In 1980s America, gritty streets were filled with crime, the threat of Cold War hovered in the air, and action movies starring tough guy heroes dominated the box office. This was a time in cinema when muscle, martial arts, and the perfect weapon were the keys to saving the day; when the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone ruled the silver screen and their on-screen carnage was only rivaled by their off-screen competition.

Why did this golden age of action movies emerge when it did, and why don’t they make films like that anymore? Here to chart the rise and fall of the golden age of action movies is Nick de Semlyen, author of The Last Action Heroes, The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage. Today on the show, Nick shares the stories behind the larger-than-life stars of the action genre — including Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Steven Seagal — and the iconic films they starred in. He also discusses why the action genre fell out of favor in the early 90s, why its movies nonetheless continue to endure in popularity, and the three action films he most recommends watching.

Connect With Nick de Semlyen

• Nick’s website
• Nick on IG
• Nick on Twitter

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Transcript Coming Soon

The post Podcast #903: The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Action Heroes appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

Nothing says manly Americana like standing in front of charcoal grill that’s spewing flames like the upturned end of a rocket ship. But creating a massive fire doesn’t always equate to properly prepping a charcoal grill. At the end of the day, you’ll earn more admirers by serving up great tasting brats and burgers than by offering a low-budget pyrotechnics show. Learn to light your charcoal grill using one of these two methods, and you’re sure to get the praise you deserve.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

The post Skill of the Week: Light a Charcoal Grill appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

America’s national parks are one of the country’s greatest treasures, and many people have it on their bucket list to visit one or more of these gems. But figuring out where to go and how to execute a national park experience can sometimes feel a little overwhelming.

Here to offer some really helpful advice on both visiting and camping in the national parks is Jeremy Puglisi, co-author, along with his wife Stephanie, of Where Should We Camp Next?: National Parks: The Best Campgrounds and Unique Outdoor Accommodations In and Around National Parks, Seashores, Monuments, and More. Today on the show, Jeremy walks us through how to navigate the complex reservation system some of the parks have in place and what it takes to secure a campsite inside the parks. He then shares his best tips for getting the most out of a national park experience in general, as well as when you’re visiting some of the country’s most iconic destinations, including Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. At the end of our conversation, Jeremy shares the national parks he thinks are underrated, and if you want to avoid the crowds of the national parks, he also shares his picks for the country’s best state parks.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Jeremy’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #711: — How to Plan the Ultimate Road Trip
• recreation.gov
• nps.gov
• KOA campgrounds
• AoM Article: Beat the Crowds (And the Fees) With Dispersed Camping

Connect With Jeremy Puglisi

• The RV Atlas website
• The RV Atlas podcast
• RV Atlas on Instagram
• RV Atlas on Twitter

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

Podcast Sponsors

Click here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. America’s national parks are one of the country’s greatest treasures, and many people have it on their bucket list to visit one or more of these gems. But figuring out where to go and how to execute a national park experience can sometimes feel a little overwhelming. Here to offer some really helpful advice, on both visiting and camping in the natural parks, with Jeremy Puglisi, co-author along with his wife, Stephanie of Where Should We Camp Next? National Parks: The Best Campgrounds and Unique Outdoor Accommodations In and Around National Parks, Seashores, Monuments, and More. Today in the show Jeremy watches through how to navigate the complex reservation system some of the parks have in place, and what it takes to secure a camp site inside the parks.

He then shares his best tips for getting the most out of a national park experience in general, as well as when you’re visiting some of the country’s most iconic destinations. Including Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. At the end of our conversation, Jeremy shares the national parks he thinks are underrated, and if you wanna avoid the crowds of national parks, he also shares his pick for the country’s best state parks. After show is over, check at our show notes at aom.is/nationalparks.

Alright, Jeremy Puglisi, welcome back to the show.

Jeremy Puglisi: It’s so great to be here, and thank you so much for always having authors on your show, big, big fan of your podcast. Great to be here.

Brett McKay: Well, thank you so much. So, we had you and your wife Stephanie, on the show a few years ago to talk about how to plan and execute the perfect road trip. And the reason I wanna bring you back on this time is you all have a new book out called Where Should We Camp Next? National Parks. So, I know a lot of people, they’re planning summer vacations, they’re thinking about maybe doing some national parks. And these can be surprisingly tricky to navigate, and I’m hoping we get some advice from you today, but I also wanna talk about camping in national parks. That’s something that a lot of people don’t… You can do, but I think a lot of people just think about visiting national parks, so camping inside of a national park adds another dimension of maybe complexity to this thing, but maybe some high reward there, let’s talk about you and your wife’s experience and your family’s experience with camping in national parks. You guys are big campers, you do a lot of RVing. How many national parks have you all camped in?

Jeremy Puglisi: So, between the two of us, we’ve done about half of the 63 national parks, and then we’ve done a lot of the other national park sites, which are not necessarily national parks. And it’s been about a decade of doing long RV trips with our kids and every summer we definitely hit up a few of our national parks. I would love to get to all of them, I don’t know if that’ll happen, but we’re working hard to do so.

Brett McKay: What’s been your favorite national park you visited so far?

Jeremy Puglisi: So, my favorite, and this surprises people. My favorite is Olympic National Park in Washington State. And I think that’s because it has so many different ecosystems, you’ve got the mountains, you’ve got the ocean, you’ve got rain forest, you’ve got some really hip cool gateway towns. And it’s pretty close to Seattle, so you kinda can fit in a city trip if you want to as well. So, that’s always been my favorite, I think Stephanie would say Glacier National Park was her favorite.

Brett McKay: So, you’re still trying to hit national parks every time you’d go out traveling in the summer?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, and this is one of our biggest tips is we often do a big national park trip at the very end of August. That’s the time we’ve been really zooming in on, because our kids are still off school here in the Northeast, they go back after Labor Day. And so, what we’ve discovered is most of the country is back to school at that point, so we have hit some of the major national parks at the very end of the summer, and not had the crowding issues that everybody has been talking about.

Brett McKay: So, you mentioned there’s 63 official national parks, but you mentioned that there’s other sites or land governed by the National Park Service. What other sites should people consider when they think National Park Service?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, so there’s 63 national parks, but there’s 424 national park sites, and there’s all different kinds of designations. You’ve got national seashores like Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Cape Cod National Seashore. You’ve got national lake shores like Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan. You’ve got national recreation areas, we have in New Jersey, we have Gateway National Recreation Area, we’ve got national memorials, national parkways. And the thing that we really wanted to get across in the book is that a lot of them have amazing camping experiences. Sometimes there are sites inside those parks, but sometimes you have to camp outside of the parks. But we wanted to sort of re-distribute the balance of how people look at national park camping trips, ’cause we all think of the iconic trips out West, and there are more national parks in the West, but in the East, we have a lot of those other designations. We have a lot of the recreation areas, the seashores, the lake shores, the monuments, and those offer great camping experiences too, and we really wanted the book to give people alternatives from the places that are so, so crowd. Some of which I think we’ll talk about today.

Brett McKay: Oh, the other thing I didn’t think about, but it made sense, the Civil War Sites. That’s National Park Service.

