Conversations with Tyler - Hollis Robbins on 19th Century Life and Literature

Episode Date: August 28, 2019

As a graduate student, Hollis Robbins helped Henry Louis Gates, Jr. unravel a mystery about the provenance of a mid-19th century book. Robbins helped date the book by discovering allusions to popular literature of that period — her focus at the time. The realization that this perspective would bring valuable insight to other 19th century African American literature prompted her to make that her specialty. Now a dean at Sonoma Sate University, Robbins joined Tyler to discuss 19th-century life and literature and more, including why the 1840s were a turning point in US history, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Calvinism, whether 12 Years a Slave and Django Unchained are appropriate portraits of slavery, the best argument for reparations, how prepaid postage changed America, the second best Herman Melville book, why Ayn Rand and Margaret Mitchell are ignored by English departments, growing up the daughter of a tech entrepreneur, and why teachers should be like quarterbacks. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded June 21st, 2019 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Hollis on Twitter Email us: [e-mail] Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercadis.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit Conversationswithtyler.com. I'm very pleased to be here today with Hollis Robbins, who was one of the leading scholars of African-American history and literature, and she is also now dean at Sonoma State University.

Welcome, Hollis. Thank you. Opening question. Why were the 1840s the most central and determinative decade in American history? Well, the 1840s was a time of change, as I've said publicly, that the 1850s is actually my decade. I think very deeply about the 1850s, widely across the world what was happening. So for me, the 1840s were the decade. that opened the door to the decade that I study.

But it's the decade that saw Frederick Douglass. It's the decade that saw the beginnings of the postal reforms. It's the decade you see a beginning of a real political understanding that slavery is going to have to end. It becomes clear America will be a very large nation, right, for the first time? Yes. And you see changes in Europe that will revolutions in Europe, that will change the makeup of the United States.

You see gold being discovered. Gold is discovered in 1848. You see the end of the Mexican-American War. It's the Mormon decade, right? It's the Mormon decade. Roads and canals decade. Yes, you see bridges being built everywhere, the beginnings of railroads at the end of the, again in the 1850s.

So, yes, infrastructure begins to be built, and the United States begins to think of itself as a, as a nation. I don't, you know, one doesn't want to talk very much about manifest destiny, but in fact, that is characteristic of the way we think about the 1840s. But it seems no one talks about the 1840s, or am I missing out? It's not a thing to think of that as the seminal decade in American history. Well, because it's, because the 1850s were so dominant, because of the fugitive slave

act, because of the writing of Moby-Dec, even though nobody knew it at the time, because of the scarlet letter, Hawthorne's the Scarlet Letter, because of Uncle Tom's cabin, that the 1850s is the decade that dominates. And why is American literature so blossoming all of a sudden in the 1850s? Where is that coming from? Well, with Harriet Beatrice Stowe, it's the fugitive slave act. But we see, you know, it's a good question. Is it Hawthorne and Melville's relationship with each other, provoking each other to

write more? Is it newspapers? Frederick Douglass, a couple of years after escaping in 1845, or writing his narrative in 1845, founds a newspaper, The North Star, because newspaper culture was thriving in the 1840s and 1850s. So you see a real print culture in America and you see novelists responding to that being published in magazines and in newspapers. And would there have been a civil war without a fugitive slave act? Absolutely not. Why not? Because the deep moral and ethical dilemma provoked by the fugitive slave act was that an individual had to choose between their personal morals and helping a fugitive slave escape and being criminalized for that very act. Stowe and others thought that this was unconscionable. How could the American government require by law that an individual had to

turn somebody in when their Christian beliefs and their ethics said, no, that we're against slavery, and I'm going to help this person escape. And Harriet Petra Stowe, she's also objecting to so many slaves having been bought and sold. Is that a practice that is being stepped up as the nation becomes more commercial as there's more infrastructure, more transportation? I don't know the data on whether more were bought and sold, but certainly the slave market and the slave economy was such that there was an infrastructure to support by and selling on a regular basis, the depictions of slave auctions were by the end of the 1840s and the 1850s common in depictions of slave narratives.

What did slave traders try to do to make their slaves acquiesce peacefully into being sold? Well, that's anything that's anything that, this is actually not my area of expertise, particularly. My area of expertise is the literature of slavery, but certainly, you know, any kind of psychological torment any kind of carrots and sticks, blackmail, not feeding slaves well, threats. I mean, you name it. Any kind of manipulation of human beings were inflicted upon the enslaved to cause them to acquiesce. And why was Uncle Tom's Cabin so effective in the fight against slavery? It was a bestseller.

