November 13, 2024 • 47 mins
Tracy talks with Nate DiMeo about podcasting, varying approaches to talking about history, and his new book, "The Memory Palace."
You can find the book "The Memory Palace" wherever books are sold; it's out on November 19. The podcast The Memory Palace is available at https://thememorypalace.us/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
and Holly is not here today, so instead I have
a very special guest, which is Nate Demeyo of the
(00:22):
podcast The Memory Palace and also author of the forthcoming
book The Memory Palace, which is coming out from Random
House on November nineteenth. If you're not familiar with Nate's show,
you will get a chance to change that in just
a few minutes. Hi, Nate, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I am so happy to be here. I'm a longtime
fan of the show.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
I'm a longtime fan of your show. Also, you have
been on our show once before. That was nine years ago,
which is hard to believe. At that time you had
sixty five episodes. Now there are more than two hundred
and twenty episodes of your show from just looking at
the website today. How are we both still doing this?
(01:06):
I guess that's my first question. Does it surprise you
that all these years later we're both still doing the
same thing?
Speaker 2 (01:13):
You know, it does and it doesn't. On the one hand,
you know, nine years so I was realizing that I
am this is my fifteenth year of doing the Memory Palace.
I'm about to enter my sixteenth year, and that is
sort of insane. And it's been easy for me to
keep track of that because it kind of started shortly
after my daughter was born and I was like, oh,
I need to make sure I have like a creative
(01:34):
outlet that I'm like building and and she's she's about
to turn sixteenth in a couple of weeks. So here
we are. Wow. Yeah, But that's the thing that is
actually more surprising than just its longevity is the notion
that you know, nine years ago felt like we've been
doing for a long time. It felt like we were
really it did. It really did. But on the on
(01:54):
the other hand, like I discovered fairly early on when
I started to do the short narrative his you know,
historical stories put them to music, kind of found a
voice that was you know, factually accurate, but also a
little bit dreamy and a little bit you know, focused
on sort of wonder and uh and kind of just
(02:16):
like the mystery of not just like the mystery of
living in the past, but living in the present with
the past, you know, the way that just for people
who love historical stories like we do in thinking about
it that just kind of like magic place that invoking
the past and the people that live there kind of
brings out in you. I really discovered fairly early on
as I started doing this that setting aside, you know,
(02:40):
careerism and setting setting aside deadlines, there was just something
I found personally useful and kind of exciting about doing
these stories and about like taking the time to to
read about, uh, you know, these figures and forgotten moments
and you know, you know, find words you know and
find words in music, and the combination of those two
(03:01):
things to like kind of share that sort of wonder
that experiencing those things like brought out in me and
share them with listeners and so like, as a result,
like this just kind of feels like a thing. I
feel like I found a thing that was useful to
my life, and as a result, it feels like a
thing I'm just kind of going to be doing in
some capacity forever. Like I felt like I stumbled upon
(03:22):
a venue in the podcast to like express these things.
So on the one hand, like, yeah, sixteen years is
a very long time, But in the other hand, it's
a little bit of like, yeah, this is my life now,
and it remains a big and vital part of it.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
I love that it sort of reminds me of how
I used to say that the first thing I found
that I was really good at was being in college.
And when I was hired to write for the website
HowStuffWorks dot com, which is a totally different website now
than it was when they hired me, I was like
being in college again, because I was spending all of
(03:57):
my time learning something and then writing about what I learned.
And now my job is still that, but now I
say the thing into a microphone afterward, and so it
continues to be sort of an evolution of the first
thing that I found that I thought I was good
at and also enjoyed.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
That's exactly right. And the truth of the matter, too,
is there's also that aspect of like, at some point
your spouse or your friend or the person at the
bar gets a little bit tired of you saying, oh,
I just learned this amazing thing and putting now you
can put it out into the you know, one puts
it out into the air in hopes that the people
that will be excited will find it.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, so stuff you Missed in History Class and The
Memory Palace. These are both podcasts about history. Obviously, you
and I and Holly, all three of us are taking
an approach that a lot of people describe as thoughtful,
but your shows are like a third the length of
virus most of the time. The last time you were
on the show, we talked about the fact that you
(04:55):
have some episodes that are five minutes long, that Holly
and I get into the same store and we wind
up with two thirty to forty minute episodes. Something you
talk about in your book that I think sort of
highlighted the way that we are each approaching history in
ways that are both similar and different. Is you talked
(05:16):
about that all of the stories you cover on your
show start with something that moved you. Holly and I
often talk about starting with things that interest us. So
sort of your show starts with kind of a thoughtful
meditation on something that moved you, while Holly and I
(05:36):
are more explaining all the things that we found interesting
about a particular subject. So can you tell us a
little bit about, like what has led you to focus
so much on being moved by something and on that
level of emotional impact in historical stories.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, I think that similar to your notion of like
that the thing that that click for you was when
you found a job that felt like you were back
in college. For me, when I first got into journalism,
there was just this sense of like I was a
kid and then a young adult who was always like, oh,
I'm one of those people who's kind of like good
in a number of different things and interested in a
(06:15):
ton of different stuff, and it's hard to choose. I
was one of one of those people, and in journalism,
and now the memory Palace like kind of allows me
not to choose. It's like it puts the value on like, oh,
I am interested in a lot of different stuff. And
so yes, there is that interest that one might be
interested in how bridges are constructed, and one might be
(06:35):
interested in the invention of the zipper or or what
happened at this battle or that battle. But the thing
that I find when I go to museums and the
things that I find when I read history is that
like that over and over again. What that spark where
I'm sort of like, oh, I do need to go
tell this to my spouse, I do want to text
my friend about that thing? Is that this thing has
(06:58):
moved me, and like I mean that like in the
in this straightforward sense like that it has like spurred
some emotion. It has made me think nostalgically about old friends.
It has taught me something about parenting. It has you know,
just like like thrilled me with like, oh my god,
I cannot believe that people live that way how you know,
and reminded me that we live differently and that notion
(07:22):
of being moved like to me, it's, uh, that's you know,
that's what I look for in life. It's what I
look for in a movie, is that I want to
you know, come out and feel a little bit differently
than I went in. And I just kind of had
discovered that that was true of the past, that there
was this kind of like magic that the that the
past held for me, like that it was this kind
(07:44):
of like imaginative space that you could go back and
you could read about George Washington, or you could go
back and you could read about you know, Shipwreck Kelly,
the guy who became you know, famous for you know,
sitting on tall objects for inordinate amounts of time, and
that real space. These are these are real things that
happen to real people. But what it really is doing
(08:04):
is it's exciting your imagination. Like that, reading about history
when it's good is no different than reading a than
reading a novel. And I wanted to create a show
that took that approach to history. And it doesn't mean that,
you know, you know that, it doesn't mean that I'm
any less serious about getting the fact straight. But I
(08:25):
have always been very feeling forward when it comes to
experiencing that stuff, and so the format that made the
most sense to me was also very feeling forward, Like
I want to create a show and write stories for
this book about history that make you feel, things that
that break your heart, that delight you. And yeah, and
(08:47):
there's something you know when I when I read my
own book, as I did recently with my audio, you know,
with with sections of my audiobook, I'm like, boy, this
is an earnest person. That's just it is the truth.
Like it is a very feelings forward approach to history,
in a very wonder focused approach, and it continues to
(09:09):
delight and drive me from story to story.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Well, let me please you to know that I started
crying while reading your book about a story that not
only did I already know but that we also have
covered on our podcast, which was about Ruth Harkness and
the first panda brought to the United States and just
(09:32):
sort of the discussion of Ruth and who she was
and thinking about what her interior world was like. As
all of that was going on, I was sitting at
my desk and realized, I was, like, I've been moved
to tears by this thing that I already feel very
intimately familiar with.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
That's in yeah, I know, I think that that. Really
I think all the time about why we remember the
things we remember, you know that like in some of
it is, oh, I remember that experience I have at
the park, that scary experience, because you know, our bodies
are telling us to remember the trauma of that. But
I also like think a lot about the kind of
inverse of trauma, just that things that are so delightful,
(10:10):
like things that like allow you to connect with with
another human being, Like those are the other things you remember?
You remember that you know, novel exciting day with a
parent when they took you to the park when you
weren't expecting to go to the park, or something like that.
And I think all the time about like why it
is that I remember, you know, certain events in my life.