Jeremy Puglisi: 100%. And so Gettysburg, there’s no camp grounds in Gettysburg National Battlefield, but there’s a whole culture of camping right outside of Gettysburg. There’s also a lot of campgrounds outside of Fredericksburg, almost all of those major sites have camping right outside of them, and people love to go on camping trips and make a whole tour out of it.

Brett McKay: So, the big take away there, don’t limit yourself just to the national parks. National parks are great, and we’re gonna talk about some of them today, but also think outside the box, think of other lands or sites governed by the National Park Service. Let’s talk about just visiting national parks in general, maybe someone just planning on going there, they don’t wanna camp, they wanna visit a national park. I’m sure people have heard, or they’ve tried in the past five years to visit a national park, they’ve heard or experienced that getting into a national park can be surprisingly difficult. Why is getting into a national park so hard sometimes?

Jeremy Puglisi: So, my theory here is that during the pandemic interest in national parks, interest in camping exploded for obvious reasons. But then everybody that had been taking other types of vacations like cruises or flying to Europe, I think a lot of them just wanted to go to the same five or six places that they’ve been hearing about their whole lives. They’ve been hearing about Yellowstone, they’ve been hearing about Yosemite, they’ve been hearing about a little place called Zion, and so I think that we had an absolute flood of people that were new to camping and maybe even kinda new to road tripping, all trying to descend on the same places at one time.

So, it is true that there are crowding issues at the most popular national parks, at the most popular times. But shoulder seasons are pretty open, and there’s also so many great national parks that are off people’s radars. Now, I would never tell someone, “Don’t go to Yellowstone, don’t go to Yosemite.” That’s your travel dream, go do that. And we’ve gone to those places too, we just wanted to open up some other options as well, and some of the places that we wanna talk about, I think like Yosemite, it’s near San Francisco. So, that’s gonna be crowded, there’s massive population density nearby. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is within striking distance of massive population density, so a lot of people go to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it’s our most visited Park. But then there are places that are a bit more off the beaten track that people cannot get to quite as easily, and there’s campsites open, there really are.

Brett McKay: Okay, so some national parks, they are very popular, different times they’re gonna be more popular. I imagine Summer, like early Summer is probably the peak time for most of them.

Jeremy Puglisi: That sweet spot where all of the kids in the country are off for school is the worst… It’s the hardest time, the most difficult time to go. ‘Cause you have kids in the country that go back to school after Labor Day, then you have kids in the country that get off earlier in May, so that place in the middle where every kid in America is off, that is definitely, honestly a very tricky time to do these types of trip. So, if you can any way move off to the beginning or end of the Summer as opposed to say July, you’re gonna do better. And then of course, if you’re not traveling with kids and that’s not an issue for you, the shoulder seasons are a really wonderful time to visit almost all of these places that we wanna talk about.

Brett McKay: Okay, so I think something people often don’t realize with the national parks is that sometimes you need a reservation ahead of time just to get into the park, or to do certain things in the park. And we had a nightmare experience with this during the pandemic. So, 2021 my wife was turning 40, and she wanted to go to Yosemite for her 40th, and so I thought, Okay, great, I’ll go to recreation.gov, buy the tickets. But at the time, they were expecting you to reserve your spot into the park three days in advance of your arrival at the park. So, a couple of weeks before the day I needed to buy my permit, I got on there to get familiar with recreation.gov and see how fast things went, and just to practice buying the permit. ‘Cause I heard that things can go fast, and so I got on there and tickets went fast in three minutes, they were all gone. But every time I was able to put a permit in my shopping cart, and delete it. So, I thought, okay, I’m not gonna have a problem with this.

So, on the day of, like this is the day that it counted, I had to get one a permit on this day, because we’d be in Yosemite three days. I had to get it. We had already bought lodging, we already bought plane tickets, so this was now or never. So, I had my friend Grant, him and his wife Mary, were gonna come with this as well, and say, “Hey, you get on too, and you just start refreshing your browser and see if you get one will increase the chances. So, we started doing it, got on 10 o’clock Central Time in the morning, ticked, started refreshing the browser trying to get one, trying to get one, trying to get one. And none of us got one, they were gone in a minute. And I remember I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I just ruined Kate’s 40th birthday. This is devastating.” Luckily, my friend Grant, he was clutch, he got on Reddit right after that happened and started searching about getting permits or whatever. And he found that if you get the app, sometimes they reserve a few permits for the recreation.gov app, so we download the app really quick and he was able to get a permit for us to get in.

So, yeah, he saved the day. So, that’s one tip there if you’re trying to get into a hard to get into park or an attraction at a park. Don’t just use the browser, get the app as well. And what was interesting, I was like, “Why is it? Is this is like an off season? We were in February is like, “This is an off season, why was it so crazy to get in at this time?” And what was going on in Yosemite, around February 20th, there’s this phenomenon and is the fire falls which is like a waterfall. And at sunset, the sun hits this waterfall and it looks like fire is going down the wall of the mountain. And so, there’s photographers from all over the world who are trying to get in to get a picture of this. If you look it up, you can see pictures of this online or videos of it.

Get there and except for people around the waterfall, the park was empty. We had basically at the park to ourselves, we went on these great hikes, didn’t see anybody on the trails at all. So, that was another thing thought that I thought was interesting. Even though a park might be busy or hard to get into, you might have it to yourself, because people are there for a certain attraction. And another thing too is, what we saw when we got to Yosemite was some people didn’t know about the reservations that you needed in advance, you see these people in line. I’m sure they drove hours to get to Yosemite, they get to the gate and they didn’t have the permit, and so they just had to turn around and go back.

So, lessons there, check in advance with the park you plan on visiting months in advance that they have a reservation system, be prepared for some parks or some attractions to have to really be ready and try to refresh the browser to get a permit. Use the app, and yeah, that was the thing, just do a lot of research in advance. But I’m curious, so, that was the pandemic, a lot of people were going to the national parks during this time, so I think a lot of parks put in this permit system. Is that still the case? Do a lot of parks still have this, you need a reservation in advance just to get into the park?

Jeremy Puglisi: Well, it’s only a handful, but actually, I’m guessing that a lot of those people that got turned away that day were not Yosemite rookies. I’m actually thinking a lot of them are probably people that have been going to Yosemite for years and never needed that reservation. Because this whole thing made a lot of news during the pandemic, ’cause it had never happened before, the National Park Service has always required reservations for campsites. But for all of its history, you could just drive up and get into the park. And so, since the pandemic though, they have been targeting really specific parks and some really specific attractions or things like fire fall. This year, there’s only five parks that require a reservation to get into the park, and again, we’re not talking camp sites here, we’re just talking getting in.

So actually, Yosemite doesn’t require a reservation to get in this year, though they do require reservations for fire fall, as you described. But this year Acadia requires a reservation to get in, but that’s not the whole park, that’s like the Park Loop Road. Arches requires a reservation, Glacier requires a reservation, but it’s only for going to the Sun Road, and you need to remember these national parks are gigantic. So, sometimes they’re just pinpointing the busiest part of the park and saying, “You need a reservation to get in.” And in Glacier, from what I understand it’s only from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM that you need that reservation for going to the Sun Road. You can be in other parts of the park and not need a reservation at all. Rocky Mountain National Park, you need reservations for specific things, and then Haleakala in Hawaii, you just need a reservation if you wanna come in super early and do the sunrise, which is a very popular.