Ostensibly, President Lincoln once said this was responsible for the Civil War. Why this novel? Well, have you read it? Or how old were you when you first read it? Uh, 57. Oh, how old are you now? 57. You hadn't read it before that?

Correct. I looked at some of it, I think, in high school, but not really. That's so interesting. Actually, when John Updike reviewed our version in the New Yorker magazine, he confessed that he had never read it before either. And he also confessed to having put down our version because our annotations, he said, were too distracting, which I thought was fun. I mean, but again, why do you think you didn't read it? No one told me to. It is, in fact, one of the best American novels

and one of the three or four best of the 19th century. Yet it's become a school kid's thing that you're supposed to read but know what he ever does. But it's gripping. It's manipulative and interesting and informative ways. Well, you've answered the question. I mean, it's manipulative, interesting. I mean, she creates what Stowe's comparative expertise is

is creating these characters that live and jump out of the page. So, and I wouldn't call Uncle Tom a character that jumps out of the page but his sort of stalwart, forthrightness, his devotion, his clarity of thought about what is right and what is wrong, guide and ground the novel. But we have Little Eva, who just patterned on a little bit on Dickens's Little Nell from the old Curiosity Shop. We have Topsy, who was just a sprite and imp, sui generis, really extraordinary character. We have Simon Legree, who everybody knows as the avatar of a cruel overseer. And did the book convince more women or more men to oppose slavery? Well, the point of the book was to appeal to white women, frankly, to white Christian mothers in the north who could imagine their own child being taken from them as in the first chapter of the book, Eliza, who is a light-skinned enslaved woman in Kentucky, learns that her son is going to be taken away from her, is going to be sold.

And she flees in the middle of the night. and in that famous scene crosses the Ohio River on ice flows, which is a signal moment. It's in American literary history. And in all of the illustrations and the paintings of this book, she is very, very light-skinned. If you take a look at any of these illustrations, white women readers would take a look and imagine themselves in that position. Now, Harriet B. Tristow is Calvinist. Is this book actually a Calvinist book in terms of its implicit theology? No. And this has to do a lot with Harriet's, Harriet Beatrice Stowe's relationship with her father, Lyman Beecher, who was a Calvinist preacher, and whose doctrinal beliefs were so strong that he basically told his elder daughter, Catherine, that she was not going to be reunited with her fiancé in heaven because he hadn't been saved, which is a cruel thing to say after your daughter loses a fiancé and then saying, sorry, you're not even going to be united. reunited in heaven. And Harriet thought that that was a little bit too cruel. And so you see in her

Calvinism in this, in her novel, tempered a little bit by emotion. She thought, And there's free will in the novel. And there's free will. Are there still Calvinists in American politics today? Well, it's a good question. Do you think most of the candidates running for president today would even be able to say what Calvinism is? I tweeted this the other day. Mayor Pete, perhaps, right? Perhaps, but can most Americans tell the difference between doctrines of Calvinism, Lutheranism, Methodism, Episcopalian? I doubt it. Is the portrayal of Uncle Tom in the novel, in fact, racist, as is sometimes alleged? Well, I mean, Uncle Tom is the racial epithet and has been for almost from the beginning of the novel.

I don't think he's racist. I think he is a character who works with, in his belief system as a character and does not fight back. He's an avatar of nonviolence. And certainly if you're going to say that nonviolence and those who espouse it are racist, then you're going to have a little bit of a trouble thinking about where to put Martin Luther King. Why does she have this one novel that's so wonderful and so famous and so full of life, just, you know, falling off of the page? And then none of her other novels are read at all anymore. Well, Dread is pretty good. Or Dread has some good parts that are, which and a lot of fat.

But the good parts of Dread are great. And there's another way of reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, and that's to read it through the illustrations. And your edition has a lot of those illustrations. If you read the novel through the illustrations, how is it a different story than just reading it through the text? Well, the biggest message, I would say, of most of the illustrations is to age Tom. He spends the whole middle part of the novel with Little Eva. And Skip and I talk about this quite a bit in our introduction to our edition, how this is the central relationship of the book, is Uncle Tom, who has found himself on a plantation, the St. Clair Plantation in Louisiana,

and sits and talks with this young girl about God, about Jesus, about heaven, and most of the illustrations show the two of them together, show him very old, frankly, to ensure that nobody looking at these two has any sexual feelings one way or the other. I mean, she's always sitting on his knee, and she's always bouncing in his lap, and she's putting things in his hair. I mean, the two of them are always together. So the illustrations must show him as old. Now I'd like to turn to modern culture and go through a number of portraits of slavery,

and you tell me how accurate or appropriate you think they are. The movie, Twelve Years a Slave. Some of it was pretty accurate. I would say the biggest inaccuracy is how close the depiction of the slave quarters was to the main house. Usually it was set at such a distance that nobody in the main house would be able to know or think about the fact of slave quarters nearby. The Quentin Tarantino movie, DeGango. Django Unchained.