We are constantly like inundated with historical information like you do,
(10:32):
like not just because we might be history buffs, but
things pop up on the internet. I think you know
things in your Instagram reel. There are all these like
little you know facts about history, but there just aren't
that many that are the ones that like make you
suddenly tear up, or that you know again, make you
want to, you know, turn to your spouse or text
your friend. And I've come to really like trust those
(10:53):
things and be fascinated by why those are the things
that move me, Like why is it the story you
know of Ruth Harkness and this woman going out to
continue her husband's mission to find a panda, her recently
deceased husband's mission to bring it live panda back to
the United States, the first one you know that will
leave China. And when those things move me, then I
(11:17):
turn around to try to figure out, like, how can
I also share this experience with someone else? And I'm
glad that it seems like it worked in this in
this case.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
My next question was going to be about how you
decided which stories to put in the book, And I'm
imagining that everything you just said was probably a big
influence on that.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah, I think so. You know, I grew up really
loving kind of anthology books, you know, whether it was
just sort of like the Book of Lists or like
Ripley's Believe It or not, like these like these books
of these short little pieces of different types like just
held such sway on my like young reader life. But
that's not really a thing that exists as we as
we become adults. Like there are magazines and magazines kind
(12:00):
of have that can have that magic. But I wanted
to kind of create one of those kind of like
magic books that you get lost in. But ultimately that
was one for adults that these were that these were
going to be stories that had like heft and that
had you know, depth, that you did have the ability
to move you and to you know, potentially change you
or change the way you think, you know, not just
(12:20):
about the past, but things, you know, the way that
you might live your life in the present, like you know,
to be really kind of pretentious about it, but I
also wanted to just simply have the power to kind
of change your day that you have this book of
these short stories that you can like I really for
the first time in a long time. The Memory Palace,
you know, has always just kind of been this, you know,
nice evocative name. But I kind of wanted to create
(12:42):
something that felt like wandering in through a museum, one
that you could take at your own pace, you know,
one that you could read a couple of stories and
put down, you know, one that you could pick up
in the middle and see a picture that grabbed you
and just start there. Like I wanted to create like
a book that was like a little bit of a
port or something like that. And so as a result,
it just kind of became this this you know, practical
(13:06):
question of how many stories should be pre existing stories
that people love from the podcast, how many of these
stories should be new, how many stories should be you know,
favorites that people who have listen, been listening for a
long time, you know, will want to have the opportunity
to kind of own and hold in their hands, you know,
which is an opportunity that like, you know, as fans,
as a person who loves your show, it's like I
(13:27):
don't quite have like there is not that chance to
just like, you know, in the same way that you
know that there are episodes of yours that I love
and in the same ways that I might love like that,
I might have like loved a book, but there's just
it would be nice to have that episode on my shelf,
and it's been nice to give people the opportunity to
do that. And so someone is like, which ones might
(13:48):
people want to read and own and hold, Which one
of these are simply just the best of what I've done,
Which one of these frankly will work well on the page.
There are some stories that are clearly audio stories from
the podcasts that because they have you know, a bit
of audio, or there's just something about the way the
music needs to work, or there's just something about the
way that I need to dictate pace with my voice
(14:10):
that simply just don't hold up on the page or
don't work as well on the page. So there are
those considerations, and then there was you know, also considerations
about what opportunities does a book present. And for me,
a lot of that was visual, So I created you
know a number of news stories that you know, hinge
upon seeing images, which created you know, a whole set
of stories that are about photographs, but also about the
(14:33):
history of photography and about sort of the history of
seeing in the history of living with visual records of
our lives and our memories, which was its own opportunity.
But then there was also a question that came from
the publisher, which is essentially like, is this a chance
that you have to kind of like let people under
the hood who do like the show, like to kind
(14:54):
of like let them know, like where these stories come
from or that sort of thing. And every idea that
pitched on that sounded like bad DVD commentary, you know,
and it was just like no, no, no, I want
to like like, I would be delighted if every Memory
Palace listener bought this book. But the truth of that
is like this is a great opportunity to get in
front of people or are just readers and notion of
(15:15):
like like, hey, this story that you just read about
Ruth Darkness, let me tell you where that came from.
Like that's not the way books work, Like they don't
come with that sort of experience. But I ultimately, like
did find as I was compiling the book and as
I was you know, really engaging with the breadth of
the work over the course of all of these years,
(15:37):
I just kept having this feeling that like I'm kind
of an odd duck, Like this is an odd passion
that I have, and this is like a slightly skewed
perspective on sometimes familiar things, or just that my curritorial
vision about the things that move me and the things
that interest me that I and the things I feel
(15:57):
this weird need to share with people comes from a
kind of strange person in strange consciousness, and like as
a result, there's like I think it is kind of
worth unpacking, and so so I end up kind of
developing this series of memoir stories. It's kind of nested
demoir stories that I think ultimately give the reader, whether
they're new to the stories or not, the sense of
(16:20):
what makes them tick through the lens of what makes
me tick. I love all of.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
That, and I loved those final stories in the book.
I was not expecting to have those and to have
kind of a personal insight into sort of some of
your thought process. We are going to take a quick break.
When we come back, we'll get to hear a show
from your podcast. The next thing that you all are
(16:55):
going to hear on the show today is one of
Nate Demeyo's episodes of the Memory Palace. It is called
the Temple of Dender, and we will.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Just let that go. This is the Memory Palace. I'm
Nate de Mau at the start of a timeline of
the history of the Temple of Dender. There's a story
that goes that Caesar Augustus, the first Roman Emperor, the
adoptive son of Julius. Caesar, after defeating Antony and Cleopatra
(17:24):
and taking over Egypt, wanted to keep his new subjects
in line, so he built a number of temples up
and down the Nile to the local gods. It was
a way to show the folks so that the new
boss wasn't so bad, he wasn't going to force some
weird new religion down their throats. And it was a
show of largesse, a splash of cash on a public
(17:45):
works project. He picked Dender, or his people picked Dender,
just north of Aswan, because there was a smaller temple
there already to two princes who drowned nearby in the Nile,
and had, through some mechanism of belief that held sway
for a relatively brief time in ancient Egypt, become gods.
And so the people of Dender had been used to
(18:05):
going to that spot already to make offerings to deities,
to ask for bountiful harvests and mild flooding and healthy
suns who wouldn't drown. And so the Romans signed off
in that location for Ahmadas structure. And a few years later,
around ten BC, there was this temple dedicated to Isis
in Osiris and the two princes. And there were men
(18:26):
there who had cut sandstone from a cliff face and
a quarry, who'd carved it into blocks, who dragged them
across the desert, who'd hefted them on their shoulders, who
were sat upon them, still warm beneath them, as sunset
cooled the air, and a breeze shook the reeds as
they floated in a flat bottom boat down the nile
where two princes had once drowned and become gods. And
(18:48):
there were men who stacked those blocks, who chiseled them
into columns and lintils and falcon faced gods, set them
in place just so sat and ate in the shade
of a wall they built with those blocks, and who
would think from time to time as their lives went on,
and they would see the temple, see it change colors
with each change of the lead, or shimmer in the
(19:10):
heat and the horizon, or see it half submerged by
the nile flooded again. They'd see this temple and think
and built that I was here, and tell their kids,
who'd say, my father built that he was here, maybe
their grandkids. Until eventually the Temple of Dender was just
landscape and landmark sandstone eroding at the next points in
(19:41):
the timeline. The story goes that travelers, explorers and soldiers
and wealthy dilettants discovered the Temple of Dender over and
over again, saw it in the distances. They came around
to bend in the river as their caravans crested a hill,
and they stopped for a spell, watered their horses or
their camels, rested for a bit in the shade of
(20:01):
its walls, and carve their names. You can see them there.
The first one is in an ancient script. Some tagger
scraped it in like two thousand years ago, but you
can still make it out. And then there's someone named
Dravetti in eighteen sixteen, and in El Pulidi in eighteen nineteen,
Leonardo Luigi Leandro. We don't know, but we can still
(20:25):
almost see him there mustachioed, sweating through wool and linen,
chipping his name in the soft stone of this temple,
that there was an antiquities dealer or thief, depending on
how you want to look at it, from Baltimore. His
name's there too. And there's a New Yorker, Lewis Braditch,
who came upon this minor temple on his way to
see better sights. It took a few moments out of
(20:48):
his grand tour one day in eighteen twenty one to
carve his name and say to history, I was here.
The story goes that the Nile flooded too high, over
and over again for millennia. That was the way of
the Nile. And there is a point on the timeline
(21:09):
in about nineteen fifty four when there were twenty three
million people in Egypt and the flooding was brutal, and
there was only one crop that year, and there was
a food shortage that threatened to become a famine but
didn't quite. And so the government decided to raise the
height of the Aswan Dam and make a lake that
could help irrigate enough land to ensure three crops a
year and food for those twenty three million, but that
(21:30):
lake would drown the Temple of Dender in many other
archaeological sites far more significant. Hundreds of tombs and towns
and forts in Abu symbol the great Temple of Ramses,
the second, the one with the four seated pharaohs carved
into the hillside. You know that one, I bet. The
Egyptian government went to the UN which was brand new
back then, and asked the nations of the world for help.
(21:54):
In fifty countries gave money to save it and save
as much of this history as they could. Aghanistan gave
two grand Togo, newly independent, gave eight hundred and fifteen
dollars in thirty cents as one of its first acts
in the international stage. President Kennedy went to Congress and
made an impassioned speech asking them to help preserve the
antiquities and to seize their own moment in history and
(22:18):
make their mark. And the United States donated twelve million dollars,
and that money paid for cranes and trucks and chisels
and contractors and archaeologists and day laborers to dismantle and
box and store as many tombs and temples as possible
like this one here before the waters rose and rose.
