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Why You Should Read Classic Literature (with Anne Sheridan) · The Daily Writer

0:01
SPEAKER_01: When you hear the term classic literature, what comes to mind?
0:04
SPEAKER_01: Most people think of books that were written by a bunch of dead white guys and wonder how they're relevant to us today.
0:10
SPEAKER_01: Well, today's guest will help you understand that the classics are much broader than that very narrow definition and why they're essential to your creative life today.
0:18
SPEAKER_01: So stay tuned.
0:19
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be a very fun episode.
0:30
SPEAKER_01: Hey friends, welcome to the Born to Create Podcast.
0:33
SPEAKER_01: My name is Kent Sanders and I'm an author, professor, and creative coach.
0:37
SPEAKER_01: This is the show where we explore the mindset, habits, and principles to help you make a bigger impact in your life and creative work.
0:44
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm excited today to bring you my conversation with Ann Sheridan, who is a pianist and a professor.
0:50
SPEAKER_01: She holds degrees in piano, biblical studies, and English, and she also taught English and literature for several years at St.
0:57
SPEAKER_01: Louis Christian College, where I also teach.
1:00
SPEAKER_01: Anne recently moved back to Iowa with her husband Brett, who is a pastor, and their daughter Louise.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: She enjoys British television and chocolate.
1:09
SPEAKER_01: Our conversation covers a wide range of topics, including what makes a classic a classic, why Gothic literature is so popular today, and also Anne's thoughts on The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars The Last Jedi.
1:22
SPEAKER_01: You'll learn the best way to read Shakespeare, how to make time to read, and why it's okay to watch mindless TV shows sometimes.
1:30
SPEAKER_01: I came away from this conversation feeling smarter and more motivated to dive into some of the classics, and I hope you do as well.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: And if you want to take a deeper dive after this episode's over, please be sure to check out our show notes at Kent Sanders.net slash literature.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: And welcome to the Born to Create Podcast.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: Hi, thanks for having me on.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thanks for uh coming on the show and talking about lots of things that are interesting and I think would be a lot of fun for our listeners to listen to.
2:00
SPEAKER_01: So we're going to sort of hone in on the topic of classic literature on this episode.
2:06
SPEAKER_01: And you were literally the first person that came to mind when I thought of this topic because you know so much about it, you taught courses on it, and most importantly, probably you love literature.
2:15
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's kind of a big prerequisite for you know wanting to talk about it and try and help other people to understand the importance of it.
2:24
SPEAKER_01: So let's start out first with this question of what makes a classic a classic?
2:29
SPEAKER_01: We've all been through school and heard teachers say you gotta read the classics, you know, and they list off what those are.
2:34
SPEAKER_01: What, in your educated opinion, makes a classic?
2:38
SPEAKER_01: Like who determines that?
2:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a really good question.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: And it's a question that um literary theorists have been kind of arguing about for quite a while.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: Um, and to kind of understand, you know, the classics, one of the things that I like to talk about to my students is how the study of literature got started.
2:55
SPEAKER_00: So um people have been reading literature for uh for a while.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: The novel um kind of came into popularity in maybe the 1700s, um, but we were live reading literature a lot long before that, and uh but it was not studied at the university level until actually the early 20th century.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: So it's really only about a hundred years old that we've been studying literature in in universities.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: And so um when that started, uh there were some people called the Levises, and they began, uh they had their own method of studying literature.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: There, there's some of the earlier uh people who actually made a study of literature, and um, you know, we can get into how they how they talked about how you should study literature, but there was also this idea of the canon that was in this earlier study of literature.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: So one of the one of the facets of the early study of literature that was that there are right and wrong answers about how you interpret literature.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: But then also there were books that were worthwhile reading and there were books that were not worthwhile reading.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: And what we notice about the canon, and and you can look up, you know, various canons online and you can see, you know, here are the authors that that are worth reading that you should study.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: And the thing about that is is that at some point people were like, well, you know what, it it involves a lot of dead white guys.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: And uh basically, yeah.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and which is not, I mean, there are a lot of dead white guys who did some really great stuff, but people started asking, you know, is this really what makes literature worth reading?
4:23
SPEAKER_00: Um and so the the definition of classic, I think now is maybe more something that has first of all stood the test of time.
4:34
SPEAKER_00: Um so it has to be old enough that that it people have kept reading it for quite a while.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
4:39
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we have this idea of sometimes you'll hear the term modern classics.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: This would be something like like maybe the Harry Potter books have it have achieved modern classic status, but they're only about 20 years old, and in 50 years, we might not care about Harry Potter anymore.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: It's just really too certain too.
4:54
SPEAKER_01: They'll remake him as another set of movies or something.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: Right.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: They'll you know, they'll do stuff like that, but maybe won't people won't read them.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, I was thinking about what makes a classic, and I think uh there are a couple of things.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: I think first of all, um, and maybe most importantly, is good characterization.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: So the characters are real people.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: They're people that we uh might imagine meeting on the street and that we could imagine interacting with in real life.
5:21
SPEAKER_00: Uh they're people who make us think about ourselves.
5:24
SPEAKER_00: So either people we want to be like and they make us better, or they're people that we don't want to be like and we want to learn from their mistakes.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: Like a morality lesson.
5:32
SPEAKER_01: Yes, you know.
5:33
SPEAKER_01: Like the Scarlet Letter, maybe something like that.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this the Scarlet Letter is definitely it's a complicated morality lesson.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: You you know, Nathaniel Hawthorne was not super fond of the Puritans, but it is like you you want to be like those characters, or you want to learn from their mistakes.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: Um and then I think something else that a classic does, which is related to the idea of good characterization, is it makes some comment on the human experience that is worthwhile.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: All literature, uh literature doesn't really have morals, it has themes.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: And the themes, uh morals in the sense of like a fable, like an Aesop's fable.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
6:09
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, it's not like you read this book and the moral of the story is this.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: Well, there could be many, many things that you could come up with from that uh because that's two on the nose, right?
6:18
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's great for Aesop, but it's not so great for something like uh, you know, a Dickens novel or Jane Eyre or um, you know, something Jane Austen wrote.
6:27
SPEAKER_00: But they do, they have themes, and uh, and a work might have many themes, but these themes are usually their comments on the human experience.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: So it helps us to understand what it is to be human a little bit better.
6:39
SPEAKER_01: That's good.
6:40
SPEAKER_01: You've you spread a lot of questions in my mind with all this.
6:42
SPEAKER_01: Because I'm like I'm like back in class learning all this stuff.
