San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Stanford professor’s ‘Entitled Opinions’ has built an international following over 16 years
As the world went into lockdown last year, Robert Pogue Harrison ended a short hiatus from his podcast with a dark, centuries-old tale.
Resuming “Entitled Opinions” that spring in 2020, the Stanford University professor wasn’t broadcasting from his usual lair at the campus’ Studio B. Instead, he spoke through the tinny echo of his home writing studio, a place fortified with wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, sherry, gin and, “Lord, even brandy, should that prove necessary to roll the afternoons forward.”
The host turned his listeners’ ears back centuries to the moment Giovanni Boccaccio produced “the Decameron” — a collection of tales from Florentines escaping the Black Death plague of 1348.
The message was clear: We’ve been to these dark woods before, and stories have lighted our way.
In the coming weeks, Harrison explored the ways loss, mutability and separation have repeatedly intruded on the human story. As a writer obsessed with exploring how the dead shape the living, a professor who teaches plagueshadowed texts and a media personality focused on the nexus of literature and everyday life, Harrison turned out to be a podcaster made for the moment.
“Historically, I was thinking about how many precedents there have been to something like our experience of COVID,” Harrison, who is still recording shows from his home, told The Chronicle. “Boccaccio’s ‘DeCameron’ is written in the context of a plague that wiped out a third to half of Europe’s population. So, it’s one literary testament to how a group of people chose to cope with that.”
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
New episode Sunday, Dec. 5. Available on Apple Podcasts and at entitledopinions.stanford.edu.
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 Izmir, 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.
Along with his brother Tom, Harrison’s first concert experience was seeing Jimi Hendrix live at Rome’s Brancaccio Theater in 1968, which inspired both teens to become musicians.
Harrison eventually landed in the South Bay, completing a self-designed humanities major on Dante at Santa Clara University. His postgraduate work was followed by a job offer from Stanford’s Department of French and Italian, where he has taught since 1986.
In 2010, he teamed up with his brother, two professors and a graduate student to form Glass Wave, writing songs inspired by the voices of literary characters, including Elizabeth Bennet’s mother from “Pride and Prejudice,” the fabled Helen of Troy and the whale from “Moby Dick.”
Glass Wave has its fans,
then chose to study musical theater at Howard University. A professor there allowed her to spend a semester studying jazz, an unusual tactic given the presumption that future starring roles would require a conventional (read: “white”) Broadway sound. “But it made sense for me to do something that spoke to me,” Iman said, “what I wanted to do vocally.”
This spectacle-laden “A Christmas Carol,” woven with traditional carols like “Joy to the World” and “Silent Night,” doesn’t call upon Iman’s jazz skills, but her depth of interpretation is also a special asset, according to director Jamie Manton, who calls working with Iman “an utter joy.” “Amber commands this role with majesty and precision, finding a depth that is rooted in powerful truth,” he said, noting that Iman’s Ghost of Christmas Present “fights on behalf of social and economic injustices, challenging Scrooge’s blindness when it comes to his own sense of responsibility and accountability.”
For her part, Iman is excited to be back on stage after the pandemic shutdown. She was actually the first woman to perform again on Broadway after theaters closed down, delivering a one-woman show in April as part of the NY PopsUp Festival. The experience, she said, was “terribly frightening” because of general fear about the coronavirus and the pressures of being tested for COVID daily — she worried that if her test came back positive, she’d have to send the audience (and the extensive tech staff) home.
In San Francisco, too, COVID protocols to keep everyone safe bring stress, but she is relishing the chance to watch her “amazing” co-star Battiste shine as Ebenezer Scrooge and to be part of a committed cast.
“To walk out onstage and see their faces — it’s such a blessing to be back in the theater,” she said. “It’s really important we don’t take these moments onstage for granted and use every opportunity we have to be storytelling vessels, especially to tell a story like this one about redemption and second chances.”
Just beyond “Carol’s” monthlong run and New Year’s lie rehearsals for “Goddess” at Berkeley Rep, with director and creator Shaheem Ali, composer Michael Thurber, and playwright Jocelyn Bioh. Iman’s voice turns light and buzzy as she anticipates it.
“It’s the first time a show has been written for me,” she said. “It’s a dream team, creatively. And I think for musical theater, this show is going to change the game. It’s going to allow young kids of color, young Black kids, to see themselves in a musical in a way that I don’t think we’ve seen in a long time.” Meanwhile, her work with BAC and Black Women on Broadway will carry on, she said. “We didn’t survive those 19 months to go backward.”