(22:41):
There is a point on the timeline mark November twenty second,
nineteen sixty three, when a young president was shot in
the back of a car and fell onto his young
wife beside him, and then was shot in the head
while it lay on her shoulder, and he died. And
then a couple of years later, after everything, after LBJ
(23:01):
one hand on a Bible in one in the air
on Air Force one with Jackie beside him in the
pink Channel, still bloodstand, after jack Ruby and Oswald, after
John juniors saluting, after all of it, the Egyptian government
offered the American government a temple as a thank you
for helping save so much from the flood. Other countries
(23:22):
would get stuff too, but the United States gave the
most money, so it would have first pick. And the
story goes that Jackie was asked to make the choice
because saving the temples and the like had been a
cause so dear to her late husband. That story is
not entirely accurate, but that's how the story goes. And
it goes on to say that she chose Dender. She
chose this temple because it was the most beautiful, and
(23:45):
jack would have loved it the most. And what she wanted,
what she wanted for this temple, what she wanted for
her husband, now two years dead, was to rebuild it
in Washington, d c amidst the foe Greco Roman temples
to Lincoln and Jeffrey, the fake Egyptian obelisk that is
somehow supposed to evoke Washington. She wanted to use this
(24:06):
real temple to Isis and Osiris, and to two princes
who'd drowned too young in the river and became gods,
as a memorial to the man she had once met
at a dinner party at a mutual friends place, and
then fallen in love with and set out to spend
the rest of her life with. And then the story
(24:31):
goes that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had hired a
new director. His name was Thomas Hoving. He was thirty six,
which was remarkably young for a job like that in
a place like this, especially that, but it was nineteen
sixty seven, you can find it on the timeline there,
and he was charged in part with harnessing the spirit
of that age and making them met a little less
(24:52):
stodgy within reason, certainly less sleepy people who have been
around the museum for a long time, will tell you
stories about coming here to look at art on summer
hote afternoons when school was out, when tourists were in
town and have whole wings to themselves. And Thomas Hoving
wanted to change that. He wanted crowds now. At the
same time, President Johnson was deciding what to do with
(25:12):
this gift from Egypt. He had already ruled out Jackie's
idea for a memorial. He wanted no part in deifying
his predecessor. Instead, he wanted a kind of contest. He
had museums and cities tell him why they thought they
were the best place in America for an Egyptian temple,
not much of one, admittedly didn't come with any mummies
(25:35):
or anything. Wasn't even all that old. But there were
proposals from all over. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,
the Smithsonian, Memphis, Tennessee, and Cairo, Illinois pitched their respective
downtowns because they were named after cities in Egypt and
would not be cool. And now you listening to this
story about a temple at the met while maybe looking
(25:55):
at that same temple at the Met, have a pretty
good hunch how all this turns out. But the story
here is that Hoving made a choice. He too knew
this wasn't much of a temple. There were already dozens
of objects in the Museum's Egyptian art department far more important.
He knew that it would cost a fortune to bring
it here. He knew it had questionable esthetic and historic value.
(26:16):
But he also knew that you and I wouldn't really care,
and he wanted to leave his mark on the history
of the med You wanted to say I was here.
There's a black stripe that stretches along a section of
the timeline of the history of the Temple of Dender.
It delineates the period of protracted competition and debate over
who would get to have it. But that section is
(26:38):
super boring, so we'll skip over it. But there's one
part of that story worth telling, and we'll mark it
with its own little dot. When Thomas Hoving ran into
some particularly thorny obstacle in the process, he called Jackie Kennedy,
who was just about to get remarried, and Hoving asked
her if she could help, if she could put in
(26:59):
a word with President Johnson on behalf of the met,
she said, and Hoving said he wrote it downward for word.
I want it to be built in the center of
Washington as a memorial to Jack. I don't care about
the MET. I don't care about New York, she said.
I don't care if the temple crumbles into sand. The
(27:24):
story goes that the Temple of Dender sat in pieces
on an island in the middle of the Nile for
almost twenty years. Then it was packed up into six
hundred and sixty one crates, sent up the river tamed
by the dam by then, and loaded onto a Norwegian
freighter and borne across waves to New York. That was
nineteen sixty eight. It sat around for nearly a decade.
(27:45):
They built a plastic dome outside the museum where conservatives
could work on it and keep it out of the elements.
They were mostly waiting for a new wing to be
built in a room here with a high ceiling in
a wall of glass looking out onto the park, specifically
to house the Temple of Dender, And then curators and
teamsters and workmen brought it inside and put it back together.
(28:08):
They are still around, a lot of them still saying
surely to themselves to their kids, to the grandkids, now
that they built this, that they were here. And there's
another point on the timeline, another part of the story.
(28:32):
The Times wrote it up. One day they were rebuilding
the temple, scaffolding, hard hats, ancient dust catching the light
through the windows, and work just stopped because Jackie Onassis
and her daughter Caroline, who was just about to turn eighteen,
came into the room. Jackie lived a block away. It
(28:53):
was nineteen seventy five. It had been twelve years since
her husband had been shot in the head while it
lay on her shoulder. The Times didn't record what she
said or know what she felt, of course, just that
she looked around a while and signed autographs to the workers.
(29:16):
And the timeline stretches on with a point marking the
opening reception in nineteen seventy eight. Champagne flutes wide lapels.
There's a point placed at Hoving's death in two thousand
and nine. Dender is mentioned right near the top of
his obituary. There are new placards in the wall opposite
the park. The old ones had yelled with age, we'll
(29:38):
mark a point for their arrival. The curators are very
proud of them. They are filled with all sorts of
details that will help the curious visitor place this temple
in its proper historical context to understand what distinguishes it
built as it was in the so called Roman period
thirty b c. To six forty eight D from temples
of earlier epics. Those epics traditionally be being distinguished by
(30:02):
various things. There's a point for the teachers telling school
groups the story explaining how this minor temple comes from
the tail end of what we think of as ancient Egypt,
the golden sarcophagus is and mummies and stuff, the time
when the old gods were on their way out, and
explain that we are closer in time to its construction
right now by almost five hundred years than the construction
(30:26):
of the Pyramids and the Sphinx were to the men
who built this temple and sat in its shade. But
you can just tell that. The story when the kids
get home will be, mom, I saw the place where
they put the mummies, and good for them. Mark a
point for the night when one of those kids sleeps
in dreams of Dender. Mark a point for the selfie
(30:49):
taken at arm's length. The tourists saying I was here.
Another for the security guard saying no flash please, for
the ggillanth time that day. One for the toddler eyeing
the pool with the papyrus, with his parents warning him
away lest he be drowned and deified. Mark a point
(31:11):
for each change in the light and how they change,
how the temple looks, and mark a point for you
here now. This episode is written and produced and stuffed
(32:28):
by me Nate Demeyo of The Memory Palace podcast, and
executive produced by Lemore Tomer, general Manager of Live Arts
at the met with research assistants from Andrea Milln and
engineering assistance from Elica Dudley. My residency is made possible
by the Metropolitan Museum of Arts chester Dale Fund. The
Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network
(32:50):
from PRX which receives support from the Knight Foundation and
from its generous listeners. Learn more about The Memory Palace
at the Memory Palace dot org and subscribe on iTunes,
Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
So now that everyone has heard the Temple of Dender,
something I found very interesting about this episode of your
show is the fact that it was at it was
done as part of your residency at the MET and
I remember when that residency happened. I thought it was
such a cool opportunity to combine museum with an audio
(33:42):
production and to put all of these things together. And
now this has moved into a new medium of a book,
and it gave you the opportunity to follow up the
episode with another chapter basically of the book that is
parts excised from that story. Do you want to talk
about that a little bit, how that evolved.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Yeah? Absolutely, you know, I absolutely love being the artis
and residence of the Metropal Museum of Art. And it's
still like it's it's still the off chance that I
get to go these days is a West Coaster. Boys,
it's still really cool to see a little plaque that
says the name of a thing that says the name
of one of the episodes that I produced, and then
my name like then like American born nineteen seventy four,
(34:25):
as though it's just like any other artwork, and that
it met It's incredible, And I really, you know, in
doing these stories about like the stuff that moves you,
there's just like nothing sort of more kind of magical
than some of these incredible spaces that they've created in
the Met, and so you know, to create a story
(34:46):
about you know, to be listened to ideally in one
of those spaces, but also that is something that's so
iconic to the museum. And then to kind of like
draw out the sort of like wonder in the mundanity
of that story is really where the Memory Palace lives.
Like the notion that this can be this run of
the mill, you know, minor temple, but that has been
(35:08):
imbued with such meaning over the years is a thing
that just I find enduringly fascinating. And when I was
walking around the Met looking for stuff to do stories
about and talking to the curators about it, and there's
no there's nothing more fun in the world than talking
to an expert about the thing that they love and
so revealed. To get to do that was such a thrill,
(35:29):
and I was like, oh, cool, So I'm going to
do this story about this American painting, and I'm going
to do this story about these objects, and that I'm
going to do a story about the Temple of Dender
and I just wanted to be really straightforward. I want
to call it the Temple of Dender, and I was told, yeah,
you can't do that the way a minute I thought
I was like the Arts of Residence. I thought that, like,
you know, I had free rein to do whatever I want, Like, yeah,
(35:49):
of course, if you're in too, do whatever you want,
that's fine. But you can't actually just call a thing
the Temple of Dender, because it turns out, as many
people know at this point, that that and I did
not that that the Temple of Dender in every mention,
in every uh you know, in every publication that the
MET does in this and this would fall under that category,
had to buy buy a contractual agreement, uh say that
(36:16):
it was the Temple of Dender in the Sackler wing,
of the Sackler Gallery, of the Sackler whatever, sponsored by
the Sackler family, you know who made their money, uh,
you know, first in medical antiseptics, but then selling drugs
directly to using doctors to sell drugs directly to patients.
