{"id":1349,"date":"2013-02-21T15:10:01","date_gmt":"2013-02-21T23:10:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1349"},"modified":"2013-02-21T15:10:01","modified_gmt":"2013-02-21T23:10:01","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s3e12-freaks-and-outcasts-with-kevin-smokler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1349","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S3E12: Freaks and Outcasts with Kevin Smokler"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-1350\" style=\"margin: 5px;\" title=\"kevinsmokler\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/kevinsmokler.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"270\" height=\"300\" \/>Colin Marshall sits down in Westwood, Los Angeles with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kevinsmokler.com\/\">Kevin Smokler<\/a>, author of <em>Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven&#8217;t Touched Since High School<\/em>. They discuss what makes him think of Holden Caulfield as a Bing user; why we study novels in high school at all, and what it might have to do with Renaissance classics scholarship; how we got turned off to these books the first time around, and the radical notion that we now have time to properly absorb them; his hymn to his obnoxious teenage self, when he felt he possessed many abilities, yet none worked in concert with one another, and all lacked context; how these curricular books interact with the teenage impulse to rail at unfairness; whether Jane Austen represents the triumph of content over form or form over content; what, exactly, is the matter with <em>The Scarlet Letter<\/em>; David Foster Wallace&#8217;s notion of challenging the reader in the act of seduction; books now fashionably disliked, such as <em>A Separate Peace<\/em>; our onetime love of Dead White Males, our swing too far away from them in the early nineties, and the ambiguous DWM-relative position in which we now find ourselves; how he earned a lasting reputation at his high school for deeming Shakespeare &#8220;trite&#8221;; those moments where the necessary context for a work floods in all at once; <em>The Day of the Locust<\/em>, and how he read it only after coming to Los Angeles at 19 to supplicate before the altar of cinema; high school readers&#8217; tendency to gravitate to the freaks and the outcasts, and whether his home city of San Francisco still welcomes such people; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/v35\/n03\/rebecca-solnit\/diary\">Rebecca Solnit&#8217;s lament over Google<\/a>, and how the city&#8217;s future belongs to them rather than to the Grateful Dead; the life of a coffee-shop based San Francisco writer; and his next book, on music, which will go looking for a universal cultural experience in the particulars of his own adolescence.<\/p>\n<p>Download the interview from\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/colinmarshall.libsyn.com\/s3e12-freaks-and-outcasts-with-kevin-smokler\"><em>Notebook on Cities and Culture<\/em>\u2019s feed<\/a> or on\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/notebook-on-cities-culture\/id266539442\">iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colin Marshall sits down in Westwood, Los Angeles with Kevin Smokler, author of Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven&#8217;t Touched Since High School. They discuss what makes him think of Holden Caulfield as a Bing user; why we study novels in high school at all, and what it might have to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1349"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1352,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1349\/revisions\/1352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}