YouSaid · the spoken record

Dana Gioia

lines on the record: 91
first: 2021-04-07
most recent: 2021-04-07
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

“If I were young, it would be Russian. What I'm doing right now is actually to go back and to relearn a lot of things that I had before. I just finished writing a 14,000 word essay on Charles Baudelaire that's going to be the introduction to a new edition of the Flowers of Evil. I knew Baudelaire's work, but spending several months rereading absolutely everything was to me illuminating and joyful. So I planned to do this for a couple of other people. Poe, who I know pretty darn well, Samuel Johnson and Wordsworth, because I think I can, in my own work, both as a prose writer and as a creative writer, I can learn from them. And my main goal right now is to finish a long poem that I started a few years ago, which sort of stopped about a third of the way through so I can finish that.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I don't think you can give people advice to this that don't have the inclination. But I think part of it is to pay attention to what interests you, not into this kind of novelty-driven commercial culture we're in. I mean, my students, and I would ask them, how long do you spend each day looking at tweets? And they say, about 90 minutes about this. Plug yourself out of the daily ephemeral culture and immerse yourself into things that are going to be still there 10 years later, 100 years later. And so I think the distractions for younger people today are so extreme that they learn very little about the past. And therefore, they learn very little about the present because you can't understand anything unless you have a point by which to judge it, a point of perspective.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, in fact, I was delighted they were such good questions. I'm usually asked the same 10 questions. And you did not ask one of them. And that was a relief.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I discovered some new thing I talked to him and he's discovering at the same time. I think he is interested in popular culture. I'm most interested in high culture. And so I think that leads us into different things. The art forms that he's interested in are hardly more than 100 years old. The art forms that I'm interested in are as old as humanity itself. And so chronologically, we're listening. So you think about his view of culture, it tends to be horizontal because he's looking at maybe 20 years in terms of hip-hop or something like this across the thing where mine is more vertical. I'm going all the way back to Virgil, to Homer, to Horace, to Dante.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first act they should take is learn how to spell my name, which is not self-explanatory in the Anglophonic world. And then I think just go to DanaJoya.com, which is my website, or even better yet, just go to YouTube, put in DanaJoya poems or DanaJoya. And one of my sons is a filmmaker. I've done about 20 short films with him. I mean, some are only one or two minutes long. You can hear my poetry. You can hear some lectures. Yesterday, in fact, I put up an 11-minute lecture on Robert Frost. So we're doing these things. And he believes, and I believe, he's the one that goads me to do this, is that we need to find a way of speaking about poetry in our culture. It's not happening in the universities. It's not happening in the mass media. So to do really good short films on poetry, I think, is a tremendous cultural value. So just do that.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who, like Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, did it while they were alive. They oversaw the things and they created, in the case of Carnegie, hundreds thousands of institutions, but in terms of Mellon and Huntington, institutions of absolute world quality that transformed the cultural landscape of their region. And we don't see that much anymore. And when people do this, they tend to do it in medicine or science, not in the arts.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the best arts funding is from the private sector, and it's where people give money while they're still alive so they can measure their results of what they're doing. I believe that people should fund things in their own communities, and they should become very actively involved. If you think about this, the people who create wealth have skills. Now, they aren't artistic skills, don't get me wrong, but they have organizational skills. They can also recognize when something's working and what's not working. If we could take some of that energy and bring it into local arts organizations, we wouldn't have the number of symphonies and museums and opera companies and theaters that are going bankrupt right now. I see a lot of people who have a lot of money not willing to give their time or not willing to give their money. Well, I'll give it when I die. I'll create a little foundation when I die. I just finished rereading a book on Henry E. Huntington.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right person under the right circumstances might spend it better once, but generally you're better off getting it closer to the people. And also, you've got 53 state arts agencies, which means you've got 53 different strategies. And you start to see the advantages of the federal system where different people try different things and then they learn from each other.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And within a year, because I traveled every week with people back to their districts, to their states, I had created a bipartisan bicameral majority. And it was because I also changed the NEA so that we were representing for the first time in the history of the agency all of America. We were reaching every community, every population versus an institution that was largely serving the artistic elite. The arts world was very angry about that, but that is the best thing that I did in my chairmanship, was to make this institution which reflected America.