So, what the NPS is doing is they’re just targeting things they know they get over crowded, and I think they’re almost keeping people from getting disappointed by showing up and not being able to park or not being able to get in. So, it’s very limited, for the most part, every National Park Service Site, you can pull up and pay the price to get in and not have a problem.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I know at Zion they instituted… You don’t need a reservation to get in to Zion, but to do this hike called Angel Landing, you need a permit or a reservation in advance to do that.

Jeremy Puglisi: And I will admit, I will never do that hike, and I think you did, didn’t you?

Brett McKay: Yeah, I did. And we took her son went up it, and he was like 11 or 10 at the time, I think he was 10 or 9. It was crazy ’cause it’s just like a chain and you’re just going up the sheer cliff. The view is great, but it was pretty crazy going up there, and it was definitely crowded too. You just kinda had to keep inching up this long line of people.

Jeremy Puglisi: I don’t blame the NPS for limiting the number of people doing that hike though, ’cause it’s dangerous. So, there’s been a lot of grumbling about the National Park Service implementing some of these reservations, but they tend to know what they’re doing, and I think that one definitely makes sense. And like Acadia National Park, the Park Loop Road, if you let too many people in, then you can’t park anywhere. So, you literally could just drive around it, but it would be impossible to stop and check out any overlooks. So, for the most part, 99% trust the NPS to make good decisions about this stuff.

Brett McKay: So, I guess the take away there, if there’s a national park you’re gonna visit, I would get on recreation.gov to check out the different reservation policies, if you need one in advance, etcetera.

Jeremy Puglisi: I would do two things, I would go to nps.gov, go to the actual National Park Service website, and then click through to recreation.gov, because what I’ve discovered over the years is sometimes there’s more and better information on the National Park Service website, and then recreation.gov is just where you go to make the reservation and sometimes the information can be different. But if you look at both of them together, you’re gonna get the whole picture of whatever is going on with the reservation system.

Brett McKay: Okay, so always do your research beforehand as to whether you need a reservation to get into the park, or to do a certain hike in the park. And then also be aware that those passes, they can be hard to get sometimes. And that could be especially true when it comes to getting your reservation for a camping site, what does it take to get a camp site inside a national park?

Jeremy Puglisi: So, for Yosemite, it is literally… And we can talk about a few different parks here, but for somewhere like Yosemite, it becomes incredibly, incredibly stressful. There’s 13 campgrounds inside the park, some of them you can reserve five months early, some you can reserve two months early, some you can reserve two weeks early. So, you got to figure all of that out. And again, nps.gov, and then go to Yosemite they lay out everything for you. They have 20 pages worth of information on the reservation system, you need a PhD to book a reservation here. And then they basically tell you. They give you a chart of when you need to get on your laptop and at what time, so basically you need to be on your laptop at 7:00 AM Pacific Time on the day that the camp sites are gonna be released. And then on the national park website, it actually says that thousands and thousands of camp sites disappear in seconds, and the issue has become so stressful that there’s been a lot of complaints from the public about it. The public is saying it’s not equitable, not everybody has access to high-speed internet, and some people are gaming the system. They’ve actually had problems with hackers and bots invading the system and getting camp sites at Yosemite.

And this is a real thing, I actually had somebody direct message me on Facebook and say, “Hey, if you wanna get into Yosemite or Yellowstone in the summer, I’ve got a hacker for you, I’ve got somebody. He’s a little expensive, but I can get you the camp site.” So, the National Park Service has kinda become aware of how stressful and awful this is, particularly at Yosemite, Zion, etcetera, etcetera. So, now they’re experimenting with a lottery system at Yosemite, which could spread to other campgrounds across the country. So basically, you put in the dates you want, you put in when you wanna go, and they sort of pull your name out of a digital hat, and then you get early access to the reservation system. And I kid you not, there are seven pages of instructions just to show you how to get the early access through the lottery system. But I do kind of hope that that kind of lottery system becomes more widespread, because I do think it’s even harder for people to get reservations if they’re not really kind of sophisticated with their laptops as silly as that sounds.

Brett McKay: Okay so getting a campground is gonna vary depending on the national park. Yosemite doesn’t have very many campsites, so there’s an elaborate reservation system. And really, you just have to take the time to walk through the instructions and then basically be at your computer at a certain point and just ready to hit Refresh over and over again until you get a spot, correct?

Jeremy Puglisi: No, you need to be on your laptop, your wife needs to be on a laptop, your three kids need to be on their Chromebooks. That’s what people do. They get the whole family literally trying to do it. And yes, you’re hitting refresh. And I have tried this, and I’ve had my heart broken many times. And the sites disappear quickly. And then a couple of times, I’ve been able to get them at some super popular places. But that is definitely an issue. There’s people that feel like they’re not gonna ever build a camp inside Yosemite during their lifetime.

Brett McKay: Okay, so to get a campsite, you have to look at each national park. It’s gonna be different on how far in advance you have to get a spot. It could be six months, it could be five months, could be two months, could be two weeks. And also, I imagine there are some national parks where you could probably just go to the place and there’s probably a campsite there, ’cause it’s not as popular, for example. Are there any national parks like that?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, I think you could go to somewhere like Big Bend in Texas. I think there are definitely some parks that are like you could walk in Shenandoah National Park it’s in Virginia. That’s kind of closer to me. I would be willing to bet money I could book a site there this weekend right now. So there’s definitely some places that fly under the radar and there are sites available almost at any time. But summer weekends, almost anywhere are gonna be booked inside the parks. And to kinda emphasize a little bit why that is, it’s dirt cheap to camp inside the national parks. It’s often $10, $20, maybe $30 a night, and those campgrounds are in the most beautiful, spectacular locations right inside the parks. And then also, you don’t have to worry about getting into the park in the morning, as you were describing, because you’ve already gone through that process, you’re already in there. You’re waking up in the park and then able to either take a shuttle or just go on a hike from your campsite. But there’s places that are definitely less crowded, for sure, if you dig around, and our book has a ton of them.

Brett McKay: Okay, so camping inside a national park can be stressful. Are there any other campsites that people should consider that are outside of a national park that can give you easy access to the national park, but avoiding the stress and headaches of camping inside the national park?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, so it does become much easier to move outside of the park and look outside of the park. Those types of campgrounds do not book up as quickly. They’re often two to three times, to four times more expensive. So that’s one of the dynamics at work here, is that a site inside of Yellowstone might be 20 bucks. A site outside of Yellowstone could very easily be 100 bucks a night, because it’s a small business owner trying to make a profit. And many of those campgrounds outside the parks are beautiful, but they’re not gonna be as beautiful as being in the park. So there’s major trade-offs. But if you wanted to do a last second national parks trip right now after listening to this podcast, you’re most likely gonna end up looking outside the parks. A good place to start, which I often recommend is KOA, that’s Campgrounds of America. They have 500 campgrounds to franchisee system, and they tend to have a strong presence outside of most national parks. For instance, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, there’s gonna be like 8 KOAs around the perimeter of Great Smoky Mountains.