And they made so much of their fortune. I'm selling
(36:39):
oxygon to people. Not only was this a key component
to the history of the Temple of Dender that I
could never quite find a way to tell even you know,
with the residency of the Met there, which is something about, uh,
the story began to overwhelm it in which didn't feel
(37:00):
it just didn't feel right to the kind of magic
of that place and the magic frankly of what the
Met has built there. And so I was like, oh,
I feel like this, this now needs to be a
thing that like becomes part of the story because it's
very clear, and it kept sort of trying to shoehorn
it into the story and it just everything kept falling apart,
(37:22):
and I realized that it needed its own addendum, It
needed its own sort of moment and the kind of
like shifting sun of the gallery of the Met. And
it was one of these kind of cool opportunities that
the book provided, like that to be able to kind
of return to that story, to tell how the Sacklers
became involved, and to tell ultimately, you know, how activists
(37:43):
led by Nandgoles and the artists were able to you know,
change the history of that, to put their own mark
on that room and put their own mark in, you know,
their own place in the timeline. It felt like kind
of a real gift to the book. And also just
to be able to frankly restore the very simple title
this is always supposed to be the temple vendor, and
and it now candy again.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Has there been any other thing or person or whatever
that you've covered on your show that you have later
wanted to have some kind of a dendum to clarify
anything about it at any nuance anything like that, You.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Know, not too often, because the truth of the matter
is like like for a Memory Palace story to feel finished,
then I kind of need to figure out what it
means to me, Like it really comes down to that,
Like that one, you know, finds a story about, you know,
as we both do, as we trawl or we just
stumble upon exciting things, and one finds a story about
(38:48):
Ruth Harkness and Interpanda. And on the one end, it's
a very it's a very easy story to make cool
because it's a very cool story. There are like lots
of interesting facts and exciting incident. But the question always,
you know, I have this, I have a list. It
is dozens and dozens and dozens of potential topics long.
I'm sure you guys have the same kind of file.
And I look at it sometimes and I'm like, how
(39:11):
come there's absolutely nothing I want to tell a story.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
About I have the exact same experience.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
Like, and also you're just like, why did I ever
care about that thing? Then, over time, sometimes like something
frankly often like occurs in your life and you'll say like, oh,
I realize that this is a story about having aging parents,
or oh, I realize that this is a story about
an ambition of a certain type of thing that I'm
currently now feeling this is about. And so I wait
(39:38):
for that feeling. I wait for, like, this is the
thing I want to say about the world to pair
up with one of those stories. And so suddenly, like
Ruth Harkness, the story you know, comes a little bit
about like these times in your life when you let
yourself like go on an adventure, and that can be
a true adventure like Ruth goes on, or it can
be just like, oh, I pursued this thing that took
(40:01):
me beyond what I thought it might be capable of,
and that you go and do that thing and it
kind of fills your life in a certain way and
and everything feels right. And I was very moved by
the fact that she, you know, as her life falls apart,
as frankly often it happens in these stories that you know,
when one thing about history is get the whole span
(40:22):
of the life. And I am very interested in what
happens to people after they do the thing we know
them for, and how they reckon with it and how
it lives with them. Ruth's story is one of these
things where you know, you think back to it and
I'm so interested in, like, oh, like things felt right
for her for a while and then they don't. And
there's something I find a lot of sort of particular
(40:43):
sadness it was worth exploring in there. But that said,
so when the memory Palace feels done, it feels done,
like it feels like, oh, I've said the thing I
need to say, and there might be like extra stuff,
but I kind of wish I could get in there,
and there might. But that usually means so let's wait
for another time to like tell that other aspect, let's
wait for a different meaning as opposed to like, let's
(41:05):
just get some more information in there. Does that make sense?
It does?
Speaker 1 (41:09):
It definitely does. And I think that's sort of one
of the things that's reflective of differences between the way
your show works and the way our show works, because
ours is often a very this happened, and then this happened,
and then this happened. Chronological story, and so occasionally there
will be a discovery about one of the things that
(41:29):
we thought happened that didn't really happen, or you know,
a realization somebody will find, you know, some previously unknown
document that reveals new insight.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
That did happen in this book now that I think
about it, you know, But it was not one of
those things where I'm like, oh great, here's an opportunity
to revisit this story or add to it. It was like, oh, shoot,
I have to reckon with this. And that is the
story of Hercules was an enslaved you know, a person
enslaved by George Washington. When I did that story originally,
like too that fifteen or something like that, the end
(42:03):
of the story hinged upon the wonder and strangeness and
kind of magic of the notion that after his escape,
like people lose track of him, and that you know,
in that he can kind of only live on in
our imagination on some level, this real person who has
become this thing. And if that's the case, then like
(42:24):
let's make sure that we hold him in a similar
way in our imaginations that we hold George Washington and
let's hang his you know, his memories and sort of like,
you know, the crime of the ownership of this man
on George Washington, and let's like let's keep that going
and like, let's we have the ability to kind of
control what we take from the story, and this is
what I'd like you to take. And it turns out
(42:46):
that six months after I released that episode, they figure
out where he went. And I did not know that,
Like I just I missed the news because it was
not at proper front page news. And during the fact
checking process, someone's someone's like, excuse me, it's like oh,
And so so there was this real question about like, oh,
this thing needs an entirely different ending, and this is
(43:07):
a story I like, and there's a real value in this,
and there's value within the kind of like construct of
this book to have this type of story in there.
At this particular moment, I'm like, oh, but then one
has to find not just a different ending, you know,
it's not it's not it's not a language question, it's
a meaning question. How does this change the meaning? And yeah,
and it was a it was a surprise challenge, but
(43:31):
one that again. So it was kind of lovely to
immerse myself again sort of in that moment and kind
of see like, oh, have I did what I got
out of it? Then not only does it hold up
under these new facts, but does it also hold up,
you know, several years later as I have changed. Yeah,
it was exciting to revisit it.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
So is there anything that you want to make sure
that people really know about this book or your podcast,
what you're working on, any of that.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
I like to think of what I do in terms
of like writing these short stories that every two weeks
I'll be the podcast and then you know, more often.
When I was working on this book, I've discovered that
I really have this like it's almost it's almost become
like a yoga practice, where like it just does me
good to think about the past. It does me good
(44:20):
to think about the way that lives go, and it
does me good to remember that we're all going to
die someday and then our time is short. And I've
just find such value in sort of like writing these things,
and I really do think about like the value of
the stories themselves, and in what I kind of want
someone to get out of and the truth is like
(44:41):
I kind of wanted people to get what I put
into it. I don't mean that like the sweat. I
just mean that, like I like to think of these
stories as having the ability, when they work well, to
kind of like inject like a little shot of feeling
into one's life. Like we are all and I certainly
am just like wrapped up in the kind of like
(45:01):
in the just whirr and sputter of the every day.
And I want each of these stories to kind of
just have the ability to kind of like shift your
day a little bit, if that makes any sense. Yeah,
And again, I want this to be the like I
want the podcast to kind of be like the thing
that can like to bring like sort of like genuine
wonder in like the strangeness of the world into like
(45:24):
the span of a dog walk. And I want, you know,
this book to be this thing that like sits on
your shelf or you have in your pocket book or
you have you know, in your carry on bag that
like you know that at each turn you're going to start,
you don't know where you're going to go, but that
you'll be like that things will be a little different
on the other end of the story, I.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
Love all of that. Having read this, this is really
it's It's such a lovely book, and I think it's
the exactly the kind of book that I would if
I had not just read the entire thing preparing to
talk to you about it. Definitely the kind of book
that I would have nearby for when I had a
moment and needed a moment to sort of reset my
(46:08):
brain and my perspective. Also, every time I hear the
words this is the Memory Palace, I'm Nate Demeyo, I
feel comforted, even though I know there is a chance
that what I'm about to hear is going to be heartbreaking.
So take that as you will. Listeners, I said earlier,
you have been on our show once before. If folks
(46:30):
are listening right now and are thinking, I want to
hear this other episode where they talked to Nate Demeyo,
Holly and I both interviewed you on June tenth of
twenty fifteen. That's when that came out, so long ago.
And your book is being published by Random House on
November nineteenth of this year, which is twenty twenty four, right,
(46:51):
that's correct, So if you haven't heard The Memory Palace before,
you can find the Memory Palace on anywhere you get
your podcasts, same with us. I'm with Stuff you miss
in History Class anywhere you get your podcasts. Thank you,
thank you, Thank you so much, Nate for talking to
me today. I hope everyone has enjoyed listening to you
and listening to your show today.
