothers and
Speaker 4: sisters are professors. So I am the only one who isn't.
Speaker 4: I'm what's called a Jewish dropout, and the and every
Speaker 4: so I think that that urge to teach, to explicate
Speaker 4: is very strong, was not at all in you know,
Speaker 4: Plimpton was an aristocratic wasp, and for him teaching and
Speaker 4: explicating I think was a little vulgar.
Speaker 2: He was.
Speaker 3: He's a performer, Yeah, he's a performer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a literary performer. And yes you are.
Speaker 3: You're much more of a professor.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm there's I'm a ham as well, But there's
Speaker 4: more professorialness in my performance than there ever.
Speaker 2: Was in his.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One thing you don't talk about in this book was
Speaker 1: your foray into music.
Speaker 3: I do talk about it a bit, A little bit,
Speaker 3: a little bit.
Speaker 1: Not a great land I thought I was wondering about.
Speaker 1: There has always been this kind of desire to experiment
Speaker 1: with your experiences in a way that that's not true
Speaker 1: of a lot of very adventurous and one of the
Speaker 1: interestings you did was describe a little bit about your
Speaker 1: kind of musical adventures.
Speaker 4: And well, when I came to New York, when Martha
Speaker 4: and I came to New York on a bus from Canada,
Speaker 4: like in the Bad Forties movie, I wanted to be
Speaker 4: a songwriter. That was my primary ambition. Well, I wanted
Speaker 4: to be a songwriter and a writer for the New Yorker.
Speaker 4: I figured I could do both. I could be Stephen
Speaker 4: Sondheim and John Updyke simultaneously. It turned out not to
Speaker 4: be the case, but I wanted to.
Speaker 3: Do that, and.
Speaker 4: I never pursued it adequately. You know, it was one
Speaker 4: of those things that I left behind too soon. So
Speaker 4: in the course of life, a wonderful composer, David Schier,
Speaker 4: approached me about writing a musical with him, and to
Speaker 4: somewhat to his shock, I jumped at the opportunity because
Speaker 4: it was the form I love most in the world.
Speaker 4: And we wrote a show called Our Table, which you
Speaker 4: can find on Spotify, and we wrote some sixty songs together,
Speaker 4: and I am I loved it.
Speaker 2: Excuse me how many songs?
Speaker 3: Sixty songs?
Speaker 4: Zero six zero, because that's the usual ratio in Broadway musicals.
Speaker 4: They have a very strong you call them trunk songs.
Speaker 4: You write sixty songs and you throw out forty. I mean,
Speaker 4: that's the standard rate at which it's done. It's a
Speaker 4: funny thing. Not that the forty or worse than the twenty.
Speaker 4: It's a kind of weird, kind of almost religious discipline
Speaker 4: that Broadway people have.
Speaker 3: And in any way, I love it.
Speaker 1: Hold on, take it over this sixty. So every Broadway
Speaker 1: play has forty songs. They're just lying in a vault.
Speaker 4: Somewhere yes, in a word, yes, And those are called
Speaker 4: trunk songs. I don't know if it's always forty and twenty.
Speaker 4: It could be sometimes thirty and ten. But yes, every
Speaker 4: songwriting team and everybody songwriter will tell you that they
Speaker 4: even Somedheim threw away four different endings for Company before
Speaker 4: he arrived at Being Alive. It's part of the discipline
Speaker 4: of the craft. I'm not always sure that it's a
Speaker 4: productive discipline in the sense that the ones you throw
Speaker 4: away may actually be better than the one you arrive at.
Speaker 1: Does anyone independently analyze the ones that are thrown away? Like,
Speaker 1: is there some this should be some central committee of
Speaker 1: Broadway that kind of takes all these in.
Speaker 4: And like like a FDA inspectors who come in and say,
Speaker 4: you don't have to throw this away.
Speaker 3: This smells good to me, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 2: This is unbelievable.
Speaker 1: It's you know, it's such a it's so show off
Speaker 1: hee by the way, you know, the rest of us
Speaker 1: are like making use of every last scrap.
