YouSaid · the spoken record

Cynthia L. Haven

lines on the record: 67
first: 2022-08-24
most recent: 2022-08-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Was a hell of a lot of fun to interview. I was lucky'cause I happened to be the last person to get in to interview him before he went back to Poland, so those were opportunities that I had to take advantage of while they were there still there. And had I waited”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would be nice, but truly. I'm the first in my family to have any university degree at all, so the idea of becoming a faculty member never crossed my mind until I found myself working within academia. So sure I fantasize it. Sure I think it'd be wonderful to be able to have a salary and to be able to not live as a freelance writer. On the other hand, I couldn't have done the things that I did. There is an enormous pressure towards conformity with an academia. Would I have been able to write the first biography of Renee Gerard if I had been? I don't think it would be something that necessarily would have been encouraged within an academic atmosphere with something I could do because I was an outsider to some extent. I've had a wonderful life doing this. I've been able to sit there and explore the greatest minds that I've known in my life. I'm in the greatest people. Renee was not just a wonderful and seminal thinker. He was a genuinely decent and generous human being. The bent one of the best that I've known.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they all died within a few years of my getting to know them, that is the problem of dealing with the old giants, as the old giants tend to disappear. I ask the same questions you're asking, who replaces them? I mean, who's asking the big questions?”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great scholar who was the first to really uncover the extent of Stalinism and the murders and the crimes of under Stalinism, he was also a poet I wrote about Joseph Frank, the noted biographer of Dostoevsky, five volume series. That was my excuse for getting to know Renee Gerard as I profiled him, and Carl Weber, the dramatist, who was a student of Come on, the great dramatist in Germany.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of when I was doing that for the Stanford. I wanted to focus on those people that I thought were the last of their kinds. Well, you know, I kind of thought of them as living legends, so I wrote profiles of people like Robert Conquest. You know him”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I understand your point and I agree with it. I would just like us to see us value more thinking I'd like to see us value literature again. I'd like to see us value poetry again. I think that this is a questionable argument and people have tact and they've talked about Nazis that used to listen to Haydn and stuff like that. But I do think that there's a better chance of something good getting through if you're reading chess. Well, of me woosh than if you're reading Twitter feeds. If we valued intelligent thinking, intelligent speaking in our public lives, I think we'd be less likely to get the kind of candidates that we're getting.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“without changing how we think by changing what we admire, what we are willing to imitate, the worse will rise to the fore. Does that make any sense?”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, it's mimesis. It's this tendency for people to just join and to me to momentums. It happens very fast in the US, I think, because so many of us are on the social media. It's our willingness to believe, I think, our value system has become so deduced by commercial forces, it's hard to find serious forms of thinking. Maybe not for you, but for people in much of America. I might be killed for saying this, but when your models are people like Trump, you know, what are you going to get in the way of depth? What are you going to get in the way of? They keep saying if you want those kinds of people to go away, we have to change the value system in America. Well, one of the things that creates a value system is the humanities. In a place where the humanities and reading are suffering decline, then the other models are going to come up and spring and be forceful. We listen to crappy commercials, we listen to crappy memes. It's going to be...”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I was thinking olden days with passing out leaflets and things, but you're right. You're right. Of course, there's VPN. Let's hope it gets through.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's keep in mind that Brodsky didn't have a lot of military power or political power. It's one thing to mouth off from a sort of pre-existing imperialist streak for Russia. It's another thing to, you know, attack and kill Ukrainians. Is there an act of Samistad in Russia right now”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have no answers for that, I mean Maria closed her online newspaper Colta a few days after this began after her whole staff signed an editorial saying no war was on the front page so if the good guys can't publish who's going to be disseminating information”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, there's a liberal class in Russia, and those are the ones that are publishing my books. I mean, Maria Stapanova is a good friend of mine. She's one of the leading writers in Russia. My publisher for the Brodsky book has a lot of Russians on its death. They know what the truth is”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It must have gotten in the Russian edition now. Again, I think the problem is the Russians I know, my Russian friends, they know all of this stuff. But how do you get through to the others? How do you get through to the ones that are, you know, still casting their votes for Putin?”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I haven't spoken to them, but I think that what they're going through has got resonances. Again, this is not most of Russia. We're talking about the Atensia who are buying the books in Russia, not the people in the provinces. I hope it gets through. I want to go back to Moscow, and most of all Petersburg.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was on Facebook, and for some reason I posted something about Brodsky. I can't even remember what the topic was. It was when he was asked what he thought was the best way to see Moscow. He said from the cockpit of a B fifty two Everyone just attacked me for posting this and you know how horrible it was that someone should say this. A few days later there was the attack on Ukraine. The thread went silent. It suddenly seemed not such a vicious idea as it had when he posted it. I hope that things change. I hope that Russia changes. I have another book coming out in Russia.