Speaker 2 (47:12):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
and Holly is not here today, so instead I have
a very special guest, which is Nate Demeyo of the
(00:22):
podcast The Memory Palace and also author of the forthcoming
book The Memory Palace, which is coming out from Random
House on November nineteenth. If you're not familiar with Nate's show,
you will get a chance to change that in just
a few minutes. Hi, Nate, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I am so happy to be here. I'm a longtime
fan of the show.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
I'm a longtime fan of your show. Also, you have
been on our show once before. That was nine years ago,
which is hard to believe. At that time you had
sixty five episodes. Now there are more than two hundred
and twenty episodes of your show from just looking at
the website today. How are we both still doing this?
(01:06):
I guess that's my first question. Does it surprise you
that all these years later we're both still doing the
same thing?
Speaker 2 (01:13):
You know, it does and it doesn't. On the one hand,
you know, nine years so I was realizing that I
am this is my fifteenth year of doing the Memory Palace.
I'm about to enter my sixteenth year, and that is
sort of insane. And it's been easy for me to
keep track of that because it kind of started shortly
after my daughter was born and I was like, oh,
I need to make sure I have like a creative
(01:34):
outlet that I'm like building and and she's she's about
to turn sixteenth in a couple of weeks. So here
we are. Wow. Yeah, But that's the thing that is
actually more surprising than just its longevity is the notion
that you know, nine years ago felt like we've been
doing for a long time. It felt like we were
really it did. It really did. But on the on
(01:54):
the other hand, like I discovered fairly early on when
I started to do the short narrative his you know,
historical stories put them to music, kind of found a
voice that was you know, factually accurate, but also a
little bit dreamy and a little bit you know, focused
on sort of wonder and uh and kind of just
(02:16):
like the mystery of not just like the mystery of
living in the past, but living in the present with
the past, you know, the way that just for people
who love historical stories like we do in thinking about
it that just kind of like magic place that invoking
the past and the people that live there kind of
brings out in you. I really discovered fairly early on
as I started doing this that setting aside, you know,
(02:40):
careerism and setting setting aside deadlines, there was just something
I found personally useful and kind of exciting about doing
these stories and about like taking the time to to
read about, uh, you know, these figures and forgotten moments
and you know, you know, find words you know and
find words in music, and the combination of those two
(03:01):
things to like kind of share that sort of wonder
that experiencing those things like brought out in me and
share them with listeners and so like, as a result,
like this just kind of feels like a thing. I
feel like I found a thing that was useful to
my life, and as a result, it feels like a
thing I'm just kind of going to be doing in
some capacity forever. Like I felt like I stumbled upon
(03:22):
a venue in the podcast to like express these things.
So on the one hand, like, yeah, sixteen years is
a very long time, But in the other hand, it's
a little bit of like, yeah, this is my life now,
and it remains a big and vital part of it.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
I love that it sort of reminds me of how
I used to say that the first thing I found
that I was really good at was being in college.
And when I was hired to write for the website
HowStuffWorks dot com, which is a totally different website now
than it was when they hired me, I was like
being in college again, because I was spending all of
(03:57):
my time learning something and then writing about what I learned.
And now my job is still that, but now I
say the thing into a microphone afterward, and so it
continues to be sort of an evolution of the first
thing that I found that I thought I was good
at and also enjoyed.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
That's exactly right. And the truth of the matter, too,
is there's also that aspect of like, at some point
your spouse or your friend or the person at the
bar gets a little bit tired of you saying, oh,
I just learned this amazing thing and putting now you
can put it out into the you know, one puts
it out into the air in hopes that the people
that will be excited will find it.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yeah, so stuff you Missed in History Class and The
Memory Palace. These are both podcasts about history. Obviously, you
and I and Holly, all three of us are taking
an approach that a lot of people describe as thoughtful,
but your shows are like a third the length of
virus most of the time. The last time you were
on the show, we talked about the fact that you
(04:55):
have some episodes that are five minutes long, that Holly
and I get into the same store and we wind
up with two thirty to forty minute episodes. Something you
talk about in your book that I think sort of
highlighted the way that we are each approaching history in
ways that are both similar and different. Is you talked
(05:16):
about that all of the stories you cover on your
show start with something that moved you. Holly and I
often talk about starting with things that interest us. So
sort of your show starts with kind of a thoughtful
meditation on something that moved you, while Holly and I
(05:36):
are more explaining all the things that we found interesting
about a particular subject. So can you tell us a
little bit about, like what has led you to focus
so much on being moved by something and on that
level of emotional impact in historical stories.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, I think that similar to your notion of like
that the thing that that click for you was when
you found a job that felt like you were back
in college. For me, when I first got into journalism,
there was just this sense of like I was a
kid and then a young adult who was always like, oh,
I'm one of those people who's kind of like good
in a number of different things and interested in a
(06:15):
ton of different stuff, and it's hard to choose. I
was one of one of those people, and in journalism,
and now the memory Palace like kind of allows me
not to choose. It's like it puts the value on like, oh,
I am interested in a lot of different stuff. And
so yes, there is that interest that one might be
interested in how bridges are constructed, and one might be
(06:35):
interested in the invention of the zipper or or what
happened at this battle or that battle. But the thing
that I find when I go to museums and the
things that I find when I read history is that
like that over and over again. What that spark where
I'm sort of like, oh, I do need to go
tell this to my spouse, I do want to text
my friend about that thing? Is that this thing has
(06:58):
moved me, and like I mean that like in the
in this straightforward sense like that it has like spurred
some emotion. It has made me think nostalgically about old friends.
It has taught me something about parenting. It has you know,
just like like thrilled me with like, oh my god,
I cannot believe that people live that way how you know,
and reminded me that we live differently and that notion
(07:22):
of being moved like to me, it's, uh, that's you know,
that's what I look for in life. It's what I
look for in a movie, is that I want to
you know, come out and feel a little bit differently
than I went in. And I just kind of had
discovered that that was true of the past, that there
was this kind of like magic that the that the
past held for me, like that it was this kind
(07:44):
of like imaginative space that you could go back and
you could read about George Washington, or you could go
back and you could read about you know, Shipwreck Kelly,
the guy who became you know, famous for you know,
sitting on tall objects for inordinate amounts of time, and
that real space. These are these are real things that
happen to real people. But what it really is doing
(08:04):
is it's exciting your imagination. Like that, reading about history
when it's good is no different than reading a than
reading a novel. And I wanted to create a show
that took that approach to history. And it doesn't mean that,
you know, you know that, it doesn't mean that I'm
any less serious about getting the fact straight. But I
(08:25):
have always been very feeling forward when it comes to
experiencing that stuff, and so the format that made the
most sense to me was also very feeling forward, Like
I want to create a show and write stories for
this book about history that make you feel, things that
that break your heart, that delight you. And yeah, and
(08:47):
there's something you know when I when I read my
own book, as I did recently with my audio, you know,
with with sections of my audiobook, I'm like, boy, this
is an earnest person. That's just it is the truth.
Like it is a very feelings forward approach to history,
in a very wonder focused approach, and it continues to
(09:09):
delight and drive me from story to story.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
Well, let me please you to know that I started
crying while reading your book about a story that not
only did I already know but that we also have
covered on our podcast, which was about Ruth Harkness and
the first panda brought to the United States and just
(09:32):
sort of the discussion of Ruth and who she was
and thinking about what her interior world was like. As
all of that was going on, I was sitting at
my desk and realized, I was, like, I've been moved
to tears by this thing that I already feel very
intimately familiar with.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
That's in yeah, I know, I think that that. Really
I think all the time about why we remember the
things we remember, you know that like in some of
it is, oh, I remember that experience I have at
the park, that scary experience, because you know, our bodies
are telling us to remember the trauma of that. But
I also like think a lot about the kind of
inverse of trauma, just that things that are so delightful,
(10:10):
like things that like allow you to connect with with
another human being, Like those are the other things you remember?
You remember that you know, novel exciting day with a
parent when they took you to the park when you
weren't expecting to go to the park, or something like that.
And I think all the time about like why it
is that I remember, you know, certain events in my life.