Speaker 4: But so I did that, and I loved it, and
Speaker 4: I wrote all the lyrics and I felt, you know,
Speaker 4: and I put myself to work to master that craft
Speaker 4: and that art as much as I could. Because my
Speaker 4: ultimate heroes Lorenzo du Ponte, Lorenz Heart, Larry Hart took
Speaker 4: part in that.
Speaker 1: Field, and I have no fear of embarrassment.
Speaker 4: I live in total fear of embarrassment. But I suppose
Speaker 4: when it comes to the contest between my egotism and
Speaker 4: my embarrassment, my egotism wins somehow.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I mean, if I can put it in slightly kind
Speaker 4: of terms to myself, I'm ambitious, you know, and I
Speaker 4: like doing ambitious things. And I you know, it's not
Speaker 4: like I'm out there, you know, trying to compete with
Speaker 4: elon musk and rocketry. You know, what I'm good at,
Speaker 4: or what I believe myself to be good at, is
Speaker 4: shaping sentences. And some of those sentences are essays. That's
Speaker 4: the form I love most in the world is the essay,
Speaker 4: what's sometimes called the personal essay and the and the
Speaker 4: but writing lyrics or writing a show is it's the
Speaker 4: same enterprise, right. It's organizing language in ways that express emotion.
Speaker 4: And for me, you know, the thing I love most
Speaker 4: is exactly the moments in that act when you get
Speaker 4: an emotion and I had an idea humming together, and
Speaker 4: that's what I always tried to do in things, is
Speaker 4: what you were talking about before and when it's just
Speaker 4: ideas it feels arrid to me, and when it's just emotions,
Speaker 4: it feels amateurish to me. And there's no form known
Speaker 4: to man in which ideas, well, you did this, you
Speaker 4: talked about this with in your Paul Simon audiobook. There's
Speaker 4: no form in which ideas and emotions come into such
Speaker 4: intimate entanglement as in a song. So anybody who can
Speaker 4: write one good song, one memorable song, has got a
Speaker 4: little bit of purchase on immortality. And I think I've
Speaker 4: written one, but I will continue to write more.
Speaker 1: On one level, what this book is is about the
Speaker 1: special pleasures of mediocrity. Yes, And because you embark on
Speaker 1: a series of things, and implicit in not all of them,
Speaker 1: but in some of the things that you embark on,
Speaker 1: is that you're.
Speaker 3: Not never going to be good.
Speaker 1: You're never going to be good at them. And this
Speaker 1: is the great discovery of my middle aged When I
Speaker 1: was very young, I only pursued things that I was
Speaker 1: good at, and I realized when I hit forty that
Speaker 1: that was a trap. And you know why ied it.
Speaker 1: I realized it because I went to Bard and when
Speaker 1: I was using the gym, I saw the barred.
Speaker 2: Lacrosse team practice, and.
Speaker 1: I observed them, and they observed that they were the
Speaker 1: most laughably inept lacrosse team I've ever seen. And my
Speaker 1: first thought was, you know, I have all kinds of
Speaker 1: athletic pretensions, so I was looking down my nose.
Speaker 2: And then my second thought.
Speaker 1: Was that is fantastic because it means that anyone who
Speaker 1: wants to play lacrosse at Bard can play lacross at Bard,
Speaker 1: and that is such a better model than every other
Speaker 1: lacrosse team. If you want to play lacrosse at Johns Hopkins,
Speaker 1: it's impossible.
Speaker 3: Because you're never going to be good.
Speaker 1: You're never going to make the team.
Speaker 2: It's a pleasure is denied to you.
Speaker 1: Why, for the completely random and totally unfair reason, the
Speaker 1: number of kids that have been playing lacrosse in you know,
Speaker 1: suburban Baltimore since they were six years old because their
Speaker 1: parents had the nutty notion that mastery of lacrosse was
Speaker 1: something they wanted to use their have their.
Speaker 3: Kids and it would get them into Johns Hopkins.
Speaker 1: But so what do we do we impoverish the vast
Speaker 1: pool of kids who would really enjoy playing well across
Speaker 1: in favor of a small bart flips. It just says,
Speaker 1: we're going to have a bad cross the shame.