But it also depends on gateway towns. So somewhere like Yosemite does not have an immediate gateway town. You’re gonna drive an hour away to find other camping options. Now, somewhere like Great Smoky Mountains National Park, there are camping options literally right outside the gates of the park. So it’s gonna vary a bit, but it’s always gonna cost more, and it’s always probably gonna be easier to get sites.

Brett McKay: Are state parks a good option for camping outside a national park? ‘Cause I imagine there’s a lot of state parks close by to some of these national parks.

Jeremy Puglisi: State parks can be. Definitely, for sure. Like I think of Custer State Park in South Dakota is a great place to stay if you wanna go to Mount Rushmore. Also national forests are a really great place to walk where there’s more sites available. So particularly thinking about Yellowstone and Grand Teton, they’re surrounded by national forest campgrounds, and those are often first come first served, which makes it a bit tricky if you’re coming from far away, and there’s often maybe like a dirt road to get in, it’s a little more rugged, there’s not a lot of services. But a lot of people do end up in national forest campgrounds, sometimes state parks. It’s unusual to have a national park and a state park right next to each other, though it does happen. Indiana Dunes, which is now a National Park, also has Indiana Dunes State Park literally right next door. And then one of our favorites, Assateague Island State Park, literally right next door is Assateague National Seashore. So you could play that game there, if you can’t get into the national park, try the state park, but that’s gonna be a little bit the exception to the rule, I think.

Brett McKay: Well, another option to consider is dispersed camping. So dispersed camping is, you can do it on certain national lands. And basically, you drive out there, and you can camp pretty much wherever you want, wherever you can find a spot. There are few regulations about where you can camp, but generally, it’s wherever. But the thing is, you’ve got nothing, like there’s no water, there’s no restrooms, you’re digging a cat hole, but it’s a good way to avoid the crowds, and it’s free. So what about dispersed camping? Where is that an option?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, so you can do dispersed camping on BLM land, which is only in about 13 states in the American West, though. I’m a New Jersey guy, I’m jealous. We don’t have that. Also, you can do dispersed camping in national forests. Like if you go to the National Forest Service website, they have rules for how close or far you can be from the road, if you need a permit, if you don’t. In those situations, if you’re gonna try what I often call boondocking, what you just called dispersed camping, you can often call a field office, whether it’s BLM or National Forest, where there’s a ranger or there’s jurisdiction over the land. And it’s very wise to check in because mother nature’s at work, and sometimes things are flooding, or sometimes trees are down and roads are cut off. So there is often a point of contact that you can make literally by picking up a phone and calling somebody to say, “Hey, look, I wanna do dispersed camping in this national forest.” Is there anything I need to know? Is anything closed?” Etcetera, etcetera. It’s getting much bigger in the American West, not so much a thing in the American East. And one of the reasons it’s getting bigger among RV owners is because RVs are becoming much more equipped with solar to be able to be out in the middle of nowhere without electrical hook-ups.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. What general tips do you have for people for just visiting the national park, whether they’re camping in it or just visiting for a few days? Any tips that you found that are useful to get the most out of the national park experience?

Jeremy Puglisi: The single most important thing that we tell everybody is to get up early. Even if your family does not naturally get up early, if you wanna hike a popular trail or go to a popular overlook, parking lots fill up, and it’s amazing. Parking lots tend to fill up by like 10 o’clock. If you can get to a popular trailhead at 7:00 AM, you’re golden in almost every case. So we’ll go to a trailhead at 7:00 AM to a hike, like Gorham Mountain Trail and Acadia. When we come down the mountain at 10:00, the parking lot’s full and people are circling. So getting up early, even if that’s not your natural thing, is hugely important. We also tell people to kind of take it slow and don’t feel like you have to cram in everything. We would rather take our time and linger in certain places than say we checked off all 12 things that we wanted to do at Yellowstone. My theory is always, I can come back if I want to. And then we also recommend too, if you do a big activity in the morning, we always hike in the morning with our kids, which they’ll grumble about, to be honest, then we tend to, in the afternoon, kinda let them pick, and that often means going back to a campground pool, maybe going into a town and getting some food or something like that, or buying souvenirs. So creating a balance between what Mom and Dad want and what the kids want has been hugely important too.

Brett McKay: And you also highly recommend visiting the office where the rangers are at, ’cause they have lots of useful information. They also, for the kids I thought it was… I didn’t know about this, the junior rangers… It’s like they’re junior rangers? Is that what it’s called?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, the Junior Ranger Program. So if you go to the visitor center and you ask for the junior ranger booklet, and it’ll be like an activity booklet that kids fill out through their day or through a couple of days at the park, and it’s answering some questions or it’s maybe doing a nature trail. It varies in difficulty from park to park. And then when you complete the booklet, you bring it back to the visitor center, and they will swear you in as a junior ranger. They’ll actually do a little ceremony, which is quite adorable when the kids are little. And then they give them a Junior Ranger badge. So that program was a huge part of my kids national park experience when they were little.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I imagine it keeps your kids from having a meltdown, keep them from complaining or having a bad attitude, because it gives them something to do.

Jeremy Puglisi: 100%. And look, if you wanna do a national parks trip as a mom or dad and you are worried about the kid part of it, because you can burn your kids out on another hike, another hike, another hike, another overlook, then camping outside of the park can be a really cool way to go, because then the campground experience can be really fun for them with pools, playgrounds, bocce ball, volleyball, whatever it might be. That’s always helped us strike a balance.

Brett McKay: And also, if you have kids, don’t forget, if you have a fourth grader, they get to go to the national parks for free. They get a free pass to all the national parks that year. And we took advantage of that during the pandemic. My son was in fourth grade at the time. We had the pass, and so we hit up a lot of national parks during that time.

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, that’s another great program The National Park Service has, for sure. And just in general though, the admission is cheap, the camping is cheap. It’s all supplemented by our tax dollars, etcetera, etcetera, but it is a… A national parks trip can be a very affordable family vacation.

Brett McKay: Alright, so let’s talk about specific national parks. We’ve talked about some general tips about how to navigate the reservation system, how to figure out if you’re gonna camp inside the park, outside the park, how to get the most out of your park experience. Let’s talk about specific parks, ’cause you do a great job in the book, you basically talk about every single national park and the ins and outs, where to camp, attractions to check out, things you need to consider when you’re planning. So let’s talk about some of the really popular national parks. Let’s talk about Yosemite. We’ve already been talking about Yosemite. And when we went, I was… Before we went, I was wondering, “Is this thing gonna live up to the hype?” ‘Cause you hear about it your entire life. So I was afraid it was gonna be overhyped, but it was so incredible. It exceeded expectations. It lived up to the hype and more. But because it’s so incredible, it’s very popular. It’s one of the most popular parks in the country. So are there any problems with overcrowding at Yosemite?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, Yosemite is the sixth most visited national park. To put it into context, more people visit Yosemite than Yellowstone, and Yellowstone’s three times the size. And Yosemite is day-trip-able, from San Fran, and most people just are gonna do the valley part. And that’s common in most national parks, that most people are going to one spot. Like in Acadia, everybody wants to do a Park Loop Road. In Yosemite, everybody wants to do the valley stuff. So if you are willing to go off the beaten track, there’s often many other options than the ones that people… The people are just kinda driving in, parking, looking around. They don’t know exactly what they wanna do. Maybe they stumble into a little bit of a hike. So look, Yosemite I wish I had some secret answer to doing Yosemite in the summer, but it is a challenge. But we’ve had people that have gone in the shoulder seasons that have really been raving about visiting in the non-summer.