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when I was appointed to this job, people said, go there and fight, you know, fight the good fight. And everybody used to tell me, just go there and fight. Don't give up. And I knew instinctively that fighting was the wrong metaphor, that my job was to reconcile. And so they would say, how can you deal with so-and-so? He's such an awful, evil person. And I said that I believe everyone in Congress is the valid elected official. They are the person that their people have sent to represent them in a democratic republic. And therefore, they deserve the respect that the system itself deserves. So I met with everybody. In fact, I took meetings with people who only took the meetings so they could yell and scream at me. And I said, you know, I had the people that supported me, the people that wanted to support me, but the people that I would convince disappoint.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Possible transformation is possible inside those walls that are not going to happen generally outside. And now we simply have functional things that they're comfortable seating, comfortable lighting. You know, we might as well be in the Elk's Lodge”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess we can blame Mies van der Roa. But, you know, modernist architecture created this notion of functionality, form follows function. The United States is full of dreadful churches, but the function of a church is different than what architects think. I know many people who have come to Catholicism because they were in France, they walked into Charth, Mont Saint-Michel, and something happened in them that they did not understand. They felt something happening inside this space that was not happening in the outer world. And that is the purpose of a cathedral. A purpose of a cathedral is to bring you into a space in which spiritual contemplation experience is possible.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those are my people. And so I like sort of ground-level Catholicism. And I believe that my church is the church of the poor, the church of the immigrant.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes and yes. I'm still a working class guy. My Catholicism had been going through a lot of stuff and when I came to Washington as an appointee, I was living downtown in the Landsberg. I renting a room. And I began to go to Mass at St. Patrick's. And I was in a church where one-third of the people were homeless, one-third were like me, over-educated guys, and one-third were the hotel service workers that were Latin Americans. And when I was there, it was truly a religious reawakening for me that, yes, we were all together in this society and in this life. And so I belong to two parishes, one in South Pasadena, which my wife prefers, which is upper middle class, highly educated, very prosperous. And the one in Santa Rosa, which I prefer”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Catholicism gives you a very sensible piece of advice. You must love everyone, but that doesn't mean that everyone's perfect. And so you have to, in a sense, manage love, community, togetherness, shared responsibility with an ability to criticize people so they can transcend their current state and become better versions of themselves.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, it is. I mean, the novels are novels of existential despair, so it's not surprising then they become novels of existential resistance. I mean, he is our version of Camus. I find him a fascinating novelist. You know, I'd always heard nothing but terrible things about him. Oh, he was the most awful writer in Europe today. You know, then I read a novel of his and I just said, it's like, once again, it's D.H. Lawrence. It's not a great novel, but there's a great vision in this. There's tremendous energy in this, and they are intellectually enlivening books. And so now I have read everything. And I also love to see him interviewed because he is a wonderful interview. I mean, he just play, you see him play with the BBC and reduce the BBC into a shivering mass of, excuse me, Jello.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, once again, I think it's a Scandinavian Catholic is in the minority. And what it did with UNSET is, in a sense, brought her back to pre-Protestant Scandinavian culture, which I think she was able to be both ancient and modern, medieval and modern. And so I think she was able to bring more of the Scandinavian character together in her novels that way. An interesting one that you mentioned, though, is Wellbeck. Wellbeck is, and because he is all of his novels essentially take place in a kind of hell, a secular hell of modern Europe, which is eradicated its roots. And you see him in the recent work trying to get out of it. And the only way he can is, in a sense, by a leap of faith.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which I sort of thought had died with Updike and Cheever with Marilyn Robinson. Who would have thought you'd have a Calvinist, series of Calvinist masterpieces”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a tremendous Catholic culture in American fiction that was largely done by converts or people that were sympathetic Willa Cather who was not Catholic wrote Death Comes for the Archbishop, maybe the best Catholic novel in American literature. But you have Flannery O'Connor, you have Walker Percy, you have John Kennedy Too, you have these people that are largely Southerners, so they were the part of Catholicism that was a minority. In some ways, a discriminated minority against the South, or you have converts. We have several really fine Catholic novelists right now, Tobias Wolfe, Ron Hansen, Alice McDermott, you know, are the three best ones, I think. But there's a kind of reinvention of this, but we are not a mainstream cultural voice yet. And astonishingly, we even have a revival of the Protestant novel.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is Catholic, but he is going to a psychoanalyst with whom he has a sexual attraction. And so it becomes Americanized in that way. You know, versus Mean Streets is Catholicism straight up. The deer hunter is Catholicism straight up. The godfather. Godfather went into even in number three. He tries it. It doesn't work very well. These are fundamentally sacramental works of art. I think the godfather is psychoanalytic rather than sacramental.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's slightly. When I saw the Sopranos and I thought the guy was named David Chase, I said, how can this happen? This guy knows Italians from the inside. Then I thought his name was, you know, was it Chiasa or something originally? Italian actually went to Stanford. I find them absolutely 99.9% on the mark of Italian Americans, but most of the religion is scrubbed away. The first season when the mother was still alive, you sort of saw the darker side of Catholicism and her. But after a while, it becomes an Italian-American film with the emphasis of a series with un-American, the way Italians have changed in America.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they are, but the question is when you begin and you locate your films in hell, how do you get out of it? And I don't necessarily find those films having convincing redemptions. I don't think we're redeemed by the blood that we ourselves spill.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Italian-American filmmakers like Coppola, Scorsese, Cimino, in a sense brought a Catholic worldview, dark Catholic worldview, into American popular culture. You know, things like Maine Streets, the Godfather, the Deer Hunter.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and Virgil and Horace. The language spoken by the Roman legions in Palestine was not particularly different from what was being recited and sung in hymns in Hawthorne, California. That was a cultural gift that was at least as good for me as getting a Stanford B.A. in a Harvard MA.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Catholic poetry is completely shaped by the sacraments, and the sacraments are outward signs that symbolize inward changes or inward turns of grace, which means that a Catholic sees everything that happens in two ways, in a physical way and a metaphysical way, in a temporal way and an eternal way, with all of the mysterious connections between that. Even up to my generation and even some of the younger ones, we were raised with Latin, which means that we hear when we speak English the echoes of an ancient language. And so there was a continuity in Hawthorne, California, hometown of both Dana Joya and Brian Wilson. When I was growing up, between a working class kid there and the court of Augustus Caesar.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Catholic worship, this is a limitation, was really about chant originally. It was about the people who were performing the rites of the sacrifices, chanting, and the people around them chanting. It was in Latin which became increasingly distant from the vulgate of the various populations. And so by the time that the Reformation came around, there was this great gap between, in a sense, a sacramental religion and what the Protestants invented, which was a charismatic religion. Catholicism has never really caught up with that. If Catholics suffer for their sins by going to mass and hearing the music.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a masterpiece and no one is, not no one, but very few people have read it, but master and man is another one. But my family does a thing every year where we pick a book and we all read it together. And we did Dostoevsky's The Idiot. Right now we're reading Kuzan Bet by Balzac. We did the red and the black. We did catch 22. But we all agree that the greatest thing we've ever read together was Anna Karenina. And it's just nothing else can hold its own against the greatness of that novel.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Death of Ivan Oyitch, which I think, well, first of all, if you asked me who was the greatest fiction writer who ever lived, I would say Tolstoy. And his short stories are full of masterpieces, but the death of Ivan Ilyich is simply one of the greatest considerations of human mortality and human limitation that I've ever read and reread and reread again.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“literary studies in the university reached this point maybe 50 years ago where in creating internal cohesion and internal structure they had less and less to do with literature and almost nothing to do with the human purposes of literature so for that it also Lukash's analysis of the 19th century novel is fantastic. I reread him a few weeks ago in his discussion of Tolstoy and Balzac. And I found it absolutely illuminating. His piece on Dostoevsky too.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, Galilee Kukash. Oh, yeah. Lukash is, to me, the most interesting Marxist critic except for Marx. And Lukash understood was Lukash wrote a book, which I think has one of the dullest titles you can imagine called History and Class Consciousness. And in history and class consciousness, Lukash gave a kind of an analysis of institutional history that fundamentally it's one of my basic concepts in understanding the world. He says that humans create an institution. You can say it's the legal system for a social use called justice. And as the legal system develops and develops and begins to find a way of becoming internally consistent, it has less and less to do with justice. Because it's more concerned in the sense about being a self-contained rational enterprise.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anthony Burgess is like D.H. Lawrence. D.H. Lawrence is without question a great writer. The question is, did he ever write a great novel? He wrote great short stories, but most of the novels have problems, and Burgess is the same way. But the fact about Burgess is that almost every page is alive. And I've read Enderby, Enderby Inside Enderby, the Enderby novels three times, and they never failed to sort of amuse me. Cockwick Orange, I've read maybe three times. But I think you're right. But I think Earthly powers may be a good thing. His biography is stunning in his self-criticism and his self-discovery. Plus the interestingness of his life.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a real good question. I love Anthony Burgess. When I interviewed Burgess in about 1977, I think, no, no, about 79. I told him, I said, I've read 19 of your books. And he said, that's too many. And what you have with Burgess is you're always feeling he's on the verge of his great novel. I think that perhaps earthly powers was his great novel because he takes the form of a Somerset Mon novel and he overlays a mafia novel, a religious novel, a buildings Roman, all in that. And I think it works. Isn't the first sentence something like I was in bed with my catamite when the papal nuncio rang?”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Michael Lind, the political writer and historian, Stapleton is one of his formative writers. And so he's, well, Starmaker is kind of an evolution of first and last men. Odd John is kind of the odd, the first great mutant novel.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, you know, it's first of all, I hope people know who Olaf Stapleton was. visionary early science fiction writer who wrote novels like Odd John and the First and Last Men. What Olaf Stapleton did was I think he was the first really great science fiction writer to think in absolutely cosmic terms beyond human conceptions of time and space. And that essentially created the mature science fiction sensibility. Even watch a show like Expanse now. You know, it's about stapletonian concerns.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think of it as Jungian and what it is doing is creating the archetypal journey of the young hero towards discovering his own strengths, part of which is finding his anima and his animus. And so what Darth Vader is, is clearly, I mean, it's almost it has Jung, you know, on his uniform. He is the shadow of the hero's personality. And the hero has to confront and eventually control or even his shadow. So I think it's a Jungian work rather than a Christian work.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We asked our eighth grade nun if there were people on the other planets, would they have to get baptized and would they go to heaven and hell? And she answered the question brilliantly, I thought. She says, well, if there are people on other planets, if they fail the way Adam and Eve did, they would need redemption and God would need to redeem them. So the first question we have to ask, have the Martians, are they an unfallen race? And I think generally we've looked at the Martians as an unfallen race. They are the noble savage. They are the edenic creatures, except in H.G. Wells.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Ray Bradbury for 10 years wrote a series of books almost at the rate of one per year that transformed not only American science fiction but American popular culture including two tremendously interesting novels Fahrenheit 451 and Martian Chronicles I think his greatness however is in his short stories if you took his ten best short stories things like sound of thunder pedestrian and they are extraordinary they create a kind of sensibility that then became encoded in our culture through the twilight zone that expanded the possibilities of American literature”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on what you mean by a Catholic artist. He is a Catholic artist in that he recognizes the power of the iconic image and the incarnational quality of art. That being said, if you ask that last thing about what he does so well, is it worth doing? I'm not sure a lot of it is. So I think of him as a kind of eccentric, brilliant eccentric artist. And the Catholicism gives a certain weight to his art, but he would not be on my short list of great artists of the 20th century.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“O God, talk about the hermitage being inaccessible. You know, no one sees the Raphael rooms, the Raphael Stanza. I think what the Vatican should do is to take their Pinocote, which is their gallery, and probably their classical collection, and create a new museum outside of the Vatican. The physical structure of the Vatican cannot support the millions of people that visit there. Because if you think about this, in most years, Rome is the most widely visited tourist location in the world, and the Vatican is the number one attraction in Rome. And so it makes St. Peter's and everything else inaccessible. But I do think that they should build a new museum for the core of their collection. And, you know, they could raise a lot of money and take... Better care of the art.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a cultural question. Probably not. I think, first of all, because it's not honorable, rightly or wrongly. But secondly, it's nice to have white space in the museum to give your eyes a break.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has happened, you know, the Albright Knox in Buffalo did this shamefully ahead of everybody else. The Berkshire Museum did it shamefully, but now it's universal because they need money and to buy works that are more socially proactive. And so I think that if they want to buy socially proactive works, have their board buy them. Don't sell your existing collection. These places will never be able to get them back.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I should let my people come in and see my collection, and then it happened, you know, began to happen at the Ufizi in Florence and in Madrid. But we have this creation. So you look at this, it's really only slightly more than 200 years old. And what we're trying to do is to preserve the best of the past and let people into it. Museums today now say, well, we are vehicles of cultural change. We don't want to be hemmed down by the past and things like this. I think it's a misunderstanding of their basic function. There are things that are art spaces for this. There are exhibitions. There are galleries. There are Kunsthalls in Germans, a wonderful term, an art hall. No collection, but we exhibit art there. That's where that should happen. And it breaks my heart to see museums sell their best paintings to raise money to, first of all, cover the deficits of their own bad management.