Moser the Moserian

Eminent Americans

Moser the Moserian

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Moser the Moserian

Ben Moser and I talk about Dutch art, the temperate greatness of the 1990s, life as an artist, and creating the conditions for your own continued relevance.

Daniel Oppenheimer

and

Benjamin Moser

Dec 12, 2023

Transcript

Reading list:

A personal and stirring guide to the great Dutch painters, by Sebastian Smee
Benjamin Moser on What We Can Learn from Failed Dutch Painters, by Benjamin Moser
How Gayness Changed During My Lifetime, by Benjamin Moser
Enemies of Promise, by Cyril Connolly

My guest on the podcast today is

Benjamin Moser

, who was born in Houston but has lived for the past twenty plus years in Utrecht in the Netherlands, a city he describes as the Brooklyn to Amsterdam’s Manhattan, close by but different vibe.

He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. His subsequent book, Sontag: Her Life and Work, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. His new book is The Upside Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, which is about his personal encounters, while living the last two decades in Utrecht, with the great painters of the Dutch golden age, folks like Vermeer and Rembrandt but also a host of other, lesser known but still quite extraordinary painters of that era from the late 16th century to the late 17th century.

I framed the challenge of my conversation with Ben as having to simultaneously accomplish two objectives that are in tension: to pay serious attention to his book, which is primarily about a rather distant past, while also honoring the ethos of my podcast, which is about the present and recent present. And we needed to do it in a real way, not a phony “the great painters of the past still breathe vibrantly in the present” sort of way.

I think we pulled it off, with flying colors, but I suppose that you, the listeners, will be the ultimate judge of that.

Discussion about this podcast

Eminent Americans

Eminent Americans is a newsletter and occasional podcast about the writers and public intellectuals who either are key players in the American intellectual scene or who typify an important aspect of it. So people like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Wesley Yang, Elizabeth Bruenig, Ross Douthat, Nikole Hannah Jones, Jia Tolentino, Freddie Deboer, Rod Dreher, Ibram Kendi, Ezra Klein, Bari Weiss, the Red Scare podcast hosts, Andrew Sullivan, etc.

Although the newsletter will touch on the political and intellectual issues that concern these folks, the focus is less the topics than the people — their backstories, what drives them, how they’ve evolved, who cares the most about them, what role they play in the larger ecosystem, and what trends do they embody or influence.

In one sense, then, it’s a rather meta concept. It’s an intellectual (me) talking about other intellectuals in their roles as intellectuals, and occasionally doing in conversation with yet more intellectuals. From another angle, it’s simply an attempt to investigate and describe the contemporary American scene through and with the people who constitute it.

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