＂You're WRONG Knowles!＂ After That, The Dark ｜ Andrew Klavan
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
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Summary
On today's show, Andrew Klavan joins me to talk about his new book, "Crossing the Bar," and why he thinks the Bible is the most important book of all time. He also talks about why he doesn't read fiction.
Transcript
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I thought, of all the things to criticize about you.
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I'm sitting here listening, you're talking Latin, you've got like plane song going.
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Drew, for the four people who watch it, they are getting an experience like none other.
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My show at this point, it's like the Ku Klux Klan, you know?
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So someone pointed out the other day, I said, whenever it was, like two months ago, I said,
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They go, Jacob goes and buys nice leather jackets.
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They said to me, they say, Drew's really angry because you haven't had him on to talk about
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And I said, well, then he should be angry with you because I've told you multiple times to
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This book at this point, I think, came out in like 2018.
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The book is after that, The Dark, which, by the way, refers to one of the poems like
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And after he wrote it, he ended all of his books with it because it was about dying.
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Sunset and evening star and one clear call for me.
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And may there be no moaning of the bar when I put out to see.
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You've read two works of fiction, the Divine Comedy and me.
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I don't understand why you don't read so much more.
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You know, they're always talking about the spirit.
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It's like it's to enlarge your imagination so that you perceive the world in a bigger way.
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So, I mean, if you're not reading me, you are literally not supporting conservatives in the arms.
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You know, I mean works that I should have read 15 years ago.
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And I have to do it for my book club show or whatever.
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And then every time, well, unless I read a bad book.
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But like whenever I read good books, by the time I get to the end of it, I say, wow.
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I'm viewing the world in a new and interesting way.
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And then I say, well, I'm never doing that again.
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And he said, no, I tried it once and it worked.
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But no, I really do think that this is a serious thing that I think as you ingest more art,
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you start to walk around the world and say, oh, I recognize this situation.
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Just like if you live as many hundreds of years as I have lived, you've seen things before
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and you see them again and you kind of know how they're going to go.
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But that happens with art, too, because you think, oh, yeah, Shakespeare said this.
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Or, you know, I read this in a book and you can see what's going to happen.
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Like when we have those friendly fire shows, we're all talking and you guys are saying,
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well, I read the polls and this is going to happen.
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And I'll sit there and go, no, that's not what's going to happen.
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I do wonder how much the, I don't want to be too harsh here, but the conservative Philistinism is, you know,
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affects our, especially our more contemporary politics.
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Because I think, even though I, you know, I'm mostly a Philistine,
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I have read a decent amount of, I don't know, poetry or something.
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I've been dragged into reading some of the great books.
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And, and it, it does, gives you a bit of a lighter step.
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They'll say like, you're, you know, come on, quit.
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You know, come on, we got to get, we got to start reading, you know, like Hitler or something.
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What do you, and it used to be, it was a manly thing to do to read the arts because you were sophisticated.
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You know, you knew that a guy like James Bond read, read all the great British novels, you know,
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It is enculturating, if that's a word, that it may, it gives you culture.
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And I think, you know, I really do think this because it's been frustrating in some ways.
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I feel like, I feel like, like 20 years ago, I started fighting this fight to take the culture
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and all the means of communications away from the left because they had this stranglehold on it
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and they were killing our country by basically producing this toxic atmosphere.
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You were talking about Jonathan Haidt, you know, this is like, this is the toxic atmosphere that
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he lives in that he, you know, he can't see through.
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I interviewed him about his, his atheism and like, he seriously can't get past it and see
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the truth because of the atmosphere that he lives in.
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And, and we've won so much of this fight, you know, we have defeated their news media.
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Their news media is now almost virtually irrelevant.
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They just kind of stink up the place with their lies, but we still have not come back
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Hollywood is, when I say it's dead, it's like lying on its back with its feet.
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It's what the cops call tits up, you know, it's like it's just dead.
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What do you make of, because there is in the tradier world, you know, which is kind of
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on the upswing. The traditionalists, people go on a high liturgy churches and stuff. That's on the
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upswing. I'm definitely part of it. There is a longing for high art, high culture, even if most
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of them never go to the opera or ballet or something, but there's still a longing for it,
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a gesture toward it. But what you're talking about is novels and Hollywood. What should we be aiming at?
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You know, is there, because I would love, I was in Hungary for CPAC Hungary and one of the
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organizers comes up to me and goes, Michael, you look kind of cultured. Do you like the opera?
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And I said, I actually do like opera, but I haven't been in ages. I said, okay, well,
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here's some opera tickets. And I go, and it was really terrific, actually, all things considered.
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And I thought it was almost entirely empty. And the people who were there were dressed in t-shirts.
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Like there was no sense that this is a real to-do and we should dress in a respectful way for
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this, you know, and we should fill up that. It's amazing. Beautiful opera house. Should we be
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aiming at the high arts or the low arts, or am I even misthinking, misconsidering this?
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You're kind of misthinking. I'll tell you what, I was at the opera Sunday. I saw The Marriage of
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Figaro at the Kennedy Center. It was wonderful, wonderful cast, wonderful production, and packed.
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It was just packed. Although, I mean, I was the youngest person there, so that might
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And look, it is very, very hard to match the European arts and culture at their highest.
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There was something about that culture that produced the greatest art that humankind has
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ever produced. And that is intimidating for Americans and has been ever since America began.
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But there was something really different about the European arts is that Europe was a number of
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small countries. So each, what we would call a state was a country, and each one could address
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the entire country in a single work of art. So Dickens could write Britain. You could write the
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entire country of Britain. We can't do that in America, too many of us, too big and too individualistic.
