 40 here so just finished reading the the new Philip Roth just finished reading the new Philip Roth biography by Blake Bailey and it's terrific it's about 700 pages everything you've ever wanted to know about Philip Roth you can find in this book you find about all the people who inspired his his novels how he transformed reality into fiction and you'll notice with Roth's most successful books that they involved a lot more than just introspection okay so a lot of Roth's work was highly repetitive he would just essentially write out his masturbatory fantasies and write about his own problems and there wasn't a big demand for that but when he based his work on research on what was going on in the wider world then when Roth helped us to better understand reality then there was a huge market for that so for example Philip Roth helped to predict 9 11 so in a book he published I think in the year 2000 the dying animal is about the professor of desire David Capuch he wrote brilliance flaring across the time zones of the Millennium New Year's Eve celebration and none ignited by bin Laden so Philip Roth saw that bin Laden was on a jihad brilliance flaring across the time zones and none ignited by bin Laden so that was Philip Roth's eerie prediction of 9 11 so great fiction can help us better understand the world around us I think the number one writer in this capacity was Tom Wolf I just love his journalism I love his fiction I think he was an absolute giant and his his writing technique whether it was nonfiction or fiction depended upon four elements so abundant use of realistic dialogue second paying close attention to status details so Roth saw people as largely motivated by trying to avoid humiliation and to gain in status then seen by seen construction so Roth Tom Wolf would write scenes so that each scene would have a beginning middle and end so that's the most satisfying way to to read about something is to have scenes with a beginning middle and end and then Wolf would use multiple points of view so you'd get inside the heads of the various characters so that's a compelling recipe whether it's for nonfiction or for fiction and Tom Wolf wrote his literary manifesto in a long essay for Harper's magazine in 1989 called stalking the billion-footed beast literary manifesto for the new social novel and this is brilliant because the things he's saying apply just as much for writing compelling nonfiction as for writing compelling fiction and in large part to do compelling live streams so I can do a live stream and all I do is talk about myself now that will be compelling and interesting only to the extent that it helps you better understand yourself all right so when I connect with you then then that's compelling and interesting if I'm not connected with you then then it's boring so I remember I took a media class in high school and there was one day that I prepared like eight hours for my presentation and the whole class just tuned out within about 30 seconds and then there are other days when I only put in 30 minutes or an hour for my presentation but I wanted to connect and so I was I was taking my cues from the audience I was allowing them to affect me as I was affecting them and then the whole class was tuned in so it was a fascinating experience to see I could do all this preparation but if I wasn't interested in connection it wasn't working so literary manifesto for the new social novel by Tom Wolf he starts may be forgiven if I take as my text the sixth page of the fourth chapter of the bonfire of the vanity so this is a great Tom Wolf novel set in New York City of the 1980s and Tom Wolf's work better helps you understand the world around you just like reading Middlemarch by George Elliott it better helps you understand yourself and the world around you so the protagonist of the bonfire the vanities is Sherman McCoy and he is a bond trader on Wall Street he's driving over the tri-barrow bridge in New York City in his Mercedes Roadster with his 26 year old girlfriend not his 40 year old wife and she's in the tan leather bucket seat beside him he's glancing triumphantly off to his left toward the island of Manhattan and the jout towers were jammed together so tightly he could feel the mass and the stupendous weight just think of the millions from all over the globe yearned to be on that island in those towers in those narrow streets there it was the Rome the Paris the London of the 20th century the city of ambition the dense magnetic rock the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening so that's what makes a compelling live stream compelling piece of nonfiction a compelling piece of fiction is that it takes you to where you feel like things are happening whether those things that are happening in your own soul in your own work situation in your own life or in the greater world around you where the future is being created right we all want to go to the middle of where things are happening and I've been listening to a terrific audible series that really helps effective communication skills by Dalton keyhole so whenever I need to take a break she says to herself smoking is it really so awful why I hadn't had to smoke until she died in 92 or smoking is worth the risk because it helps me relax or prevents me from gaining weight and after all that's a health risk to and so on in fact the drive for consistency also called the drive for consonants between our perceptions of ourselves and our behavior is so