Yes. Well, I don't think it was designed to be accurate. It was designed to be a fantasy. But the emotional valance. What in it is objectionable or proper or? That's a crazy question. I don't think I could answer that. I don't think, I mean, again, it was designed to be,

it was a response to some movies that you're probably not going to ask me about from the 1970s. A couple of Italian movies whose names I'm forgetting right now. that tried to depict slavery after roots in ways that were realistic and suggested that the slave owners today, that there are people as cruel today as we're in the 1850s. And he's responding to a kind of film depiction of slavery. In his film depiction of slavery, he wants to give more autonomy and more agency to Django. So in that case, I would say there's a lot of accuracy that. But if there's a kind of pornography of violence, which, yes, is used to show slavery is horrible,

but is nonetheless a kind of pornography of violence, which cannot help but stimulate some parts of us, which may in some ways enjoy violent movies. Is that itself objectionable? Well, this was a question that came up in the 1850s, in fact, or perhaps going back to your question about what was important about the 1840s, is after Frederick Douglass's narrative and after William Wells Brown's narrative, there was a circulation of a certain kind of pampherson. conflicts depicting slavery. And there was a concern among abolition that some of the depictions of undress and whipping were a kind of pious pornography. They circulated and you could read tales of bondage and punishment, S&M, in a way that there was concern that many people were buying and

circulating these slave narratives not for abolitionists but for titillation. Stephen Spielberg's Amistad, good or bad movie. It's a good movie. There's a butt in your voice. What's the butt? Well, the bot is that it, I mean, it's romanticizing, you know, that as typical of films about slavery, and I think Django is, could be criticized for this too. Only one heroic enslaved person is given agency when everybody else sort of falls away. So Sinkay becomes this, you know, is the spokesman for everybody.

because he's descended from kings. Herman Melville's short story, Benito Serrano. Fantastic and a good depiction. And why is it better than all these other options we've been discussing? Because of agency and because of the idea that individuals under enslavement can be heroic, oppressed, manipulative, sneaky, humans just like everybody else. Do Chinese readers have Strowsy and insights into African-American literature? Well, it's a good question. I was asked to give a keynote speech at an ethnic literature conference a couple of years ago in China, or actually about a year and a half ago. And I think they had reached out to me as a white scholar of African American literature with the interest of how to think about ethnic literature in a way that doesn't necessarily become separatist or doesn't necessarily require that the individual studies. the literature, identify with that literature. And so the questions and thoughts I would get from

graduate students and other faculty had a kind of distance about how African American literature, how ethnic literature should be read. I'm not sure it was necessarily Straussian, but was different and more interesting. Do they see that we don't? Do they see it as more conservative or more radical? I think they are, well, different texts in different ways. I think that the, they see the narrow, narrowness of what gets studied and why. I had a really interesting conversation with, with one, one scholar about Neil Simon. The playwright. The playwright. Why don't we study Neil Simon in graduate school? So the questions are just outside the box. And the questions about African American literature, I mean, it was in conversation with a Chinese

scholar that I, I finally saw in all its clarity, though. ways that Melanie Wilkes and Ashley Wilkes are implicated in the Ku Klux Klan, and this still doesn't seem, this doesn't get reported or emphasized in posters of Gone with the Wind. The Ku Klux Klan, I mean, the only person that really stands up for the Klan or has nothing to do with a clan in Gone with the Wind is Scarlett O'Hara. I mean, she thinks it's a ridiculous organization. And, you know, again, I looked through all the scholarship on Gone with the Wind, which is not a book that I've written about until recently. And it's not emphasized. And part of the reason it's not emphasized is that Gone with the Wind isn't taught in

African American literature classes where African American literary scholars would take a look at it and say, well, of course this is about the Klan, or at least the second half of the book is about the Klan. So most of the scholars who are scholars of the South just sort of push it to the side. No, I've tried reading Margaret Mitchell, but to me it was unreadable. I'm not sure why. How can you sell me on Gone with the Wind? Oh, I'm not going to sell you on it. I mean, again, I mean, like Stowe, well, I mean, Stowe wrote several other very good books. Mitchell only wrote that one. It's, you know, it's, it's melodramatic and it's a love story. And the last time I taught the film in a in a black cinema class, several years. years ago at Johns Hopkins. We began with Gone with the Wind, and we began with a gone with the wind because all black cinema at some level engages with that film. It is the foundational film for depictions of slavery against which later films, like 12 years of slave, like

Django and Chained, have to contend. Now, you're a white woman studying African-American literature. You have a kind of outsider perspective of your own. What does that help you see? that maybe is obscured by other parts of people working in your field? Well, I got into the field accidentally because I had been reading about, I had read excerpts of a slave narrative that Skip Gates had found in 2001 called the Bondswins narrative and had excerpted it. He found it at an auction or he bought it at an auction. It was a manuscript called The Bonds Women's Narrative by Hannah Crafts.

