Virtual Memories Show #130:
Elizabeth Samet –
The Cult of Experience and the Tyranny of Relevance
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“How do you learn things? How do you acquire the patience to admit when you don’t know things? I think those are really important things for an Army officer to know.”
Elizabeth D. Samet has been a professor of English at West Point since 1997. We talk about the tension between education and training at the military academy, the importance of books to soldiers and officers serving overseas, learning West Point’s unique argot, preparing her students to be unprepared, trying (and failing) to convince Robert Fagles that Hector is the moral center of the Iliad, why she doesn’t teach Henry V to plebes, how not to get caught up in the tyranny of relevance, why she balked at learning the fine art of parachuting, and more! Give it a listen!
“The question I’m endlessly fascinated with is, what do we call war and what do we call peace and can we draw these nice distinctions? It seems to me right now that we can’t.”
NOTE: The opinions Elizabeth Samet expresses in this interview are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of West Point, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.
We also talk about teaching students who are both future Army officers and 18-year-old kids, how West Point and the student body changed after 9/11, her new anthology (Leadership
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“I have this idea about Plato: no one loves Plato who does not already think himself a guardian.”
We talk about a lot of of books in this episode. Here’s a list of ’em (Note: if I ever go to a Patreon crowdfunding model for the show, this is the first thing that goes subscriber-only):
- Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point
- No Man’s Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America
- Leadership: Essential Writings by Our Greatest Thinkers
- An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, Vol. One of the Liberation Trilogy
– Rick Atkinson
- The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, Vol. Two of the Liberation Trilogy
– Rick Atkinson
- The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945, Vol. Three of the Liberation Trilogy
– Rick Atkinson
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
– Michael Chabon
- Bleak House
– Charles Dickens
- Middlemarch
– George Eliot
- Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant / Selected Letters, 1839-1865
– Ulysses S. Grant
- Everything Flows
– Vassily Grossman
- Life and Fate
– Vassily Grossman
- Catch-22
– Joseph Heller
- The Iliad
– Homer (tr. Fagles)
- The Odyssey
– Homer (tr. Fagles)
- Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
– Henry Marsh
- Black Swan Green
– David Mitchell
- The Complete Works
– Montaigne
- Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, Vol. 1
– Plutarch
- Hamlet
– Shakespeare
- King Richard II
– Shakespeare
- War and Peace
– Tolstoy
- Anna Karenina
– Tolstoy
- Hadji Murat
– Tolstoy
- The Aeneid
– Virgil (tr. Fagles)
- Sword of Honor
– Evelyn Waugh
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:
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About our Guest
Elizabeth D. Samet is the author of No Man’s Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America
Credits: This episode’s music is On, Brave Old Army Team by West Point Marching Band. The conversation was recorded at Prof. Samet’s apartment on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
(Henry Holt).We talk about what it means to miss New Jersey, what makes The Shore different from any other seaside amusement region, what he learned while writing for the YA category, what he unlearned from his copywriting day-job, the value of 
and 
), the author who started him on his path, his balance between writing fiction and essays, how readers read and misread his work, his methods for fusing the personal and the critical, why students should read some of his essays before taking his classes, whether he considered going Hollywood, why and how he assembled 
anthology, and who his favorite New York Met is. (I was surprised by his answer to that last one.)
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,, as well as several novels and novellas, and three poetry collections, and has edited several anthologies, including 
. His essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Threepenny Review, Double Take, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Preservation, Cite, 7 Days, Metropolis, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies. He is the director of the nonfiction graduate program at Columbia University, where he also teaches writing. His two most recent books are the personal essay collection 
. The intro and outro were recorded in my home office on a