@Google Presents: Lewis Lapham, in conversation with Richard Gingras

Uploaded by AtGoogleTalks on 17.09.2011

>>Richard Gingras: Well, good afternoon. Thank you for joining us here in Mountain View and
elsewhere on the VCs and, and for the audience who will eventually see on, on YouTube as
well. Very pleased to have Lewis Lapham with us today. Let me share a couple of thoughts
as we get into this conversation. Personally, as a, as a, as a technologist for some 30
years now, I've long been fascinated not only by the technological, the impact of the technological
change on media, but also by our own inclination to believe that our times are entirely unique.
And of course to some degree our times are unique. But that's not only the case. Often
there are common themes across time that are fascinating and often extremely informative.
In reading Future, the magazine that you have in front of you this weekend, I was amused
for instance by Plato's conveyance of, of Socrates' view that the invention of writing
was not a great potion for remembering, that the marketers of the day were saying it was,
but a tool that would introduce forgetfulness into the souls of those who learn it; a tool
that would provide students with the appearance of wisdom, but not with its reality. Or how,
for instance, the Swiss scientist, Konrad Gessner, raised the alarm about the effects
of information overload and its confusing and harmful effects on the mind. The interesting
thing was that was in 1565 and his warnings refer to the flood of information unleashed
by the printing press, common themes. Today we grapple with how the internet has disrupted
the business models of print publications, but forget for instance that the period of
great near-monopolistic success of newspapers was really limited to a 40-year period and
triggered largely by the introduction of television and the subsequent winnowing of three to four
newspaper towns down to one. It's for those reasons that, that I find the editorial model
of Lapham's Quarterly to be so fascinating. Because it looks at a single issue, a single
theme, a single subject, and exposes how that subject was considered across time. So if
you read this issue of, of, about the future, you will read Plato, you'll read Roy, Ray
Kurzweil, you'd read Gandhi, you read Philip K. Dick. So let's talk to Lewis Lapham. It's
not an overstatement to call the gentleman at my right here a legend in American literature
and journalism. His leadership of Harper's Magazine for nearly 30 years and guided it
through its richest period of analysis of our politics and our culture. Beyond his editorial
leadership, I think it's important to note that Lewis is a profoundly talented writer
and anyone who simply reads the introduction to this issue will see that quite clearly,
and a keen observer of our life, our times, and the ideas that evolve within that. As
Bill Moyers put it, "Lewis Lapham speaks the truth to power and wealth in each issue of
America's oldest political journal in the essays he writes, in the articles he publishes,
he opens the veins on issues like class, power and politics." So thank you very much, Lewis,
for joining us today.
>>Lewis Lapham: Thank you, Richard.
>>Lewis Lapham: Thank you for that handsome introduction.
>>Richard Gingras: Well, I only speak the truth, Lewis. So why don't we start actually,
given Lapham's Quarterly. What was your inspiration for starting it in the first place?
>>Lewis Lapham: Well I started out in life wanting to become an historian and I went
to graduate school for one year at Cambridge University in England after I graduated from
Yale and found out very quickly that I was not cut out to be a scholar. I didn't have
the patience for footnotes. I had a passion for history and I would listen to stories
about everything and anything. Talleyrand's mistresses, Kaiser Wilhelm's uniforms, giant
ants standing watch over the treasure of Peru, the Carthaginian wars, but I, I was not a
true scholar, so I became a journalist. And I came to San Francisco, where I was born
and raised in San Francisco, and, and nearby here in Menlo Park, and the, went to work
as a newspaper reporter in 1957 for the San Francisco Examiner and then gradually went
to the New York Herald Tribune, went from the newspaper to the magazine, the Saturday
Evening Post and Life, and then to Harper's Magazine in the 70s and so I'm old enough
to have seen a number of severe changes. I mean when I first came to New York in 1960,
there were seven newspapers in the city. And the Life and the Saturday Evening Post were
the major media of the 60s. But by the end of the 60s they'd been supplanted by television
and so I was there both for the collapse of the Saturday Evening Post and the collapse
of Life magazine. And now you see the kind of what and then there's the introduction
into the New York Times in the 1970s of the op-ed page, so that what in the 1950s would
have been a 5,000 word article by say the Secretary of War or an aspiring president
of the United States to be published in Harper's Magazine or the Atlantic by the end of the
1970s that had become a 750-word op-ed page piece in the Times or in the Wall Street Journal.
