My guest on the show today is Willard Spiegelman, emeritus professor of English at Southern Methodist University and the former longtime editor of the Southwest Review. He is the author of many books on English and American poetry as well as a number of collections of personal essays, including his most recent, My (Lucky) Stars, which he calls a “memoir of taste.” In it, he writes about the mostly middle brow artists who shaped his sensibility, popular entertainers like Gilbert & Sullivan, cabaret singer Mabel Mercer, and the great Patsy Cline.
Someone once said of my show that I basically just interview Jews and Gays, and so it’s probably worth noting that from that perspective Willard is what we in the business call a two-fer, both gay and Jewish. We talk about both of those aspects of his life – growing up gay in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Philadelphia, the relative ease, looking back, of his coming out, and so on – but in some ways I think this episode fits better into two other Eminent Americans thematic lineages.
One is Texas, where Willard lived for many decades as a prof at SMU and for which he developed a multi-layered appreciation. We talk about the institutions of high culture in the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex, which have been the beneficiaries of generations of oil money. There are the hard charging women of the SMU sororities, to whom Willard gave sage counsel, and their complex hierarchies, rituals, and manners, which deserve more artistic representation than they’ve received. And there is two-step dancing, which Willard fell in love with.
The other genealogy into which I’d slot this episode is my series of episodes that spend time valuing the best of popular and middlebrow culture for the ways in which it can unite and even civilize our fractious, pluralistic nation. I’m thinking of my fashion episodes, on J. Crew and Ivy Style and men’s fashion; my conversation with Sherman Alexie on our shared appreciation for genre television; talking to Matt Dinniman on his Dungeon Crawler Carl series; and perhaps most gloriously my special two part episode on that great goddess of middlebrow culture, NPR’s Terry Gross.
For Willard, and for me too, there is something genuinely significant, and interesting, in the ways we connect with our fellow Americans via these sometimes quite brilliant and often quite frivolous cultural products. It could be Legally Blonde, to pick one of Willard’s favorite movies, or the comedies of Judd Apatow, which he and I both dig. Or Saturday Night Live, which he liked back in the day, and which I’m slightly embarrassed to admit I still kind of like. His new collection is a love letter to some older iterations of this kind of work, and also, as the memoir in taste framing would suggest, an indirect reflection on himself and what he half-jokingly, but I think also half-seriously, refers to as his deep superficiality.
Eminent Americans is a collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, and a brother by another mother to its publication, Arc magazine. Read and listen to more from Arc at arcmag.org.
Peace