6:46
SPEAKER_01: So you would say something like let's say a Christmas Carol, which I reread every year by Charles Dickens.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: So you would say there's not a moral to that story so much as it is there are themes.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: There are themes.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: And that one's an interesting story because he he certainly does have a point that he's trying to get across.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: It is a little bit of a morality tale.
7:04
SPEAKER_00: Um, but you might have uh, you know, there are themes there of like poverty, there's group themes of greed, there's even maybe themes of like um not just poverty, but institutionalized poverty.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: There are themes like that, you know, there's a little romance there, there's how you interact with people, how you um, you know, what makes what makes a good uh relationship, for example.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: Um, Scrooge thinks that his relationship with Marley has been good, but in fact they don't they didn't really have much of a relationship.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: They had in insofar as they were both similar.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, there's what makes what makes somebody happy?
7:47
SPEAKER_00: Is it money?
7:49
SPEAKER_00: Is it relationships?
7:50
SPEAKER_00: Is it health?
7:52
SPEAKER_00: You know, we see the the Cratchits do not have money, they don't really have health even, but they are happy for the most part.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: I mean that's how we look at them.
8:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, much happier than Scrooge, definitely even though he has a lot more money.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he has money.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: He also has he's also, as far as we know, pretty healthy guy.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: Uh maybe not super old, you know.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: He so he has a lot of the things that we would think of as being happy.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: So there are a lot of things that even in that short little story, you can talk about as themes that they that they help us to think about.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: So you would say Charles Dickens, his his objective with writing that was not really to present a right or wrong thing, it was more to just tell a good story.
8:35
SPEAKER_01: Is that kind of an overall function of good literature?
8:37
SPEAKER_01: Is it's not about saying this is right or wrong.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: It's not doesn't have much so much of a teaching function as it does a storytelling function.
8:45
SPEAKER_00: It does.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: Good literature is they are stories, and they are stories that have many different things that they talk about.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: And it really the answer to that question is complicated because I think it depends on the author.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: There are some authors who do have things that they wanted to get across, they do have uh points that they're trying to make.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: But something that we've said as we've studied literature further is that you know, most of these authors, like Dickens, is dead.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: We don't know what he meant.
9:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
9:10
SPEAKER_01: You can't ever know because he's not around to tell us.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so um literary theorists do not like to um give motives to uh authors that we cannot prove.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: And even living authors sometimes, you know, they're not always the most honest.
9:27
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they tell us what they meant, but they tell us what they think we want to hear.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: And so we can't even necessarily always trust what they say, and maybe we have a different reading, and that's a lit literary theory now says that's okay.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: It's okay to have different readings of different stories.
9:43
SPEAKER_01: And isn't that true of of art in general?
9:45
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you ask a musician, why do you make music?
9:48
SPEAKER_01: If you ask a painter, why do you paint, if you ask a novelist, why do you write, I mean, there's a whole bunch of reasons why we do anything.
9:54
SPEAKER_01: And yeah, can can any of us be objective enough to really give you a litany of here's all the reasons why I did this?
10:00
SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh yeah, I had a bunch of reasons, but also there's kind of this this impulse that you can't put into words to create something.
10:07
SPEAKER_01: You know, we all have different avenues of some people, their their avenue is writing, some people their their channel is in music or film or whatever it is.
10:16
SPEAKER_01: Can any of us ever really know why we do anything because we're so complicated people?
10:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it requires a level of self-awareness that a lot of people don't possess.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh you know, a a novelist might have enough self-awareness to present or enough uh you know skills of and be able to observe well enough that they can present another person pretty truthfully.
10:39
SPEAKER_00: But it's different when you're talking about yourself, so they may not have enough self-awareness to know, well, why did I really do that?
10:45
SPEAKER_01: And maybe for a lot of us who who tell stories, maybe the way that we do talk about our own experience is filtering that through characters.
10:52
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can you can well, it's like being in a play or something, you can transform into someone else, and that character can actually do and say things that are more truthful to the human experience than what you can do in like actual real life conversation.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: And that's also a function of how we read literature too, is uh we read sometimes we can understand ourselves better by reading about other people.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: And this is true of film and and sometimes music even as well.
11:19
SPEAKER_00: That we can see other characters who are like ourselves, uh, but maybe they're worse, and we see, oh, I don't I don't want to be like that person.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: Or they're like ourselves and they just help us to understand ourselves better.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: Oh, maybe I maybe I do these things because of this motivation, for example.
11:37
SPEAKER_01: So are there any particular books that come to mind as ones that you have read that you feel like really changed your perspective on something, or they they impacted you in such a deep way that you thought, wow, that really there's a fundamental shift somewhere in my thinking or my being because I read that story.
11:53
SPEAKER_01: And maybe it's hard to even narrow it down.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, i I've thought about that before, and and other people who read literature will say, you know, there's here's books that have really changed my life, like um Carol's Karen Swallow Pryor is a professor at Liberty University who she teaches English, and she said Madame Bovary by Gustave Lebert is something that changed her life.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: To read about Madame Bovary and her mistakes helped her to think about relationships.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, for me, uh something that comes to mind is the novel Jane Eyre, which I read in high school, and uh oftentimes for me I don't read a book and think, oh, this book has changed my life immediately.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I don't even really like it when I first read it.
12:35
SPEAKER_00: When you're forced to read it, none of us really likes that.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, I was I was I read it in high school and I kind of wanted to, but it was it's long, it's like 600 pages, and uh poor Jane has lots of stuff happen to her.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: But then as I was listening to people, you know, I listen to people talk about novels and I I think about them later.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: And uh Jane is an example, you know, the character of Jane Eyre is an example of somebody who did the right thing in the face of many different uh ways to do to do the wrong thing.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: She was encounter you know, she encountered people, you know, who were evil and she didn't like them and she still did the right thing.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: She encountered people who were doing the wrong thing and she loved them and she just still did the right thing.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: And then she encountered somebody at the end of the novel, she encounters uh someone who's won who's asking her to to marry him and go off to uh be a missionary in uh Africa or something, and she knows that's not the right thing for her either.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: So it was a good thing, and she still did what was right for her.
13:37
SPEAKER_00: And so that level of self-awareness in a character and that that level of moral fortitude to do what you feel that you have been called to do.
13:45
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: Uh i has been something that you know has has really inspired me, I think.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell So this is probably a dumb question.
13:51
SPEAKER_01: I'm showing my ignorance here, but who wrote who wrote that?
13:54
SPEAKER_00: Oh, Charlotte Bronte.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: Okay, Bronte.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: I I I forget to say, yeah, Charlotte Bronte.
