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Liza Libes is a writer and literary critic at Pens and Poison. Her parents escaped the Soviet Union. She went to Columbia. She found that Columbia's English Department had replaced literature with Marxist theory, postcolonial studies, and critical theory. She's been pushing back ever since.
We talked about: the teachers who made us both writers; reading Wallace Stevens's The Snowman — out loud, in full — and the seventh grade class that made Liza stand in the snow for an hour to understand it; Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and the fascism problem; what happened to Columbia's English Department and why it matters for publishing; why Marxism is fundamentally an ideology of resentment (Bertrand Russell said it 100 years ago); the novel Yesteryear and what it reveals about contemporary literary self-righteousness; why writing characters who disagree with you is the whole point; the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey and what "a complicated man" does to Odysseus's character; and Christopher Nolan's Odyssey film — specifically the Cyclops scene he cut, why it was the scene that defined Odysseus, and why its absence drains the heroism from the entire story.
Follow Liza at Pens and Poison on Instagram → @pensandpoison
TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 — Intro — who is Liza Libes and what is Pens and Poison?
1:20 — Looking back on your 18-year-old writer self
2:51 — The teachers who made us writers — Brother Patterson and Poetry Friday
5:34 — Standing in the snow to understand Wallace Stevens — The Snowman read aloud
10:31 — The Lost Generation: Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot — and the fascism problem
13:03 — Shakespeare and Co., Paris, and missing Notre Dame before the fire
14:57 — Columbia's English Department: literary theory replaced literature