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, right now, American Art Museums, Western art museums are going through a destructive period of self-doubt. Now, if you think of what a museum is, a museum is a conservation technology. I mean, the museum is a relatively modern creation. It really happens only after the French Revolution, when they decide that when they grab the emperor's urban palace, which is the Louvre that they will bring all of the art that they've taken from the aristocracy and the royalty and put it there and allow people to come in, they also created the earliest version of the NEA because they took the upper apartments and they made the free rent for artists. After a number of years, they realized that was a bad idea. That's a whole separate topic. And then because of that, the Habsburg emperor in Vienna said, well,”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly crowded when I go there. I have a house in South Pasadena now. So when we're there, my wife and I who are members of the Huntington, and as you probably know, I have donated my archive to the Huntington Library, which is one of the great American institutions, also one of the great stories of American culture. I've given the Miarcha. But we go there walking in the mornings, and it's extraordinarily beautiful. Also great for bird watching. And all the plants and flowers pretty much, if you find it, are labeled. So you'll see thousands of plants and flowers.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love the roar. I guess that's technically we used to do a reading series in the Roric Museum. And I loved it because you were surrounded by the paintings of this Russian mystic. And it almost looked as if you were doing a production meeting for Lost Horizons in terms of describing Shangri-La. The Huntington is the greatest collection of English paintings outside of England. And it's on 200 acres of gardens. So it's wonderful. But it's pretty well known.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Side of you. Let me give you one other fine museum people don't know about. It's in Balboa Park, which is arguably the most beautiful public space in California. There's this ugly modernist building, tiny, awful little thing, in this awful little moat that is a blemish on the entire park. It's the Timken Gallery, which is only six rooms and every room is full of fantastic paintings. When I'm there, there's usually three or four other people there. People don't know about it. And there's a Bosch. There's a Bosch there too”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to see there, but I want to see the bosches. I want to see the Bosches again and again, the Verasquez. And so to me, it's my pleasure. And I love going to these forgotten museums that have one or two great paintings. And one of the things I really want to do is I want to go back to Detroit to see their Museum of Fine Arts, which is one of the greatest collections in America. And usually when you go there, half of it's closed. It's like the hermitage. And so you have to go there a couple of times to be able to see. And they also have, you know, they have one of the great Brigles there. But anyway, so I love this. And I feel that I'm a verbal artist, but there is an extraordinary intellectual emotional and spiritual power that the greatest paintings have. And so if you put themselves in their presence, they unlock and awaken things.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, as a kid, I still know this weird stuff. As a kid, I was hungry for beauty. And so I went to the Hawthorne Public Library, which is a monument to the good effects of political graft. Somebody was on the take, and so they built an enormous library and they put ten times as many books as Hawthorne needed. And I read and studied everyone in art. And so I would go there and I would make lists of these things. I am still to this day most of my trips are to see art museums. And I see them again and again and again and again. The last trip I took internationally with Madrid and I took my kids there as well as a nephew. And they thought I was crazy. Every day I was in the Prado or I was in the Baron Tyson von Bornamitzvah day after day after day. And I said, you know, I mean, there's not that much else.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to understand that these paintings exhibit some of the heresies of the Catholic Church or have these terrible Catholic tendencies. But you go there and it's just chalk-a-block with this stuff and no one's ever seen, you know, I mean, very few people get it. It took me a long time just to be able to get into it. I've never been able to get into their chapel to see the art there.”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a hard one. I think it's probably the hermitage because you can never see two-thirds of the art. And there's usually some huge portion that's out on loans somewhere. So who can actually assess how magnificent, even after they sold it to Lisbon and Washington, D.C. in large quantities? It's this great, unknowable museum. The finest really small museum, and that's perhaps what you ask, I mean, the museum that nobody goes to is this weird gallery at Bob Jones Jr. University. Bob Jones for years simply bought old masters when they were $700. And he has this incredible collection, or he had, he's dead now. The university has this incredible collection of Italian Baroque art, which they don't really want people to come in and see. And in fact, when you go there, they have a warning sign that says,”
2021-04-07 · Conversations with Tyler · Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source