An hour with Lewis Lapham

KPR presents, wants to hear from you. I'm Kay McIntyre, and coming soon on KPR presents, I'll be speaking with University of Kansas Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little and Kansas State University President Kirk Schultz about their first year on the job. How did it go? What's ahead for next year? What's ahead for the next 10 years? Plus your questions. What would you like to ask the top J-Hawk in Wildcat? It's your chance to pose a question to Chancellor Gray-Little and President Schultz. Whether you're a student, an alum, an employee, a fan, or just an interested taxpayer, submit your question by going to our website kpr.ku.edu and click on KPR presents, wants to hear from you. And thanks in advance for your questions. He's been called the Liberal Lion of the Literary Left. I'm Kay McIntyre, and today on KPR presents,

Lewis Lapham. He's the famed former editor of Harper's Magazine, creator of the Harper's Index, author of numerous books, including Pretensions to Empire, Theatre of War, Money in Class in America. He also wrote the American ruling class, a movie done in documentary style featuring a mix of real people and fictional characters. You can also hear his radio podcast, The World in Time, available through Bloomberg Radio. Lewis, welcome. Thank you, Kay, for having me on KPR presents. With that kind of resume, one might be forgiven for thinking that at age 75, you're entitled to slow down a bit. But in fact, you've recently launched a brand new publication, Lapham's Quarterly. It's a collection of essays, artwork, fiction, nonfiction, photos, all based on a particular topic. To coin a phrase from the radio program, this American life, each quarter, you take a theme, bring your reader stories and essays about that theme.

That's correct. It's the great books made topical. It's to bring to the microphone of the present, the voices of the past, so that my contributors are along the lines of the acidities, Julius Caesar, Juvenile, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth I, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and so on. It comes across a distance of 3,000 years and it brings to writers not only from the West, but also from the Chinese and Islamic civilizations. All of them focused within the perimeter of the topic, whether the topic is money or war, the environment, medicine, education. That is 80% of the quarterly. We're talking about a publication that is 224 pages, perfect spine, wide margins, handsome illustrations from great painters, sculptures,

photographers, no advertising. 80% of the text are the voices in time and then at the end, there may be five or six essays from contemporary authors also dealing with the same theme and bringing the perspective of the present on the wisdom and the experience of the past. And I have to say it is a beautiful publication. It's a beautiful thing to be hold. It's on rich, sumptuous paper. It's in this age of the internet and kind of throw away medium. It's really something of substance, visually, intellectually and tactically. Yes, it's an object and it's meant to be kept and put on it'll stand on a shelf and the issue that we did for example on money two years ago is as good today as it was two years ago because

once again I am drawing on writers whose work has passed the test of time and if it can stand up for five hundred years it can certainly stand up for another two. And we also sell the quarterly in box sets so you can make a handsome gift and a handsome presence on a bookshelf. I want to pick up on that point that you just made about you have contributors from throughout the ages and I think that's one of the things that really caught my attention immediately about it was the juxtaposition of pieces from 2000 years ago with something that was written five years ago and on the next page there will be something from 20 years ago and on the page after that something from 800 years ago. And although you start each of your entries with the date it's almost incidental. I found myself diving into the pieces and feeling like they were

contemporary even though I'd started out knowing that this particular piece was written in say the 1600s. Well I think of that as a of history and time as a continuum and I bear in mind two quotations one from Guta who said he who cannot draw on three thousand years as living hand to mouth and the other one from Mark Twain who says history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes and the point is that over the human journey across the five the the frontiers of five millennia we've learned to salvage things that we find beautiful or useful or true and accurate penetrating observations onto human predicament don't go out of style and what allows the voices to be heard after so many years is the force of mind and the power of expression and that carries across

the barriers of death and time. Each of your publications is based on a particular topic you mentioned a couple of the topics that you've done so far. How do you go about picking the topic for this quarter? Well we have a board of editorial advisors who include people like Barbara Aaron Reich and Sean Woodlands and Eric Foner historians and essayists and journalists and we keep in touch with the telephone or the email and every so often we have a meeting in New York usually around a dinner table and we talk about possible ideas for forthcoming issues it's like a faculty meeting but very informal and then people around the table suggest texts they say well you can't possibly have an issue on money unless you put in Washington Irving's famous description of America in the