important that we'll go out of our way to claim supportive evidence as well researched and arguments in favor of our ideas as well taken right so this is how it works when I see supporting evidence from my ideas how to oh this is well researched mate this is peer reviewed this is solid stuff this isn't like a comic book version of reality like the research that supports my opinions this is solid this is real stuff but the research that supports your opinions are it's a it's a bit dicey mate while dismissing is contradicted contradictory argument is a stupid poorly researched and based on rare occurrences you can see this being played out in the media on major issues all the time by people who've taken different views of the world this effect is so pervasive that social psychologists call it the confirmation bias we need we see what we need to see to be internally consistent so for example if you believe you are a capable kindly and attentive spouse and you're made criticism you for being yeah we see what we need to see so that we can feel internally consistent so in other words we ignore everything that contradicts our own sense of ourselves and our own sense of how the world works so you probably had the experience of dealing with people are just unable to accept reality right they just have these very strong visions for how the world should work and anything that contradicts their vision for how the world should work they just ignore right these people are quite quite annoying but to some extent we're like them we all tend to contradict and to ignore anything that is not in consonance with who we think we are and how we see in the world so I'm reading this biography of Saul bellow by James Atlas it came out I think in the year 2000 and so much reminds me of myself it's it's embarrassing so I was terribly terribly prone to jealousy when I was a teenager when I was first falling in love and when this girl I liked she she's talked about going to a journey concert with some college guy I just like cut her off and I just stopped answering her her letters because I was just so insanely jealous I would get a girlfriend and then if I saw her you know hanging out with another guy I just get really angry because I was so insecure so bellow a biography by James Atlas I have not enjoyed Saul bellow's work I did read Ravelstein I think that's the only novel of his I've been able to finish but as I'm reading about Saul bellow it reminds me so much of myself sickly child yeah that's how I grew up sickly child he was his mother's favorite she treated him like an invalid I remember when I was a kid my parents would tell me that my mother had a vision that I would grow up to do amazing things for God so a lot of great writers and high achievers in the public sphere our presidents often seem to come from homes where they were adored by their mothers and ignored by their fathers so saw bellow was the designated nostalgia man in his family he was the keeper of war memories his brothers were aggressive and practical so this is this is like me under designated nostalgia man my my siblings are much more practical than me the heroes of all of saw bellow's books are all versions of saw bellow okay so it's not surprising that many writers tend out to be quite narcissistic reason that we make live streams and that we write blog posts so we produce books is that we want to we want to hear appreciation that we want to hear adoration that we that we want to be liked and loved and respected so the heroes of all also bellow's books were him like variously depicted as a dreamer or as bookish head in the clouds intellectual or a confused soul in need of guidance so he had two brothers who were quite worldly successful and they kind of looked after him saw bellow grew up in Montreal and they would speak like French with the dominant language but they'd also speak English in school they'd speak Yiddish at home like they grew up literate in several different languages we read British books and saying God save the queen and recited the Lord's prayer so just I so identify with this in my teenage years he romanticized relationships so I would read more into my relationships with girls and was really there and so saw bellow would need right about his teenage relationships you'd romanticize them he would cast them as all sweetness in light but in reality saw bellow like like me he was quite erratic in his constancy he was greedy for attention like girls would leave me for the weekend just absolutely exhausted because I just suck them dry for all the attention and nurturing that I could get my therapist said she pictured me as a little boy who would just suckle on a mother's breast you know so greedily because he was afraid that the milk would run dry so saw bellow grew up greedy for attention and fiercely jealous so that greed for attention he was was much of the fuel for his writing he noticed this girl he liked was wearing the fraternity pin of a basketball player and he grabbed it and tore it off her and ripped her blouse and she remembers I was afraid of the guy and this this scene finds its way into his novel Humboldt's gift maybe we never forget saw bellow they were such a vibrant Jewish community Humboldt Park in Chicago that you're a violent kid his high school girlfriend recalls you almost shaped me to death because I went to a dance with some basketball player so in high school there was this girl I liked and she went to the senior problem