And we didn't know anything about the author. We didn't know anything about its date. We didn't know anything about its provenance. And he went to work trying to find it through things like, you know, what was the ink it was written in? And what were the illusions? Were there allusions to Uncle Tom? Did it fit in with a slave narrative genre launched by Frederick Douglass? Anyway, he had excerpted it in the New Yorker magazine.

And I immediately recognized some of the borrowings or some of the excerpts. as borrowings from Charles Dickens' Bleak House. And I had been trained as a Dickens scholar at Princeton, or 19th century American and British literature. And most of the scholars that he had shown this book to hadn't recognized those echoes. And from the very beginning, Skip thought what I brought to the field when I started working with him and when I began to transition from an American literature scholar to an African-American literature scholar was that I was trained in the very books that most African-American writers in the 19th century were themselves reading. And in fact, if you're really going to take 19th century African-American literature seriously, you need to read the books that they were reading,

and they were reading Dickens and they were reading Tennyson, and they were reading Carlisle and Wordsworth. And sonnets also, right? And sonnets and sonnets. Though the first good African-American sonnet writer was Paul Dunbar, and that was much later in the century. Now, very often black history is brought into American politics rather directly, but bringing indigenous Native American history, that has very different effects on political discourse. How does that contrast work? Well, it's going to be difficult, I think.

The Native American Studies is the fastest growing ethnic studies field in the United States right now, and about time. I mean, after Canada's Truth in Reconciliation, I think the United States, Canadian universities' Native American Studies programs are growing. We have one of the best programs here in California at UC Davis. And I was recently at a conference with the number of humanities deans for around the country. And we were racking our brains about how we are going to get enough Native American studies scholars to be launching the classes that students are beginning to demand. I think there's a real question of why Native American Studies isn't a program and department at most universities.

I think I came from Johns Hopkins. I don't think there was a Native American studies scholar in the history or literature department there. Politically, there's no upside, right? There's not much of a chance of redemption. There are hardly any good guys. And I mean that word, guys, literally. There's not any president you can in a major way praise for how Native Americans were treated, on net. So it makes everyone look bad and then you're not sure what to do about that next, right?

Well, that's part of the issue. The other issue is why is there Black Studies programs at universities is because there were protests that led to them in the 1960s. There was student demands saying, we need to study this as a discipline, as a scholarly discipline. We demand a canon. We demand professors. We demand funding. And we haven't seen that with Native American studies. So we haven't, the scholarly infrastructure hasn't been there to support scholars working on the, on the subject. So you have a variety of reasons that it hasn't happened yet and will happen. And I think the question is, how does the framework of examining the Native American history, how is that going to conflict with the paradigms for studying black history? And I think

I think you're right. There's going to be conflict. What needs to be achieved so that a protected class no longer needs to be protected? How do we know when we're there? Well, that's too big a question. I don't know the answer to that. What's the best argument in favor of reparations based on the history of slavery? The best argument, I think Coates's argument a couple of years ago when the Atlantic was the best argument, which is that systematically property and value was taken away from the descendants, from slave families and from the descendants of the enslaved.

around the country. And I think writing the wrongs of redlining, writing the wrongs of incarceration errors, writing the wrongs of family separations, his argument still, as far as I'm concerned, is the most convincing. Now, you've written a good deal on the

history of the Postal Service. How did the growth of a Postal Service change romance in America? Well, everybody could write a letter. In 1844, this was the other exciting thing that happened in the 1840s. Roland Hill in England changed the postal service by inventing the idea of prepaid postage. So anybody could buy a stamp and then you'd

put the stamp on the letter and send the letter. Prior to that, you had to go to the post office. You had to engage with the clerk after 1840s and after prepaid postage. You could just get your stamps and anybody could send a letter. In fact, Frederick Douglass loved the idea of prepaid post for the ability to, for the enslaved to write and send letters. You know, after that, people wrote letters to each other and letters home, letters to their lovers, letters to... When should you send a sealed letter? Because it's also drawing attention to itself, right? Well, I mean, envelopes. It's interesting that envelopes, sealed envelopes, came about 50 years after the post office became popular. So you didn't really have self-sealing envelopes until the end of the 19th century. And that was technology or people didn't

