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.

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