We are constantly like inundated with historical information like you do,
(10:32):
like not just because we might be history buffs, but
things pop up on the internet. I think you know
things in your Instagram reel. There are all these like
little you know facts about history, but there just aren't
that many that are the ones that like make you
suddenly tear up, or that you know again, make you
want to, you know, turn to your spouse or text
your friend. And I've come to really like trust those
(10:53):
things and be fascinated by why those are the things
that move me, Like why is it the story you
know of Ruth Harkness and this woman going out to
continue her husband's mission to find a panda, her recently
deceased husband's mission to bring it live panda back to
the United States, the first one you know that will
leave China. And when those things move me, then I
(11:17):
turn around to try to figure out, like, how can
I also share this experience with someone else? And I'm
glad that it seems like it worked in this in
this case.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
My next question was going to be about how you
decided which stories to put in the book, And I'm
imagining that everything you just said was probably a big
influence on that.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah, I think so. You know, I grew up really
loving kind of anthology books, you know, whether it was
just sort of like the Book of Lists or like
Ripley's Believe It or not, like these like these books
of these short little pieces of different types like just
held such sway on my like young reader life. But
that's not really a thing that exists as we as
we become adults. Like there are magazines and magazines kind
(12:00):
of have that can have that magic. But I wanted
to kind of create one of those kind of like
magic books that you get lost in. But ultimately that
was one for adults that these were that these were
going to be stories that had like heft and that
had you know, depth, that you did have the ability
to move you and to you know, potentially change you
or change the way you think, you know, not just
(12:20):
about the past, but things, you know, the way that
you might live your life in the present, like you know,
to be really kind of pretentious about it, but I
also wanted to just simply have the power to kind
of change your day that you have this book of
these short stories that you can like I really for
the first time in a long time. The Memory Palace,
you know, has always just kind of been this, you know,
nice evocative name. But I kind of wanted to create
(12:42):
something that felt like wandering in through a museum, one
that you could take at your own pace, you know,
one that you could read a couple of stories and
put down, you know, one that you could pick up
in the middle and see a picture that grabbed you
and just start there. Like I wanted to create like
a book that was like a little bit of a
port or something like that. And so as a result,
it just kind of became this this you know, practical
(13:06):
question of how many stories should be pre existing stories
that people love from the podcast, how many of these
stories should be new, how many stories should be you know,
favorites that people who have listen, been listening for a
long time, you know, will want to have the opportunity
to kind of own and hold in their hands, you know,
which is an opportunity that like, you know, as fans,
as a person who loves your show, it's like I
(13:27):
don't quite have like there is not that chance to
just like, you know, in the same way that you
know that there are episodes of yours that I love
and in the same ways that I might love like that,
I might have like loved a book, but there's just
it would be nice to have that episode on my shelf,
and it's been nice to give people the opportunity to
do that. And so someone is like, which ones might
(13:48):
people want to read and own and hold, Which one
of these are simply just the best of what I've done,
Which one of these frankly will work well on the page.
There are some stories that are clearly audio stories from
the podcasts that because they have you know, a bit
of audio, or there's just something about the way the
music needs to work, or there's just something about the
way that I need to dictate pace with my voice
(14:10):
that simply just don't hold up on the page or
don't work as well on the page. So there are
those considerations, and then there was you know, also considerations
about what opportunities does a book present. And for me,
a lot of that was visual, So I created you
know a number of news stories that you know, hinge
upon seeing images, which created you know, a whole set
of stories that are about photographs, but also about the
(14:33):
history of photography and about sort of the history of
seeing in the history of living with visual records of
our lives and our memories, which was its own opportunity.
But then there was also a question that came from
the publisher, which is essentially like, is this a chance
that you have to kind of like let people under
the hood who do like the show, like to kind
(14:54):
of like let them know, like where these stories come
from or that sort of thing. And every idea that
pitched on that sounded like bad DVD commentary, you know,
and it was just like no, no, no, I want
to like like, I would be delighted if every Memory
Palace listener bought this book. But the truth of that
is like this is a great opportunity to get in
front of people or are just readers and notion of
(15:15):
like like, hey, this story that you just read about
Ruth Darkness, let me tell you where that came from.
Like that's not the way books work, Like they don't
come with that sort of experience. But I ultimately, like
did find as I was compiling the book and as
I was you know, really engaging with the breadth of
the work over the course of all of these years,
(15:37):
I just kept having this feeling that like I'm kind
of an odd duck, Like this is an odd passion
that I have, and this is like a slightly skewed
perspective on sometimes familiar things, or just that my curritorial
vision about the things that move me and the things
that interest me that I and the things I feel
(15:57):
this weird need to share with people comes from a
kind of strange person in strange consciousness, and like as
a result, there's like I think it is kind of
worth unpacking, and so so I end up kind of
developing this series of memoir stories. It's kind of nested
demoir stories that I think ultimately give the reader, whether
they're new to the stories or not, the sense of
(16:20):
what makes them tick through the lens of what makes
me tick. I love all of.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
That, and I loved those final stories in the book.
I was not expecting to have those and to have
kind of a personal insight into sort of some of
your thought process. We are going to take a quick break.
When we come back, we'll get to hear a show
from your podcast. The next thing that you all are
(16:55):
going to hear on the show today is one of
Nate Demeyo's episodes of the Memory Palace. It is called
the Temple of Dender, and we will.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Just let that go. This is the Memory Palace. I'm
Nate de Mau at the start of a timeline of
the history of the Temple of Dender. There's a story
that goes that Caesar Augustus, the first Roman Emperor, the
adoptive son of Julius. Caesar, after defeating Antony and Cleopatra
(17:24):
and taking over Egypt, wanted to keep his new subjects
in line, so he built a number of temples up
and down the Nile to the local gods. It was
a way to show the folks so that the new
boss wasn't so bad, he wasn't going to force some
weird new religion down their throats. And it was a
show of largesse, a splash of cash on a public
(17:45):
works project. He picked Dender, or his people picked Dender,
just north of Aswan, because there was a smaller temple
there already to two princes who drowned nearby in the Nile,
and had, through some mechanism of belief that held sway
for a relatively brief time in ancient Egypt, become gods.
And so the people of Dender had been used to
(18:05):
going to that spot already to make offerings to deities,
to ask for bountiful harvests and mild flooding and healthy
suns who wouldn't drown. And so the Romans signed off
in that location for Ahmadas structure. And a few years later,
around ten BC, there was this temple dedicated to Isis
in Osiris and the two princes. And there were men
(18:26):
there who had cut sandstone from a cliff face and
a quarry, who'd carved it into blocks, who dragged them
across the desert, who'd hefted them on their shoulders, who
were sat upon them, still warm beneath them, as sunset
cooled the air, and a breeze shook the reeds as
they floated in a flat bottom boat down the nile
where two princes had once drowned and become gods. And
(18:48):
there were men who stacked those blocks, who chiseled them
into columns and lintils and falcon faced gods, set them
in place just so sat and ate in the shade
of a wall they built with those blocks, and who
would think from time to time as their lives went on,
and they would see the temple, see it change colors
with each change of the lead, or shimmer in the
(19:10):
heat and the horizon, or see it half submerged by
the nile flooded again. They'd see this temple and think
and built that I was here, and tell their kids,
who'd say, my father built that he was here, maybe
their grandkids. Until eventually the Temple of Dender was just
landscape and landmark sandstone eroding at the next points in
(19:41):
the timeline. The story goes that travelers, explorers and soldiers
and wealthy dilettants discovered the Temple of Dender over and
over again, saw it in the distances. They came around
to bend in the river as their caravans crested a hill,
and they stopped for a spell, watered their horses or
their camels, rested for a bit in the shade of
(20:01):
its walls, and carve their names. You can see them there.
The first one is in an ancient script. Some tagger
scraped it in like two thousand years ago, but you
can still make it out. And then there's someone named
Dravetti in eighteen sixteen, and in El Pulidi in eighteen nineteen,
Leonardo Luigi Leandro. We don't know, but we can still
(20:25):
almost see him there mustachioed, sweating through wool and linen,
chipping his name in the soft stone of this temple,
that there was an antiquities dealer or thief, depending on
how you want to look at it, from Baltimore. His
name's there too. And there's a New Yorker, Lewis Braditch,
who came upon this minor temple on his way to
see better sights. It took a few moments out of
(20:48):
his grand tour one day in eighteen twenty one to
carve his name and say to history, I was here.
The story goes that the Nile flooded too high, over
and over again for millennia. That was the way of
the Nile. And there is a point on the timeline
(21:09):
in about nineteen fifty four when there were twenty three
million people in Egypt and the flooding was brutal, and
there was only one crop that year, and there was
a food shortage that threatened to become a famine but
didn't quite. And so the government decided to raise the
height of the Aswan Dam and make a lake that
could help irrigate enough land to ensure three crops a
year and food for those twenty three million, but that
(21:30):
lake would drown the Temple of Dender in many other
archaeological sites far more significant. Hundreds of tombs and towns
and forts in Abu symbol the great Temple of Ramses,
the second, the one with the four seated pharaohs carved
into the hillside. You know that one, I bet. The
Egyptian government went to the UN which was brand new
back then, and asked the nations of the world for help.
(21:54):
In fifty countries gave money to save it and save
as much of this history as they could. Aghanistan gave
two grand Togo, newly independent, gave eight hundred and fifteen
dollars in thirty cents as one of its first acts
in the international stage. President Kennedy went to Congress and
made an impassioned speech asking them to help preserve the
antiquities and to seize their own moment in history and
(22:18):
make their mark. And the United States donated twelve million dollars,
and that money paid for cranes and trucks and chisels
and contractors and archaeologists and day laborers to dismantle and
box and store as many tombs and temples as possible
like this one here before the waters rose and rose.