13:58
SPEAKER_01: I always I always get uh her mixed up with um Jane Austen in my mind.
14:03
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure that happens a lot.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they're similar.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: They uh Jane Austen was writing in the early 1800s, um, so she died, I think, in around 1818.
14:12
SPEAKER_00: Uh and pretty young, right?
14:14
SPEAKER_00: She yeah, she was about forty, Jane Austen was when she died.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: And so was Charlotte Bronte, interestingly.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: She was, I think, 38 when she died.
14:21
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and she lived the longest of any of her siblings.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: There were multiple siblings, and they all died um before her.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: She was the longest lived.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: It was just completely different time.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: Um, but she she was writing in uh a little later in the 1800s.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: So early Victorian era.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: Charlotte Bronte is in Charlotte and her sister Emily, and then her their sister Anne are interesting examples of of how classics work because Jane Eyre was immediately popular.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: But uh Emily Bronte, Charlotte's sister, wrote Wuthering Heights, and it was not necessarily always well received.
14:58
SPEAKER_00: In fact, there were some pretty like harsh uh reviews of Wuthering Heights, but it's now considered a classic.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: So that's something else that we talk about when we talk about classics, is that sometimes they're not instantly classic.
15:12
SPEAKER_01: Why do you why do you think some classics you know, putting quotes around that term, because what's a classic to one person isn't always classic to other or of a generation.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: Why do you think some classics fall in and out of favor?
15:24
SPEAKER_01: Is it just the times really and what generations think about things, the political environment, that type of thing?
15:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it that's a hard question.
15:32
SPEAKER_00: And uh one of the things I think about, I think it's easier to think about in terms of music, actually.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: Uh so we know that some of those some of the great composers were not actually very well received in their lifetimes.
15:43
SPEAKER_01: True.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: And part of the reason for that is because they were doing something so new that people didn't get it.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: You know, people were they were stuck in what they had been doing, which we can see, you know.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: We don't we don't as a culture generally like change that well.
15:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: Um, and so it sometimes took a while after the composer had died, and and people said, Oh, wait, you know, he was doing some interesting stuff.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: They some of these harmonies are kind of fun.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's true of literature sometimes as well.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: Perhaps it was so new that the original audience didn't really get it, or it showed them something about themselves that they didn't like so well.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: Uh as to why literature falls in and out of fashion, it kind of depends on the culture that it's being read by at that particular moment.
16:32
SPEAKER_00: So I'm in my uh literature class that I'm teaching right now, we're just finishing up reading the novel Dracula, which is a great, uh just a great monster story, but has lots of other really interesting themes of religion and feminism and and colonization and and just lots of other interesting stuff in that novel.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: But it is a really good example of Gothic literature.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: Gothic literature, for whatever reason, and just obsession with gothic stuff, comes back about once every hundred years.
17:05
SPEAKER_00: Why?
17:06
SPEAKER_00: I'm not entirely sure, but about once every hundred years, society comes back around to where we like gothic stuff.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: We're in we're in a period of time where we like Gothic stuff right now, as you as um everybody can tell.
17:18
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so it says something about the culture at that time.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: You know, we're we're either we're in a a changing period in our culture, or uh we're in a period where we're uh afraid of some things, and so Gothic literature kind of represents our fears in a in an other in another way.
17:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but for whatever reason, gothic stuff speaks to us about once every hundred years.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: And so in the interim time when we're not as interested in Gothic stuff, perhaps these gothic things are not as interesting.
17:52
SPEAKER_00: You know, a culture has changed and and whatever that story is doesn't speak to the culture as much anymore.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: So do you do you like the novel Dracula ad like on a personal level, or do you require that for your class because it sort of fits with what you what you want to do in the class?
18:07
SPEAKER_00: Uh both, but uh but I choose everything most of the stuff I choose to teach is because I like it.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: Well, I do too, you know.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
18:15
SPEAKER_01: I don't think you can escape that really as a teacher.
18:17
SPEAKER_01: Do you are there any particular movie versions of Dracula that you really like?
18:21
SPEAKER_00: Uh no.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: It's Dracula is one of those strange, strange stories, and there was a film version.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: The one film version I have seen um is Francis Ford Coppola's 90s version, which he entitled Bram Stoker's Dracula.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: That like that's part of the title.
18:37
SPEAKER_01: Was that the problem with Tom Cruise?
18:38
SPEAKER_00: No, it has Keanu Reeves in it.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: Uh really?
18:41
SPEAKER_01: I had no idea he was in a Dracula movie.
18:43
SPEAKER_00: He plays Jonathan Harker, who's one of the heroes.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh strange casting.
18:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: Um, and Gary Oldman.
18:52
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
18:52
SPEAKER_01: Uh Keanu Reeves and Winona Ryder, those are two nineties.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: They are names is very nineties.
18:57
SPEAKER_00: And it's an interesting movie.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: It is not a great adaptation of Dracula.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, it's it's got enough content I can't show it in my classes.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it's interesting because of the way it changes Dracula.
19:10
SPEAKER_00: So it's not a great adaptation of Dracula, but it changes the story and it shows how our culture has changed.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: So when Dracula came out in 1897, uh, the character of Dracula was just a monster.
19:23
SPEAKER_00: He could act like a human, but there was not any good in him, just not at all.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: He's had no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: He was only interested in hurting people.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: And by the time uh Dracula was made into a film in the in the 1990s, by the time they actually tried to adapt that book really faithfully, at least that was what Francis Four Coppolo seemed to be trying to do, uh, something about culture changed to the point where uh Dracula was given a love interest and he was given empathy, and we feel kind of sorry for him, which is not something that happens in the novel.
19:57
SPEAKER_00: You don't, you hate him.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: And uh it's very strange because Coppola was trying to make you know, he said this is Bram Stoker's Dracula, but that's that was the title.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't but it wasn't, and and but I think it talks about how we view uh monsters now in our society.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: We've changed vampires are not scary monsters anymore.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: They are uh relatable and and they're love interests.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they're not all like Edward Cullen and Twilight, but they're but they're kind of uh you know, they're they're people that we want to well are they're people.
20:35
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that was kind of a Freudian slip, I suppose.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: Instead of a monster.
20:38
SPEAKER_00: Instead of a monster.
20:39
SPEAKER_00: We we view them as people and we want to kind of be like them or we want to be in relationships with them, and but we also feel sorry for them, whereas you don't really feel sorry for Dracula himself.
20:50
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever seen uh Nosferatu?
20:53
SPEAKER_00: I have not.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: Well, no, you know, maybe I have, but it it's been so long that I don't remember it super very well.