with this basketball player you know so jealous that I spread all these nasty rumors about her afterwards that she and this guy had massive sex so saw bellow lost his mother when he was about 12 I lost my mother when I was three and so it left saw bellow forever mother bound like it was a bondage that he played out in five separate marriages and a string of failed relationships he was never able to free himself of the intensity of his need for a mother saw bellow like myself like most writers had this strong self dramatizing impulse and it grew out of this need to make himself heard so I'd often complain at home you're not listening to me and my stepmother related that to a friend of the family and the friend said oh look just needs 500 people paying attention to him and if you're at UCLA he'd have that right now but he's a wounded young God the saw bellow siblings he would always be the baby of the family so I'm 54 but I'm still the baby of the family because my siblings are 8 and 11 years older than me and conventionally much more successful than myself so saw bellow work for his brother Maurice but his brother fired him because saw bellow would keep reading on the job saw bellow got quite discouraged by his teacher's failure to recognize his promise he wanted their attention so saw bellow started out the University of Chicago one of America's elite universities but he could no longer afford the fees so he transferred to Northwestern it was a good school but it couldn't compete with the University of Chicago so initially saw bellow just wanted to deny that he'd ever gone to Northwestern because it wasn't particularly prestigious but as his fame grew he began to look more favorably upon Northwestern he became almost defiant it was less prestigious but the teachers there they showed greater appreciation of his talent so for attention hungry people like myself and saw bellow we go to where the attention is we grow towards attention like plants grow towards the light the Northwestern was in some ways more elitist than Chicago's so until about the 1960s English literature departments in in the United States were dominated by Anglo-Saxons in particular so it was regarded as a career for gentlemen and so the English departments tend to be dominated by the new critics of Southern agrarians for whom all literature was English so University English departments until about the 1960s were under the vigilant protection of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and he didn't have Jews getting tenure teaching English literature in the United States until Lionel Trilling I think in 1939 but there were no such restrictions in anthropology so saw bellow was discouraged from studying English literature on a graduate level so he went to seek out advice from the chairman of the English department you told him you got a very good record but I would not recommend you study English you weren't born to it no Jew could really grasp the tradition of English literature the chairman explained no Jew would ever have the right feeling for it and that makes a certain sense because history of English literature is really the history of Christianity okay English literature is primarily shaped by Christianity so bringing Jews into the study and the teaching of English literature is is bringing in outsiders so University of Chicago did not discriminate against Jews as much as the Ivy Leagues in the early part of the 20th century so there was a joke about the University of Chicago that it was composed of Jewish professors teaching Roman Catholicism really meaning the great books like from Thomas Aquinas to Augustine to Protestants so Jewish professors teaching Roman Catholicism to Protestants that's the the old joke about the University of Chicago anthropology was regarded as like the most far-out academic pursuit and so a lot of Jews went into anthropology they weren't generally welcomed to the field of English literature so anthropology was for people who wanted to criticize society radicalism was implicit in anthropology especially sexual radicalism so physical anthropology had been overtaken by cultural anthropology early in the 20th century with the denial that there were real differences between races so anthropology gave young Jews a greater sense of freedom from surrounding restrictions they were seeking immunity from the Anglo-Saxon custom I didn't worry about being accepted or rejected by a society of Christian gentlemen unlike the field of English literature so anthropology the study of foreign cultures provided expression for Sorbello's own sense of exclusion from American society there was a condition that haunted him his whole life even after he became an exemplary and deeply assimilated spokesman for all the opportunities that the United States offered but like many Jewish intellectuals of his generation so Sorbello was was born around 1900 he never got rid of the suspicion that he wasn't quite part of America because America the United States of America was founded by people from England and the United Kingdom so they made up about eighty five ninety percent of the population at the time of the War of Independence all the founding institutions of the United States of America are Anglo-Saxon so it makes sense that Jewish immigrants particularly first generation Jewish immigrants would not feel necessarily a strong part of things so Tom Wolf wrote the great novel about New York in the 1980s the bonfire of the vanities