It seems to be the season for Robert Pogue Harrison. A few weeks ago, journalist Janet Albrechtsen ran a profile in The Australian, the continent Down Under’s leading national news paper. This weekend, Scott Anderson’s “Podcast an intellectual dig through past plagues and future tech” appeared on the website of The San Francisco Chronicle. Christmas is coming early for one of Stanford’s most high-profile professors.
An excerpt:
Though he’s also an author and the guitarist for the rock band Glass Wave, the professor’s international following mainly comes from the creation of a pioneering podcast that’s now in its 16th year. “Entitled Opinions” is available on Apple Podcasts, where it consistently ranks in the top five most popular shows for literature globally.
Aqsa Ijaz was teaching literature in her home country of Pakistan when she discovered the show in 2012.
Ijaz would listen at night after finishing her teaching duties at Government College University in Lahore. She was hooked on the probing method that Harrison and his guests used in examining humanistic issues. Ijaz began playing the shows for her students.
“Robert has really influenced my own work, partly because he has a reverence for the past, but it’s not a cheap reverence,” said Ijaz. “The show was a strange expansion of my world.”
Harrison’s singular approach to the podcast’s lyrical monologues and long-form interviews is rooted in his early life. He was born in İzmir, Turkey, to an American father and Italian mother. His childhood was spent playing under umbrella pines and in overgrown ruins scattered through the countryside. At 12, he and his family moved to Rome, where he learned five languages and became entranced by the poetry of Dante.
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Glass Wave has its fans, but Harrison admits his biggest following comes from “Entitled Opinions.” It started with the idea of him interviewing fellow professors for a radio hour on Stanford’s KZSU FM. A writer at heart, Harrison began scripting intense opening monologues read over music, which evolved into an ongoing prose performance that he recites to Glass Wave’s blistering song “Echo.”
In the fall of 2005, a few weeks into the show’s run, a tech-savvy assistant producer uploaded it onto iTunes’ then-nascent podcast service. It wasn’t long before admiring messages were coming in from places as far-flung as Kobe, Japan. Harrison decided not to limit the show’s topics to literature. He’s since trod territory as varied as the historical Jesus, the Rwandan genocide and “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski.
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Lena Herzog, a Russian-born photographer and visual artist, has appeared twice on the show.
“Even though I’ve been interviewed by places like the New York Times, these are the interviews I was most excited about — over the moon, really,” she said. “With Robert, it’s always a high-level conversation. … Intellectuals can be incredibly conformist, especially in the United States. Robert is not codified. He changes his opinions if warranted, and that comes from extreme rigor and discipline of thought. He makes for a very unusual intellectual.”
Recently, Harrison has brought that freethinking approach to questions about science and technology. He’s done shows with experts on cybersecurity, internet addiction, artificial intelligence and controversial biotech ethics. His most recent show, released on Oct. 8, featured an interview with renowned environmental landscape architect Thomas Woltz and focused on using outdoor design for better custodianship of the earth.
His conversations have been so probing that, in June 2017, Harrison was invited to give a presentation to some of the top gene-editing specialists in the world, including Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Anne Doudna of UC Berkeley. True to form, Harrison took the opportunity to recap Dante’s story of Ulysses sailing out beyond the Mediterranean Sea, only to meet his death in the Atlantic — a metaphor for where the scientific luminaries’ ambitions might be heading.
For fans, it was another sign that “Entitled Opinions” will continue as one of the most brazenly intellectual shows on the digital airwaves.
Read the whole thing here.
December 2nd, 2021 at 10:49 pm
Thank you so much, Cynthia! I’m going to have to go back and reread Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs because I think I remember something
about at least, some of that re Akhmatova/O Mandelstam/Dante detailed there. I know I do remember reading it somewhere
knowing that in a glancing way. And i had a book of Osip’s prose and some letters (from Ardis) that had an English translation of Mandelstam’s Conversation on
Dante. So many times I have the experience with your blog of a kind of lovely renaissance of feeling and memory about certain topics I
had great emotional resonance with in past decades and it is sheer delight to then remember, to retrace those steps and most of all to see
all these things somehow continuing their literary, immortal life on earth.. Its like you bring news from the world of the beautiful in literature, the exact news I would want to hear but do not have your connections and consciousness to realize or find out about on my own.
I am really looking forward to your California book on C. Milosz. How joyful it is to hear to read further witness to so many noble people whom we thought would always be with us on the literary scene as if they had come back to say more;you truly have your finger always on the pulse of so many streams of beauty. I am just grateful for what you have done and what you continuing to do in this light.https://zagumi.com/
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