Brett McKay: Yeah, like I mentioned earlier, when we went in February, we hardly saw anyone else on the trails. We had to hike on the snow. There was still snow on the ground. And we did that. That was fine. It was fun, actually. And there was a ton of people there for the fire-fall at the fire-fall spot, but other than that, there was actually a lot of solitude. So I wouldn’t go again during the fire-fall time, but it seems like winter, in general, is a great time to hit Yosemite.

Jeremy Puglisi: What you’re saying about the hiking is incredibly true. I mean, most people are touring in our national parks. They’re driving in, they’re parking. They don’t really quite know what to do. They’re looking around a little bit. Every national park we’ve been to, from Yellowstone to Glacier to Acadia, very, very crowded parks. Once you get out on the trail… I’m not even talking deep back country. Once you just get out on the trail, it tends to not be super, super crowded.

Brett McKay: Have you guys camped in Yosemite?

Jeremy Puglisi: It’s been a long time, but yeah.

Brett McKay: So was Yosemite one, I imagined you would recommend finding a spot outside? ‘Cause it’s probably just too stressful to get a spot inside the park.

Jeremy Puglisi: In the book, we have a couple of recommendations, but they are 45 minutes to an hour outside of the park. And for most people, that’s a bummer. There is a really cool place called Auto Camp Yosemite, and that’s a campground that’s only Airstream rentals. And it’s expensive, it’s kind of boujee, but that’s a really cool option outside of Yosemite. And then there’s some RV resorts that are an hour away that are fine, but it, frankly, doesn’t compare to being in the park. Now, somewhere like Glacier, there are awesome, beautiful campgrounds outside of the park. So it’s gonna vary from park to park.

Brett McKay: Okay. I recommend Yosemite, if you’re gonna visit a national. It’s fantastic. Another iconic summer national park destination is the Grand Canyon. Anything people should consider when planning a road trip or a camping trip to the Grand Canyon?

Jeremy Puglisi: So there’s some similarities with Yosemite. So the gateway town of Williams is over an hour away. So sort of you’re in the park or you’re far away. The reservation system is a little bit simpler, so you can reserve six months in advance there. And on the South Rim, the more popular rim, there are campgrounds that are open year-around, and there’s a few campgrounds that are just in the summer. Now, on the North Rim, it’s seasonal camping. There’s no camping in the winter. So you could do off-season Grand Canyon. And in fact, a lot of people say it’s really, really beautiful to go. I mean, you run the risk of having bad weather, but there’s campgrounds open year-around. You might consider the shoulder seasons there. And Williams is really cool as a gateway town. So I would certainly recommend stopping there, spending a couple of nights there, and then going into the Grand Canyon.

Brett McKay: Okay, so camping, six months advance reservation mostly?

Jeremy Puglisi: I would definitely get on six months if you want that reservation, for sure, ’cause the campgrounds will book in the summer. Shoulder seasons are gonna be a bit more friendly. Grand Canyon too, for me, like you wanna be there for a sunrise and the sunset, but I feel like the average person can go for just a couple of nights and really experience the Grand Canyon, unless you wanna get super adventurous and do some serious hiking. You don’t need a week at the Grand Canyon, I don’t think personally.

Brett McKay: Yeah. No, we went to the Grand Canyon when I was a kid. I think we just did a day. I mean, we were just kind of driving through and we stopped. Probably could have done a little bit longer. We also talked about, inside the Grand Canyon National Park, there are different types of attractions that, besides the camping, are gonna require advance reservation. What are some examples of that?

Jeremy Puglisi: Like if you wanna do a floating trip or something like that, you’re gonna need to hook up with a concessionaire and you’re definitely gonna need tickets or something like that, but all the hiking is… As far as I know right now, there’s no reservations for things like that. But if you’re gonna be doing something with a concessionaire or a deeper hike into the canyon and staying overnight, that’s also something you’re going to definitely be booking in advance.

Brett McKay: Alright, let’s talk about the most popular national park. That’s Great Smoky Mountains, correct?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, so Great Smoky Mountains is the most visited national park. I think they topped. They almost hit 14 million visitors last year, and I think that’s like twice the amount of visitors that other national parks got. And it’s just a population density issue. I mean, I could hop in my car right now from New Jersey. I could be at Great Smoky Mountains in 10 hours. So people all up and down the East Coast can get to the Smokies within a day’s drive. So yeah, it’s super, super popular. It, up to very recently, was completely free to enter the park, which is maybe one of the reasons it gets very crowded, but Great Smokies, to me, is very accessible and much less stressful than some of these other places we’ve been talking about, for sure.

Brett McKay: What’s the camping like inside Great Smoky?

Jeremy Puglisi: Lots of great camping. And when you think of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, you have the Tennessee side, and you have the North Carolina side. So you can approach the park from two different states, which is another reason why it’s so crowded. But there are tons of great NPS campgrounds in and around the park. There’s probably about 15 of them. There’s places like Smokemont and Elkmont that are super popular or harder to get, but much easier than the other places we talked about. And then the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, there’s several gateway towns, where we were saying Yosemite doesn’t really have an immediate gateway town, Grand Canyon doesn’t have a gateway town. Great Smoky Mountains National Park has Cherokee on the North Carolina side, it has Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge on the Tennessee side, which is almost like a little mini Las Vegas right outside of the gates of the park, then also Townsend. So there’s a massive… There’s probably 100 camp grounds outside of the park. So you don’t hear about the stressful stories. If you can’t get a site inside the park, you just move to one of the KOAs outside of the park. The last time we went to the Smokies, we stayed at Camp Margaritaville. We stayed at a Jimmy Buffett property, 10 minutes from the gates. And my wife’s drinking Margaritas at night, there’s a pool, there’s a hot tub. It’s a very different type of national parks trip than the ones that last, we’ve talked about.

Brett McKay: It’s also got… It’s got Dollywood too.

Jeremy Puglisi: Dollywood is awesome.

Brett McKay: Is it really that great? ‘Cause I’ve got some family members who go there all the time, and I’m like, “Why would you go to Dollywood over and over again?”

Jeremy Puglisi: I’ll tell you why, I’ll make the case for Dollywood. Lots of live music. So the ticket… You pay your ticket price, which is not cheap. I mean, it’s less than Disney World, but certainly not cheap to go to Dollywood. But there’s live music all day. You could literally not go on a ride and just go from concert to concert to concert. And these are good people. These are high-level talent. But then also, Dollywood has world-class roller coasters. I like roller coasters. I won’t go on super frightening upside down roller coasters, but they have those too. If you want music and you want entertainment, you want food, all that’s there. But if you also want the thrills of the roller coasters, that’s there too. Now, for the national park purist too, somebody who’s into hiking and all that stuff, you might wanna avoid Dollywood. But we’ve gone twice, and we really liked it.