(22:41):
There is a point on the timeline mark November twenty second,
nineteen sixty three, when a young president was shot in
the back of a car and fell onto his young
wife beside him, and then was shot in the head
while it lay on her shoulder, and he died. And
then a couple of years later, after everything, after LBJ
(23:01):
one hand on a Bible in one in the air
on Air Force one with Jackie beside him in the
pink Channel, still bloodstand, after jack Ruby and Oswald, after
John juniors saluting, after all of it, the Egyptian government
offered the American government a temple as a thank you
for helping save so much from the flood. Other countries
(23:22):
would get stuff too, but the United States gave the
most money, so it would have first pick. And the
story goes that Jackie was asked to make the choice
because saving the temples and the like had been a
cause so dear to her late husband. That story is
not entirely accurate, but that's how the story goes. And
it goes on to say that she chose Dender. She
chose this temple because it was the most beautiful, and
(23:45):
jack would have loved it the most. And what she wanted,
what she wanted for this temple, what she wanted for
her husband, now two years dead, was to rebuild it
in Washington, d c amidst the foe Greco Roman temples
to Lincoln and Jeffrey, the fake Egyptian obelisk that is
somehow supposed to evoke Washington. She wanted to use this
(24:06):
real temple to Isis and Osiris, and to two princes
who'd drowned too young in the river and became gods,
as a memorial to the man she had once met
at a dinner party at a mutual friends place, and
then fallen in love with and set out to spend
the rest of her life with. And then the story
(24:31):
goes that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had hired a
new director. His name was Thomas Hoving. He was thirty six,
which was remarkably young for a job like that in
a place like this, especially that, but it was nineteen
sixty seven, you can find it on the timeline there,
and he was charged in part with harnessing the spirit
of that age and making them met a little less
(24:52):
stodgy within reason, certainly less sleepy people who have been
around the museum for a long time, will tell you
stories about coming here to look at art on summer
hote afternoons when school was out, when tourists were in
town and have whole wings to themselves. And Thomas Hoving
wanted to change that. He wanted crowds now. At the
same time, President Johnson was deciding what to do with
(25:12):
this gift from Egypt. He had already ruled out Jackie's
idea for a memorial. He wanted no part in deifying
his predecessor. Instead, he wanted a kind of contest. He
had museums and cities tell him why they thought they
were the best place in America for an Egyptian temple,
not much of one, admittedly didn't come with any mummies
(25:35):
or anything. Wasn't even all that old. But there were
proposals from all over. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston,
the Smithsonian, Memphis, Tennessee, and Cairo, Illinois pitched their respective
downtowns because they were named after cities in Egypt and
would not be cool. And now you listening to this
story about a temple at the met while maybe looking
(25:55):
at that same temple at the Met, have a pretty
good hunch how all this turns out. But the story
here is that Hoving made a choice. He too knew
this wasn't much of a temple. There were already dozens
of objects in the Museum's Egyptian art department far more important.
He knew that it would cost a fortune to bring
it here. He knew it had questionable esthetic and historic value.
(26:16):
But he also knew that you and I wouldn't really care,
and he wanted to leave his mark on the history
of the med You wanted to say I was here.
There's a black stripe that stretches along a section of
the timeline of the history of the Temple of Dender.
It delineates the period of protracted competition and debate over
who would get to have it. But that section is
(26:38):
super boring, so we'll skip over it. But there's one
part of that story worth telling, and we'll mark it
with its own little dot. When Thomas Hoving ran into
some particularly thorny obstacle in the process, he called Jackie Kennedy,
who was just about to get remarried, and Hoving asked
her if she could help, if she could put in
(26:59):
a word with President Johnson on behalf of the met,
she said, and Hoving said he wrote it downward for word.
I want it to be built in the center of
Washington as a memorial to Jack. I don't care about
the MET. I don't care about New York, she said.
I don't care if the temple crumbles into sand. The
(27:24):
story goes that the Temple of Dender sat in pieces
on an island in the middle of the Nile for
almost twenty years. Then it was packed up into six
hundred and sixty one crates, sent up the river tamed
by the dam by then, and loaded onto a Norwegian
freighter and borne across waves to New York. That was
nineteen sixty eight. It sat around for nearly a decade.
(27:45):
They built a plastic dome outside the museum where conservatives
could work on it and keep it out of the elements.
They were mostly waiting for a new wing to be
built in a room here with a high ceiling in
a wall of glass looking out onto the park, specifically
to house the Temple of Dender, And then curators and
teamsters and workmen brought it inside and put it back together.
(28:08):
They are still around, a lot of them still saying
surely to themselves to their kids, to the grandkids, now
that they built this, that they were here. And there's
another point on the timeline, another part of the story.
(28:32):
The Times wrote it up. One day they were rebuilding
the temple, scaffolding, hard hats, ancient dust catching the light
through the windows, and work just stopped because Jackie Onassis
and her daughter Caroline, who was just about to turn eighteen,
came into the room. Jackie lived a block away. It
(28:53):
was nineteen seventy five. It had been twelve years since
her husband had been shot in the head while it
lay on her shoulder. The Times didn't record what she
said or know what she felt, of course, just that
she looked around a while and signed autographs to the workers.
(29:16):
And the timeline stretches on with a point marking the
opening reception in nineteen seventy eight. Champagne flutes wide lapels.
There's a point placed at Hoving's death in two thousand
and nine. Dender is mentioned right near the top of
his obituary. There are new placards in the wall opposite
the park. The old ones had yelled with age, we'll
(29:38):
mark a point for their arrival. The curators are very
proud of them. They are filled with all sorts of
details that will help the curious visitor place this temple
in its proper historical context to understand what distinguishes it
built as it was in the so called Roman period
thirty b c. To six forty eight D from temples
of earlier epics. Those epics traditionally be being distinguished by
(30:02):
various things. There's a point for the teachers telling school
groups the story explaining how this minor temple comes from
the tail end of what we think of as ancient Egypt,
the golden sarcophagus is and mummies and stuff, the time
when the old gods were on their way out, and
explain that we are closer in time to its construction
right now by almost five hundred years than the construction
(30:26):
of the Pyramids and the Sphinx were to the men
who built this temple and sat in its shade. But
you can just tell that. The story when the kids
get home will be, mom, I saw the place where
they put the mummies, and good for them. Mark a
point for the night when one of those kids sleeps
in dreams of Dender. Mark a point for the selfie
(30:49):
taken at arm's length. The tourists saying I was here.
Another for the security guard saying no flash please, for
the ggillanth time that day. One for the toddler eyeing
the pool with the papyrus, with his parents warning him
away lest he be drowned and deified. Mark a point
(31:11):
for each change in the light and how they change,
how the temple looks, and mark a point for you
here now. This episode is written and produced and stuffed
(32:28):
by me Nate Demeyo of The Memory Palace podcast, and
executive produced by Lemore Tomer, general Manager of Live Arts
at the met with research assistants from Andrea Milln and
engineering assistance from Elica Dudley. My residency is made possible
by the Metropolitan Museum of Arts chester Dale Fund. The
Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia, a network
(32:50):
from PRX which receives support from the Knight Foundation and
from its generous listeners. Learn more about The Memory Palace
at the Memory Palace dot org and subscribe on iTunes,
Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
So now that everyone has heard the Temple of Dender,
something I found very interesting about this episode of your
show is the fact that it was at it was
done as part of your residency at the MET and
I remember when that residency happened. I thought it was
such a cool opportunity to combine museum with an audio
(33:42):
production and to put all of these things together. And
now this has moved into a new medium of a book,
and it gave you the opportunity to follow up the
episode with another chapter basically of the book that is
parts excised from that story. Do you want to talk
about that a little bit, how that evolved.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
Yeah? Absolutely, you know, I absolutely love being the artis
and residence of the Metropal Museum of Art. And it's
still like it's it's still the off chance that I
get to go these days is a West Coaster. Boys,
it's still really cool to see a little plaque that
says the name of a thing that says the name
of one of the episodes that I produced, and then
my name like then like American born nineteen seventy four,
(34:25):
as though it's just like any other artwork, and that
it met It's incredible, And I really, you know, in
doing these stories about like the stuff that moves you,
there's just like nothing sort of more kind of magical
than some of these incredible spaces that they've created in
the Met, and so you know, to create a story
(34:46):
about you know, to be listened to ideally in one
of those spaces, but also that is something that's so
iconic to the museum. And then to kind of like
draw out the sort of like wonder in the mundanity
of that story is really where the Memory Palace lives.
Like the notion that this can be this run of
the mill, you know, minor temple, but that has been
(35:08):
imbued with such meaning over the years is a thing
that just I find enduringly fascinating. And when I was
walking around the Met looking for stuff to do stories
about and talking to the curators about it, and there's
no there's nothing more fun in the world than talking
to an expert about the thing that they love and
so revealed. To get to do that was such a thrill,
(35:29):
and I was like, oh, cool, So I'm going to
do this story about this American painting, and I'm going
to do this story about these objects, and that I'm
going to do a story about the Temple of Dender
and I just wanted to be really straightforward. I want
to call it the Temple of Dender, and I was told, yeah,
you can't do that the way a minute I thought
I was like the Arts of Residence. I thought that, like,
you know, I had free rein to do whatever I want, Like, yeah,
(35:49):
of course, if you're in too, do whatever you want,
that's fine. But you can't actually just call a thing
the Temple of Dender, because it turns out, as many
people know at this point, that that and I did
not that that the Temple of Dender in every mention,
in every uh you know, in every publication that the
MET does in this and this would fall under that category,
had to buy buy a contractual agreement, uh say that
(36:16):
it was the Temple of Dender in the Sackler wing,
of the Sackler Gallery, of the Sackler whatever, sponsored by
the Sackler family, you know who made their money, uh,
you know, first in medical antiseptics, but then selling drugs
directly to using doctors to sell drugs directly to patients.