20:59
SPEAKER_01: That is super creepy.
21:01
SPEAKER_01: I know it's from the 1920s.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: I think it's I think it's German in its origin.
21:04
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't, you know, from the US, but wow, that is the creepiest version of a vampire I think I've ever seen, even though it's from almost a hundred years ago.
21:12
SPEAKER_01: It's super weird.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and the novel Dracula is incredibly scary.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a real creepy novel.
21:19
SPEAKER_01: I have not read it.
21:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna have to read that now.
21:21
SPEAKER_01: So I know that you have a particular interest in fantasy literature.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: In fact, you just saw a course this past semester on Christian fantasy literature.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: Would you say that uh C.S.
21:29
SPEAKER_01: Lewis, Tolkien, those are your two sort of big, big names that you really like in terms of fantasy, or are there others that you really enjoy?
21:38
SPEAKER_00: They are.
21:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh Lewis and Tolkien are especially if we're talking about Christian fantasy.
21:42
SPEAKER_00: It's interesting.
21:43
SPEAKER_00: People think when people think of Christian fantasy, they think there must be a lot out there because we have these two giants of fantasy who have written, you know, Lewis and Tolkien who wrote these great fantasy works, but they are really uh they're the two main ones.
21:57
SPEAKER_00: I also in that course I taught Madeline Lengel.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: And uh George MacDonald, who I I like as well.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: They're a little bit more comp complicated figures as far as their Christianity was concerned.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: Um but yeah, Lewis and Tolkien I I I mean, they Tolkien in particular kind of changed the fantasy game.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: He did something just really incredible with his the way he built his world, the way he built his characters, his stories, uh, that it it's just new.
22:27
SPEAKER_00: It's new in the the 20th century.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: How would you say somebody can how do you approach the Lord of the Rings?
22:34
SPEAKER_01: And I will confess I've read part of The Fellowship of the Ring, and I didn't read past that.
22:39
SPEAKER_01: I got about a hundred pages into it, and it was so dense I just couldn't, it felt like it was a chore to get through it.
22:44
SPEAKER_01: I know a lot of people love it.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: I love the movies.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: What is the best way to approach that particular series of books?
22:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so uh when I first read The Lord of the Rings, I also got about a hundred pages in and I set it down for I think months.
23:00
SPEAKER_00: So there is a there is a dry spot in those first books.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: Um so you kind of have to you have to push through.
23:07
SPEAKER_00: That's what I tell people.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: You have to push through the fellowship, and once you get about the middle, it gets a lot more interesting.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: With a book that long, I mean, The Lord of the Rings is a thousand pages, which is about as long as the Bible is.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: Now, it may not be quite as dense as as the Bible, but it it's a long, it's long.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: Uh I would just read a little every day.
23:30
SPEAKER_00: That's how I that's how I tackle things like that.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: And at some point it does it gets interesting.
23:36
SPEAKER_00: Which is about all I can say.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: It gets interesting.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: Now, on the other hand, I know that there are literary scholars who don't like the Lord of the Rings and have never been able to get into it, and they just don't deal with it.
23:47
SPEAKER_00: And that's okay too.
23:48
SPEAKER_00: If you're not a fantasy person, it's a lot harder to get into fantasy.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: And so maybe spending, you know, a few weeks reading a thousand pages of fantasy literature is not going to be a good use of your time.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: Uh I would say give it a couple hundred pages, and if it's you're not into it at that point, you move on and you say, This is just not it's not my thing.
24:09
SPEAKER_01: So you would categorize the Chronicles of Narnia as fantasy literature also, correct?
24:14
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
24:15
SPEAKER_00: Yes, I would call it fantasy.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: It's not sci-fi, really.
24:20
SPEAKER_00: Uh I mean, maybe one of the novels kind of gets into tries to give a little bit of sci-fi.
24:26
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, if if you're if you're explaining scientifically why something is happening, that's moving towards sci-fi.
24:33
SPEAKER_00: So um a wrinkle in time, I would call like sci-fi fantasy, because there's elements of fantasy, there's unexplained things, but there's also uh there's also points where they try to explain what's happening.
24:44
SPEAKER_00: They try to explain the wrinkles and how they how they mathematically work.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: And maybe we don't get it, but we say, okay, they have some sort of explanation.
24:52
SPEAKER_01: So is is one of the differences between sci-fi and fantasy that sci-fi, and I'm speaking in broad generality, obviously, is that sci-fi the impulse there is to want to have some sort of explanation for things that are happening.
25:07
SPEAKER_01: They want to, at least even if they're not realistic, they want to have some sort of rules or guidelines for why things are the way they are, etc.
25:13
SPEAKER_01: Like James Cameron's, you know, movies, like Avatar.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
25:17
SPEAKER_01: They try to explain things.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: Whereas fantasy, you just kind of accept that there's dragons and wizards and that kind of stuff.
25:23
SPEAKER_01: Is that a fair way of looking at it?
25:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, pretty broadly, that that's the way it works.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: Um I I'm not a scholar of sci-fi, but yeah, it's it's science.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: So it's trying to give a scientific uh explanation.
25:37
SPEAKER_00: So in like in one of the Thor movies, uh Jane Foster, uh who's supposed to be a scientist, says that science fiction is a precursor to science fact.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: So that's you know, ideally how the how it is supposed to be viewed.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: That at some point we could get there.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: Right?
25:55
SPEAKER_00: At some point we could get to the to the Star Wars level, maybe, uh where our our society is is like that.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: Or or maybe Star Trek is even a better example.
26:04
SPEAKER_00: At some point we can get to where where we're going out into the into the universe and finding other cultures.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: Whereas fantasy uh is a separate world, and that's just part of it's it's like a fairy story.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: We we want it to be true to itself, to its inner consistency.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: Tolkien talked about the inner consistency of reality, but it doesn't have a scientific explanation, it just it's the way it is in that story.
26:30
SPEAKER_00: This is how the world is.
26:31
SPEAKER_00: The world has fairies or wizards.
26:33
SPEAKER_01: So would you categorize Star Wars as more sci-fi or fantasy or some sort of unique blend of the two?
26:41
SPEAKER_00: Uh I think it probably leans more towards sci-fi.
26:45
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but there's probably s yeah, I think I I think I would say it's probably more towards sci-fi because it tries to give up explanations for everything that's happening.
26:53
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
26:53
SPEAKER_00: There are explanations within it.
26:55
SPEAKER_01: Are you a huge Star Wars fan?
26:56
SPEAKER_00: I am, yeah.