Brett McKay: Alright, so Great Smoky Mountains sounds like camping inside the park, it’s not as stressful as the ones out West, and there’s also great camping outside as well and a lot of other stuff to do outside the national park. And just from reading about it, I’ve never been, but it sounds like a lot of great hiking as well.

Jeremy Puglisi: Hiking there is beautiful. We did a hike this past year where you can actually hike up to a national park lodge and spend the night, the Leconte Lodge. And the only way you can get there is by hiking. But there’s a beautiful hiking there. And the Great Smokies, it’s like rushing rivers, really deep, thickly, green forests, and then you kind of emerge at the end to a view of the mountain. So it is a very good hiking park.

Brett McKay: Alright, so Yellowstone is another popular national park, but it’s also huge. So any tips on getting the most out of your Yellowstone visit?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, Yellowstone was definitely one of our favorite trips. You need to decide where your base camp is for Yellowstone, ’cause you can enter the park from so many different places. And we decided to use West Yellowstone as our base camp, which is actually in Montana. But Yellowstone is a driving park, to me, more than it is a hiking park. It’s a touring park, where a big part of the experience is gonna be hopping in your car, driving from place to place to place, so planning for those drives and not being shocked, you have to do a lot of driving, is a big part of the experience. We actually love the driving, but we learn to bring snacks into the park, bring water into the park. You often end up pretty far away from concessions. And we did Yellowstone, like I mentioned earlier, in the last week of August. And I could have landed a plane in the Old Faithful parking lot. It was so empty. So I know Yellowstone is definitely crowded in June and July, but end of August would be a really good time to do Yellowstone. And if it’s your first time, a big tip would be to concentrate on the lower loop. Now, there’s awesome things in the upper loop, but the lower loop has so many of the iconic places we think about, like Old Faithful, like Grand Prismatic Springs.

And then if you have more time, you could do the lower loop in, say, two days, three days. Then if you have a longer trip to Yellowstone, then head into the upper loop, do Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. And then Lamar Valley is quite far away from everything, up there on the upper loop, but the wildlife was incredible. We were in, like, five bison jams. If you’re going to Yellowstone for wildlife, go to Lamar valley. Don’t let people tell you to go to Hayden Valley. That was a total bust for us, and I’ve heard that from other people. Lamar Valley is the place to go to see bison.

Brett McKay: What’s camping like in Yellowstone?

Jeremy Puglisi: So many options. There’s a universe of camping inside Yellowstone. In the lower loop, the Madison Campground is one of the more popular options, but then there are campgrounds in all of the different parts of the park. So if it’s your first trip to Yellowstone, look at Madison Campground. That’s relatively close to the gateway town of West Yellowstone. And then as you progress into a second or third Yellowstone trip, you can get deeper into the park, further into the park, into the northern loop and get sites there. And it’s gonna be easier to get sites in the northern loop than the southern loop, ’cause the southern loop’s where everybody goes. And then there’s great gateway towns, KOAs. There’s all that stuff right outside of the park.

Brett McKay: And another nice thing about Yellowstone, depending on where you are in the park, it’s really close by to Grand Teton National Park.

Jeremy Puglisi: I liked Grand Teton more, and I sometimes…

Brett McKay: I did too.

Jeremy Puglisi: I totally liked Grand Teton more. It’s a super short drive from the bottom of Yellowstone into Grand Teton. If I’m remembering correctly, it’s like a 10-minute drive. And personally, for me, I liked Grand Teton more because we’re a hiking family, and Teton is a hiking park to me, where Yellowstone is more of that, like cruising around in your car kinda park. And I just thought the views were more resplendent and awe-inspiring in Teton. I am not saying that Yellowstone is overrated, but my whole life, people have been saying, “Yellowstone, Yellowstone, best park, national park in the country,” and it was maybe not even in my top five. Grand Teton was certainly in my top three. And Grand Tetons are great for camping. So in the center of Grand Teton National Park, there’s an area called Colter Village, and it’s all concessionaire-run, but there’s a RV-specific campground, there’s a tent camping specific campground, there’s a cabin area. We stayed in cabins last time. And cabins can be an option in some of these national parks. The cabins in Teton were adorable. Then they have this area called The Tent City or something like that, where two of the walls are made of wood and two of the walls are canvas, and it’s kind of like rustic glamping. So Teton is pretty easy to figure out the camping thing too.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I would agree Grand Teton is much better than Yellowstone. We went there, I think it was end of 2021, and we did Grand Teton. And what’s amazing about Grand Teton, it seems so out of place in United States. You look up at it and it looks like you’re looking at the Matterhorn, like you’re in Switzerland, but it’s the United… It’s crazy. Views are great. And yeah, then we went to Yellowstone. We just kind of drove around. That was it. But Teton was the highlight.

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, and Jackson’s great too. I’ve not spent much time in my life being jealous of rich people, but when I was in Jackson, I was like, “Man, I wouldn’t mind living here,” right at the base of Grand Teton. To me, to be able just drive from your house and to Grand Teton National Park would be amazing.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned you wouldn’t say Yellowstone is overrated, but it didn’t entirely live up to the hype. Are there any national parks you would say or you think are overrated, even amongst the ones we’ve talked about, like Grand Canyon, etcetera?

Jeremy Puglisi: I very rarely go to one of these parks, and, “Oh, this is overrated.” I just tend to be a guy that’s like, I’m just so happy to be there. I think Olympic is underrated, in Washington state. I think Olympic is one of our most majestic national parks, and it’s certainly not on as many people’s bucket lists as a bunch of these other ones that we’ve talked about. We loved Mount Rushmore. Now, a lot of people say Mount Rushmore is overrated, and we certainly… And there’s the history, Mount Rushmore is very complicated, etcetera, etcetera, politically, but our family really liked Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse. Also, I would say Badlands National Park is underrated. Badlands National Park in South Dakota, you feel like you’re on another planet. It’s not that big, it doesn’t take that many days to see. And a lot of people just kinda skip it on their road trip out west to get to Yellowstone, but I think that one’s underrated as well.

Brett McKay: Yeah, if you go to Badlands, you just hang out where Teddy Roosevelt hung out.

Jeremy Puglisi: Exactly. And Theodore Roosevelt National Park, I would say, underrated, up in North Dakota. It’s just so hard to get to. That’s part of the problem.

Brett McKay: Well, I think too… I mean, maybe you even know more about this, ’cause I think when most people think national parks, they’re thinking the big ones out west. Are there any overlooked national parks in the East that people like, “Man, you should go check that out ’cause it’s actually really cool?”

Jeremy Puglisi: 100%. So like in the East, we have Acadia National Park in Maine, which is one of the most visited. So that one is very popular. But then you have Cape Cod National Seashore, which my family adores Cape Cod National Seashore, it’s not underrated in our region, if that makes sense, everyone knows it around here, but I don’t know many people from out west who are like, “I’ve gotta get to Cape Cod National Seashore.” So I’d say nationally, that one is a little bit off the radar. Then I think Shenandoah National Park in Virginia is definitely underrated. I think it’s overshadowed by Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which is somewhat nearby. Shenandoah was beautiful, a beautiful hiking, beautiful views. Only takes a couple of days to see it. And now New River Gorge is our newest national park, so I don’t know if I wanna say it’s overrated or underrated yet, ’cause I think people are just sort of figuring it out and discovering it, but I do think that that will emerge as a really, really popular national park in the East. And I also love Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina. That is astonishing beach camping options, etcetera, etcetera. And everybody on the East Coast knows it, but I don’t think that nationally, people know it.