1820s when he's coining the phrase the almighty dollar and deploring speculation on the Wall Street markets of the day and so on and you begin to think of which subject will be rich enough to or not rich enough because all of those subjects are an embarrassment of riches but that can be where the writing can be of the sufficient variety over a serious length of time with contributions again from the Orient in the Middle East and then we hit upon a subject I mean the next one we're going to do the current topic is arts and letters that will be followed by sport for the summer of 2010 and then in the fall we will do an issue on the city the idea of the

city civilization citizen civic and so forth the polis but matched with the urbanization of the world compare the city as it was understood by the Greeks in Athens with maybe a few thousand people in town as opposed to the city of Shanghai which has a population with 27 million or Mexico city but the idea of the city the opposition between the city and the country is a theme that that runs throughout the historical record after that we will do an issue on celebrity another theme that stands the test of time and then went on trade one on utopia one on fashion one on government I mean there's as I say it's an embarrassment of riches you

I'm constantly surprised and delighted by the wonderful writing that I discover thought that I had read once I'm happy to reread again and even if it's an old text something can be have been around for four five hundred years but if you have never read it it is new to you or if you've never read it juxtaposed next to an essay or a piece of art or something that puts it in a totally different perspective that's right when you see it as a part of a whole instead of an island marooned in the middle of an unknown sea yes it can have more resonance so once you've selected a topic where do you go from there well you again go with your board of editorial advisors of whom there are it's it's a floating crap game so sometimes between 15

and 23 and they each of them will send in suggestions long lists of texts books authors and we collect those I have a staff of brilliant young editors all under the age of 30 who rejoice in in the historical project and we chase down all those texts find them in use bookstores or in Barnes & Noble or in libraries and assemble a large pool of manuscripts of readings of chapters from here and there poems plays and over a period it's a quarterly so we have at least two months maybe a little more to sift through modify change juxtapose these many texts and if we end up with say 80 and in the quarterly we've probably read as many as 500

oh my you I can't even imagine what that winnowing process is like well it's a lot of fun because you're always dealing with the a list when I was the editor of Harper's magazine I would assign articles and when you're the editor of a magazine it's always kind of like you're hoping for Christmas you hope the manuscript will come in and you'll unwrap it and there will be a present beyond your fondest dream you're often disappointed the manuscript isn't quite up to what you had hope to or the author got divorced and left for France and the manuscript doesn't appear at all or he or she has an agent demanding an outrageous price or the author is sufficiently narcissistic to insist that no word nor phrase can be it can be changed or trifled with

because they are after all his work and therefore carved and stoned but when you're dealing with Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy and George Elliott they don't have agents and also you're always reading the a list you're not reading C or B manuscripts that maybe can be made into something with work and it's you're surrounded by truly wonderful writing and so it's not a chore it's a pleasure and the whole point of the quarterly is to convey that pleasure to the reader in other words I find something that I delights me and I want to give it to somebody to the reader to somebody else and say here behold look at this the way one lends books to one's friends it's the same spirit in which I am editing the publication it's not academic and it's not comprehensive and

it's not definitive it's not homework it's to say here look if it's fun to edit along those lines it should be fun to read and it is fun to read it's just it to me it reminded me of going to the very best college seminar and reading a selection of works that I might not have put together on my own it but but drawing from cultures different cultures different time periods and just getting a totally different perspective on on the theme of the day this is also a very contemporary and modern technique it's what the people who fool around with the internet and with blogs would call a mashup and there if you I'm sure you know that but there's a lot of that

going on and it's the making of mosaic and so this this technique although I'm dealing with the old masters is is very much the direction of expression in the wonderful world of cyberspace in an age when so many newspapers and magazines are really struggling financially what kind of leap of faith did it take to set out on this particular path well on the first place I did it because it was something I love to do and I thought if I could do the thing that the excited me more than anything I could think of doing it would be this and then I thought there probably would be an audience not a mass market audience this quarterly is set up on a

premise that it can break even at a circulation of roughly 40,000 sold a subscription of $60 a year or $15 an issue in the bookstore and it seemed to me that 40,000 wasn't an excessively large number given the population of 300 million in the United States and then secondly I began to notice the coming back into onto the public stage history in its many different forms not only the movies that are made on historical themes whether you're talking about Scorsese or Russell Crowe or Nicole Kidman you you see the number of films that then have a and historical background you also see the rising circulation and audience and rating for the history channel

you see the kind of documentary that HBO will do with both recent history and sometimes history of the more distant past you see the curve for the movie and the movie audiences you know it is a bell curve that reaches the top at around age 18 and then begins to trail downward movies are made by and large for an adolescent audience that the bell curve for television extends a little further it begins to turn downward in the 40s and so the people I thought that would be the audience people over 40 which is the direction of the demographic in the United