26:58
SPEAKER_01: So what this is like we can't be friends, you know, if we No, I'm just telling Because some Star Wars people are like, I base my whole life on Star Wars, that kind of thing.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm not like that, no.
27:07
SPEAKER_01: But I'm thankful because those people are sort of weird, you know.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: It's like everything in your life is about this one.
27:14
SPEAKER_01: We've all known that.
27:15
SPEAKER_01: You know, that's the best somebody made it up.
27:17
SPEAKER_01: But in general, I'm curious what your thoughts are because you know, I look at Star Wars as modern-day literature, and it certainly has those elements.
27:24
SPEAKER_01: What are your thoughts on Star Wars episode 8, The Last Jedi?
27:28
SPEAKER_01: Like, did you like it, dislike it, somewhere in between from a storytelling and literature point of view, what I'm sure you had specific thoughts as a teacher who teaches stories and literature.
27:38
SPEAKER_01: But I'm sure that's that's at least partly how you how you experience the Star Wars movies and that kind of thing.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh I liked it, but I didn't like it a lot.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: That's maybe the short answer.
27:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh the Star Wars films, my husband likes to talk about them as having a poetry in the way they're constructed.
27:58
SPEAKER_00: And so uh, you know, they're they're they're in groups of three.
28:02
SPEAKER_00: That's the way they work.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: You know, you have three movies, three prequels, three originals, or whatever, and now we have the three um sequels or with the sequel trilogy.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: And we've already pointed out, other people have already pointed out that episode seven kind of mirrored episode four, and now episode eight is supposed to be mirroring episode five, which is a tall task because episode five is really good.
28:27
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: It's good storytelling.
28:29
SPEAKER_00: Episode eight, I think part of the problem that it ran into was that it was too the temptation is to say it was too long, but really I think it was badly paced.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: And so, I mean, you probably talk in your storytelling classes about um Freytag's pyramid, which is the basic way a story, particularly how plays are constructed.
28:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've not used that terminology, but yes.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, so you, you know, you have the exposition, you have you know rising action, you have some sort of climactic uh event, then you have falling action, then you have conclusion.
29:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like story structure stuff.
29:04
SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
29:05
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so uh those are not it's not like the climax always happens in the middle of a story.
29:11
SPEAKER_00: Oftentimes it happens kind of at the end.
29:12
SPEAKER_00: And I think episode eight, I wanted it to be over a lot sooner than it was.
29:17
SPEAKER_01: I felt the same way.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like I was like, this has been fun and and I really like it, but now why isn't over why isn't it done yet?
29:23
SPEAKER_01: Like Why are they still on Canto Bite?
29:26
SPEAKER_01: Please get them off that planet.
29:27
SPEAKER_00: So I think that it had a pacing problem.
29:29
SPEAKER_00: I think that it it tried to put too much stuff in and then it didn't uh it didn't reach its climax and then conclude quickly enough.
29:39
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
29:40
SPEAKER_00: It spent a long time, which is something that the Lord of the Rings films have a problem with too.
29:44
SPEAKER_00: So it maybe it's sort of part of that genre, um, those sci-fi fantasy type things, they have too much stuff they want to conclude to wrap up.
29:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's easy to be self-indulgent with those.
29:55
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
29:56
SPEAKER_01: I s I suppose, you know, because a lot of those filmmakers they love that genre.
30:00
SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
30:00
SPEAKER_01: Obviously, why would you make those movies or write them?
30:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
30:03
SPEAKER_01: You know, if you didn't love them on some level, so I guess that's a danger with any sort of art.
30:08
SPEAKER_01: But it does seem like sci fi and fantasy are particular offenders of you know, sort of like the two-hour rule.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
30:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they and part of that is because it's so hard to build a world.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: And so you have to give a a a complete setting and a story.
30:25
SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you think about like, you know, just your basic rom-com or something, we know the world.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: We know New York City.
30:31
SPEAKER_00: We've seen enough movies about New York City, we know about it.
30:34
SPEAKER_00: They don't have to spend time talking about it.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: But in Sci-Fi and Fantasy, they have to build the world and we have to believe it.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: And in order for the in order for the film to be successful, we have to believe it, but then they also have to give a story.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: That's a lot to do.
30:46
SPEAKER_01: So when when you think about when you think about literature, like with a capital L, are what makes literature with a capital L like literature, this is important literature that people should read, it gives us important ideas and themes about the human condition or human experience, versus I guess for lack of a better term, I would say disposable stories.
31:08
SPEAKER_01: How do you how do you determine between like what is great literature and what is just not great literature?
31:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, so I think a good example of this would be uh William Shakespeare.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: He is like the ultimate dead white guy as far as the canon is concerned.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: Um we've been told, I mean, he's he just had his 400th anniversary.
31:30
SPEAKER_00: This is the 400th anniversary of his death.
31:32
SPEAKER_00: Uh so for the last, you know, hundreds of years, we've been told Shakespeare is he's the pinnacle of writing.
31:40
SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
31:41
SPEAKER_00: And some people don't like Shakespeare, and I mean that's okay.
31:45
SPEAKER_00: I have problems with that.
31:46
SPEAKER_00: I think that Shakespeare should be read, even if you don't like it.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: I think it's uh it has enough cultural currency it should be read.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: But I think that it's interesting to think about why Shakespeare is remembered because Shakespeare did not come up with any of his stories.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: He uh Romeo and Juliet is a good example.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: He took stories from other sources that he liked and he mixed them with other stories and he kind of changed them, you know, how he wanted to.
32:14
SPEAKER_00: But I'm not sure that he had any plays uh that were like they just came out of his head.
32:20
SPEAKER_00: So Romeo and Juliet, there have been like four or five versions of Romeo and Juliet that were written before they came out of Italy, and they came in the you know the last hundred couple hundred years before Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet.
32:33
SPEAKER_00: Uh so his, you know, these these and they even were kind of named close to Romeo and Juliet.
32:39
SPEAKER_00: So uh he was not the first one to come up with that story.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: But when I say Romeo and Juliet, 99 out of a hundred people, maybe a hundred people, are gonna say Shakespeare.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: Right.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: Because they've heard of it.
32:51
SPEAKER_01: Right.
32:52
SPEAKER_01: There was a nineties movie, I think, called that or something, wasn't there?
32:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, there was Baz Luhrmann's Romeo plus Juliet.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: And so that was an adaptation.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: It was obviously I was yeah, I was mixed on that, so it yeah, and it used the it used Shakespearean dialogue, so it was it was still um it was still Shakespeare's play.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: It was just really differently staged.
33:10
SPEAKER_01: That is super interesting.