and so hit for Wolf the idea of writing a novel about this astonishing metropolis a big novel wanted to cram as much of New York City between the covers as he could this was the most tempting the most challenging the most obvious idea an American writer could possibly have Wolf first tried this approach in 1968 but what he had in mind then was what he called a nonfiction novel he'd just written the electric Kool-Aid acid test about the psychedelic and hippie movement and he began to indulge in some speculations about nonfiction as an art form and he records his speculations in a terrific anthology called the New Journalism so he talks about the four essential elements for creating compelling journalism which are the same four essential elements that he uses for creating fiction abundant use of realistic dialogue pay very close attention to status details multiple points of view and scene-by-scene construction so Tom Wolf the 1960s alone in his little apartment on East 58th Street was worried that there'd be someone out there who'd write a big realistic fictional novel about the hippie experience that would blow the electric Kool-Aid acid test out of the water somebody there might be droves of them among the hippies were many well-educated creative people but the years went by and none of those novels ever appeared and Wolf writes in 1989 to this day they remain unwritten so Wolf turned to his proposed nonfiction novel about New York City he thought this book should be a novel of the city take people where things are happening we all want to be where the action is that's one of the reasons I got so excited about a career in journalism that had put me right in the middle of things so Balzac and Zola had written novels about Paris Dickens and Thackeray had written novels of London city was always in the foreground exerting its relentless pressure on the souls of its inhabitants so where we place our souls has a tremendous effect on us even the architecture in our lives affects us or the people affect us or the weather affects us we are all influenced by our context so in the 1960s we had certain powerful forces that were converging had the economic boom that began that began in the middle of the Second World War and it surged into the 60s without even a mild recession so these prosperous times created a sense of immunity so that standards that have been in place for millennia would just swept aside you got the sexual revolution which is rather prim term Tom Wolf notes of the lurid carnival that took place and the boom of prosperity also triggered something else over racial conflict like bad feelings between races all right those those are always with us but they'd been rumbling on low boil in America's cities ever since the great migrations from the rural South begun in the 1920s but you had to have certain conditions that allowed these bad feelings to become overt so with Black Lives Matter we've encouraged certain segments of the population to feel agreed and that they should get out and protest so I was looking at the Twitter feed of my friend Monica Osborne and she just tweeted apparently big riot and lootfest is being planned for Los Angeles I'm looking forward to seeing my friends to say violence is necessary looking forward to seeing my friends set fire to their own multi-million dollar homes and throw their Gucci into the streets you got to walk the walk so not sure when this big riot and lootfest is coming for Los Angeles I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to the summer of Deandre the dude that that woman cop shot in Minnesota right she thought she was reaching for a teaser apparently the guy that she shot wasn't wasn't such a righteous man after all so Dante Wright had a warrant out for his arrest for attempted aggravated robbery charges after choking and holding a woman at gunpoint for $820 in 2019 so you don't want to get into fights with people who have guns such as the police and when you create confrontations people's range for rational thinking starts to diminish as you're under pressure so she thought she was reaching for a taser but she was actually reached for a gun and she shot the guy but he played a tremendous role in that by creating very tense situation so he was shot and killed by police officer Kimbley Potter in Minnesota on Sunday leading to days of unrest so in 1965 we had a whole series of race riots erupt and it wasn't just because of some negative feelings on the down low between various racial groups these riots moved to Detroit in 1967 they peaked in Washington and Chicago in 1968 Tom Wolf says these were riots that only the 60s could have produced just as there were social conditions the the late Obama era collapse produced Black Lives Matter which then created their reaction of America voting in Donald Trump which then created a reaction which led us to Joe Biden and and the current current moment in the 60s the federal government created the war on poverty the heart of which were not arms for the poor but setups called caps community action programs community action programs was something new in the history of political science they were official invitations from the government the people in the slums to improve their lot by rising up and rebelling against the establishment including the government itself so Black Lives Matter these race riots these wild and Tifa protests they've been incentivized by our elites most of our major corporations for example have