And then of course you, you, you get the, the arrival of the internet in the 1980s and
you see the recasting not only of the newspapers, but also of network television so that the
forms are continually evolving and I'm again old enough to have seen a number of those
changes and so I'm not either horrified or surprised by the move to the internet.
>>Richard Gingras: And so what led you recently to, to creating Lapham's Quarterly?
>>Lewis Lapham: Well, I'd, I'd been the editor of Harper's Magazine for 30 years and I found
that journalism can only take you so far, and that good long form journalism is, is
hard to come by. There are people that can do it well and they are rare and precious
talents, but there are not that many of them, and I also noticed that a lot of journalism
was beginning to repeat itself and also in the 80s it became much more politicized. You
were either for us or against us, you were either writing for a neo-conservative journal
or for a liberal journal and they weren't really talking to each other. When I first
became the editor of Harper's Magazine in the 70s, I could manage to put somebody like
Irving Kristol and Michael Harrington in the same issue. I then believed in something called
the marketplace of ideas, but during the 1980s with the election of Reagan, the, and what
were then known as the culture wars, journalism became more polemical and it, you began to
see the rise of people like Rush Limbaugh, who makes an appearance I think in the 1980,
1983 with the change of ruling by the FCC. And so I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied
with journalism, at least as I under, I'm talking about monthly long form journalism
with literary pretentions. [laughing] I'm not, I'm not talking about news clips or,
or headlines and I found that I was reading, more and more I was reading history, because
I was finding in the reading of history a, a, a substance, a form of narrative that I
could and less opinion. In other words, so much of journalism was turning into talking
head opinion and it was a ques, and I was more interested in what do we know as opposed
to what do we think? And I was finding the answers to that kind of question in, in works
of history. And I also was getting older and when you are the editor of Harper's Magazine,
what you would do is you would take 15 manuscripts home at night and hope to God you could turn
at least one or two of them into something worth reading. And I didn't want to spend
my time reading so many badly-written manuscripts and I figured, here, I wanted to re-read the
Thucydides or Gibbon or Tolstoy or Dickens or Balzac and get back to the works that had
survived the wreckage of time and the winnowing of bad translation by reason of the force
of expression and the, and the power of imagination, so.
>>Richard Gingras: So with regard to this issue, which people have before them right
now on the future, were there specific messages that you had in mind as you assembled that?
Did you know-
>>Lewis Lapham: No.
>>Richard Gingras: when you went into it?
>>Lewis Lapham: Well, I, I just knew that it was a, I, this quarterly has been going
on for about, it's been going on for four years, this is the last of volume 4. And what
we do is we take a topic that's more or less in the news. In other words, in the spring
we, we did one on work, 'cause the question of unemployment was in the headlines. Last
summer we did one on food, because food is a page one story in many different ways, in
terms of the world's natural resources, in terms of environment, in terms of rising population
as well as in terms of the aesthetics of, of fine dining. And we've, we've done issues
on medicine and on money and on war. And so I, I try to find a subject that is, has some
purchase in the current conversation, and at the moment, at least in the United States,
there is a good deal of concern about the future. It is not what it used to be, and
so this is an approach to the idea of the future over time as it, as existed. I mean
you can actually look at the future, you can think of the future as America's first and
best natural resource. I mean it's, the future is what moves the merchandise in or you know
I will happy birthday at every point of sale, I will be a new man or a new woman. And so
that when you're buying the car or where you're buying the eyebrow pencil, you're in a way,
buying the future. I mean it's the, it's the, it's the advertising business. And much of
our consumer society is founded on the advertising. So there's that kind of future and then there's
also the dark and apocalyptic future, which is the one that is used by sometimes the state
at other times by the church to keep the population in line. In other words, it was the great
source of power for the Vatican or for the Christian church through most of its 2000
years, the fear, the fear, the fear of hell, you know. And it's also what keeps the money
coming to our military defense complex. The fear of Russians or the fear of Al-Qaeda or
terrorists behind every bush, and so on, is what, you know, bids up the prices of the
weapons industries and we have now the market in fear essentially was what was the was the
main product being sold by the Bush administration for eight, eight years. And we now have something
like 840,000 people working for the National Security Agency, and they are the landest,
the largest landholder in Virginia by far, although most of the facilities are underground.