33:11
SPEAKER_01: I've seen that before.
33:13
SPEAKER_01: So the uh I think Joss Whedon did a version of He didn't much ado about nothing.
33:18
SPEAKER_00: Yes, a little bit that was like in black and white or something.
33:20
SPEAKER_01: Like what's what is the deal with these modern movies that are then well, and like Hamlet is the same way where I think there's one coming out that's a modern it's said in modern times, but they're using Shakespearean dialogue.
33:30
SPEAKER_01: What's the deal with that?
33:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so uh you know, what makes Shakespeare great is his language.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: So to to kind of answer the question about or partially answer the question about what makes literature with a capital L, it has to it has to do something fun with language.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: And Shakespeare was amazing with language.
33:48
SPEAKER_00: He invented hundreds of words.
33:51
SPEAKER_00: I mean things like uh bedroom.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: Like we didn't have that word before Shakespeare.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: Uh I think Star Crossed or the Green Eyed Monster, I think is another Shakespeare thing.
34:02
SPEAKER_00: Like uh he just came up with so many things that we just say now.
34:05
SPEAKER_00: A lot of our vocabulary is from him, and uh so you can't really have Shakespeare without keeping his language.
34:14
SPEAKER_01: That makes sense.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: Uh and but at the same time, his language is is old.
34:19
SPEAKER_00: Like when I when I read Shakespeare with my students, it's necessary to read an edition that has um explanatory notes in it.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: Because otherwise you're gonna have a hard time getting those jokes that he's telling and those um references that he's making because it's just it's 400 years old.
34:37
SPEAKER_00: We don't talk like that really anymore, and we don't have those same jokes anymore.
34:41
SPEAKER_00: Humor has moved on.
34:43
SPEAKER_00: Um, or you know, the way we speak humor, the words we have for things have moved on have moved on.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: And so I think that uh you have to keep Shakespeare's language, but in order to help people understand uh and in order to help people like Shakespeare, they have updated it and put the characters into modern dress and had them act modern.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, I think of like you you mentioned Hamlet.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: There's I mean there's been so many adaptations of Hamlet, but there was an adaptation in the I think in the 90s with Ethan Hawk as Hamlet, and it was a modern thing, and um he spoke the to be or not to be uh the to be or not to be soliloquy was spoken in a blockbuster.
35:30
SPEAKER_00: He's walking through the you know the That is a nineties right of blockbuster, but it it's a little on the nose, but you know, the to be or not to be uh speech is about whether to act or not, and that's Hamlet's whole thing.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't know what he's he's frozen, he cannot do anything, he can only think, he can't act.
35:49
SPEAKER_00: And uh so Ethan Hawk is walking through the action section of Blockbuster, which is which is really on the nose.
35:57
SPEAKER_01: That's kind of cool.
35:58
SPEAKER_00: Uh but it is, it's fun, and so it helps you to see, oh yep, he's talking about action.
36:02
SPEAKER_00: You know, should he should he do something?
36:04
SPEAKER_00: Should he should he do it something about his uncle who's married his mother and you know, probably killed his father, or should he just sit back?
36:11
SPEAKER_00: Uh so I think that it helps us to understand and like Shakespeare a little bit better if we stage it in in modern garb and in modern scenarios.
36:22
SPEAKER_01: That totally makes sense, and I I I had no idea why that was the case.
36:26
SPEAKER_01: So it's it's almost like reading, instead of reading the notes, you know, the explanatory notes, you have these other things that are cluing you into characters, you know, like lighting and color and characters' actions and setting, you know, all those things are are sort of the shorthand version of what's happening because the the language is not sometimes a little stilted to us.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's hard for us to to grasp because we're 400 years out.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's not Shakespeare's fault, it's not our fault.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: It's just we don't talk like that anymore.
36:55
SPEAKER_01: So if you were gonna start with something that Shakespeare wrote, what would you recommend starting with?
37:01
SPEAKER_00: Well, I have my students read Hamlet, which is it's probably one of the best Shakespeare plays.
37:08
SPEAKER_00: Um I think people would argue that people have their favorites.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: Uh the problem with Hamlet is it's very long.
37:13
SPEAKER_00: It it takes like four hours to stage.
37:15
SPEAKER_00: So you could read it in four hours, but you probably are gonna take longer reading it.
37:20
SPEAKER_00: Uh but it's good.
37:22
SPEAKER_00: So I I've also though started with Romeo and Juliet, which is a good play.
37:29
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we kind of laugh at, you know, these teenagers who are they get married a day after they have met each other.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, you read you read Romeo and Juliet and or you watch it, and almost every time I watch it, I think, no, don't kill yourselves.
37:43
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, I don't want them to die.
37:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm in I'm in invested.
37:46
SPEAKER_00: And it's not as long, and the language is is amazing.
37:50
SPEAKER_00: It's also a little bit more accessible than Hamlet.
37:52
SPEAKER_00: The Hamlet is a very cerebral character, and so the language that he uses is pretty cerebral, whereas Romeo and Julia is not that way, is it they are a couple of teenagers who are behaving impulsively.
38:05
SPEAKER_00: And so uh it has some beautiful language and some really great wordplay, but it's a little more accessible.
38:11
SPEAKER_00: And people are also a little more familiar with it.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: Right.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: We've heard, you know, Romeo, Romeo, where for at though.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, we know that.
38:19
SPEAKER_00: Every once in a while I run into students who don't know the ending of Romeo and Juliet, which is also kind of fun.
38:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
38:24
SPEAKER_00: So somet sometimes you might you might actually be surprised by the ending.
38:28
SPEAKER_01: So it's not really a happily ever after sort of a story.
38:32
SPEAKER_00: It's not, but it's a good tragedy.
38:33
SPEAKER_01: Not a Hallmark channel thing.
38:34
SPEAKER_00: In a good tragedy, you you don't want it to end tragically, and you also think maybe this will work out.
38:39
SPEAKER_00: A good tragedy fools you into thinking maybe only a couple of characters I don't care about will die.
38:46
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we don't care about those.
38:47
SPEAKER_01: Right.
38:48
SPEAKER_01: So if if we're reading great literature like Shakespeare or other things that we know have been appreciated over a span of time by generations, should we feel guilty about watching, you know, some cheapo crazy show on Netflix?
39:03
SPEAKER_01: Should should you feel guilty about watching the Hallmark channel, which are kind of like disposable movies?
39:07
SPEAKER_01: And that's not a criticism, that's just sort of a statement of they're cranked out by the dozens, you know.
39:12
SPEAKER_01: Um it's not a guys or girls thing, it's just we all sort of have, for lack of a better term, more lowbrow tastes, you know.
