My appearance on Conversations with Tyler
Shakespeare, advertising, Harry Potter
This was a lot of fun for me. Many thanks to Tyler for such a stimulating conversation!
The first half-hour is a discussion of Measure for Measure: incest, Catholics, James I, Isabella’s virtue, feminism, Merchant of Venice, “Shakespeare is ideologically pragmatic”, and more. My favourite moment was when Tyler suggested that Isabella did in fact sleep with Angelo and I was scandalized. We got out our books and started doing close reading.
During “overrated versus underrated” I was asked about Milton, Spenser, Tolkien, and Harry Potter. Other questions included: “Will fiction be able to deal seriously again with religion?”, “What’s the best portrait of mental illness in English fiction?”, and “Why do you think Swift is the smartest of all English language writers, Shakespeare possibly excepted?”
I might blog separately about some of the answers I gave and how I would change them with more consideration…
The best thing about this podcast was that it was a real conversation and we really just said what we thought. Tyler read all four of the Forsyte Chronicles! And liked them!
COWEN: Galsworthy, Forsyte Chronicles, the book.
OLIVER: Oh, overrated. They’re even worse than you think. They’re so boring. Absolutely crushingly dull.
COWEN: I think they’re good melodrama.
OLIVER: Oh, Tyler.
COWEN: They were made into a TV series, which is a downgrade, but it tells you something about them, that they can be made into a TV series that many people watch.
OLIVER: Did you read all four?
COWEN: Yes.
OLIVER: Oh my God.
Here’s one fun exchange.
COWEN: Is this a Girardian play?
OLIVER: I didn’t actually go and look at what Girard said, and it’s a long time since I read him. There’s a lot of substitution.
COWEN: Right, and doubles.
OLIVER: Well, isn’t the whole point of the substitution that they’re not doubles? No one actually is substituted properly. There is no such—
COWEN: But that can be Girardian, too.
OLIVER: Can it?
COWEN: Yes, it can.
OLIVER: I feel like the Girardian analysis is stretched and stretched like bread dough, and it never quite snaps, but it’s been stretched so far at this point.
I also went on a rant about advertising.
OLIVER: Then there was this terrible, terrible thing called the Creative Revolution in the 1960s, where supposedly—this is like the modernism of advertising.
COWEN: I like modernism, to be clear.
OLIVER: I like modernism too, but it made some terrible mistakes
You can find transcript and video here, and below are some podcast app links.
You're right and he's wrong (obviously) but they do sleep together in the source text (Promos and Cassandra) so maybe he's picking up on traces of an underlying narrative pattern...
I used to think the peak of a career would be appearing on Desert Island Discs. Increasingly, I think it’s appearing on Conversations with Tyler. Great episode, Henry!