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And that's why Americans have found their expression almost always their greatest expression in genre,
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in musical comedy, in detective stories, in westerns, in science fiction. We're really good
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at those. I mean, you look at somebody like Conan the Barbarian. He's tossed aside as junk. No,
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these are some of the greatest adventure novels ever written. And they say something about American
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life without, of course, ever talking about American life. I work mostly in the crime genre,
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sometimes in fantasy and horror. You and I did another Kingdom trilogy together, which is still
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selling quite well, by the way. I just got some royalties for that. It's doing very nicely.
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Yeah, you get Zittenbupkus. I'll send you a bagel. I don't know, maybe.
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But somehow, somehow the American dream is expressed in dreamlike stories that are genre stories. And that's
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a really interesting fact and really different. But we shouldn't be cowed by the high culture
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of Europe, though we should ingest it so we can put the stuff that's in there into our works.
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But it's just different. I mean, a movie like Casablanca, The Godfather, these are works of art. There's no
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question about it. And the fact that they're not, you know, Macbeth, they don't have the language that
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Shakespeare had is not to be, doesn't mean that we should turn up our noses at them. I think it really
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is important. You know, one of the true crisis resolutions in my life, I was just writing about it
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for somebody else. And so I'm on top of my mind, is I knew that I had, let's just say,
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a sophisticated vision of what the world is. It was a complex, sophisticated vision. But I knew my
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skill was writing fast-moving, you know, crime stories. That was really the talent I'd been given,
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right? And I thought, how do I do that? How do I put those things together? And I read a great
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Victorian thriller called The Woman in White. And I was lying in bed reading this and I sat up in bed and I
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thought, that's how you do it. And then the trick became taking a slow-moving Victorian novel and
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turning it into a fast-moving American novel, which has been sort of the work of my life.
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If you read After That the Dark, you will see the results of that. And I'm not, I am selling the
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book. I hope everybody goes out and buys the book. But this is, when I finished that, I thought, yeah,
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that's what I'm trying to do. Because it is full of complexity. It is full of a vision of the world.
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But it is done as a fast-moving American thriller, because that's America. America is not a slow-moving,
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ruminating culture where we sit around and worry which fork goes on. You know, Henry James, who was
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an American writer and became a British writer, talked about where the fork was. And if you didn't
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know where the fork was, then that told you something about character. It doesn't tell you
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anything about an American. An American is a very different kind of character who I think is
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expressed in musicals, Westerns, detective stories, and science fiction, and fantasy. That's how we
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talk to each other. And I think it's right and proper that we do. We shouldn't look down on it.
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Right. I've never considered that, that in America, you can't have this totalizing vision
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in a totalizing work of art. Because we're just, it's a weird country that was founded by like
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pilgrims, religious separatist zealots, and kind of miscreants, and moneymakers. And then we got a bunch
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of slaves, and then a ton of immigrants. Right? You know, it's like pretty hard.
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And yeah, and you get these wonderful moments when like, you know,
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Bing Crosby listens to Louis Armstrong and thinks, I want a little of that black stuff in my life. And
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you know, Bing Crosby is singing songs written by Jews. And it's like, yeah, it's different than
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Mozart, you know, because Mozart is embodying an entire culture. But it is a work of genius. It's a
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work of genius. Right. When you hear the American songbook written by all these Jews for blacks,
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for whites, and you know, and Irish guys singing, you know, all this stuff, you're hearing something
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new and beautiful and unique. And I think we should be proud of it and understand it as an expression
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of ourselves, this incredible, wild country. It's nothing like it. I mean, maybe Rome a little bit
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at its peak, but nothing like this. No, that was the comparison I was thinking. And in terms of
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genre, you know, for gigantic globe-encompassing decadent empires, I was thinking of the poetry of
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Catullus, much of which is just pornography. And, you know, I guess that's a prolific genre in a
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decadent global empire as well. But better to focus more on like the crime stories and the musicals and
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the... No, I mean, you know, Yeats made fun of the critics of his day, the poet, the Irish poet Yeats
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made fun of the critics of his day because they were stuffy. He called them bald heads, you know,
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old bald heads. And the last line of that poem is, what would they say if their Catullus came their
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way? In other words, the art in its time was filthy and it was fun and it was big and dirty. And now the
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critics are going, oh, Catullus. And so I really do think the critics get in our way.
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They get between us and the things we love. One of the reasons I talk about video games is
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because I think they are a stunning visual art form at their best. Obviously, 90% of them are
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crap. But every now and again, you do something and you think, wow, that's beautiful. And I'm being
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sucked into it by gameplay, which has never happened before. And these are just new things. And I think,
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you know, yeah, art is a two-way street. So if you're sitting in your mother's basement smoking
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dope and playing video games, you are not participating in art. But I've played video
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games that have stuck with me and have changed the way I see things and have enhanced the way I see
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things. So I just don't think snobbery is what works. I think recognizing quality both in European
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style art and in American art is what brings it to life. And I think that's why conservatives get lost.
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You know, they will go to the opera. They will watch a guy's eyes plucked out in King Lear.
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But then when they see it in Game of Thrones, they think, ooh, you know, it's violent.
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Naughty. Nasty. Yeah. Drew, you might have convinced me to stop being such a Philistine
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and to go read After That, The Dark, a book that is out right now. Everyone needs to go get it.
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I believe I'm seeing you in about three seconds to go do Friendly Fire. Is that right?
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I know. This is, we got to get you. Is that a nice Michael Knowles sweater? If not,
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we have to get you one. You can all go get yours at dailyware.com slash shop.
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I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show. See you tomorrow.