States as you know the population is becoming older people who have lost their taste for television who have seen enough of the world or have made enough of their lives to have time to learn what they thought they had learned in school and that audience has proved to be there I mean you have to remember that every summer 25,000 people dress up in the costumes of the union blue and the Confederate grade to reenact the battle of Gettysburg and you see the crowds that go through Williamsburg, Virginia or through the gilded age mansions in Newport and so the interest in history is present in the society and I thought surely that interest would be sufficient to sustain a quarterly hoping for a circulation of 40,000 and I've been surprised and delighted

to find that it is also attracted an audience among younger readers, again my editors are all in their 20s, their friends enjoy it because one of the downsides of our high speed modern electronic communication is to give the illusion of an eternal now a perpetual present in which things come and go so quickly that there is no future there is no past I mean the data shred and blow away in the wind tunnels of cyberspace and people can't remember what happened yesterday or two weeks ago or God forbid three years ago and they lose track of their own stories they don't know where they are or and that produces a feeling of anxiety people like to know

in what context they are present and the reading of history secures them it gives them some kind of an anchor in the drift and gulf of time that is constantly dissolving so young people are attracted to it for for that kind of a reason you if you lose track of your cicero made the point he said not to know what happened before one was born as always to be a child Arthur Schlesinger made the same kind of point by saying that if you have no sense if you can't connect the then with the now you don't know where you are or where you might be going

and what if you perceive history as both a natural resource the inheritance the treasure that go to speaks of and also as an applied technology that is to say navigational lights flashing across the Gulf of time telling us where we might be without that you you you have trouble envisioning a future because the future is just a dissolving present fog and so it provides that kind of grounding and young people are grateful for it it's that reassurance that there is in fact nothing new under the sun that's true that is reassuring and it also shows that you

belong are part of a wider and broader self it gets you out of the prison of your own self it shows you that other people have come up against circumstances not identical to but certainly similar to your own it makes you less afraid of what the next day might bring in the way of the end of the world or doom of one kind or another the world has in fact ended many many times if you were a Jew in Germany and in the 1930s the world was at an end if you were Cherokee Indian forced under the trail of tears by Andrew Jackson the world was at an end if you were a part of the quality of Richmond, Virginia in 1865 the world was at an end and so on I mean

it's happened before and we survive again I mean across the the long journey of five millennia we say what is beautiful useful or true and that is the historical record in your publication I noticed you made a real effort to include pieces not just from Western civilization which is where I know so many of us sort of have our grounding in terms of historical reference but you've also made a real effort to include pieces from the far east an area where a lot of us might not have as much familiarity well yes I do make that as a great effort because the you know we hear a lot about globalization and the world given modern means of transportation and communication is we are much nearer neighbors than we were a hundred years ago or even 50 years ago and it's well to be reminded that at one point the most sophisticated, powerful

enlightened city in the world was Beijing China in the under the great Kublai Khan and you can read the travels of Marco Polo who will remind you know he brings back to Europe to Italy in a 12th century he brings back the description of Fabulous Cathay there been Baghdad was in the eight to nine to tenth centuries almost the center of the civilized world and the we are constantly learning from each other the Arabs are the other ones who give rise to the Italian Renaissance because they they bring to Italy not only the notion of the zero which allows us to set up the the Medici bank but also the translations of Greek and Roman antiquity

together with much that we with the advanced medicine and navigational technique of that 12th, 13th century these are all brought to the west by the Islamic east and what China brings it there's a long list and the compass gunpowder and so on and so forth and so this exchange between different cultures across frontiers has been going on for a very long time so that the notion of globalization is by no means new and not shouldn't be seen to be as frightening as it sometimes can be made out to seem of all the topics that you've done so far which one has been

the most fun for you well I enjoyed the one on education because I'm a historian or teacher Monquet I left college in the 50 1956 I left Yale once at Cambridge University England with a thought that I might become an historian but I turned out that I didn't have the patience for the character for footnotes and so I drifted off into the desert of journalism but I've always retained the my love of history which is why I started this this quarterly and I think think of myself as a a professor in exile was you spent a lifetime in the publishing business what is surprised you the most about producing this type of publication how's it different than