[laughing] But the, so yeah, I mean the either the hope of the future or the fear of the
future are what drives both the America's politics and its economy.
>>Richard Gingras: I'd like to, let's, let's go a little bit deeper on that. I was, I won't
quote the whole thing because you just touched on it here, but, but clearly post 9/11 as,
as you point out, we've, we've, we've seen the loss of our utopian romance, our, our
sense of the positive future, which is important because it's our perception of the future
that really affects what we do in the present in many regards.
>>Lewis Lapham: Well, it's the perception of the future that is in fact the stock market.
Because when you're buying stock you're buying the future. Ninety-seven percent of the dollars
in circulation are invested in the future. I mean that's, that's what you're buying.
I don't mean to interrupt, I just mean to confirm your point.
>>Richard Gingras: Yes.
>>Lewis Lapham: Okay.
>>Richard Gingras: Yes, yes and so given that and given that we've the American psyche was
always about hope, was always about the, the, the quest to the future, ambition, we could
all do something better, and that has deteriorated substantially if not nearly completely in
the last decade with the exception of maybe pockets of innovation. How do we, how do we
switch that? Is there a, any guidance on how we move our perception in that regard?
>>Lewis Lapham: Well, it, it, it changes. I mean, I mean, you're right, I mean the idea
of America is, is a brave new world and Thomas Paine is talks actually says "America is the
birthday of a new world, full of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Those are the
promises. And that's the premise of the constitution, it's all, the constitution is a tool with
which to plow the ground of one's own invention of one's self or acquiring of property or
making something of one's self. I mean, I mean these are the freedoms granted by the
constitution and it's in certainly in the thought of Jefferson. We, but again, the future
has changed shape over, over time. I can remember when the future was rosy and, and, and bright.
I, I, I, [pause] I, I, I can remember the, the Kennedy administration. I can remember
the election of, of, of John Kennedy in 1960, a brave new world, a new frontier, men on
their way to the moon, the young Kennedy appeared in the guise of the young Prince Hal inheriting
the kingdom from the aged Uncle Eisenhower and again a sense of youthful hope and expectation.
And then of course you have and you have the assassination of Kennedy and that leads to
some of the what follows from that or among the things that follow are the argument about
the Vietnam war, the reappraisal of the American government as a tyrannical, lying establishment.
You know you get, you get the on one hand in the 60s you have you have various visions
of the futures in the 60s. You have the flower people and the and Woodstock and the summer
of love, and then on the other hand you have the Chicago Convention of 1968, the assassination
not only of Jack Kennedy, but also his brother and of Martin Luther King. You have the complete
transformation of the Beatles. [laughing] I was, I spent the, let me see get the year
right, yeah the fall, I'm sorry, the early winter of 1968 in Rishikesh with the Beatles.
And the Beatles had just come from the summer of love in the states and '68 is the here
they are in Rishikesh talking to the Maharishi and it's the same, at the same time as the
Tet Offensive that is taking place in Vietnam where it becomes clear that we have lost the
war. And then followed in that spring of '68 by the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and,
and Martin Luther King and then the Chicago riots in the summer of '68 and the you can
see the turn in, in, in the Beatles' music. The music that of you know prior to '68 tends
to be have a happy, lilting, hopeful tone and after '68 it begins, the Beatles break
up very soon after that and the music begins to turn interior, and ambiguity and melancholy.