Brett McKay: And we mentioned too, the civil war sites. That’s also governed by the National Park Service. And you mentioned you can camp, not exactly in the monuments, but nearby, and that could be another cool… You can plan a whole summer vacation around that. We’re just gonna camp along these civil war sites.

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, ’cause Gettysburg is really close to Hagerstown, and then they’re both really close to Harpers Ferry. So those three… And there’s not campgrounds in those parks, but there’s a culture of camping outside of the parks, that you could do a tour of those three battlefields. You could do a week’s trip camp around those three battlefields, and then maybe also head down to Fredericksburg, Virginia. And that’s cool too, ’cause then you’re getting history. It’s a whole different type of national parks trip than just going hiking out west.

Brett McKay: So you all have done a lot of camping and RVing to national parks, but there’s a lot of great state parks too. Do you guys have a list of your favorite state parks that you think are almost as good as a national park, but don’t have the crowds?

Jeremy Puglisi: 100%. The first one that always comes to mind when people ask about state parks, Custer State Park in South Dakota, if it changed to a national park tomorrow, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. I’m sure the state doesn’t want it to. It is just as a grand as any national park I’ve been to. The wildlife at Custer State Park was better than Yellowstone. And I had people tell me that before. I didn’t believe them. But then we went there, and we saw more bison there than we saw in Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. So Custer is magnificent. There’s like 13 campgrounds in Custer. South Dakota takes a lot of pride in their state park system, and I think that Custer is the crown jewel. And then you could camp in Custer and go right to Mount Rushmore. It’s not very far. South Dakota, most people blow through South Dakota. We always tell people, South Dakota is its own vacation.

Another one to consider, and this is not technically a state park, but the Adirondack Park in New York state, it’s operated separately from the state park system, that is another place that is just as magnificent as any national park, and I feel like it flies way under the radar for people all across the country. Filled with great camping, filled with great hiking, filled with fishing, with waterfalls. Any outdoor activity you want, you can find in the Adirondack Park. And the Adirondack Park is massive, and it’s intertwined with communities and towns. It’s very, very different than a national park. And then my favorite state park in the country, personally, is Assateague State Park in Maryland, where you can camp right on the beach, where you can hear the waves crashing over the dunes from your tent site or RV site. Maybe not as big or as grand as a national park, but it just is beautiful, to me.

Brett McKay: For me, one that sticks out, if you’re going to Zion, in Southern Utah, there’s a state park that’s nine miles from St. George. It’s Snow Canyon State Park. It exceeded my expectations on the hiking and the views. So if you’re going to Zion or you don’t wanna deal with the crowds at Zion, check out Snow Canyon State Park. And then another great state park I like, I don’t know if you can camp in there, but Jack London State Park. It’s by San Francisco kind of. So you got the Redwoods, great hiking, small, like hardly any crowds, and you get to see where Jack London, he built this house out of materials in the area, and the week before he moved in, it burned down to the ground, and the ruins are still there. You can check that out. So that’s cool. Jack London State Park in California.

Jeremy Puglisi: That reminds me of Mark Twain State Park in Missouri, where Mark Twain’s, I think the birthplace home is there in that park as well.

Brett McKay: Well, Jeremy, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Jeremy Puglisi: So the books are ‘Where Should We Camp Next?’ And now the follow-up is ‘Where Should We Camp Next?: National Parks.’ You can get it wherever books are sold, get it at an independent bookstore or from Amazon, obviously. And then everything else we do is at The RV Atlas, The RV Atlas Podcast, @thervatlas on all of the different social media handles.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Jeremy Puglisi, thanks so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Jeremy Puglisi: Thank you so much. And again, thank you for having all the great authors on the show and letting us talk about our books. Appreciate it so much.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Jeremy Puglisi. He’s the co-author of the book, Where Should We Camp Next? National Parks. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about him and his wife’s work @thervatlas.com. Also check out the podcast, The RV Atlas Podcast on any podcast platform you enjoy. And check out our show notes at aom.is/nationalparks, where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you’d think of. And if you’d like enjoy ad-free episodes of The AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code “MANLINESS” and checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher Premium app on Android, iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of The AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member, who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #895: The Essential Guide to Visiting and Camping in the National Parks appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Note: This excerpt was adapted from Butcher On The Block: Everyday Recipes, Stories, and Inspirations from Your Local Butcher and Beyond by Matt Moore.

“I like to call myself a ‘live to eater,’ my entire life revolves around food,” says James Peisker, who wields a sharp boning knife in one hand and a cup of black coffee in the other. As a butcher, business owner, and COO of Porter Road Butcher in Nashville, Tennessee, James and cofounder Chris Carter have spent the past decade building an empire while also fulfilling their mission of fueling a better tomorrow through properly raised meats.

I called on James to showcase some of the basic skills and techniques that one might use to further their skills in butchering common items at home. Admittedly my request could come off as somewhat counterintuitive: Porter Road Butcher and butchers across the country make their living by serving their customers, creating custom cuts or orders on demand. But James was happy to oblige my ask by spending a day showcasing his skills and philosophy. “The fun part of my job is educating people—to enjoy food and cooking.”

Below I share some of the advice James imparted, along with specific techniques he demonstrated for butchering two common meats in your own kitchen. 

A Primer on Butchering at Home

This primer is for those looking to get started with butchering at home.

Beyond the traditional array of texts and books devoted to this subject, I also encourage and promote those seeking more refined knowledge to take advantage of technology—videos, podcasts, applications, online education, as well as virtual events; these are now widely available to take your butchering to the next level. But in my humble opinion, whatever your method of self-study, it is also best polished off with creating a relationship with your own local butcher, as the trend of sharing knowledge within this trade is contagious.

On that note, a defining characteristic that I uncovered throughout my travels is that most butchers learn the art of butchering just as much through trial and error as they do through apprenticeship. And while the trade has thousands of years of refinement, it continues to evolve. Practicing and learning these techniques, whether basic or in-depth, can provide a lifetime of enjoyment and self-improvement, not to mention an opportunity to pass on knowledge and passion to those that follow.

The Environment

Unlike in the old days, modern butcher shops do not typically contain sawdust-laden floors with mineral-scented, funky air. Primarily you will find a well-lit, well-designed shop that’s squeaky clean. As James says, it all changed after The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s novel that exposed the meat processing industry of the past, ushering in new standards and regulations that are still practiced today. If you plan to handle raw meats and other items at home, you should follow the practices embraced by professionals.

At home, the countertop is typically the most stable and best surface for butchering. It should be cleaned and sanitized regularly. Ideally the countertop is also at a comfortable height. Leveraging the steady counter for cutting and chopping is vital, but using gravity to rest certain items on the counter, while pulling or tearing other items that hang from the surface, can also be useful when working with larger portions. If you are working in a tighter kitchen, be aware of any other items that might be around the butchering area that should be moved prior to working, like a fruit bowl, as you want to eliminate the chance of unintentionally contaminating other surfaces or items. If countertop space is an issue, any sturdy, sanitized surface can be used, such as a table or dedicated butcher block.