donated to the domestic terror group Black Lives Matter so the government provided the money the headquarters and the advisors so the people in the slums obliged the riots were merely the most sensational form the strategy took more customary form was the confrontation confrontation was a 60s time and we're still living in the 60s in this era it was not by mere coincidence that the most violent of the 60s confrontational groups the Black Panther Party of America drew up its 10-point program in the North Oakland poverty center okay poverty center funded by the government that's what the poverty center was there for essentially to encourage rioting and confrontation such was the backdrop one day in January of 1970 and I decided to attend a party that Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia were giving for the Black Panthers in their apartment at Park Avenue on 79th Street so Black Panthers were among the most famous manifestations of Black nationalism so many Blacks have not felt part of the American project so they developed their own nationalism just as many Jews have not felt part of the national project of the Gentile countries they were part of so if they became particularly nationalistic then they'd become Zionist Zionism is an expression of Jewish nationalism Wolf thought there might be material for a chapter in my nonfiction vanity fair type novel about New York I didn't know the half of it was at this party that a Black Panther Field Marshal rose up beside the North Piano there was also a South Piano in Leonard Bernstein's living room and he outlined the Black Panther's 10-point program to a room full of socialites and celebrities who entertained a vision of the future in which after the revolution there were no longer be any such thing as a two-story 13-room apartment on Park Avenue between grand pianos in the living room or for just one family so all I was after was material for a chapter in a non-fiction novel but the party was such a perfect set piece that I could not hold back writes Tom Wolf I read an account the evening for New York magazine called radical chic there's a companion piece an article about the confrontations the war on poverty had spawned in San Francisco Mao Maoing the flak catches two were published as a book in the fall of 1970 once again I brazed and waited for the big realistic novels that were sure to be written about this phenomenon that have played such a major part in American life in the 1960s and early 1970s racial strife in the cities once again the years rolled by and these novels never appeared so if you read the Los Angeles Times Washington Post the Wall Street Journal the New York Times Wall Street Journal there's a lot of intelligent useful commentary in there but overall any connection between the truth what's being reported in these publications is incidental so there there aren't multiple points of view in these publications there's only one set point of view generally speaking on black lives matter on racial protest there's only one acceptable point of view in the mainstream media and that is black people have every reason to be furious at white people and so the news media stokes the rage the news media tells them that the cops are racist that the government is racist that our society is racist and so the news media many of our elites in the academy they're just giving one point of view they're not entering into the points of view of the other characters such as Asians Latinos and whites it's just one dominant ethos that the news media pushes on us it's like a comic book version of reality that the blacks are only oppressed that there as Steve Saylor notes they are above criticism and they are beneath agency that's the point of view that the news media wants to push and so where great novel can come in is that it can give you multiple points of view you can you can feel things intensely from from various perspectives with with close attention to status detail close attention to realistic dialogue so you don't get a lot of realistic dialogue in the mainstream media instead you get quotations that tend to be heavily heavily sanitized but when you pick up a great book like I often get the feeling this is this is real life right I'm not getting a sanitized watered down version of reality that's what a great book can do competent cruel and dismissive you might ignore or distort the message one way or another home what do you think here you attribute the message to the fact that you're made might be just having a bad day or you might decide that they're playing some kind of odd joke on you the idea is to maintain your consistent views of yourself and your behavior now this process is also supported by the unconscious operations of the mind as well a group of people were having their brains scanned using magnetic resonance imaging while receiving critical information about their favorite presidential candidates the scans indicated that the reasoning areas of the brain frontal lobes virtually shut down when this dissonant information was being delivered but when consciousness was restored when they got information that fit their perceptions by telling them of course that the first information was actually a lie was fabricated the emotion circuits of the brain hold it up happily I guess it's hard to change your mind and it is unless you can get someone to do something they wouldn't ordinarily do then a change can happen okay let's carry on this another time