39:19
SPEAKER_01: Should we feel guilty about that?
39:21
SPEAKER_00: No, I don't think so.
39:22
SPEAKER_00: I think there's it's it's fine to watch Hallmark movies if you're watching them all the time.
39:28
SPEAKER_00: You might want to think about how you're using your your time, but uh we all have periods of time where we go through and we watch things that probably aren't super highbrow.
39:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I do that.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: And and part of the reason that we do that is because it's easy and also it helps us to escape from our lives, which is okay, and that's legitimate.
39:45
SPEAKER_00: It's it's okay to have just a time where you're not thinking about what's going on in your life.
39:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
39:51
SPEAKER_00: Um, I was listening to another podcast recently uh in which Karen Twella Pryor, who I mentioned earlier, and Rosalie De Rose, who teaches English at Moody, uh were speaking about literature, and I think it was Rosalie De Rose who made the comparison between great literature and sort of popular literature.
40:09
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and she said it's kind of like the difference between you know eating really healthfully and eating junk food.
40:15
SPEAKER_00: It is not it's not bad to eat a brownie.
40:17
SPEAKER_00: Like that's food does not have a moral uh quality.
40:21
SPEAKER_00: So it's we can eat brownies every once in a while, but we know that we should be eating salads pretty regularly as well if we want to be healthy.
40:29
SPEAKER_00: And so the same thing is true of literature.
40:32
SPEAKER_00: Uh you should be reading good literature in order to improve your mind and in in order to kind of work out your brain and and to help you to be a better person.
40:41
SPEAKER_00: You know, literature helps you to be a better person, good literature does.
40:43
SPEAKER_00: It's you know, at least one study has shown this.
40:47
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but at the same time, it's okay to just read some fun stuff every once in a while, or watch a silly show on Netflix or or a or a Hallmark movie.
40:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think there's a there's an element to it as well where you want to just be part of what some people call the great conversation in society.
41:05
SPEAKER_01: You're familiar with the themes of great novels and of great art and all those things, and you don't want to be that person standing around at a party or or get together where everybody else is talking about something and you have no clue what they're talking about.
41:18
SPEAKER_01: That just seems to be part of a basic education that hopefully we will continue to embrace after high school or after college.
41:25
SPEAKER_00: And it's also true, that same thing is true, though, of of so-called popular literature and popular, you know, shows and films.
41:34
SPEAKER_00: You want to be part of that conversation too.
41:36
SPEAKER_00: And there anything, even a Hallmark movie, is going to represent culture in some way.
41:41
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
41:41
SPEAKER_00: We can analyze anything.
41:43
SPEAKER_00: Anything can be talked about.
41:44
SPEAKER_00: And so, I mean, you don't want to get overwhelmed and you don't have to watch the entire Netflix, you know, library.
41:50
SPEAKER_00: That's you're gonna get overwhelmed with that.
41:52
SPEAKER_00: So you pick and choose the ones that you really want to be uh conversant in, but it's there's also some worth in watching what other people are watching so that you can talk to them about it.
42:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
42:01
SPEAKER_01: Well, as we start to wind this down, um, this has been super fun, by the way.
42:05
SPEAKER_01: I've really enjoyed talking about this stuff.
42:07
SPEAKER_01: And I'm learning a lot.
42:08
SPEAKER_01: I feel like I'm back in class.
42:09
SPEAKER_01: I'll learn all kinds of cool stuff.
42:11
SPEAKER_01: Let's say somebody um is listening to our conversation and they're thinking, all this sounds great, but I I'm so busy with work, with my Netflix shows.
42:20
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I gotta catch up on House of Cards or whatever, whatever show.
42:24
SPEAKER_01: Uh not that I'm saying I'm addicted to that show, which I'm not, but um the final season is coming out here shortly, which I will have to watch probably in one day.
42:31
SPEAKER_01: But let's say somebody feels overwhelmed and busy with life.
42:34
SPEAKER_01: How do they make time to read?
42:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
42:36
SPEAKER_01: How do you how do you personally do that and what would you recommend?
42:39
SPEAKER_01: Maybe a few practical takeaways for people who want to make more time to read in their life, but they have a hard time doing it.
42:45
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh well, I mean, first of all, I'm not great at at doing this either.
42:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, binge watching is part of our society, and it's just a lot easier to to check out and even watch a cerebral show uh rather than to read a book.
43:00
SPEAKER_00: But I would say commit yourself to doing some amount of reading every day.
43:06
SPEAKER_00: Whether that is before bed, uh, you know, it's it's been proven that if we read before bed rather than look at a screen, we actually sleep better.
43:16
SPEAKER_00: We go to sleep quicker, we sleep better.
43:18
SPEAKER_00: You know, those screens are not they're not great for our eyes or our brains, they turn our brains on rather than help us to shut down at night.
43:26
SPEAKER_00: So take seven minutes before bed and start reading something, or have just half an hour a day where you sit down and and you read for that half an hour.
43:38
SPEAKER_00: Um something else that I've liked to do and that I know some other people like is to start listening to books on podcasts or on like audible.
43:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, find yeah, because you can do that on your commute or you can do that while you're working out.
43:54
SPEAKER_00: Uh sometimes it's a the downside of that is sometimes it's a little hard to follow a novel if you're not actually.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: looking at it.
44:01
SPEAKER_00: Right.
44:01
SPEAKER_00: If your eyes aren't engaged, your mind might wander.
44:04
SPEAKER_00: But that's sometimes a good way to start some of this.
44:08
SPEAKER_00: But it's just like it's like eating well or working out, like Rosalie DeRose said.
44:14
SPEAKER_00: You just you have to cultivate that um that habit.
44:18
SPEAKER_00: So you do a little bit every day.
44:21
SPEAKER_00: And um and eventually you strengthen that you strengthen that muscle.
44:25
SPEAKER_00: Your brain is a muscle and or or your you know your it works like a muscle you can strengthen it.
44:30
SPEAKER_00: And so um the more good literature you read, the easier it is to read.
44:36
SPEAKER_00: And good point.
44:38
SPEAKER_00: And then you know the better you'll be at at doing that reading, the the the faster it'll go, for example.
44:46
SPEAKER_00: But it's really true that the more you know if you read Shakespeare all the time you wouldn't find the language very difficult.
44:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah that makes sense.
44:53
SPEAKER_00: But if you only read it once a year even it's going to be hard.
44:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah or once every you know forty years or something you pick it up.
45:00
SPEAKER_00: Right.
45:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah that's a great point.