what you've done before what you did at Harpers well I don't think it's it's it's not much different because I'm I'm proceeding on the same principle in other words people say how do you decide what to put in to to an issue on on war but of course the subject is vast and my only criterion is is the writing any good can I hear in the words the sound of a human voice sound of somebody who has had the courage of his or her own thought and is writing on the out of the experience of what he or she has seen felt her nose and it's the same principle that I applied as the editor of Harpers magazine I mean I was happy to publish articles along policy lines with which I did not agree if I thought that the the writing had force and

the and that there was real power of expression so that allows me to cross the political aisles I can publish pieces by right wing supposedly right wing authors and left wing authors I I don't get into those kind of doctrinal or more political polemic and I try to stay within the quarterly I avoid polemic and when I want is narrative or literary fiction or document it's not so much the idea is what do we what do we know what have we learned what have we seen on that topic of looking for those great voices which really speak to us today I'd like

you to read an excerpt from your essay that it that begins the most current edition of Lappams Quarterly on arts and letters regarding myself as neither art historian nor literary critic I escape the chore of having to discern zeitgeists and deconstruct paradigms at liberty to indulge my enthusiasm without apology or embarrassment I'm free to take as much pleasure from the novels of Raymond Chandler and Jonathan Carey as from the poetry of Wallace Stevens because I look for the value of the human currency I don't much care whether an author chooses for her mise en scène accord of Henry VIII or the roof of a Harlem tenement whether the artist draws abandoned on the beach at Yokohama or paints an angel on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Goya's etchings of the Napoleonic Wars I discover and enlarge state and sense of being of the same order as the one met with in the second movement of Beethoven's piano sonata number

27 or in the sequence of images on exhibition in Ordin's poem Muse de Bozar. Feelings the most diverse follow from the awakening of more than one mind to the excitement of simultaneous discovery which is the means of communion that distinguishes the making of a work of art from the passive and single-minded consumption of a camera angle or an applause track. In other words the the issue that that comes from is the current one it's about arts and letters and my sense of art is that it's a gift the gift in the hand of the creator alive in the mind of the beholder and it's their joint enterprise that makes of the the changes the private good into a public good and adds to the store of human energy and hope. We're speaking with Lewis Lapham founder and editor

of Lapham's quarterly and former editor of Harper's magazine. I'm Kay McIntyre you're listening to KPR Presents on Kansas Public Radio. Lewis Lapham was in the area to speak at the Kansas City Public Library and the University of Kansas Hall Center for the Humanities. Both of those talks were about the role of the humanities in the 21st century. Lewis I expect that you were pretty much preaching to the choir at KU's Hall Center for the Humanities but in this day and age when so much emphasis is being placed on math and science especially in education where do the humanities fit in? Well you're right so much emphasis is put on technology and are the great American research universities of the top 20 in the world 17 are in America but the emphasis there is on the production of knowledge as opposed to merely preserving or transmitting it and I was recently

reading a book by a man named Jonathan Cole who for many years was the dean was the provost and dean of faculties at Columbia universities and his book is called The Great American University and he's celebrating the university as prometian in their pouring forth of the intimations of immortality which he just finds as the laser magnetic resonance imaging FM radio GPS systems DNA fingerprinting radar superconductivity the barcode viagra I mean the law it's a very very long list and his notion is that the the the university is that the research university is the wellspring of American economic prosperity and military grandeur but I read through his lists and his enthusiasm of technological advance and it's like reading through the list of heroic his list of

heroic discovery is like reading through the catalog of ships drawn up by Homer's Greeks on the Beach of Troy but in a book of 600 pages he has no mention of the humanities so I admired the technological achievements but I was struck by the absence of the human voice in other words what we have is multimedia interfacing instead of literature and art and we have innovative delivery strategies in place of religion and philosophy and I don't think that the technologies despite the many comforts that they brought forth are capable of finding their way to a new idea matched to the terms and conditions of the new millennium our technologists are like the sorcerers apprentice they deploy continuously improved means by increasingly two increasingly ill-defined ends

we've acquired a great many new weapons and information systems but we don't know at what or at whom to point the digital enhancements and unless we look to the humanities to clean up the mess made by the belief in magic and the faith and money or we stand a better and an even chance of murdering ourselves with our own toys at the mistake the standard speech in favor of the humanities likens them to a suite of innocent virgins set upon by hedge fund managers and dogs and the argument is it's too passive it's too polite the mistake is to present the humanities as luxury instead of necessity as exquisite ornaments or pheasants under glass and that's the

