YouSaid · the spoken record

Janna Levin

lines on the record: 117
first: 2020-07-09
most recent: 2020-07-09
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

“Be a tiny little thing, like a thing you should put in your back pocket. It's going to be like an object more than like a thick book. I like that idea. And it's Leah Halloran, the artist Leah Halloran, did these like gorgeous paintings for it. So it's going to be really like an object.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like we'll have a conversation later because you know I'm a big believer that life in the universe is it's impossible that we're the only ones but I have very cynical ideas that they have the same technology that they live right now that you know we've been around for a bleep They're not here at the same time like right next door like I have a lot of cynicism about that kind of stuff but I'm very very open to the idea that there's life in the universe”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Justin, I've been trying to get you, you've been out to Pioneer's, but I would love to have you out on our stage. And whenever, you know, the Modern plague allows. We really want to have you come join our sort of community of oddballs and artists and musicians.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or any particular aspect? No, exactly. Good question because it's not one thing. It's the buildup. It's the buildup. It's the layers. We are not devils or divines. It's not maudlin or saccharin. She describes our ugliness as human beings and then says, I mean, basically the essence of the concept of the brave and startling truth is that we realize that it's us. And she doesn't do it in a saccharine or sentimental way. She describes us as devils and the ugliness of the human spirit to build up to that kind of epiphany that when we go out into space, it's like earthrise, you know, the picture of the Earth rising above the lunar surface taken by one of the Apollo missions, we are out there in space and then we turn around and we look at ourselves. And it's just Angelou's salt of the earth. Despite all odds, belief in the human spirit.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go up on stage and cry during this poem. I'm not going to do it. And there are like opera singers who describe these with certain arias that they can't do them because they break down sobbing. So I had to practice it enough that I could control my impulse, like to break out into tears. It is such a stunning piece of work. It's not only Maya Angelou at her best, but she had this fantasy about thinking about space. And the poem actually flew to space. It went onto one of the NASA missions and went to space. And it's like what we're talking about structurally in all these levels, it has all these levels. The relationship with Maria, the friendship with Emily Levine, the Lake Maya Angelou that flew to space on NASA. And I finally rehearsed it so that I only choked up a little bit. Little bit”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like a good tactic. And obviously now Maria is the ambassador. She runs the single most popular poetry series in the country, the world, really. And it came out of our collaboration. It's about the universe, but it's absolutely 100% Maria. And so she similarly forced me in a less public way than Emily Levine did to her, but forced me to start to look deeper into poetry. And so as a brilliant curator, which is really what Maria is, she's a brilliant essayist and curator, and she's a brilliant reader. She found poems for me and curated them for me. And a brave and startling truth was like the thing about that one was like, I kept crying every time I read it at home. And I was like, I will not.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The coffee shop they were in, stood herself up and began reciting poetry as an act of outrage that Maria said she wasn't interested in poetry.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And she has this wonderful story that she tells about her friend Emily Levine, who's a petite older woman who slapped her hands on the coffee table in the”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I want to be totally clear about this. I am a prose writer. I have zero foray into poetry. I like poetic prose, but I like prose. It was absolutely my friendship with Maria. And Maria and I both were kids who said things like, I don't like poetry or I'm not interested in poetry. And Maria has a yeah.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Makes you less resentful. Like, why did this happen to me? And this is unfair. No, it's not, it's an opportunity to develop your”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to be okay with that, I think a lot of us cling to the degrees and the accolades. And trust me, you know, helped me in my life to have those things. So I'm not dismissing them. And I'm really grateful for them. But if you're not going to get that accolade, big deal. Learn how to pivot. move away from the boot. The boot actually has no power unless you insist on continually pushing against it, unless you consider it your only avenue forward. And you're just going to keep pushing until the boot and convince the boot and, you know, that forget it. Move to the left and figure out something else and go over their heads. And that's really Really liberating. That took me much longer to realize, and it's super liberating. Suddenly, you know, they got no power over you. If you're not interested in the avenue that they offer.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think it's very interesting. Certain people with privilege are enraged by a boot in their face because they were told that they had the road paved ahead of them. And it's an advantage to not think that. So then when the boot is in your face, your immediate reaction isn't like, how dare you? I deserve this. I'm owed this opportunity that you're reacting. That's who you are. You're the guy with the boot. And what can I do to go around you? What can I do to go over your head?”