see the need for it. Technology. The idea of folding the envelope and then having it be gummed and self-sealing, there were a number of patents, but they kept breaking down. But technology finally resolved it at the end of the 19th century. Prior to that, you know, you'd write in code. And also, paper was expensive. So, you know, you often wrote across the page horizontally and then turned it to the side and crossed the page writing in the other direction. So if somebody was really going to snoop on your letters. They had to work for it. Annette, what were the social effects of the postal service? Well, communication. I mean, the post office and the need for the post office is in our constitution. But it was a galitarian, it was winner take all, it liberated women,

it helped slaves, or what? All those things. I mean, but yeah, I mean, De Tocqueville mentioned this in his great book in the 1830s that anybody, some farmer in Michigan could be as informed as somebody in New York City. When was the post office truly bureaucratized? Truly bureaucratized. What do you mean by that? Well, it's nominally a bureaucracy quite early on, but it seems very often it was an informal place in a small town.

People would go in there, do their social business, spit their tobacco on the ground, whatever, and get on with things. And then at some point, you have a very formal set of civil service requirements and a post office is more or less a known, predictable thing. Or no? Well, I mean, you still have it as the social space. I don't remember that big study some years ago that if two people were supposed to meet someplace in a town with no other information, where would they end up meeting? And always the answer was at the post office. So it's still a social place. I mean, the real bureaucratization came with unionization in the 20th century and with zip codes in the 60s. And when was the postal service racially integrated? It had been racially integrated.

It was unintegrated under Woodrow Wilson, and then after that reintegrated. So that you see Richard Wright writes about working at the post office. And Lodds of Mercy, I think, is the book. But there were famously black postal delivery men through the 20th century. Even in the South? I don't know as much about the South. Why is the Post Office so productive of tales of suspense? Well, if you send a letter, it's going to get delivered. It's going to happen one way or the other.

There's this great scene in Lolita when the mom finally figures out what Humbert, Humbert, is up to. And she writes these letters outing him. And she's about to cross the street to put them in the mailbox. And she gets hit by a car. And it's the dramatic scene. If those letters had gotten into the envelope, into the mailbox, his schemes would be over. but he reaches down or some kid says, oh, here are some letters, and he's saved for better or worse. You now live in Northern California. What would you say that people in Silicon Valley do not understand about teaching? That's a real jump. I'm going to have to sit and process that for a second. Well, you know, I've been a professor for a long time and, you know, I think about how to scale things up. I think about how to teach to thousands or tens of thousands rather than to the 20, 20 people in the classroom, I'm not sure that it's possible that the process of education, which is the process of learning, information, mediated by

a trained, educated individual to students, which is the way teaching has been taught, you know, since Socrates' time. I mean, certainly there are things that we do now differently than we're done in Socrates time. But the delivery and cogitation and discussion and synthesis of ideas and learning has to happen. I don't see it scaling up. What do you think it is exactly that makes in-person face-to-face teaching more effective than, say, teaching over Skype? It's not just the in-person. I think it's the dynamic of the individual's, the individual professor or multiple professors in the team teaching and the dynamic of the students sitting together. And when I teach poetry, we might spend the entire class period on one sonnet.

And everybody around the room has seen something different and convinces laterally the others in the room to see something. Students choose something over with each other. They affect each other. It's a dynamic process. What's your view of bundling teaching with income sharing agreements? So I invest in the student. I get a share of the student's income as a company. I then have an incentive to teach and place that student.

Is that going to work? Is that going to solve our teaching problem? Is it fundamentally an issue of incentives? It might. I do, you know, there is, I don't see anything more wrong with it than any other kind of loans. I think it has a burden on the graduate. The graduate certainly can't take a gap year after graduation and go to France and fish or something like that. But the burden is the same in an ISA as it is with a student loan, so I don't see it as fundamentally different.

Another Silicon Valley question. Which are the good artworks about founders? There aren't any. Why not? Well, it's a good question. I don't understand why finders don't have more operas about them. Why we don't see operas and movies about Steve Jobs, about Peter Thiel, about Jeff Bezos. I mean, there's the David Fincher film of the founding of Facebook, but that's pretty much it.