wrong way to think of the humanist idea the humanist idea comes out or comes out of the Italian Renaissance and the the humanists were poets who who were as took as much pleasure in the pride of mind as they did in the pleasures of the flesh I mean it's a it's an heroic idea up against the hosts of ignorance and superstition and fear it's the passion of thought and the will to understand and what we need is an idea that will somehow bring a bring us to a better understanding of the relation between man and nature both communism and capitalism come out of a materialist notion of nature as the earth is something to be devoured and we're

running out of things to devour I mean the natural resources are being depleted in an alarming rate the same time the world's population is rising at an equally alarming rate and this is a circumstance that is not subject to a technological fix the fix has to be philosophical or aesthetic or religious and our religions at least from my point of view have run there pretty much run there of course the various literal interpretations of the Bible much of the doctrine handed down by not only the Catholic Church but also by the Muslim faith are clearly out of sync with the facts of on the ground I mean these are religions that come out of

the Middle Eastern deserts and are made to the what was known in first century AD or the seventh century AD and they're based on a picture of the earth that is not the one that we see from space you take a look at the photograph of the blue ball from space and that context requires a very different understanding of man and his relation not only to nature but also within himself and it's that kind of an idea that there's no idea in capitalism and

whatever idea was in communism has been proved to be unsuccessful so we need a new idea to deal with a newly perceived shift of circumstance and this is where the the religious mind comes into contact with the scientific mind which finds itself up against mystery that it can't explain and if you talk to a number of physicists you will find or chemists or biologists you will find that their science can take them so far and then there is a point at which to which they have no answer so the need for the humanities is urgent and to bury the humanities in the tombs of pious sanctum owner your precious marble is to fail the quiz as to

what constitutes the purpose of an education and it confuses the license of a market with a freedom of mind. I heard a radio piece you had done maybe a month ago on marketplace through American public media about day jobs that many famous authors had and that in fact most of them needed a quote-unquote real job to make a living. Trollop was a railway no he was a post office official who had to tour around England to inspect their postal system and he did his writing on trains traveling between Manchester and London or Hall or wherever but he needed the job as the postal supervisor. T.S. Eliot was a bank clerk for Lloyds of London in charge of he was an accountant

keeping the books for the foreign exchange rates Emily brought I can't remember which of the two Bronte sisters it was either Emily or Charlotte was a a governess being paid a a pittance to watch the children of some well-to-do English gentry and Kafka had a job in a bureaucratic check I can't remember offhand what what was the nature of the entity that he was working for but it was something that paid him a not very much but it was the pittance he lived on he couldn't make his living from books but the again it speaks to your point that the the status quo the powers that be the the money in hand however you want to define it is not likely to bankroll descend

opposition ideas that it is unfamiliar with many artists of course have had patrons and have made Mozart never had much money at all I mean he had to he had to give music lessons and so that again the the humanist idea is played out against heavy odds of all kinds so about the freedom and courage of mind is what it's about over the past couple decades we have become more and more formally educated to the extent that young people today have you know far more education than generally their parents and their grandparents and their great grandparents did and yet as a society we might have more formal education but that our knowledge base is in

some ways getting smaller and smaller well in some ways our knowledge base of course getting bigger and bigger if you're talking again we go back to those research for universities that coal is talking about those are constantly expanding the knowledge base it's very we're doing this in the sciences we're coming up with things like the genome project or the advances in modern weaponry that are being sponsored by the Pentagon are truly marvelous to behold the internet was a Pentagon project so we are constantly adding knowledge at such a rate that if you the man or woman who graduates this year from in just school of engineering is likely to find within the next 10 years everything has already been made obsolete

but if you're talking about the humanities then we're not getting our students do not get a very deep acquaintance with with history or with culture or with art and because again these are seen as luxuries and kids don't go to school to become to acquire the wisdom of Solomon I mean they go to school to get a job I mean that's the point of American education and it has been from the beginning and it's been very successful but again we attempt something that is truly generous and romantic we try to do for our children what wasn't done for ourselves to try to give them everything if we possibly can teach them not only the speeches of Cicero but also cheerleading

and hygiene and you know the proper use of the cell phone and the condom so it's the but education is not about and this is the mistake that we make I think education is not about stuffing Plutarch said the mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled it's to awaken the student to the power and value uniqueness of his or her own mind that's the should be the purpose and whether that's accomplished by teaching somebody to dissect a frog or translate Escalus or memorize the plays of Shakespeare however that light comes into the mind of the