And they made so much of their fortune. I'm selling
(36:39):
oxygon to people. Not only was this a key component
to the history of the Temple of Dender that I
could never quite find a way to tell even you know,
with the residency of the Met there, which is something about, uh,
the story began to overwhelm it in which didn't feel
(37:00):
it just didn't feel right to the kind of magic
of that place and the magic frankly of what the
Met has built there. And so I was like, oh,
I feel like this, this now needs to be a
thing that like becomes part of the story because it's
very clear, and it kept sort of trying to shoehorn
it into the story and it just everything kept falling apart,
(37:22):
and I realized that it needed its own addendum, It
needed its own sort of moment and the kind of
like shifting sun of the gallery of the Met. And
it was one of these kind of cool opportunities that
the book provided, like that to be able to kind
of return to that story, to tell how the Sacklers
became involved, and to tell ultimately, you know, how activists
(37:43):
led by Nandgoles and the artists were able to you know,
change the history of that, to put their own mark
on that room and put their own mark in, you know,
their own place in the timeline. It felt like kind
of a real gift to the book. And also just
to be able to frankly restore the very simple title
this is always supposed to be the temple vendor, and
and it now candy again.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
Has there been any other thing or person or whatever
that you've covered on your show that you have later
wanted to have some kind of a dendum to clarify
anything about it at any nuance anything like that, You.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
Know, not too often, because the truth of the matter
is like like for a Memory Palace story to feel finished,
then I kind of need to figure out what it
means to me, Like it really comes down to that,
Like that one, you know, finds a story about, you know,
as we both do, as we trawl or we just
stumble upon exciting things, and one finds a story about
(38:48):
Ruth Harkness and Interpanda. And on the one end, it's
a very it's a very easy story to make cool
because it's a very cool story. There are like lots
of interesting facts and exciting incident. But the question always,
you know, I have this, I have a list. It
is dozens and dozens and dozens of potential topics long.
I'm sure you guys have the same kind of file.
And I look at it sometimes and I'm like, how
(39:11):
come there's absolutely nothing I want to tell a story.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
About I have the exact same experience.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
Like, and also you're just like, why did I ever
care about that thing? Then, over time, sometimes like something
frankly often like occurs in your life and you'll say like, oh,
I realize that this is a story about having aging parents,
or oh, I realize that this is a story about
an ambition of a certain type of thing that I'm
currently now feeling this is about. And so I wait
(39:38):
for that feeling. I wait for, like, this is the
thing I want to say about the world to pair
up with one of those stories. And so suddenly, like
Ruth Harkness, the story you know, comes a little bit
about like these times in your life when you let
yourself like go on an adventure, and that can be
a true adventure like Ruth goes on, or it can
be just like, oh, I pursued this thing that took
(40:01):
me beyond what I thought it might be capable of,
and that you go and do that thing and it
kind of fills your life in a certain way and
and everything feels right. And I was very moved by
the fact that she, you know, as her life falls apart,
as frankly often it happens in these stories that you know,
when one thing about history is get the whole span
(40:22):
of the life. And I am very interested in what
happens to people after they do the thing we know
them for, and how they reckon with it and how
it lives with them. Ruth's story is one of these
things where you know, you think back to it and
I'm so interested in, like, oh, like things felt right
for her for a while and then they don't. And
there's something I find a lot of sort of particular
(40:43):
sadness it was worth exploring in there. But that said,
so when the memory Palace feels done, it feels done,
like it feels like, oh, I've said the thing I
need to say, and there might be like extra stuff,
but I kind of wish I could get in there,
and there might. But that usually means so let's wait
for another time to like tell that other aspect, let's
wait for a different meaning as opposed to like, let's
(41:05):
just get some more information in there. Does that make sense?
It does?
Speaker 1 (41:09):
It definitely does. And I think that's sort of one
of the things that's reflective of differences between the way
your show works and the way our show works, because
ours is often a very this happened, and then this happened,
and then this happened. Chronological story, and so occasionally there
will be a discovery about one of the things that
(41:29):
we thought happened that didn't really happen, or you know,
a realization somebody will find, you know, some previously unknown
document that reveals new insight.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
That did happen in this book now that I think
about it, you know, But it was not one of
those things where I'm like, oh great, here's an opportunity
to revisit this story or add to it. It was like, oh, shoot,
I have to reckon with this. And that is the
story of Hercules was an enslaved you know, a person
enslaved by George Washington. When I did that story originally,
like too that fifteen or something like that, the end
(42:03):
of the story hinged upon the wonder and strangeness and
kind of magic of the notion that after his escape,
like people lose track of him, and that you know,
in that he can kind of only live on in
our imagination on some level, this real person who has
become this thing. And if that's the case, then like
(42:24):
let's make sure that we hold him in a similar
way in our imaginations that we hold George Washington and
let's hang his you know, his memories and sort of like,
you know, the crime of the ownership of this man
on George Washington, and let's like let's keep that going
and like, let's we have the ability to kind of
control what we take from the story, and this is
what I'd like you to take. And it turns out
(42:46):
that six months after I released that episode, they figure
out where he went. And I did not know that,
Like I just I missed the news because it was
not at proper front page news. And during the fact
checking process, someone's someone's like, excuse me, it's like oh,
And so so there was this real question about like, oh,
this thing needs an entirely different ending, and this is
(43:07):
a story I like, and there's a real value in this,
and there's value within the kind of like construct of
this book to have this type of story in there.
At this particular moment, I'm like, oh, but then one
has to find not just a different ending, you know,
it's not it's not it's not a language question, it's
a meaning question. How does this change the meaning? And yeah,
and it was a it was a surprise challenge, but
(43:31):
one that again. So it was kind of lovely to
immerse myself again sort of in that moment and kind
of see like, oh, have I did what I got
out of it? Then not only does it hold up
under these new facts, but does it also hold up,
you know, several years later as I have changed. Yeah,
it was exciting to revisit it.
Speaker 1 (43:50):
So is there anything that you want to make sure
that people really know about this book or your podcast,
what you're working on, any of that.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
I like to think of what I do in terms
of like writing these short stories that every two weeks
I'll be the podcast and then you know, more often.
When I was working on this book, I've discovered that
I really have this like it's almost it's almost become
like a yoga practice, where like it just does me
good to think about the past. It does me good
(44:20):
to think about the way that lives go, and it
does me good to remember that we're all going to
die someday and then our time is short. And I've
just find such value in sort of like writing these things,
and I really do think about like the value of
the stories themselves, and in what I kind of want
someone to get out of and the truth is like
(44:41):
I kind of wanted people to get what I put
into it. I don't mean that like the sweat. I
just mean that, like I like to think of these
stories as having the ability, when they work well, to
kind of like inject like a little shot of feeling
into one's life. Like we are all and I certainly
am just like wrapped up in the kind of like
(45:01):
in the just whirr and sputter of the every day.
And I want each of these stories to kind of
just have the ability to kind of like shift your
day a little bit, if that makes any sense. Yeah,
And again, I want this to be the like I
want the podcast to kind of be like the thing
that can like to bring like sort of like genuine
wonder in like the strangeness of the world into like
(45:24):
the span of a dog walk. And I want, you know,
this book to be this thing that like sits on
your shelf or you have in your pocket book or
you have you know, in your carry on bag that
like you know that at each turn you're going to start,
you don't know where you're going to go, but that
you'll be like that things will be a little different
on the other end of the story, I.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
Love all of that. Having read this, this is really
it's It's such a lovely book, and I think it's
the exactly the kind of book that I would if
I had not just read the entire thing preparing to
talk to you about it. Definitely the kind of book
that I would have nearby for when I had a
moment and needed a moment to sort of reset my
(46:08):
brain and my perspective. Also, every time I hear the
words this is the Memory Palace, I'm Nate Demeyo, I
feel comforted, even though I know there is a chance
that what I'm about to hear is going to be heartbreaking.
So take that as you will. Listeners, I said earlier,
you have been on our show once before. If folks
(46:30):
are listening right now and are thinking, I want to
hear this other episode where they talked to Nate Demeyo,
Holly and I both interviewed you on June tenth of
twenty fifteen. That's when that came out, so long ago.
And your book is being published by Random House on
November nineteenth of this year, which is twenty twenty four, right,
(46:51):
that's correct, So if you haven't heard The Memory Palace before,
you can find the Memory Palace on anywhere you get
your podcasts, same with us. I'm with Stuff you miss
in History Class anywhere you get your podcasts. Thank you,
thank you, Thank you so much, Nate for talking to
me today. I hope everyone has enjoyed listening to you
and listening to your show today.
Speaker 2 (47:12):
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Tracy V. Wilson
Holly Frey
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