I mean, the founders, entrepreneurs today are Titans. Does Moby Dick count? That's a whaling venture. It's backed by something like venture capital. Well, that would be, yeah, that's a good example. but we don't actually see the founders after the Piquod set sale. What's it like having been the child of a founder? Well, that's a complicated question. My dad was an entrepreneur before it became cool, I guess.

And so we were always founded electronics firms in New Hampshire. And I have three siblings, and we worked at the company. I spent summers soldering microchips and being yelled at to stay out of the clean room and making catalogs and understanding the industry a little bit, the 1970s were a hard time for high-tech companies. And so he would do well, then they would fail, or then he'd start another one and maybe do well for a while and then would do something else. It was a hard life, but it was fun.

It was exhilarating. If you study the history of dams, you know, dams that hold back water, what will you know that maybe the tech people don't? I'm not sure. I'm interested in dams. I'm interested in the history of California's water. I worked for a while with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. So I got to know a little bit about the water, about the importance of the dams and how California wouldn't be California without the system of dams and water. But I'm not sure I'm an expert that could tell anybody more than the current experts. The problem of daycare and taking care of children. Why is that so hard to solve? And is there a tech solution? That's a good question. I was on this commission. This was in Colorado in the 1990s. The governor of Colorado, Roy Romer, wondered, asked these questions. I think it was on two commissions now that I remember it. You know, again, is this something that could be scaled? Is there something that government should do to ensure quality child care? Look, anybody can have a child. And the conditions under which most children are raised, I mean, we think about,

even the ideal of, you know, two-income parents, one staying home, being with the children, somebody's got to take care of the kid before kindergarten, the variety of conditions for these children around the world I don't think most people think about. I worked for a while for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, and the woman that ran Planned Parenthood got into it, I guess, devoted her life to plan parenthood to contraception after seeing children with malnutrition that were just left alone to die or were not taking care of well and realizing that, you know, education was required. In a tech-obsessed world, do scent and perfume matter more or less?

Well, I think scent is the underrated. I wondered if you were going to ask me this in underrated, overrated. Scent is underrated in the tech world. Send is underrated in entertainment. I think there's only been one film by John Waters, which attempted to bring scent into the theaters. And that was, what, 30, 40 years ago? Does that film, you know, perfume from the Patrick Siskind book,

but that's still mainly a novel? Right. And does it come with Scratch and Sniff? Not that I know of. I think it was a Franco-German film. I'm not sure. Ah, okay. We now get to underrated versus overrated.

Are you game? Sure. Okay. First one out. Tap dancing. Underrated or overrated? Underrated. Tap dancing is excellent.

What makes it interesting? Well, I was just actually having a conversation with a dance faculty at Sonoma State, which does not offer tap dancing. It's a very avant-garde program. It's a very edgy program. And the example given of being edgy was, oh, we don't do tap dancing. And I thought, well, I like tap dancing. It's fun. It's uplifting. I just find it fun. The Thomas Mann novel, Dr. Faustus.

Totally underrated. More people should read it. There's this great scene. When's the last time you read it? Oh, 20 years ago? There's a wonderful scene where Mephistopheles brings grapes to Dr. Faustus out of season. And he's like, wow, how could there be grapes out of season? And in these days when we have whole foods right around the corner, I mean, I don't, I can't imagine most people, in America imagining that you would sell your soul to the devil to get grapes out of season. Worrying about rabies, overrated or underrated? Underrated. So it's all underrated today.

It's all underrated. There should be more discussion of rabies. Or most people don't know that in fact, public policy has eradicated something that had been a real concern for most Americans. There's a great scene in To Kill a Mockingbird. when Atticus Fitch is called home because there's a rabid dog walking down the street. And it's the scene where he takes his gun and with one shot puts the dog down and is the one man in town that can do it. Amiri Baraka, formerly known as Leroy Jones. Overrated?

Underrated? Well, I think he's underrated. It is unsettling to me that so many students don't know him. and I try to teach him and teach his poems when I can. He's featured in one chapter in my book on sonnets because he has two extraordinary sonnets. He didn't call them sonnets, but they are sonnets. He was a really good poet. Tiger Woods.

I don't know too much about, well, I know that he's a golfer and I golf, but I don't watch him. So overrated. Comparison from the Bible, Genesis or Exodus? Genesis. Why? Well, in the beginning. It's the beginning. Does it have the better stories? It's got the better stories. Exodus is, you know, has too much of the list about it. We don't, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we don't have to deal with the lists in Genesis. Margaret Mitchell or Einrand. Well, it's interesting that two of the bestselling novelists of the 20th century women are both equally, uh, ignored by English departments and universities. I mean, Margaret Mitchell and gone with The wind is paid attention to a little bit just because, as I said, it's something that literature and film works against, but not Einran at all.