45:03
SPEAKER_01: So it's more of an intentional choice than it is just a passive, well I'll read when I have time.
45:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah and you have to you know like like this podcast I was listening to Karen Swallow Pryor and Rosie de Rose were saying you have to treat it sort of like a a discipline.
45:16
SPEAKER_00: It is not to say this is good for me in the same way that you say a salad is good for you and you just do it.
45:23
SPEAKER_00: And eventually you might want to eventually you'll get into it and you'll like it.
45:27
SPEAKER_00: But at first it might be a little hard.
45:29
SPEAKER_00: It might be like working out for the first time in several months.
45:33
SPEAKER_00: You know it might be a little painful.
45:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah you don't go to the gym and just you know you're gonna immediately lift hundreds of pounds.
45:39
SPEAKER_00: No.
45:39
SPEAKER_01: So and I don't know anything about weightlifting so maybe that's not even something people do is like I don't know much about it either.
45:44
SPEAKER_01: But you don't immediately go and start doing this massive load of things you have to inch into it.
45:50
SPEAKER_00: So Yeah.
45:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah you don't you don't even run a mile usually to for most people this is true for me.
45:57
SPEAKER_00: You have to you have to work up to it.
45:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
46:00
SPEAKER_00: So the same thing is true of literature.
46:02
SPEAKER_01: Well this is great tips.
46:03
SPEAKER_01: Uh I really appreciate you being on the show today.
46:05
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.
46:06
SPEAKER_01: I've gotten a great education so this is fun.
46:09
SPEAKER_01: How can our our listeners get in touch with you if they want to do have some follow-up questions or want to maybe continue the conversation that way.
46:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah um they can contact me on Twitter.
46:18
SPEAKER_00: I'm on Twitter usually uh so um a l sheridan at a l sheridan so a underscore l underscore sheridan um you can also um email me so at asheridan at s dlchhristian dot edu um or find me on Facebook and and message me there.
46:37
SPEAKER_01: Very cool well Anne thanks so much we appreciate it.
46:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah thanks for having me well I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Ann Sheridan.
46:48
SPEAKER_01: At the end of every interview I always share three specific things that I learned from our guest and these are key action steps you can put into practice right away to start making a bigger impact in your life and your creative work.
47:00
SPEAKER_01: So let's dive in.
47:01
SPEAKER_01: Takeaway number one is this artists need to be part of the great conversation.
47:07
SPEAKER_01: Now when I refer to the quote unquote great conversation I'm talking about the overarching themes, entertainment or ideas that guide our cultural narrative.
47:17
SPEAKER_01: Now in terms of literature there are certain books that have had a huge impact on culture.
47:21
SPEAKER_01: For example the works of Shakespeare or in terms of movies you might say something like Star Wars or Star Trek.
47:27
SPEAKER_01: You've heard the phrase the more things change the more they stay the same and you begin to see this as true when you study great works of art and great books from different periods of history.
47:37
SPEAKER_01: You know the human condition has not really changed in a really really long time if ever we need to not only read current literature but also be familiar with the great concepts and ideas that have shaped our culture generation after generation takeaway number two great art is not always appreciated in the lifetime of the artist there are certain styles, artists and trends that go in and out of style every so often and this should not really surprise us because every generation places its own value are different ideas and cultural artifacts such as books and movies.
48:12
SPEAKER_01: For example, Van Gogh's artwork was not nearly as popular in his lifetime as it is today.
48:18
SPEAKER_01: And I'm sure that Van Gogh had no idea that one day he would become one of the world's most beloved and celebrated artists.
48:25
SPEAKER_01: So how does this apply to us as creative people and as artists and leaders well I think it means that we have to play the long game creatively speaking we're not just creating things for today but we're creating for the next generation and the one after that as well and hopefully after that.
48:42
SPEAKER_01: So don't have a short term mindset.
48:44
SPEAKER_01: We're in this for the long haul not just for this week or this year or even this decade but for decades and generations into the future.
48:52
SPEAKER_01: On a related note I was really intrigued by Anne's thoughts on how Gothic literature becomes popular during a period about once every hundred years.
49:00
SPEAKER_01: And I think right now we're living in a period of great social upheaval, division, fear and uncertainty.
49:06
SPEAKER_01: And our interest in certain types of art and certain themes represents our fears and desires as a culture.
49:12
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's why Gothic literature is and gothic themes as a whole has been popular for the last 10 or 15 years because those things represent our fears they represent uncertainty they represent sort of a cultural darkness if you will.
49:27
SPEAKER_01: If you want to dive into the study of generations more deeply I highly recommend the book called Generations The History of America's Future 1581 to 2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe.
49:38
SPEAKER_01: I've been, I'm not going to use the word obsessed because that's that's a little too extreme, but I've been highly intrigued by these concepts that they talk about in this book for a couple of decades now, ever since graduate school.
49:50
SPEAKER_01: So I recommend you check out that book called Generations The History of America's Future by those two authors if you want to dive into that theme more deeply.
49:59
SPEAKER_01: Then finally takeaway number three is you can tackle the great classics of literature by reading a little bit every day.
50:06
SPEAKER_01: Now Anne gave several great tips on how to tackle some of these books even if you are a really busy person.
50:12
SPEAKER_01: And it's really simple you just read a little bit every day.
50:16
SPEAKER_01: She mentioned how to make this a habit by reading a little bit before bedtime every evening.
50:20
SPEAKER_01: And this has kind of a double whammy effect.
50:23
SPEAKER_01: Number one you make consistent progress on your reading and number two you also give your eyes a rest and you get better sleep by not working on a screen right before bedtime.
50:34
SPEAKER_01: So those are three key takeaways.
50:36
SPEAKER_01: I really love doing this interview.
50:37
SPEAKER_01: This was a lot of fun and it impacted me in several different ways as you can tell so hope that you enjoyed it as well.
50:43
SPEAKER_01: Well that wraps up this episode of the Born2Create podcast you can find all of our show notes at KentSanders.net slash literature this episode was produced by me Kent Sanders and our associate producer Ben Sanders.
50:57
SPEAKER_01: If you enjoyed this episode please subscribe and leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts.
51:03
SPEAKER_01: You can do that by visiting KentSanders.net slash Apple and finally if you enjoyed this episode please consider sharing it with a friend or a family member who you think might enjoy it.
51:14
SPEAKER_01: You can find lots more resources to help you unlock your creative potential at KentSanders.net.
51:19
SPEAKER_01: Until next time remember that you were born to create and design to make a difference.
51:24
SPEAKER_01: Now go create something awesome