Episode · Conversations with Tyler · 2021-04-07
Books mentioned on Dana Gioia on Becoming an Information Billionaire
Before he was California Poet Laureate or leading the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia marketed Jell-O.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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The Death of Virgil
Discussed“Now, Hermann Broch, as you know, he wrote the famous novel The Death of Virgil. He was a Catholic. Is that coincidence?”
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Paul Bunyan
Discussed“For Britten he did Paul Bunyan. Well, here's here's the thing you learn from Auden. His greatest libretto in terms of poetry is his first one called Paul Bunyan, which made an absolutely terrible opera –”
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The Bassarids
Discussed“So I think, you know, his his greatest libretti I think his best two are the two that he wrote for Hans Werner Henze, The Elegy for Young Lovers and The Bacchae, The Bassarids.”
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Earthly Powers
Discussed“I think that perhaps Earthly Powers was his great novel. Because he takes the form of a Somerset Maugham novel and he overlays a mafia novel, a religious novel, a buildingsroman all in that.”
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The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy is a profound classic exploring human mortality, existential dread, and the emptiness of conventional bourgeois life.
Discussed“Death of Ivan Ilyich. Uh which I think Well, first of all, if you asked me who was the greatest fiction writer who ever lived, I would say Tolstoy. Uh and and his short stories are full of masterpieces, but The Death of Ivan Ilyich is simply one of the greatest considerations of human mortality”
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Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina is Leo Tolstoy's sweeping nineteenth-century Russian tragedy exploring themes of love, adultery, family, and high society in Imperial Russia.
Recommended“But we all agree that the greatest thing we've ever read together was Anna Karenina. And it just nothing else can hold its own against the greatness of that novel.”
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Death Comes for the Archbishop
Discussed“Willa Cather, who was not Catholic, wrote, you know, Death Comes for the Archbishop, maybe the best Catholic novel in American literature.”
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The flowers of evil
Discussed“I just finished writing a 14,000-word essay on Charles Baudelaire. That's going to be the introduction to a new edition of The Flowers of Evil.”
Other mentions in this episode (10) — ad reads, self-promotion and passing references, never counted
Passing The Catholic Writer Today
“But Dana has numerous other books including books of poetry. A book The Catholic Writer Today.”
Passing Can poetry matter?
“Perhaps his most famous work is Can Poetry Matter?”
Own book Studying with Miss Bishop
“And my other two teachers, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald, whom I write about in this book, were people who basically came to teaching very late.”
Passing The Bank Dick
“I adore W.C. Fields. Bank Dick is a great movie.”
Passing Last and First Men
“Tremendously influential, rather clumsy visionary early science fiction writer who wrote novels like Odd John and the First and Last Men.”
Passing Odd John
“Tremendously influential, rather clumsy visionary early science fiction writer who wrote novels like Odd John and the First and Last Men.”
Passing Last men in London
“Tremendously influential, rather clumsy visionary early science fiction writer who wrote novels like Odd John and the First and Last Men.”
Passing The Idiot
“And we did Dostoevsky's The Idiot. Right now we're reading Cousin Bette by Balzac.”
Passing Catch-22
“We did Catch-22. But we all agree that the greatest thing we've ever read together was Anna Karenina.”
Passing Red and the Black
“We did The Red and the Black. We did Catch-22.”