student that's and then he or she is on her own I mean there is no such thing as people talk about the educated citizen and boom on the lack of the educated citizen but there is no such thing as an educated citizen that's a that's a an imaginary beast like something you'd find like a unicorn in a medieval bestiary what there are are self-educating citizens people whose minds have been awakened and who continue to educate themselves throughout their their lives I mean I have one thing that I want to read to you and which which sums up to me the the the idea of education what the purpose is of an education and again what the purpose is of the quarterly and I'm

quoting here from TH White book The One's in Future King and the magician Merlin is seated under a willow tree and he's talking to the young king Arthur who is moping and sad and Merlin is offering Arthur a certain cure for melancholy and this is what he says the best thing for being sad is to learn something that's the only thing that never fails you may grow old and trembling in your anatomies you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins you may miss your only love you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds there is only one thing for it then to learn learn why the world wags and what wags it that is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust never alienate never

be tortured by never fear or distrust and never dream of regretting not to me is the secret not only of education the purpose the hope of lapens quarterly but also the what accounts for longevity when the cellist post bloke Cassal's was 93 he was living in Puerto Rico with a woman 50 years younger than himself and a New York journalist went down to see him and said Mr. Cassal's you're the most famous cellist in the world and yet here you are in Puerto Rico you're living in the sun with a lovely woman much younger than yourself why do you practice the cello every morning for four hours and Cassal said at 93 because i'm learning something what a wonderful sentiment to end on but Lewis before we call it a day i want to talk about one of the most beloved and enduring

contributions you made to Harper's magazine and that's the Harper's index if you're not familiar with the Harper's index it's a list of statistics facts and figures that on the face of it don't necessarily have anything to do with each other but upon closer reading the juxtaposition of these facts is entertaining pointed sometimes just plain funny now i took the liberty of doing a couple of Harper's index searches before we started this conversation today first i searched Kansas and came up with this the rank of Chicago among the windiest U.S. cities number 53 the rank of Dodge City Kansas among the windiest U.S. cities number one even better i searched national public radio and came up with this the number of veterans administration employees whose salaries exceeded $100,000 per year 7,367 the number of NPR

employees whose salary exceeded $100,000 per year six Lewis where did you ever come up with the idea of devoting a page of Harper's magazine to these facts and figures well i left Harper's briefly in 1981 and then returned in 1980s for me and during that period of exile i wrote a column for the Washington Post that appeared every two weeks and one day i just wrote a column like that i made it up i was trying to think about the world situation and i presented it in that form you know you know number of i can't remember what the the various categories are that i invented but they were all invented i mean you know number of enemies or something along those

lines and then when i got back to Harper's magazine i took that idea and decided to turn it into and make it into real numbers with and the trick was the juxtapositions you know i mean the number of we had at one point the the amount of money that was being spent on national down for the arts was $150 million and that was exactly the same number that was being spent on military bands you know but it was the trick the the fun of it was the juxtaposition it's just a delightful little you know it's a little light thing and it gets you thinking about well it's like it is like when you when they when they're looking for oil you drop a drill down and and take a core sample you know drill goes down however many hundreds or thousand feet and then they bring it up and then they look at it and they see the different strata of earth and rock and from that try to

make a guess whether it's oil bearing or not but this was like the same kind of thing dropping in an oil bit a drill bit or a plumb line and just into the sea of the of the culture and see what came up and i'm delighted to see that a similar feature has found joy in the lapels well yeah i would try try and do those kind of things that's great again lapels quarterly a delight to read i just wanted to mention just briefly like i said my favorite edition so far that i've read is the crimes and punishment in which you'll find over the course of a dozen pages an excerpt from Macbeth the confessions of Saint Augustine a letter from Jack the Ripper Malcolm X and a photo from the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid all within about a dozen pages of each other there you go a lot of fun to read thank you okay thank you for the conversation thank you very much i've been visiting with Lewis Lapham founder and editor of lapams quarterly

and former editor of harpers magazine for more information about lapams quarterly their website is lapams quarterly dot org that's l a p h a m s quarterly dot org kpr presents is a production of cancels public radio at the university of cancels kpr presents wants to hear from you i'm k mac entire and coming soon on kpr presents i'll be speaking with university of cancels chancellor Bernadette gray little and cancels state university president kirk shultz about their first year on the job how did it go what's ahead for next year what's ahead for the next 10 years plus your questions what would you like to ask the top jhawk and wildcat it's your chance to pose a question to chancellor gray little and president shultz whether you're a student an alum

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