There was a very dismal view of the future at the end of the Nixon administration. Not
only do you have the Vietnam War and the violence of the civil rights movement, but you also
had the Watergate, you had the revelations of America's treachery abroad under the guidance
of the CIA in Chile and elsewhere. And you get a period where the interest rate by the
end of the 1970s, the interest rate has gone up to whatever, 18%. Gold is selling for even
more money than it's selling today and there's a feeling of gloom, which is encapsulated
in Carter, who just talking about American malaise and there's this feeling of depression
and then you have that followed by the new morning in American brought by Ronald Reagan
from sunny California. So yeah, the idea of the future is a work in progress and it changes
and it is of course exactly what drives the stock market. The stock market is simply a,
it, it, about the values of hope and fear.
>>Richard Gingras: That's an interesting and keen observation. I think again we tend to
forget that I think that part of what I take out of that is in a sense our, our, our views
of the future have typically been more pessimistic than optimistic.
>>Lewis Lapham: Well, you know, yeah in our, in our recent history, yes.
>>Richard Gingras: Yeah. I'd like to take and, and, and torque this a bit and, and given
your decades of experience in media and, and your first hand witnessing of media transformation
in various instances, and, and certainly I have to believe your longer term study of
the evolution of media, certainly we want to talk about the internet. But before we
even go there, I'd be interested in your insights as to how journalism itself has transformed
over time in approach, in tone. For instance today we decry and for good reason how much
of today's mass media landscape is, is, is so tawdry, but forget that journalism, though
that term wasn't really used then in the time of Jefferson, was not exactly a paragon of,
of, of truth, ideas and wisdom.
>>Lewis Lapham: Far from it. The journalism as we know it, at least as far as I, if I
got the story straight, starts with the Fugger Newsletters in the 16th century in Augsburg,
Germany. The Fugger Bank was the biggest and most powerful bank in medieval Germany and
it starts as newsletters from agents in various parts of the world: letters from Peru about
the mines; letters from Egypt about cotton. It's all about trade and it's all about money.
That's the first birth of journalism. And it is today a, which is one of the reasons
why today the probably the biggest and largest and most successful news organization in New
York is Bloomberg. Bloomberg is hiring foreign correspondents, they have 2600 foreign correspondents,
all of them reporting on markets. I mean if you want to know what real estate costs 42
miles southeast of Sophia, Bloomberg will tell you. And so there is and that is journalism
at its roots. That's the root of it. It's also the root of the early journalism in America.
You have a few newspapers, you're talking about Jefferson and Adams and the Alien and
Sedition Act in the newspapers of the 1890s and they are violently partisan. Accusation,
the accusations that are being leveled by the Federalist's papers at Jefferson and by
the Republican papers at Adams are would today be considered scandalous and outrageous beyond
belief. I mean, I mean all of the writers would be sent home to wash out their mouths
with soap. [laughing] There was nothing they wouldn't accuse each other of, and, but the,
then in the, in the, in the, those were newspapers of limited circulation and with a specifically
political purpose. The major newspapers, I can't remember the names of them, but they
were for the merchants. They were the kinds of things, enormous broad sheets as long as
four feet across and six feet long, which would be spread out on coffeehouse tables
in the ports of Boston, New York and Charleston and again, it's all about trade. It's about
which ships are arriving, which ships are departing, what cargoes are being sold, what
land is being advertised and so on. Then in the 1830s you begin to get the sensationalist
press, the New York Sun comes on and sells for a penny, where the established merchant
press sold for five or ten cents. And these are fabulous stories. I mean they're about
scandal, they're about murders in Five Points in the City of New York, they're about, you
know, it's what Henry Luce in his memos setting up Time magazine in 1920 sent a memo to the
staff explaining what Time magazine was about and what it was about according to Henry Luce
was, I quote, "sex and gru." By gru he meant gruesome, you know, murder, train wrecks,
kind of along the lines of the New York Post today. So the journalism has always played
to the crowd, I mean, and it's played to a market and it deals in sensation. And the
people who say, well, why is the press so filled with bad news, why can't they give
us some good news? And the point, that kind of criticism misses the point, because the
good news is the advertising.