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Teaching modules of how to be a better person and to pave the way behind you, not in front of you. And it's really been a pretty important principle for me, I guess, that when I see something happen, I don't think this is so unfair. Why are they doing this to me that I think instead, okay, am I able to rise to figure out a solution to this? And I'm not always able to do that, you know. But when I do, I feel like it's genuine progress.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not about fairness. Nobody told you you were owed fairness. No such thing. And it really taught me to think that, oh, life is a series of obstacles. It's not a paved path. And the obstacles are what make you. When I've really screwed up with something like that, I felt really deep shame. Nobody had to tell me to be ashamed. I felt really deep ashamed. And when I've succeeded in that, I've felt really good and nobody needed to tell me I should feel good about it. It's just obvious. And so I started to see life as a series of obstacles that were tests, trials, you know.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that we have to stop fantasizing that we're, you know, my dad always said, you know, my dad was from a tougher upbringing and he always said, life isn't fair. He told me that all the time. Oh my God, it's so hilarious. I can totally hear him saying it. Life's not fair.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Leg ups I had from all these other people and how I look around and I don't see any diversity. Why should I only talk about the hardship in my road? Like it bugged me instinctively. And I think that what I realized was I had been sold because of my kind of comfy childhood an idea that life is great and just don't screw it up. And that's false. Life is not great for most people. And they have to do a hell of a lot more than not screw it up. They have to build bridges and pave ways and do things no one's ever thought of and fight poverty and find solutions. And I just thought. The people that have taught me the most have done those things.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh man, it is one of my best, you know how we might all have these certain boulders we nail into the wall to cling to. This is one of them for me, very much so. I think we struggle with the idea of who's privileged and who's not privileged, what opportunities have you been given, what have you earned. And we all have a different balance of that. I definitely had feminist parents. You know, I had intellectual parents. I had a lot of ups and advantages. And when I came to blocks in the road, I really didn't like that I had people to stand up on me and demand, what do you have to say about being a woman in science? Like it really bugged me. And I thought, but you're not talking about all these.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's why I love it. That's why I love it. It doesn't, there used to be this, and I think it's fading, but this kind of 1950s attitude murdering to dissect. I mean, most scientists are looking for meaning. And Brian Green's recent book is all about search for meaning. And he's a brutal naturalist. as I am and and it's about meaning. And so I think that that shift is starting to happen in the cultural consciousness that scientists aren't about destroying emotion. They're about finding a different way of feeling connected to the world.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are direct descendants of the Big Bang. We are direct descendants of the generation of stars that made carbon and oxygen. We are direct descendants of neutron stars colliding and providing us with gold, which is actually this insane monetary thing that we exchange with no understanding that the absolute only place that came from was the collision of two dead stars somewhere else in the universe that threw it our way. That gives me such a good warm, fuzzy sense of meaning that I don't need to turn to fairies and fantasies.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I take very little interest in it. I don't get worked up about stuff that's happening on the earth. But then again, I do. I got totally swept up in the recent events. And rightfully, because I think if you have even a modest platform, you have to speak out. Like these aren't things I want to do. I have no interest in politics. I have no interest in identity. I don't see having more melanin or having this genitalia or having this psychology. Like it's zero interest to me, frankly. But I see it as hurting people close to me. And so I'll speak out and do those things. But yeah, I find solace in a very far horizon view. Understanding”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I can, but it's not such an easy package. I mean, I am absolutely as vulnerable to anybody else, to the stress of quarantine, not grooming oneself. Not my hair is wild, not socializing and missing your friend. Like that doesn't, it doesn't, it's not a panacea. It doesn't make me not miss those things or not struggle with those things. But in the bigger scale, I think feeling a freedom from the requirement to conform and some of the pressures of social media, it has helped me in those ways. There's no question. That having more universal perspective, putting those things into their tiny packages where they belong has been easier for me. And Maria is absolutely right. I used to call it local politics. Anything that happened more recently than about a million years ago is local politics.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazing, amazing one, and she's part of why, I mean, it's true, she's Bulgarian, English is not her first language. She has the lightest, lightest accent, but her command of English is beyond basically anyone else's.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you think there's sense that sometimes when you lose your train of thought? You come back to it, you found a better way to boost it and expand.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that that's something, in a sense, that we're skirting around when we're talking about film and storytelling and the structure of books and art is that sometimes we need those other fertile grounds, even if it confuses us for a second, even if we remember the direct A to B logic of the thought, that becomes a kind of a fertile ground for when we recover that thought for it to actually be able to implant in a bigger way or something. I don't want to overpush metaphors, but I do in good company.