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Traveling, I love traveling. I visited a Pushkin house in Moldova, I believe. Pushkin had houses everywhere in the Russian Empire. He had places his state and they're all memorialized in the Eastern Europe, so”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was 20 years ago maybe. This is charming, and Kiev is just absolutely beautiful. I love the lava caves, those tombs that they have underneath Kiev. I very much hope that it survives all of this and that Odessa is restored to the Ukraine.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually I was working with Vogue's travel editor and he had just come back from Katmundu and was telling me how beautiful it was, and I was also seeing a man who was a concert pianist who was about to give a concert in Katmandu. So this was a twofer so I could do both and pack it all up and leave for India and Nepal. I turned the pages at the concert.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it was more like the devil wears Prada. I did edit an article by the sister of the Princess of Wales, or the Princess of Wales to be. That was my highlight. There was editing an article by Sarah Spencer.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was very much the same way in London where I was working for Vogue and Condenast, the same kind of ladders. I was under B. Miller rather than her American counterpart. That was the first job I could get in London. So I was very glad to have it. But they didn't make me into a fashion plate, horribly hopeless on fashion.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's interesting. It's kind of hard he was so solidly of an era. His plays aren't performed much, and they haven't been for a long time. I like the wit. I like the sharpness. I think the last, you know, yes, we could use a revival.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best question he asked He was fascinated beginning in the nineteenth seventies with the loss of what he called second space, with the loss of the religious dimension in human thinking, with the loss of any notion beyond the little here and the little now. He explored that beginning with a fragmentary science fiction experiment called Second Space. Second space was the title of his last, the last volume that was published, you know, with his supervision. He was very restless about that. I think it is a powerful thing to explore.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm interested in big questions. I think a lot of people aren't, a lot of interviewers aren't. It's not an era for big questions, is it?”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nosiness. As a young woman it gave me a chance to meet interesting people. Lots of people like to be interviewed. So it was a chance to ask a lot of questions and learn a lot of things.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interested in thinking We're talking about thinking. I'm interested in people who ask big questions and all those people ask big questions”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that it was a turn to philosophy. Literature is part of me too. I was reading Les Mis Wable as a little girl. I'm not interested in philosophy per se. I was interested in Renee Gerard. I think I can promise I would not write about another philosopher. It's a huge field of study.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, very much so I began at seventeen is a reporter actually at sixteen It teaches you a lot of things. It teaches you to perform on deadline, it teaches you not to object to your work getting edited, which is a problem with a lot of authors. It teaches you to be flexible, teaches you how to ask questions, teaches you how to do interviews, lots of good skills there.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“bread and the bone will out in the flesh. Yes he never gave it up, not entirely. I think it became a smaller portion of his psyche.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a Russian imperialist. I mean he got into the fight with Derek Walcott was on the importance of his own nation and it's a strong streak in the Russian culture.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not just that poem he got into a fight with Derek Walcott at a famous conference when he was belittling the smaller nations of the world. There's a sort of national imperialism of Russia that is not just Putin that goes all the way down, I think, that poem about the Ukraine is indeed very unfortunate. It's not going to serve his legacy well. It doesn't serve common sense well.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think mastard is a big word grapple. Think he grappled with it. It's hard for us in English to see how well that works and the butterfly is a masterpiece. And as you know, I wrote the conversations with George Klein and that was a masterpiece translation. Give us more masterpiece translations and we'll have a better judgment.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Russia, he will never die. He is one of the great poets of the twentieth century. In America, I think a lot of it depends on the future translations. The word play in his poems, the inventiveness is such that it makes it very difficult to squash it into the English language. And there's been attempts, there's been controversy, there's been issues with the estate and everything else. I hope that we someday get a good complete volume of Joseph Brodsky in English that is as magical as the original Russian.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we did, more or less. I mean, he spent the time in Washington, DC, New York City, but his first calling was to be a naturalist. That was his first attraction as a child, so he studied nature from a child, the American wilderness puzzled and somewhat confused him, as he put ten different kinds of oaks instead of three like you'd have in Poland.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“His favourite phrase of hers was distance as a soul of beauty. That was a big part of his Nobel speech getting the right distance from someone. She was a profoundly religious thinker. He was quoting her all the time.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think he talks about that so much as people in captive mind as people trying to get along and live within the system and the way they pathologically divide themselves into two people so that they can avoid the martyrdom that happened to so many of their peers.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bad things are attractive to us. We're followers. Why is Putin still got support in Russia after what he's doing? I mean, why are the Trump supporters?”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, then we get back to Renee, don't we? It's imitation, it's a desire to conform, it's a desire to rise, get a better job, get tenure, whatever it is that still pressures people. Mi Boche did not grow up under communism. That didn't come about until the fall of Warsaw and its destruction. Human nature remains the same. It's just a shame that it's getting more pathological forms.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is his only book that has been continuously in print and a bestseller since it was published in nineteen fifty three. It's an amazing book and yes, it's an amazing book to us today. It has a lot to say to us about what you're talking about and a lot else about the conformity, about the pressures to what he called the Murti Bing pill. You've read Captive Mind.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's a poet, and I think that's a problem poetry is well, it's not taught the way it was or the humanities of God have somewhat gone by the wayside, not for people who love poetry, but it's not taught. I would like to see Cheswov Miwos taught in schools as an American. That's the premise of my book. I think he had an enormous amount, but he was not a systematic thinker, as a poet. He was not trying to create a system, but he had an enormous amount to say to us today.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that in unfortunate tendency to say always or never if you quizzed him more thoroughly he'd say he would say well no not always or whatever but I think that that is sometimes been tackled on by people as a flaw”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ooh, I think it allowed Shakespeare to play around a lot more. There's a lot of medic influences in the other plays as well, Julius Caesar is an excellent one for the Memetic Desire that leads to a basically a lynching. I think the comedies give you a chance to play with it, and I think that that's a large part of their delight.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but I think that there are other ways of seeing Shakespeare besides Renee's. Renee had a lot of interesting things to say, but I don't think he's the only person that said interesting things on that or any other subject.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he was fascinated by Shakespeare it was a love affair of sorts. That was his kind of marriage to the English language. That's the only book he wrote in English. I think he had a great deal to say. I think that that's one of the most interesting explorations that he had in his book Theatre of Envy is very critical to his corpus. And I think he's an excellent critic.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And later in the interviewing process with Jean-Michel, I said to him, Gorlean, that's an Armenian name. Would your family involve with that? And his face fell. He had lost a number of his extended family in that genocide, and that is why he grew up in Beirut, not farther east. And what I concluded in that chapter was that Jean Michel Gorleon, having been a second generation, Holocaust survivor, that had impressed them in that what seemed outrageous to us, the idea that Renee had seen a lynching was not so outrageous to him because it had actually happened, and then not too distant memory. So I told the story that way. I told that chapter that way was a way of going back and revisiting that past and revisiting the impression that it had on the man standing in front of me. So no, he hadn't seen a lynching. You don't go and watch a lynching. You're either one of the people throwing the stones, or you're the lynchee.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I was the writer. I was interviewing Jean Maria Gorleon in Paris and who was at one time, you know, Renee said many people were his best friends. Jean-Marie Michel de Greleon was one of the people that he often said that about. And he claimed that Renee had told him that he had witnessed a lynching. This is one of those moments in one of the most powerful moments I've ever had in an interview in the floor kind of opens up when someone says something like that. And I thought, wait a minute, how can that be true? But it was my job to check it out and see whether it could be true. But more than that, it was an opportunity for me to explore what lynching meant in the US and abroad and talk about that. I was surprised in my research to find out how recently lynchings had happened. I had thought of them as something from a much earlier decade in the twentieth century having ended. It gave me a chance to think about it.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It hadn't happened. Renee did not run an open house. He had a surprisingly conventional private life, was madly in love with the one woman he was married to for fifty years, sixty years. Here's a story for you. Martha and Renee had a marriage that was so harmonious. They never apparently never gave each other presents on birthdays or whatever they did that, and their children had to call and tell them that their sixtieth wedding anniversary had just happened because it went by without them noticing.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, I'll tell one. You asked about Peter Thiel. I was asked to fact check that Peter Teal had wanted an answer to a question about Renee's theory and drove up immediately to Renee's house to get the answer that he needed. And someone asked me to fact-check that and I got the answer. I thought Renee was not a guru. He did not live on a top of a mountain, and of course that didn't happen. So I had to let down the person who had asked the question.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“about false consciousness, the momentum of a feeling can drive one into a mob without one being aware that that is exactly what you're doing. It's a very subliminal thing.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there's a main one. I think that there's three of them that I've written about, and I'm sure that there are others that I will write about.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's what I meant when I said that he was in academia, but not really of academia. He climbed no ladder, he had no mentors within academia. He wound up in academia really pretty much by accident.”
2022-08-24 · Conversations with Tyler · Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard, Czeslaw Milosz, and Joseph Brodsky · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source