And what's Herman Melville's second best book? Billy Budd. Why Billy Budd? Well, like Antigone, like the Kane Mutiny Court Marshall, the trial scenes sparks extraordinary conversation in the classroom. And if you're going to read one book by Chester Heim's, what should it be? I don't remember all the names of them. He's worth reading. What's interesting in it?

The two detectives and the patter between the two detectives in the way these detective novels operate differently and the same as other classic detective novels. Film music, another topic you've written on, why are hit songs and movies not so much a thing anymore? In 1960s, parts of the 70s, it's very common for the songs on the top of the charts to come from movies like Mrs. Robinson.

That seems to have vanished. What happened? Well, has it? I mean, I hear frozen everywhere. So I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm not as much an expert on change over time. I expect that there will always be songs from movies.

Well, there was that song from a stars born that was all over. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure I agree with your question. I think film music has changed. but not that much. Can you think of a potentially good movie ruined by a bad soundtrack? I'd have to think about that. What's a paradigmatic example of a movie made better by a good soundtrack?

The Pink Panther, Henry Mancini's score. I mean, the movie, it's ridiculous, but the score, Henry Manzini's score is, I mean, you're going to be humming it now the rest of their day. Overall, and I don't hear me in the music, but just the use of sound. Is the use of sound in movie soundtracks improving or declining in quality? how much it's making the movie better? Well, I read something recently that, in fact, the sound has never been better,

but primarily in TV sounds, because there are so many channels, I mean, people write about this, there are so many amazing shows that what draws, and people are doing many things while the TV is on in the background, if they're cooking in this, and what draws people to put down their knife while they're chopping things and look at the TV or when they're changing channels to stop is sound. not visuals, so that music, theme songs have improved.

Movies seem too loud to me these days. Maybe I'm just seeing the wrong movies. But it seems harder to hear subtle sounds. And there's more Blair. The sound quality has never been higher. Well, I think that's true. Apparently you're seeing too many Transformers films. Though Hans Zimmer's scores in many films,

he's very, very loud but also very good. Is Neil Stevenson correct, that the Western as a genre doesn't exist anymore? And if so, what happened to it? You know, I think about this a lot. You know, growing up in the 60s and 70s, the Western was what you'd see on TV. I was thinking about the number of Native Americans

I would see in a week, you know, watching Bonanza or whatever Westerns happen to be on the late show. And these depictions of Native Americans were not accurate and were stereotypical and were deeply problematic. but at least they were present because the Western was a dominant form on television and film. And I

asked some students today, like what TV do you watch that features cowboys and Indians or Native Americans? And there aren't any. Hans Christian Anderson, Emperor's Clothes. What's the Straussian reading of that story? Well, Emperor's New Clothes is a everybody knows the story.

What most people don't recognize is that was a happy, flourishing town. The short story says, time passed merrily in that town. So while the king was trying on clothes in his wardrobe, and while all his ministers were bringing him clothes, and he was trying them on, and perhaps he was a little vain, the town was doing well. It was economically thriving.

There were no problems. And Anderson wrote this during a time, changing to a constitutional monarchy. The question being, you know, things are pretty good when you have a benevolent monarch who's not paying any attention. Is it still a happy town by the end of the story? No, because once the king,

once these weavers swindle the emperor and, you know, the little boy cries out but he has nothing on, everybody's very upset, everybody's sad. So the ministers and the ruse of of having a king who isn't paying attention is requiring that we're going to have a king that does pay attention. I find the story

very conservative. What if the alternate original ending had been kept? That's a good question. And I think the alternative ending is a benevolent monarchy, is the best form of government. Thomas Carlyle, Sartar Resortus. Why is that an interesting book? It seems unreadable to so

many people. It's about clothes. Who would read Carlisle on German idealism, romanticism, and clothes, and none of it makes sense. What's the bottom line on that? I totally agree with you. It's overrated and I've never finished it myself. What is the Strowsian reading of Babar the Elephant?

When's the last time you read it? Not long ago. Okay. I used to teach it alongside Edward Said's Orientalism. Because in this story, Babar the Elephant comes to town, is dressed by the lady. He gets this green suit of clothing,

which is not exactly right. It's not good enough to be with an elite of the town, but it's good enough for him then to go back to the elephants and be king there. So he is a kind of subaltern in the dominant colonial hierarchy, but then can go and oversee the elephants, but still be in sway to the colonialist enterprise. So it's reactionary in your reading. Why don't science fiction writers focus on clothes more?