One night, many years ago now, my wife and I were sitting in the living room, reading quietly, when our daughter appeared on the landing in her pajamas. “Dad!” she demanded in the urgent tones of someone whose sleep had been disturbed by a deep conundrum. “Who’s meaner — the father in ‘Cenerentola’ or the Queen of the Night?”
She was 4 years old, and these were the questions that kept her awake at night.
It’s hard to believe at a distance of more than two decades, but for a brief and delightfully surreal period in her life — between the ages of 3 and 6 — my daughter was an opera fanatic. She watched DVDs of “Falstaff ” and “Tosca” and “The Abduction from the Seraglio” on endless repeat, the way other kids watched Disney classics. She listened to recordings of Verdi and Rossini operas in the car to and from school every day.
She even came with me to performances (though not ones I was planning to review), where she could snuggle on my lap or my wife’s and get her Puccini or Mozart fix.
Did we get dirty looks, or at least concerned glances, from the other audience members? You bet we did. I would have done the same in their shoes. But in my actual position, I merely thought to myself, “Take your side-eye somewhere else, buddy. This 4-yearold knows ‘Traviata’ better than you do.”
She did, too. In that slightly obsessive way that kids can glom onto whatever subject matter happens to capture their imagination — dinosaurs, Harry Potter, baseball — and master their most arcane specifics at lightning speed, my daughter soaked up operatic story lines and their accompanying music.
She was happy to reel off the plot of one of her favorite pieces on the slightest prompting — not as a play for attention, but because she was convinced it was the and couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else missing out.
She once spent an hour-long car trip ensuring that her grandmother didn’t live another minute without knowing the entire dramatic trajectory of “La Bohème.” On another occasion (which unfortunately we only heard about secondhand), she did the same for her babysitter in the middle of a Thai restaurant in the Castro, while conversation died away at the neighboring tables and the patrons strained to catch every detail.
Then there was the day I picked her up at preschool to discover that she had corralled her fellow toddlers into reenacting “Das Rheingold,” casting herself as the beautiful Freia and her friends as Fricka, Erda and others. (I don’t recall a Wotan; in the gender-segregated world of preschool, this might have been an all-female Wagner staging.)
What prompted this enthusiasm? What was there in opera that she found so deeply rewarding?
It wasn’t primarily the music, although she did like the tunes as vessels for emotion. She was particularly fond of the tenor aria from Act 2 of “Rigoletto,” she once said, because “when I listen to it, it calms me up.”
No, it was the stories that caught her fancy — thrilling tales of love and death, full of plot twists and surprises, heroes and villains.
I know this because I can date the beginning of her opera mania to a specific single moment, when she picked up the liner booklet for a recording of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” and asked, “What’s this about, Dad?”
She was less interested in hearing the CD — that could wait — than in finding out what had happened to the mournful ancient princess on the cover.
I know it because she habitually insisted on fast-forwarding past the orchestral overture (”it wastes my time,” she said) and getting right to the good stuff, the part that involved characters and conflict and romance.
And I know it from the ritual question that always preceded our exploration of a new opera. “Does anybody die or get married?” she would ask — thus intuiting, as skillfully as any budding Aristotle, the fundamental theatrical genres of tragedy and comedy.
It’s easy to suppose that this was all a bid for parental approval, or simply my daughter modeling what she saw around her. But the truth is that I don’t do much listening around the house. My daughter probably grew up thinking my job was a matter of sitting at my computer and complaining about deadlines. The resources to feed an opera craze were available to her, but she found her way to it on her own.
Then one day, just like that, it was over. Midway through Act 2 of the umpteenth viewing of “Falstaff,” she said, “I’m bored,” turned off the DVD player and left the room. She never looked back.
People used to say, “Oh, she’ll return to it. Once something is that deeply embedded, it’s there for life.” But they were wrong. My daughter is nearly 30 now, and she retains nothing about this chapter of her life except what her mother and I have told her.
Did it really happen the way we remember it? Could a passion so thoroughly ingrained and all-encompassing simply vanish like dew in the morning sun? What did all those operas mean to her?
These are unknowable mysteries. But what I know for certain is that for as long as this episode lasted, these stories — the ones I myself love and cherish — touched her heart in some basic way. Just thinking about that calms me up.