>>Lewis Lapham: The, the, the bad news is the suckering the, the customers into the
tent so that they can then, you know, in the first whatever, the top of the hour on the
news is the body bags in Brooklyn and the terrorists in Libya and the forest fires in
California, and then when you're thoroughly frightened or then comes on the smiling advertiser.
Obey the law, pay your taxes, and you get to go to the Virgin Islands on the American
Express card. And that's the good news and that's what the press does. I mean the press
you know hustles the bad news in order to sell the ads. I mean it's, I don't know if
you know the way a newspaper is made up, but a newspaper is made up, first, the first thing
are the ads. I mean you get a, this was true when I was working for the San Francisco Examiner
and again when I was working for the New York Herald Tribune. I mean you get the dummy comes
up and all the ad space is blocked out and the how many ads have been sold tell you how
much copy you can put in. I mean the news is, is secondary, subject to the advertising.
And again what a newspaper is selling, mostly it's selling itself in its traditional form,
it's not selling itself as a source of information, it's selling itself as a billboard, that's
its, that's its product and that's where it makes its money, from the advertising. So
again, the, it's subject to a market force and always has been. [cough]
>>Richard Gingras: I want to make sure we have time for questions, but there's at least
one more I want to get in before we do that and it's an area that I find particularly
interesting in studying the evolution of media. It seems that with the introduction of new
media technologies, whether one is talking about the printing press, or radio, or television,
or the internet itself for that matter, there's typically a longer lag before the form and
style of the media itself change, understandably. Radio news, for instance, began with announcers
reading the newspaper to their audiences before they recognized that a better, a different
writing style, crisper and so on, was more appropriate for that form and so on and so
forth. As much as I appreciate long form narrative journalism, we know from analyses of audiences
and reading habits and so on that people today have far less patience and are far less inclined
to go to that full length of that 3000 word article. I ask you this question because in
your history you, among your achievements have been interesting innovations in form.
When you returned to Harper's in the 80s, one of your big innovations there was the
Harper's Index, which for those of you don't know it was basically this crisp, bullet pointed
list of statistical observations. There was both knowledge and observation in those very
simple statements. So do you have any ideas or see opportunities in the evolution of the
forms we use to convey complex ideas?
>>Lewis Lapham: Yes, I do. I see a lot of room for that. I mean I, it was the Harper's
Index that, those of you are familiar with it, but I also did something called Harper's
Readings, which was like, they were short form things, excerpts taken from longer passages
and from obscure places from minor journalism, journals or from foreign newspapers and usually
or from court transcripts or from legal memoranda of various kinds. I mean they were found objects
and presented in many of the, in much of the same way that quite a few of the blogs are
now presented on the internet. This was before the internet actually. This was 1983 and the,
and then we also had a form called the Annotation, where we would take a document, whether it
was a hospital bill or a writ of execution and then spread it out on, on two pages and
then with annotation, draw out the meaning behind the language or what the point was
and so forth. And again, the form is constantly evolving and changing. I and I think this
is true not only with the, with print, but also with what can be done online, also what
can be done with film or documentary. I mean I have a great fondness for documentary film
and I, but I think it can be further developed and become more of an art form. The moveable
type is invented in 1450 more or less and for the first 50-60 years, the reaction from
the humanists in Italy and elsewhere in Europe is one of horror. It, its, as Richard said
at the beginning of this conversation that the horror expressed by the established authorities
has a way of sounding the same across time. I mean he was, you were mentioning somebody
from 1565 and then much of that is true. Much of it of what was being said you know with
the new type was worthless. But that's also true of much of what now gets posted on the
internet. The, your writing for, it's a, much of it is disposable. It's language that is
meant to be used as disposable, I mean, you know, it's a customer, I mean it's a consumer
good, it's like Kleenex. Ok, but, but that's always been true. And it takes, I mean if
you go back and read the, the list of books that get, I forget what the major prizes are,
the Pulitzer Prize and so forth, if you go back and look at the history of those books
for fiction over the last hundred years, you'll be appalled at how many of them are so bad.
The, the, but we, they weren't thought of as bad at the time, but they're seen as, they
don't survive because their, the strength of their thought or expression is not sufficient
to survive the, the test of time so that we have a different look at them from our perspective.
But the, I'm losing my train of, but no, its, so you have the moveable type comes in the
late 15th century, but it's another hundred years before you get to Cervantes, Shakespeare
and Montaigne, all of whom are more or less contemporary at the end of the 16th century,
who have found a way to use the new tool and, and, and bring to it art and high form of
expression and I assume that we will be doing the same kind of thing with whatever language
evolves out of the, out of the technology that we now have with the internet. I mean
obviously they'll be a drive toward compression, it, something in the direction, it'll take
twitlet, if you can elevate Twitter to the, to the form of a Japanese haiku, that's the
kind of thing that, that, or you'll see it if you're familiar with the Hermann Hesse's
book, The Glass Bead Game, you, you will see again, a, a, that's like writing a computer
program with not only philosophical ideas, but also with musical phrase and poetic metaphor.
I mean I would think that anybody at Google would find an extraordinary groping toward
some of the same kind of thinking in Hesse's book.
>>Richard Gingras: I'm gonna ask for questions if someone would like to approach the mic.
>>Lewis Lapham: [coughing]
>>Richard Gingras: I mean to that last point while someone, while we, while we hunt for
a questioner, if not I'll jump in with one. But it's interesting that whenever there's
a new medium that allows the propagation of more information, the first concern is that
that's just gonna yield more junk. And of course that's true, but it also seems true
that the wheat to chaff ratios over time stay about the same. So with the internet, no question,
there's hugely more chaff, but there's also a lot more wheat. It might take a little bit
more time to find it, but it's there. Hugh?
>>male #1/Hugh: Thank you. These days most major publications live in a bifurcated state,
with an online edition and a print edition. Lapham's Quarterly maintains a website. I
was wondering how you think of the two as separate entities, and more generally, where,
where you see this strange bifurcation going?
>>Lewis Lapham: Well, we, we, our website is not a replication of, of, of the, the journal.
It, it's its own thing. It's an allied endeavor in a different form and there are things we
can do on the internet with juxtaposition, with, we have a one of the departments is
something called déjà vu, so we will take a news story off you know within the last
month or so either a news story or photograph and then match it to something remarkably
close from 300, 500, 1000 years ago and we have set it up as a dissolve, so that you
have the, the first thing you see is the current image or the current story and then it dissolves
into the, into the historical record. We also find it is a way of using, of, of, of getting
contributions from interested readers who will send further texts and, and, and supplements.
We're also using it as an audio source and the not only interviews with some writers
and, and historians, but also a way of getting at the sound archive. We have a, in the United
States both at the Smithsonian and the University of Michigan very voluminous sound archives,
so the idea would be if in the issue itself we have a speech by Teddy Roosevelt, on the
website you'd, you could hear it. And the, there are amazing things that can be done
with that, we haven't developed that yet to the fullest possibility and there's also the
other way of I'm hoping to use it for documentary film. The, I made a documentary film a couple
of years ago then it was up for a prize in Amsterdam and I went to the Amsterdam International
Documentary Film Festival and I stayed in Amsterdam for three or four days and I was
astonished to see how much documentary film there is being made all over the world, I
mean, you know, by people in not only Saudi Arabia and Mongolia, but also in Indonesia
as well as in Russia and the Balkans and so on and none of this really makes it on to
American TV, because there's no market. The, the BBC will take maybe 50 of these films
a year for distribution in England, but our, at least at the moment our television, PBS,
Bravo and so on, History Channel, are not interested in politics. I mean it's ok, polar
bears and [laughing] you know, disappearing ice, but they don't want us to see the political
story or the historical story and some of this, a lot of this again is not very good,
but that's true of anything. It's not only true of, I mean there's not only a lot of
junk in the newspa, on the internet, there's a lot of junk in the bookstores. There's a
lot of junk. I mean the world is full of junk, but, but the, but it's also there is you know
the, there's gold, too, and the, and the idea is to, and the gold usually takes time to
appreciate it or to it takes engagement on the part of the reader. In other words, the
work of art to me is the engagement between the, the artist and the beholder and if they're,
and you get a moment in time really where the person looking at the painting or the
person reading the poem or the novel or the philosophy tract, is in the same space at
the same, [pause] I don't know what you call it, the same cloud maybe as, as, as the person
who painted the painting or the author who wrote the book. And it is in that joining
of human energy that is the reason that great art survives. I mean it's, it's miraculous.
And it can happen, I mean it can happen off any kind of a platform. But each platform,
I would think, would have a different, something of a different medium. I can remember coming
to New York in 1960 and there were, it was clearly distinct literature and theater, dance,
music, jazz, they were called in those days the seven lively arts and they had different
audiences, they were different disciplines, they required different kinds of skills. And
they were each, they were all valued within their own terms. By the end of the 60s you
have something called media. Media is the word that comes out of Marshall McLuhan and
Understanding Media in 1964. And by the end of the decade the seven lively arts had been
kind of fused into an amalgam called media, which is something else, so that [cough] again
it's constantly in flux. I'll tell you another difficulty with media, I mean I did a film
once that was a history of American foreign policy in the, in the 20th century and I got
to write it as well as to walk around Hanoi and talk it, but the, you come up against
this kind of problem, you come up against, I was given either, I can't remember whether
it was 73 words in 42 seconds or 42 words in 73 seconds in which to explain the origin
of World War II. And the voice over had to connect the still footage of the Munich conference
in, in, in 1938 with the news footage of the German Stukas bombing Warsaw in 1939 and there
you see, that's a problem in form. I'm not saying it can't be done. I don't think it,
I did it, but I don't think I did it very well. But in order to do that well, you have
to evolve a kind of a language that is again closer to poetry than it is, than it is to
prose and maybe that is certainly the direction over the last hundred years has been towards
shorter and shorter and shorter. I mean if you go back and read Harper's Magazine in
1850, everything was 10,000 words and very small print and then so that's clearly a direction.
Visual is another, you know, but the thing is there's so much room to experiment and,
and to fool around, I mean it, it is a, I would think an exciting prospect to try to
invent new forms and within the new form still have the density and the intensity of something
worth thinking about.
>>Richard Gingras: Lewis, I, I, I have to thank you. Your perspectives are both refreshing
and inspiring no matter how difficult some of the times might be. I don't know if we
have time for a, I think we don't, as much as I would love to. I also want to close with
definitely go to that go to link, get your free subscription and if you can afford it,
buy another subscription and give it to a friend.
>>Lewis Lapham: Yes.
>>Richard Gingras: Forty-nine dollars a year. It's a great buy. It's hours of entertainment
and knowledge. I can't imagine a cheaper source of entertainment and knowledge. So go buy
one. Now. But again, I, it's, it's, it's been an absolute pleasure, indeed an honor
>>Lewis Lapham: Richard, thank you.
>>Richard Gingras: and I look forward to continuing the conversation.
>>Lewis Lapham: Thank you very much.
>>Richard Gingras: Thank you.
>>Lewis Lapham: Thanks.