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not that different from Roger Penrose or Roger Penrose, who's an absolute, I don't know, national treasure for England. He describes that moment of having a realization on one side of a street that he's crossing, forgetting it while he's going through the complex process of not getting hit by a car and getting to the other side of the street and feeling elated, but not remembering the thought. And long it took him to recover the thought.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also our friend Sean Carroll has written a wonderful book From eternity to here, which lays these issues out. And I think is really a really nice read.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we really, if I showed you a movie forward and backward that was complex enough, you could tell the difference, but if it was basic enough, you couldn't. And there's something about the laws of physics that they're basically totally reversible. You shouldn't be able to tell the difference between forward and backward. And yet relentlessly we go forward. And so this is the crux of some deep mystery that we haven't solved and there are very smart ideas about and we can get part way in the conversation about entropy and all that crap. But something about time is resistant to interpretation and understanding.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Turn forward and backward in time. Why not? And the laws of physics, even more so, are completely invariant under the direction of time, meaning if I showed you a movie of a billiard balls knocking, the reverse movie would make equal sense. But if I go up complexity levels and I show you a flower blooming or a flower rotting, you immediately know which one's forward and backward. But the laws of physics don't have that in them. Why is that?”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the tough stuff, the stuff that we don't know as fact that we're grappling with, that we don't have the full picture over is what is time? Why does it insist on having a different role than space? I mean, Einstein taught us that there's space-time. And, you know, I'm adamant not to put a hyphen in that. It's spacetime. It's one phenomenon. We live in four dimensions. To talk to you, Tim, I have to specify three in person, three spatial coordinates where we are north, south, east, west, what floor we're on up and down, and what time we're at. And it is absolutely clear that space and time are kind of this unified thing, yet time is viciously different. It refuses to conform. I can turn left and right, but I can't”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, you must. And he's so clever and kind and thoughtful. I mean, he's really an exceptional one of those walks the earth every 50 years, maybe, you know?”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, Kip said to me at 80, he said, you know, I'm going to start this new career at making movies And he's the coolest. Coolest, most wonderful guy. I mean, I cannot sing Kip's praises enough.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who pulled me into his office and said, I'm really curious about what you're doing. This is odd and interesting. And I was a nobody. And so Kip looms large in my life in a lot of ways and therefore interstellar. Also the moth story that we talked about, I've sold the film rights to that with Linda Opst and Nick Wexler attached who are the Linda is the same person who produced, who helped Kip make interstellar. So small worlds in a big suit. We're all in a big suit.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The interstellar dilemma. Interstellar actually got that really right, and I actually want to mention interstellar because Kip Thorne, I have a lot of connections with this because Kip Thorne, who is one of the most creative physicists I've ever known, wrote the treatment for interstellar. It was his idea to write that. It was his treatment. He also won the Nobel Prize for the Lyigo experiment which detected the collision of black holes. And he was also one of the two main characters in the book that I wrote about the discovery. So Kip and I have tons of connections. And also I consider him a wonderful friend. And he was one of the only people when I was completely unknown and kind of waffling and nobody liked my work. I was working on stuff that nobody respected or thought was good. He was the only person.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After that fact, which is pretty big to take on its own if you want to, like for instance, we could travel twenty six thousand light years to the black hole at the center of our galaxy as long as we went very, very close to the speed of light, we would survive the trip, but 26,000 years would have passed on Earth. And so what's so great about that? Yeah, this is the interstellar.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And not America. And maybe not any human beings, maybe human beings would be extinct. And so I can travel to the forward of your time, but I haven't yet figured out how to travel to the forward of mine. To me, I would have had a few months. My clock would have ticked slowly. My milk would have lasted as long as I expected. My thoughts would process on the time scale I'm comfortable with. I would not notice anything but ordinary time. And that's a fact that that is true. We experimentally measure that. We experimentally detect that. We know that that's a fact.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Shame to say, despite all of your fantastic protein powders. I would be pretty confident that I would come back to the grief of not finding you here.