Speaker 4: Yes, I know, but not to be pious. But that's
Speaker 4: sort of one of the themes of the book. Maybe
Speaker 4: is the theme of the book, because the truth is,
Speaker 4: and I have a little chapter called the Mystery of
Speaker 4: Interiority where I look into that old folk legend that
Speaker 4: hummingbirds and elephants have the same number of heartbeats in
Speaker 4: the life and find that there's actually at the University
Speaker 4: of North Carolina State, there's a scientific team that looks
Speaker 4: into this question, that took up this question, and it's true.
Speaker 4: And the point of it, the metaphor of it is,
Speaker 4: is that the hummingbird's sense of existence is just as
Speaker 4: extended as the elephants. It just is only that feels
Speaker 4: that way for the hummingbird, right, not for the elephant.
Speaker 4: And in exactly the same way, the accomplishments that we
Speaker 4: master or attempt to master at which we're no good,
Speaker 4: give us the same sense of you know, little steps
Speaker 4: turning into a seamless sequence, the sense of the flow,
Speaker 4: which is the key to happiness. Happiness is absorption. Happiness
Speaker 4: is reaching that flow state. And in a weird way,
Speaker 4: any time you achieve it, you have the hummingbird's heartbeat
Speaker 4: inside you. You have a strong interior sense. Like the
Speaker 4: kids in at Bard, right, they didn't know they were
Speaker 4: bad lacrosse players, and I'm sure they talked about lacrosse
Speaker 4: all the time and tried to improve their game.
Speaker 3: And that's exactly bad.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, they do know they're bad.
Speaker 1: No, no, I don't mean that it's a joke, right,
Speaker 1: because it's the second The corollary to the observation that
Speaker 1: there is beauty in badness is that the second thing
Speaker 1: is that it is only through pursuing something not badly
Speaker 1: you weren't bad at these things, but inexpertly, yes, that
Speaker 1: you come to a full appreciation of the expert.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 1: The person who goes up to the magician and says,
Speaker 1: I know how you did that is someone who doesn't
Speaker 1: try to be a mediocre they have If they were
Speaker 1: a mediocre magician, they would.
Speaker 3: Know better than they would be an how they would
Speaker 3: be a true awe.
Speaker 2: It's the same thing I was gonna say this with
Speaker 2: It is only when.
Speaker 1: I became a mediocre runner in my middle age that
Speaker 1: I that I began to appreciate what a world class runner.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: And it's only by being a terrible pianist that I
Speaker 4: have some glimpse of what it is to be Bill
Speaker 4: Evans or Errol Garner.
Speaker 2: This is the greatest case for community theater.
Speaker 3: Yes, this is true.
Speaker 1: Which is the is the kind of whipping boy. Community
Speaker 1: theory is the whipping boy of every pretentious intellectual. I
Speaker 1: grew up with a community theater. I'm here to tell
Speaker 1: you civilization is community theater is based on community theory.
Speaker 4: I mean that, but you know that's not you know
Speaker 4: who said that? Forgive me for a professorial moment. Frederick
Speaker 4: Laul Olmsted, the great designer of Central Park and one
Speaker 4: of the great American political thinkers, said that the thing
Speaker 4: that the commonplace civilization of a liberal society depended on
Speaker 4: community theater. He talked about glee clubs, he talked about
Speaker 4: amateur opera societies. That's the living, beating heart of a
Speaker 4: liberal society.
Speaker 3: Are those things?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, give me.
Speaker 3: One more name. I'm in loving this so much. It's
Speaker 3: like being in therapy.
Speaker 2: And let's do David Blaine. Why not, let's finish on magic.
Speaker 4: David Blaine was so Luca, my wonderful son who is
Speaker 4: now doing his pH d in philosophy at the University
Speaker 4: of Texas. After all of his adventures magic and music,
Speaker 4: he had ended as a philosopher went to work as
Speaker 4: David Blaine's personal assistant. David offered him that job, and
Speaker 4: it was a wonderful learning experience, much better than going
Speaker 4: to progressive school, because he had to learn how to
Speaker 4: keep you know, Russian models away from each other, and
Speaker 4: how to care for an albino alligator, and money the
Speaker 4: other things, and David in the middle of it. This
Speaker 4: is my favorite anecdote in the book, was doing a
Speaker 4: bullet catch.
Speaker 3: Now bullet cap was doing it for a TV special.
Speaker 4: And in the bullet catch, the magician has a steel
Speaker 4: cup in his mouth or her mouth, and somebody fires
Speaker 4: a bullet from a rifle directly into the cup.
Speaker 3: You have to catch the bullet.
Speaker 4: And now normally it's done as a trick, as a gaff,
Speaker 4: because it's too dangerous. Twelve magicians were killed in the
Speaker 4: early part of the twentieth century doing the bullet catch
Speaker 4: on stage, so nobody does it that way. And Luke
Speaker 4: explained to me David was going to do a true
Speaker 4: bullet catch, and I said, well, what's how do you
Speaker 4: do a bullet catch?
Speaker 3: And he said, well, it's a.
Speaker 4: Very strong titanium cup and it's a very low velocity
Speaker 4: rifle and a very small caliber bullet, and it's all
Speaker 4: laser guided. I said, oh, really, so there's no trick
Speaker 4: to the bullet catch and he said, oh no, Dad,
Speaker 4: there's a trick to the bullet catch. The trick to
Speaker 4: the bullet catch is catching the bullet. And as soon
Speaker 4: as Luke said that to me, I said, that's the
Speaker 4: wisest thing I've ever heard, right, because we all instantly
Speaker 4: know what that means, Right that, after all the preparation
Speaker 4: you do when you're writing or talking or anything, after
Speaker 4: all the ways in which you make sure that you
Speaker 4: will not be killed by the bullet, at some point
Speaker 4: you have to stand there with your mouth open and
Speaker 4: the cup in it while somebody points a rifle at you.
Speaker 4: And that, for me is, you know, the existential leap
Speaker 4: that we all have to make in artistry, mastery, whatever
Speaker 4: we choose to call it. And I thought so, I
Speaker 4: thought it was a wonderful story because everybody knows what
Speaker 4: that moment is of catching the bullet.
Speaker 1: That trick can only be done in certain states. Yes,
Speaker 1: exactly stand your ground laws.
Speaker 3: I can.
Speaker 4: I can I thank you Malcolm for your incredible generosity
Speaker 4: in doing this. And can I tell you a story
Speaker 4: that I don't think you know, is that Malcolm is
Speaker 4: known in our house, as my children are growing up
Speaker 4: as not that you're not dad, Malcolm, because this is
Speaker 4: the conversation we would always have. Malcolm would come for dinner,
Speaker 4: dazzle Luke and Olivia and then going and they would say,
Speaker 4: Malcolm tells the most interesting anecdotes and he always finds
Speaker 4: the one right story to illustrate it, not that you
Speaker 4: don't dead, or Malcolm always has exactly the right question
Speaker 4: to ask, not that you're not doing that dead, And
Speaker 4: so we in our household, Malcolm Gladwell is known as
Speaker 4: not that you're not dead, Malcolm.
Speaker 3: So thank you not that you're not.
Speaker 1: Adam Gopnik's book, The Real Work on the Mystery of
Speaker 1: Mastery is available now, and be sure to check out
Speaker 1: the audiobook version at pushkin dot fm. Special thanks to
Speaker 1: the ninety second Street Why for hosting us. This episode
Speaker 1: of Revisionist History was produced by Kiara Powell with Ben
Speaker 1: ad F Haffrey, Lemingestu and Jacob Smith, fact checking by
Speaker 1: Kashelle Williams and Tully Emlin. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney.
Speaker 1: Extra special thanks this week to Julia Barton, Morgan Ratner,
Speaker 1: Kerry Brodie and Eric Sandler. Original scoring by Lubisquira, mastering
Speaker 1: by Sarah Bruguer, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. I'm Malcolm
Speaker 1: Glapa