I wonder about this. I mean, the Star Wars, you either, have this sort of toga or this sort of Irish knit stuff with leather jackets that that Han Solo wears. And color is used in such literal ways, right? Yeah. Red uniform, the guy's going to die. Exactly.

I mean, in both Star Trek, Star Wars, I mean, I look around with all the technological advancements and I wonder why people are wearing just throw away clothes. People buy hundreds of things a year, throw them out. They're badly made. workers in bad circumstances are making them. I don't understand why there hasn't been real disruption in attire. In your vision, how do you think clothes will differ 50 years from now? Well, unless somebody steps in and does something, they're going to be exactly the same and they're going to be horrible.

So I'd like to see fabrics that you can wash at home that last over time. But what do you want from, say, smart clothes with embedded sensors? Do you want the clothes to carry memory? should they do some functions of your smartphone? What can they do that they're not doing for us right now? Well, just having this conversation would be an improvement. I mean, right now, those who are dominating the clothing industry, it's just about style, about what color. I think there hasn't been a conversation yet about what happens in Paris and what happens in Silicon Valley. Why isn't there more good science fiction? Well, I think there is. What do you mean more?

I'm enjoying, I'm just, I'm reading Ted Chang's short stories right now. I've read Neil Stevenson. There's great stuff. What's the bias in mainstream media coverage of higher education? What do they get wrong? They get, well, inside higher ed and Chronicle, and I write both of them, individuals I know there, to say, you know, study, stop focusing on the elite schools. Spend some more time on, I'm in the CSU system at Sonoma State University. There's 23 Cal State schools, I think, it's the second largest public university system in the country. Schools like ours should have more coverage. It should not be Harvard, Yale, Swarthmore, Amherst,

as emblematic of what's happening in higher ed, or even Oberlin. So at schools like yours, the best students typically are very, very good, but they're not necessarily readily discovered because it's not Harvard or Stanford. So if someone is coming along and they want to try to hire the very best students from, say, a California state system school, how should they find them? What are the empirical correlates of those people who are the very, very best students? It's a good question. And it's something that I'm actually thinking on and working on.

One of the reasons I wanted to come to California and work at a state university is students at a place like Johns Hopkins, there's already a pipeline to go to the best, to go to Google or Facebook. The problem at, it's not a problem or the challenge at a place like Sonoma State with first-gen students is that the opportunity horizons or the idea that, oh, I could go work at Facebook or I could go work at Google or I could go create an app, hasn't, isn't something that first-gen students often embrace. So the first thing that we need to do in classrooms is open up opportunities is to say, have you thought about this? Is this a possibility to bring speakers to campus, to say this is something you can do, to have recruiters come to campus and speak to our students? And that's what we're doing. To improve the job that you're trying to do, if you could have better data on something,

what would that something be? I have to think about that. I'd like to know what makes a really good teacher. In looking at the literature, the teachers, the quality of teaching, is measured primarily on student outcomes, on student test scores. But it's hard to say that that is the best measure, or that's the best measure of how a teacher teaches. There's an Alfred North Whitehead quote,

he said, sometimes I give a student an A or a B instead of a C or a D because they'll earn it 20 years from now. that a good teacher will lodge education in a student's mind that may not bear fruit for 10, 15 years. How do we measure that? Is it possible to be measured? How do we measure the delivery of information per hour per comment? How do we figure out who's good and who isn't good? And right now, the only way that we can study teachers are studying the students, those who have decided to go into the, field of teaching. And what are your intuitions? So there'll be some obvious correlates, such as putting time into being a better teacher,

but the obvious correlates aside, what do you think are the hidden correlates with people ending up being excellent teachers? There's a way of finding the channel of communication between the teacher and the student to be always open. You know, the teacher has a number of students in front of him or her, and it is a number of is constantly opening that channel and delivering information individually to each student all the time in the manner that the student needs it. I can't believe I'm about to gesture to Malcolm Gladwell, but his comparison of elementary school teachers to quarterbacks, I think is fruitful

in a way, being nimble, being quick on one's feet, being able to respond to be able to call an audible. And so a teacher, if a student asks a question and the teacher can pivot and answer that student at that moment, there's that quality of pivoting quickly that I think makes a really good teacher. And having raised two very successful children, what did you learn about teaching from doing that? Well, I raised two successful adults, and I think that's actually the question. I was not going to raise children. I was going to raise adults. And I told them that from the very beginning. act in ways that you would like to see the world act, not just to do unto others or do not do under others,

but is the way you are being right now, the way you would like to see the world run. And that, you know, speaking to young people as if they're adults is something that I've brought into the classroom. Hollis Robbins, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes,

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