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So let's start in the concrete, the things that we know are true. There are forms of time travel that we absolutely know are possible. I can travel to the forward of your time. Can't travel to the fort of mine, but I can travel to the ford of yours. So for instance, if I decide to travel near the speed of light to go to Andromeda, a nearby galaxy, and come back traveling very near the speed of light, I might have experienced, as close as I get to the speed of light, I will experience as little passage of time as imaginable. But let's just say it's a few months for me. For you, Gosh, Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away, it would have 2.5 million years would have passed.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally, can you go test a completely different person But my other story about John McPhee is I did a talk at Princeton a couple years ago, like a panel talk about writing. With some colleagues, and I'm not going to name the person who said this to me, but he's a very accomplished writer, and he studied with John McPhee as you did, and he said that as a grown man, accomplished, you know, writer in everywhere, made his career, went back to John, shared one of his pieces with him, and John like edited it And he said he was in tears. It was covered with red And he was, and yet everything was on the nose.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And every one of those essays is loaded with unbelievable insights. And I don't know if you ever studied with John McFee. I don't think he did. But I sort of think of him as sort of the wild maverick version of John McFee.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Recommendations, and so the other person who broke my heart when he died was David Foster Wallace. Who can write about things that have exactly zero interest in and grip me? The Illinois State Fair. Consider the lobster.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is what I wish had happened to me back then. So you didn't have to go through such a grueling process of unlearning bad writing.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hence, technical finesse and prowess and skill is something that I really do admire. And it's what we were talking about. You don't have to have that skill to recognize the skill. And to experience the pleasure of the gift of somebody giving that to you. And, you know, he's known as a terror when he edits people.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It kind of has a Borghesean. Like vision, you know, But I think what you're pointing to, so a lot of people And I'm not a rabid sci-fi fan. I enjoy it, but that's not, I think the reason why I select the authors I select is because they don't usually write about science. When they turn to it, they turn to it with the care like Chang, the care and emotion and intimacy that they would to absolutely any other subject.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do know Ted Chang's short stories. I believe, and this is maybe I should be embarrassed to admit this, I believe I have a collection of short stories in my audio book that I haven't gotten to.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he didn't bullshit me. He didn't be like your book says Gordos McCarthy. He was like, look at him. He's 77. Look at what he went through. Like, he really gave me respect to not treat me like a child. And that's the only reason why I came in back into the living room.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my own book, The Turing Machines book was in press at the same time that I was reading that book. It was at the press. And we have the same editor from Knopf, Dan Frank, who's just an extraordinary editor. And I called Dan and he literally had to talk me off like the windowsill.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which I don't think anybody would look at as a science book. It's a totally apocalyptic book. And I think people would just see it as an apocalyptic dystopia. But there is to me it's a science, a conceptual book. You know, it has that core. And it's unlike any book he's ever written in a lot of ways because he can be a very kind of Faulknerian florid writer. And this is lean as hell, brutal. And there's no where, what, who, when, or how. No character has a name. You don't know where they are. Whatever the apocalyptic event is, it's not named. I mean, it's just unbelievable. I read that book literally in cabs by streetlight. I read it in less than 24 hours. I was possessed by it.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Virtuosity, thank you. But there's a lot of books like that that I really love. There's a book that's been around for quite a long time, Don Dele's White Noise, which is also not one of his most famous books and is hilarious and brilliant and incredible. And it's kind of about this small college town professor and maybe a chemical spill and you're not quite sure what it is. And it is absolutely hilarious and incredibly clever. I have so many of these. I'm not going to go through all of them, but I'm going to list one more, which is Carmcarthy's The Road.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh man, I'm such a fiction fan. I mean, there's this book, I teach a class at the college where I haven't taught it in a while, which is called Science and Literature. And it is basically a collection of books that have all just seared me. One of them, for instance, is Katsu Ishiguru's Never Let Me Go. And he won the Nobel Prize a few years ago. And that is one of his least popular books, and it's spectacular. It's about cloning. And it's a very personal, intimate book, how he took this utterly abstract concept and made it completely small and intimate. And it's stunning. It's an incredible book. And he writes it in a female first person flawlessly. It's partly just a display of unbelievable talent, but it's”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a felt sense. And so I feel that about structure. If you really, really work on structure, you challenge yourself, you break some bad habits, you don't allow yourself to be self-indulgent. And so, yeah, I really do think of them like architecturally.”
2020-07-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #445: Janna Levin on Extra Dimensions, Time Travel, and How to Overcome Boots in the Face · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT