Into the COLAverse – Episode 23: Judith Coffin

[0:00:01 Frederick]  Welcome to into the colaverse A podcast that takes us on the unique journeys of Faculty in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Join me your host, Frederick Luis Aldama. As we learn of the many ways that our faculty and their cutting edge work is transforming the world today. It is my huge honor to be here with Judith coffin, Professor of History in the Department of History here with us at UT Austin. Welcome Judith. It’s a pleasure to be here, Judith. Oh my goodness. I love everything that you do and I’m fascinated with this work. You know, learning me learning, reading your work and being deeply interested in in French, intellectual culture and French activist, intellectual culture as well as material culture. How my goodness, how did you find that path and you know, cultural history, France focusing in on gender and sexuality. Yeah, maybe you can share some of your journey. I know the journey as a kind of heroic journey with its surprises and obstacles along the way, but maybe you can share with us a little bit of that journey.

[0:01:33 Judith]  Well, I wouldn’t describe it as heroic although, you know, probably the route to the last book was heroic. But we, but you want to start by going further

[0:01:41 Frederick]  back. I wanna go. Like, how did, what, how like was there something? I mean, ok, so my daughter, loved French as a little girl and she was reading the Madeleine stories, among others. And, you know, of course, we don’t teach language here in schools until way too late. She was, you know, learning Spanish at home as a heritage speaker. But so I found a French, you know, culture club that she joined when she was like four or five. I’m just wondering, like, for you, was there something in the water that took you in this direction already that, you know, at a younger age or?

[0:02:25 Judith]  Well, I suppose there was something in the water, but I think there’s probably also something of a, of a riptide. My grandmother was a big francophile and drove an ambulance during World War one and my parents both spoke French, although they were not, they were not French at all. So I think, I thought when I was in, I mean, although I took French in high school, I wanted to do sort of anything. But so when I took my college courses, I wanted to do Russian history and German history and I wanted to study revolutions and fascism and I sort of associated French with my grandmother who I loved but who was a kind of stuffy character. And I said, no, I’m not gonna do, I’m not gonna do that., you know, you back into these things. It’s, there’s, there’s nothing, there’s nothing heroic, about this. then when I got to graduate school I was kind of in innocent. I didn’t know what it was all about. and I wanted to study German history or Russian history. I knew I wasn’t gonna be able to do Russian history. But I thought I had my German was good enough and it wasn’t, and I spoke fluent French. And so I became a, so I became a French historian, kind of like that sort of against, against my, against my will. But I got really lucky. Well, I didn’t want to be a historian at all when I was little, I grew up on a farm and I wanted to be a vet. but that foundered on organic chemistry in college. So I abandoned that pretty quickly. And and I went to Trinity where I had wonderful, wonderful professor. And then I went to Wesley in France where I also had wonderful professors. I didn’t realize quite how famous they were when I was there. But now I look back on those, you know, their names of, you know, really important people. Daniel Roche Jean, Marie Guma, Sami nai, I mean, all kinds of all kinds of really, really important people. So that, so that sort of got me on the, on the French track.,

[0:04:50 Frederick]  and you were at Yale as well, you know, with, gosh, was that I’m not sure exactly the timing, but there was a huge interest more than interest in French, post structuralism or deconstruction. Right at Yale.

[0:05:07 Judith]  There was, there was, but there was also on the history department side of things, there was a huge interest in what was then, since I’m not a youngster, what was then the new social history and history from below. So I was sort of on that side of things and, and we would see the compli people hanging out at the cafeteria at the other end of the cafeteria. They were the cool ones, right? They were the Europeans. And and we hung out with the American and, and what was a big deal at Yale when when I was there was African American history, social history, labor history. And I had a wonderful advisor at Yale too named John Merriman who just died died last year and he was great. We studied 19th century revolutions, we studied social history, cul cultural history and he let us do whatever we, whatever we wanted. And that was also when gender history was just being sort of discovered. So I wanted to do that. We didn’t even call it gender history in those days we called it Women’s History., and Merriman didn’t particularly know anything about that, but he was perfectly happy to have me do it. So that’s, that’s so I forged, I forged ahead and he said that’s fine. Go ahead. Do, do whatever, do whatever you want. So I wanted to write first about prostitution and then a big book in French came out on that. And so I switched to, to labor History and my first book was about, about women’s work. And I guess what I was interested in, in social history and this is what, and this is what actually took me to, to cultural history is, you know, how is the world organized? How are our representations of the world, organized and gender seemed to be one of the best ways of coming at that. So that’s, that’s what took me, took me down that road and at first I did labor and then I started to, and I started to think more and more about sexuality.

[0:07:16 Frederick]  Mhm. Yeah. Amazing. I think I would have been sitting with you as well by the way. oh, really? Yeah.

[0:07:24 Judith]  No, you would have been over with the cool.

[0:07:27 Frederick]  No. Ok. Well, I don’t know. so, you know, your book, The Politics of Women’s work, speaking of which, and kind of cultural, his history work that you do do. oh, my goodness. Yeah. Tell, could you tell me a little bit more about this sewing invention of the sewing machine, the advertising in and around it and especially, you know, your interest in gender. and the kind of form forming of a kind of modern social division of labor and consumption, culture and production. Anyway, there’s just so much around that. It’s amazing.

[0:08:12 Judith]  It’s cool. Right. It’s, it’s one of those topics that kind of jumped out at me. I said, oh, gosh, you know, there’s so many, so many things. This is not only a machine that, women, not only women but women, work on, they work on at home. it raises all kinds of questions about what it means to be skilled, a skilled worker. When people say sewing isn’t skilled, I tell them, ha ha you take home ec and try and, and make that. I mean, it is very skilled work. It’s just not, it’s just not particularly, particularly, well remunerated. And then these advertisements for the sewing machine are completely, completely crazy. They have elephants working sewing machines. There are all kinds of medical concerns about that. It’s erotically arousing to be working at a, at a sewing, at a sewing machine. So there were all of these fantasies bound up in this, in this device, which is actually also one of the first mass produced and, and, and mass marketed consumer devices as well as, as well as being a factory one. So I liked that it, at that it blended all of those that it blended, you know, household and factory and, and, you know, paid and, and unpaid work and work and sex and, and all that stuff. so that was fun. That, and that was, that was where the book started. And then it, and then it went off into, and then when it went off into debates about sweated labor about consumerism, about political economy. the sort of intellectual history. So it was an intellectual, I mean, you can see in the book, me going from being a sort of pure social historian to being more interested in culture and representation and, and the division and the division of labor and the way it’s organized and contested

[0:10:12 Frederick]  was there. Judith in your, in your work. Was there, did you start to see? I know that it’s located in France but similar histories around things like sewing machine or gender, you know, cultural histories in places like the United States or in other countries.

[0:10:35 Judith]  Oh, yeah, I mean, there’s all this wonderful imperial advertising. I mean, singer is a big American company, like a huge American company with big factories in Russia before the revolution, it loses all those factories in the, in the revolution. But yeah, singer is selling selling advertisements for the machine all over, all over the globe and they have sewing machines with wings, you know, promising to come and emancipate the womanhood of, you know, Western Africa or Southern Africa or China. And, and, and all of that. So, that was really a remarkable subject. I haven’t thought about it for a while. You’re making me want to go back, want to go back to it since, since it’s, it’s really fun now that I think I might read some of those, differently and I bet I could find, I bet I could find more of them.

[0:11:34 Frederick]  I, oh, my goodness. I, that seems like I can’t, well, I can’t wait for that book, Judith. So

[0:11:44 Judith]  I would

[0:11:44 Frederick]  love to see how the flying singer sewing machine, you know, influenced, you know, both colonial relations and also representations, you know. Wow, that’s pretty amazing. Yeah, that’s a, that’s a

[0:12:00 Judith]  good chapter in that, in that, I mean, that’s the best chapter in that, in that.,

[0:12:06 Frederick]  yeah., I mean, well, really incredible. So, you know, this actually, you know, leads me nicely into your, you know, wonderful book, Sex Love and Letters and, you know, this deep dive into the, you know, De France and the work you do there. But before we jump in there, maybe for some of our listeners, we could, or you would do us the honor of contextualizing a little bit of Simon de Beauvoir, you know, existentialism, but it may be especially existentialism in regards to gender. and the context in which Simone De Beauvoir was, you know, there was a lot happening in, in the, in France and in the world at the time that she was really becoming a force.

[0:13:04 Judith]  Yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot going on and, and and one of the things that I wanted to do in this book, I mean, Simon De Beauvoir is most famous as one of the founding figures of second wave feminism. But she’s so much more than that and, and involved in so many issues and struggles other than that. So she writes the Second Sex in 1949. It comes out in different venues in 1947. Actually, parts are published in vogue. And then it’s published in, in in 48 and and 49 then comes out as a book in in 49. And that is when existentialism is not new to the Postwar period, but that’s when it really takes off. And existentialism is actually in a simple version, very simple to explain. It says nothing is given, nothing is to be taken for granted. There is no set rules, there is no biological determinism, there is no, you know, there is no rule of rule of God. We are thrown into the world and we make our own meaning. Is that enough of a, is that enough of an explanation, do you think? And, and all peop, all kinds of people are running with that in the immediate aftermath of the war. One of the reasons that it’s so compelling in the aftermath of the war and, and against the backdrop of, you know, not just the front, the occupation of France by the, by the Nazis, but but Nazism and the holocaust and, and all, it’s just, you know, we’ve got to start all over. We have to remake ourselves and we remake ourselves in freedom, that freedom isn’t necessarily fun to live. It’s not easy to live. It is a struggle to live. But that is, I mean, you know, it, it is AAA kind of heroic form of humanism. It’s often criticized for, for that, for being a little bit too too heroic, but Bear uses it to think about gender. People like Richard Wright, use it to think about race. Others used to, you know, Sarre uses it to think about everything. People use it to think about colonialism and, and anti colonialism. It’s this, you know, kind of we can remake ourselves and we mustn’t, we must overthrow sort of encrusted structures of domination and, and stuff. Anyway. Bear’s version of it is nothing is give, you know, famously, one is not born a woman, one becomes one, right? That there is no biological determinism. What is, what is this thing called woman? That’s what she famously, famously starts with, which of course is, of course relevant today since people seem to think that this is a, impossible, impossible line of inquiry and wonder why we would even go down it. I mean, she makes it very clear, you know, what, what does it mean? What does she say? Is it a rustling of petty coats? Is it a certain something in the, in the air? Is it a, you know, is it the fact of ovaries? Anyway?, so she goes on and talks about it talks in the second sex, is an ex second sex is an existential treatment of the formation of gender if you will. And she goes through and it’s a huge, it’s a huge book, a daunting, a daunting read and it goes through biology, culture, anthropology. It has a whole section, the whole second half of it is about lived experience about how, where she draws on mostly, mostly literature and memoirs to talk about the kind of female psyche and the way it’s, it’s twisted by expectations and experiences, which have, which run all kinds of, all kinds of women’s experiences from being a little girl to, you know, finding one’s sexual and gender identity onto old age. So it’s, so it’s all of that and it comes out and it’s quite shocking. Although one of the things I try to show in my book is, it’s not as shocking as all that. And then it takes on many different lives over the course of the 19 fifties and the and the 19 sixties she writes memoirs, she writes three depending on how you count them three or four volumes of memoirs. where she goes over her life in, in great detail, it’s kind of existential state, state, tale of coming of coming of age. And that life sends people back to her book, The Second Sex, which not that many people had read when it first came out. And the combination of the life and the book and the emergence of feminism in the 19 sixties, you know, brings it, makes it and into a global, a global sensation, but it’s a long process and it has to do not just with the second sex, but also with their memoirs, which are much more popular than the second sex ever was. That’s what people really read. That’s what people really respond to

[0:19:13 Frederick]  in your book, sex, love letters. You not only bring to light the content of these letters for, you know, us as scholars and, and readers in general, but you also talk about how the readers themselves and their feedback say in today’s kind of parlance in a way shaped Simone de Beauvoir, certainly her writing or her response to it. I’m, I’m really fascinated by this. It’s sort of like, you know, the way we read constantly about. Well, in my, in my particular world in popular culture with comics and Netflix shows, you know, how much the audiences and the readers actually have a direct impact on the creating the itself of the narratives of the stories.

[0:20:16 Judith]  Yeah. And I think that the feedback loop is a lot faster in the, in the stuff that, that you that you write about. But I was really stunned, after I started working on this to go back to Bear’s memoirs and see how often she writes about her readers and say I’ve got letters from my readers. my readers are what keep me going. My readers have made me think about this differently. She’s not always very nice to her readers. That’s one of the things that I, you know, I didn’t want to pull any punches about that. She, she, she sort of goes, oh my, you know, here I am, I think I’m writing for the rad radical avant garde. And in fact, you know, it’s all of these, you know, bourgeois housewives who are reading me and, and making me into their, into their heroin. But, I think, I mean, at least one of the, one of the things that I argue is that, you know, they make her into a, into a feminist when she writes the second sex. It’s very much, you know, the sort of eagle eye view looking down from above and the further she goes into her memoirs and the further, you know, she, the more correspondence she gets, she says, oh, you know, I’m, I’m implicated in this. I am, I am one of these, I am one of these figures that I write about and she’s very ambivalent about that and one can’t blame her. you know, we don’t always like to be, told by our readers what we’re, what we, what we as authors are doing in our in our books. But I think she does, you know, gradually become a feminist. I mean, I think that also in the late sixties and seventies, she is, you know, figuratively and almost literally seduced by the by the women’s liberation movement. And then she’s willing to throw in her cards with them after keeping keeping a distance for such a long time. I mean, she felt herself to be much more of an activist involved with civil rights, anti colonialism, the Algerian War, those she thought were the big issues. And one of the things I show in the book is how she moves from those issues to feminism. And, and I don’t want to suggest that feminism is the end of the trajectory because it’s not, this isn’t, you know, a book about Simmon Bobo’s heroic voyage to feminism. She actually goes on and I talk about this in the in the conclusion in 1968 the world is blowing up. Paris. Students are on strike. What is she doing? She’s far from Paris and she’s writing a book on old age, which is published in 1970 which gets her, you know, thousands and thousands of appreciative letters. So, so, you know, she’s nicely out of sync with things in in some ways and I wanted to, and I wanted to bring that out

[0:23:26 Frederick]  out of sync but, and correct me if I’m wrong out of sync in some ways that are pretty spectacular. And I’m thinking, you know, could we even say that she was one of the main figures that became a bridge between second wave feminism and third wave feminism, especially in her reaction, very strong reaction and very public reaction to the French colonialism.

[0:23:57 Judith]  Well, yeah, I mean, it’s not, I’m not sure that she is a bridge. I mean, she becomes something, you know, her reputation in the 19 eighties is not so great among them who say existentialism is too, is, is, is too simple existentialism that, that bears account. Although it tries to take tries to take account of race doesn’t do a very good job with that. She’s, her arguments are famously dismantled by Audrey Lord who’s talking about Beauvoir when she says the master’s tools will never help dismantle the master’s the master’s house. So third way feminism wants to break with the kind in lots of ways with the kind of work that Bear was, that Bear was doing. you know, and between generations of activists, there’s always a lot of, there’s always a lot of friction. There’s always a lot of, ok, we’re not gonna do this. I mean, Bear herself says I want, when in 1949 I want nothing to do with the women’s suffrage movement. And this is, you know, a few years after women have gotten the vote, she goes, that’s yesterday’s news. I don’t want anything to do with that. So it’s not exactly surprising that third wave fem, third wave feminism, you know, in the eighties and nineties is saying we don’t want anything more to do with this Eurocentric existential second wave feminism. We’re doing something we’re doing something new. And yeah, and there’s, there’s quite a a bitter critique of, of Beauvoir and the point of my book is not to defend her. I don’t, you know, I’m a historian. So historians get to get to duck out of of questions like this. And I just wanted to, I, I really was interested in her readers above all. I suppose that’s, that’s the old social historian. I wanted to know what these ordinary women said and I was actually glad not to be able to know what Beauvoir’s return letters looked like. All I had was one side of the dialogue. And for me, that was really an interesting puzzle, right? How am I going? I know it’s a dialogue. I’ve only got one piece of it. How am I gonna put this? how am I gonna put this together? But there, you know, we have thousands and thousands of pages of Simon de Beauvoir and, and we have many, many brilliant philosophers and political theorists who have and, and, you know, gender and sexuality theorists who’ve taught, talked about her work. So I didn’t really want to wade into that. I wanted to get, you know, sometimes it’s boring to just look at ideas. You wanna know how ideas are lived, right? How they get distorted in the process of, of circulating, you know, how, what, what parts of a book or a philosophical system, people grab hold of and try to make work in their daily lives and that’s what a lot of these correspondents are doing. You know, I read this sentence and, you know, I took it home with me or I took it to my labor organizing group with me and it made me think whatever they did and sometimes their ideas are completely distorted in the process. But that’s what’s interesting, right? That’s what that, you know, how, how people, how people live philosophical theories. That’s kind of, that’s, that’s what this book is, is really about.

[0:27:52 Frederick]  Yeah, I love that how people live philosophical theories. and your attention to audiences, readers and listeners. I know you’ve published, on Elle magazine, survey research of the fifties as well as,, the radio or psycho psychoanalysis and radio in 20th century France. I love them. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us about that. Yeah.

[0:28:21 Judith]  Well, that was, that was, I, I was, I was working on that when I got, derailed by finding this big Beau Beauvoir archive. There was, there was another French French woman who ran a radio show who was who and who got phone calls from all over from all over France, phone calls and letters. And she collected all of the letters because all of these people are sort of doing survey research. So she saved the letters and the letters are in an archive in in tour. And I was, and I worked in those, but I was actually really interested in the radio dimensions of it. Radio is a form of communication. So why did she think that speaking on the radio was particularly intimate, you know, podcasts do some of the same, same stuff they land in different ways than texts do. And so I was interested in the history of that idea. And then I went back to look at some of the early radio practitioners in the twenties and thirties in France. And they’re all in love with Freud and they’re all infatuated with the idea of listening as a route to the interior as listening as a particularly almost psychic experience. And let me make and they did radio plays that and they did plays where they asked readers to send in their dreams and then they acted out their dreams and asked listeners to write back. So all of these experiments with sort of radio and psychoanalysis and interiority were very interesting to me. And then I kind of followed that through to the fifties and sixties where they’re doing a very different kind of, a very different kind of, of broadcast. But with some of the same, with some of the same ideas about immediacy and wireless communication and instantaneous reactions. and I might go back to that

[0:30:50 Frederick]  too. Yeah, I

[0:30:53 Judith]  guess, yeah, this spring, the book, The Sex Love and Letters just got translated. Actually last week, just came out last week in France.

[0:31:01 Frederick]  Oh, wonderful.

[0:31:02 Judith]  So that’s still been at the center of my, of my radar. But there’s lots to go back to in the radio and advertising and all of that stuff.

[0:31:13 Frederick]  Some of your, well, you have, of course radio psychology in the modern, among other sex and intimacy, historical perspectives, thinking like a historian. What, Judith, what would you say is, I don’t know, something you’d like, you’d like your students to have as a takeaway from your courses. you know, I’m thinking of this also in light of news, recent news, where, you know, President Gordon Key decided to pretty much eliminate, you know, world languages there in West Virginia. And I’m just like we are, you know, we’re, we’re at, in many ways at a kind of a front line even though we shouldn’t be when we’re teaching culture history, cultural history of places outside of the United States.

[0:32:10 Judith]  Yeah. I mean, that’s just, that’s so shocking and, and this thinking, like a historian, I’m teaching that my thinking like a historian is about world war one. And that’s because it’s, I, I want students to be able to write about, but it’s teaching research methods and I want them to be able to write about whatever topic they want. But they seem shocked when I say, if you want to work on a given subject, you’ve got to have the language. They say, oh, I’m interested in Turkey. So, you know, oh, you have to have languages. Well, you can’t do work without having languages. But I think, you know, just inhabiting a different world, inhabiting a different persona. My other course this semester is on the French revolution and we’re just finishing the old regime and, and I ask them what they think is weird about the old regime and they say something and then I say, OK, turn that into a question. Why is it like that? You know, you just have to be able to climb into worlds that are different than your own and that’s fun. That’s exciting. But it’s also analytically, it’s also analytically interesting. You know, how does, how does one understand one understand a world where you don’t, you, you, all of its assumptions aren’t self evident to you, right? How do you turn that into, into something interesting. So, I also teach a course on France under the occupation. That’s part of the Normandy Scholars program, which is a really great program. We have tons of wonderful alums who have, who’ve gone through the Normandy Scholars program. And there they do five courses on World War Two, all from different, national perspectives. They’ve taken a course in American history, French history, Polish History, Russian history and German History., and then we all go to Europe at the end for three weeks. and we go to London to Bayou, to Paris, to Berlin, to Warsaw. and that’s a, that’s a fabulous, that’s a fabulous program. And that really makes, I think students understand. They do want to study abroad, they do want to go abroad. That’s, that’s so important to them. It’s one of the reasons there’s so many IRG majors right now in, at, at, at UT. So it’s crazy to eliminate language teaching. It’s really, yeah, it’s really shocking.

[0:34:58 Frederick]  It is. there’s a lot that’s shocking today. that’s one of them though. That one

[0:35:05 Judith]  of them.

[0:35:06 Frederick]  Yeah. there’s

[0:35:08 Judith]  that shocking but

[0:35:09 Frederick]  whatever, you know. Oh, my goodness. Well, we just keep on keeping on. let me ask you, Judith as we begin to wind down. So you’ve mentioned,, already, you know, possibly, you know, catching up with that flying singer machine, maybe, dipping back into French radio. but,, right now, of course, you’re, you know, very much, you know, still writing, maybe the Second Crest or continuing to ride the wave of, you know, this important book that you published. Now that it’s republished or translated in French Sex Love and Letters. But in, in between and around all of this wonderful activity. What are you reading and watching? That’s exciting for you or reading or

[0:35:58 Judith]  watching? What am I reading and watching?

[0:36:00 Frederick]  Yeah. Oh,

[0:36:04 Judith]  well, you know, I have a big pile of books next to my bed. You said you might ask this. So I went over and and looked at them. So there’s Annie Arno who had always been a huge fan of the French, the French writer, who won the Nobel Prize. This to everybody’s surprise this last, this last spring. So there’s Annie or no. There’s a book on Ukraine by Omar Barto about the, you know, the very mixed history of Ukraine. There’s a book about rafting on the Colorado River called the Emerald Mile, which is famous. And then there are a lot of cookbooks, most of them by Odele. And, and that, and that’s, and there’s, and there’s all that, what have I been watching? I’ve been listening to slow horses on audible, you know, the mckerron, things. I like those. I rewatched the wire recently because I think David Simon is just amazing. I think the wire is one of the, I don’t know, you’re a popular, you’re a popular culture. What’s your line? I think it’s like Balzac.

[0:37:21 Frederick]  Yeah, I think that that kind of storytelling on TV. Well, first of all, as you just mentioned was a real watershed for television. It is very, it is Balzac of the 21st century. And I would also say that I’m missing it. I don’t see, I’m not seeing that kind of complexity, riveting complexity and a kind of elaborate storytelling in TV, right now or shows right now.

[0:38:01 Judith]  Yeah, there were a couple that were, yeah, they’re all, they’re, they’re not quite as good. I mean, he did another one called The Deuce. Did you see that?

[0:38:09 Frederick]  I didn’t

[0:38:09 Judith]  know? Well, that was really interesting to, it was interesting to me what he said about it because he said I was a reporter in Baltimore and for me, the story was drugs. That’s what I did. And that’s what I did in the Wire. And then he said a couple of years later, wait a second, the other story is prostitution. You know, which is kind of right there interwoven with the drug trade, and, you know, bringing out women characters and that’s when he decided to do, to do the deuce, which is about the porn industry in, in New York. And it’s not quite as good as they are but it’s very, very good. It’s very, it’s very interesting with Maggie Gyllenhaal who’s, who’s really

[0:38:59 Frederick]  wonderful. Yeah. Well, that I’ll put that on my list.

[0:39:04 Judith]  TV, is, has really, I mean, it’s true. They aren’t as good as, as The Wire but I find regular movies too short. They feel like reading short stories. I, after, after watching TV, shows where you can really unfold the character. I mean, I like long novels. I mean, War and Peace is my favorite novel ever. So, you know, I like, I like the, the long things but these short movies you sometimes go, I mean, Oppenheimer was great but you didn’t really get very much inside Oppenheimer and what, and what made him?

[0:39:41 Frederick]  That’s really interesting. Yeah. So, you know, how much has going back to your fascination with,, listeners, audiences, readers and just consumption practices and behaviors, you know, how much has,, serialized TT V becomes such a central part of our lives, but more maybe interesting. How has it reshaped our interest and engagement and excitement with stories that allow us to breathe and to kind of explore and expand that the finite kind of limited feature film just disallows, you know. Yeah.

[0:40:24 Judith]  No, that’s really, that’s a, that’s a lovely way of putting it. I really, I really, really like that and, and, you know, I think that’s one of the reasons Bear’s Memoirs were so popular. I mean, there were three volumes. One of them, one of the volumes was two volumes., and it was really a sort of day by day here is, you know, here’s what I read in the newspapers about the Algerian War. Here’s how it made me, here’s how it made me feel. Here is where I went hiking here is where I went bicycling. And it’s the kind of thing that you can really, you know, exactly as you, as you put it, you can, you can breathe, you can inhabit it, you can identify with and not identify with it in different ways. I mean, you can talk about the characters forever. I mean, you know, I still talk about Omar of the Wire with my friends, right in a way that I don’t about that. I won’t about Oppenheimer.

[0:41:26 Frederick]  Well, Judith, this has been an absolute extraordinary short journey for me. Thank you for inviting me and our listeners along the way, learning about, you know, the, the significance, significant place of cultural history, the archives that you’ve returned to again and again there in Paris. And, you know, just kind of beautifully guiding us to use your own words to climb into worlds that are different things. Judith,

[0:41:57 Judith]  thank you very much for inviting me. It was really a pleasure

[0:42:04 Outro]  into the colaverse is produced by the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts Sound Engineering by the Liberal Arts instructional technology services. You can find into the Colliver podcasts on Apple podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. Thanks for listening and see you next time