Having access to a nearby trash can will allow you to easily discard items without touching other surfaces. Of course, keeping your hands and other items clean is of vital importance, so a sink in which to wash your hands and tools with warm water and antimicrobial soap throughout the process is ideal. When you have finished your work, it’s important to properly clean and sanitize the surfaces and any tools used during the practice.

Also, be mindful of your clothing. Since sometimes the practice can be messy, it’s best to wear a washable apron or clothing.

Like most things in life, preparation is key here. I like to create a mental game plan of my process in advance so that I’m not running back and forth, potentially contaminating other surfaces, like the handles of my refrigerator and cabinet pulls. If you are storing larger quantities, be sure to have plenty of ice and storage options on hand, and clear out room in your refrigerators and freezers prior to starting your routine.

The more thought out your process, the better your results and the easier your cleanup.

The Tools

I pressed James on what items are necessary for butchering at home, and I got a sense he’s somewhat of a minimalist. “Find a sharp knife that you are comfortable with—that’s all you really need,” he says. For James, that sharp knife really means two boning knives: one that is stiff and another that is semi-flexible. The stiff knife can be used for jobs that require more heavy-duty work, such as cutting through joints, small bones, and cartilage, whereas the semi-flexible boning knife has a bit of give to it, something that comes in handy when filleting a fish or trimming away silver skin from a tenderloin. So while a sharp knife is James’s primary tool for the trade, I do gather a few more items that are helpful for the at-home butcher, which can be sourced at most kitchen supply stores or online outlets.

• Knives
  • Stiff and semi-flexible boning knives, breaking knives, paring knives, heavy-weight cleaver.
• Honing/Sharpening Steel
  • Used to hone the blade of a sharpened knife.
• Sharpening Tool or Machine to Sharpen Knives at Home
  • Note: Several kitchen-supply or retail locations as well as mail-order companies now conveniently offer this service.
• Boning Hooks
  • Used to secure meats on a cutting board when butchering.
• Gambrels
  • Used to suspend or hang cuts of meat.
• Cut-Resistant Mesh Gloves
• Kitchen Apron
• Kitchen Shears
• Butcher Paper
• Butcher’s Twine
• Masking Tape
  • Used to secure wrapped butcher paper, if desired.
• Sharpie Marker
  • Keep handy to denote contents and dates of wrapped items.
• Cutting Boards
  • Ideally a board solely dedicated for use with poultry.
• Storage Vessels
  • Baking sheets, wire racks, sealable containers, and bags.
• Clean Towels
• Hand Soap and Dish Soap
• Nontoxic and Antimicrobial Cleaners
  • If you prefer to avoid harsh chemicals, you can create your own cleaning solution to use on countertops, cabinets, cutting boards, and other surfaces. Simply combine 1 cup of white distilled vinegar with 1 cup of distilled water. A few drops of lemon and/or orange essential oils can be added to enhance the cleaning power and provide a clean scent. Note: Due to the acidity of the vinegar, it’s best to avoid using this on softer stone surfaces such as granite or marble.
• First Aid Kit

Common Butchering Techniques

A whole chicken and a beef tenderloin are two meats that can be usefully butchered at home. Here are step-by-step guides on how to do so.

Whole Chicken

In my mind, breaking down a whole chicken is a necessary skill for the avid home cook. Yet whenever I find myself perusing my local grocery store, I can almost spot the fear in people’s eyes when it comes to breaking down a whole bird.

First and foremost, buying the entire chicken is typically at least 20 to 30 percent cheaper than purchasing a single cut. You get the best of all worlds: a nice selection of white and dark meat to feed the family, while also putting that backbone or other trimmings in the freezer for a stock to elevate the rest of your meals. That said, not all chickens are created equal. James is a big believer in sourcing hormone-free birds that have plenty of territory to roam. You can taste the results—the meat is a touch darker in color, more flavorful, and super tender. As mentioned previously, it’s a good practice to always dedicate a plastic board solely to working with poultry. The following method is just one way (James’s way) of breaking down a chicken, which can be emulated for turkey as well as game birds. That said, there are many different techniques that you can utilize to get a similar result.

1. With the breast up and butt end of the bird facing you, pull the legs of the chicken to loosen and, using a stiff boning knife, slice through the skin to expose the legs.

2. Turn the chicken over, and using your hands, pop the thigh bones out of the sockets by pulling the legs to the backbone.

3. Shove your thumb into the oyster, the small circular piece of dark meat on the back of the thigh, and invert the legs, slicing each thigh away from the back—there should be little resistance when following the natural break of the thigh bone.

4. Separate the legs from the thighs, using your knife to follow the thin line of fat as a guide to the joint.

5. Rotate the chicken, placing the neck portion on the board, and use the knife to follow the natural seam to remove the backbone from the breastplate, using a bit of force to cut through the rib bones.

6. Using the point of the knife, stab into the middle of the breastplate, and slice the breastplate to cleanly separate the two breasts.

7. Pop the wing out of the socket from one of the breasts, and slice the wing at the joint away from the breast. Repeat with the remaining breast.

Whole Beef Tenderloin

As with breaking down a chicken, this simple technique allows you to purchase whole tenderloins, carving them into a large roast to feed a crowd, or slicing into individual steaks.

Often during the holiday season, you will find steep discounts on whole tenderloins, and breaking them down at home is a realistic and affordable way to put those discounts to good use. A whole tenderloin consists of the head, center (or chateaubriand), and tail, and it’s typically composed of two chains of meat. Don’t fret if you are already confused—the biggest advice I can relay here is to use your hands. Follow the natural lines of the meat and you’ll be just fine.

1. Using your hands, pull away the excess fat, or suet, from the meat. Most of the fat will pull easily and naturally from the tenderloin, but as necessary, a knife can be used to trim away any stubborn portions that do not simply peel away.

2. Slide your hands down the tenderloin, with your thumb in the center, to find the seam between the two chains of the meat. One of the chains will be roughly 30 percent smaller in size than the other, typically with more fat. Trim the smaller chain away from the tenderloin (this piece of meat can be ground for burgers, or pounded thin for fajita or other stew meat).

3. Working with the larger chain, carefully use your knife to trim away the silver skin and any additional excess fat from the meat. The key to removing the silver skin without having any waste is to pull on the silver skin back and forth, allowing the knife to gently cut it away.

4. Looking at the smaller tail portion, determine the point at which the tail could be folded under the tenderloin to create a consistent thickness throughout.

5. At that point, use your knife to cut the tail of the tenderloin roughly 75 percent through the meat and fold the tail underneath the tenderloin to have an even, consistent piece of meat.

6. To single tie the roast, use butcher’s twine to go underneath the tenderloin, and wrap the twine onto itself two times to hold it in place. Tie a standard knot firmly to secure the twine. Continue in this method until the entire tenderloin is evenly tied. This method is most useful if you desire to cut the loin into individual steaks, secured by the twine.

7. If cooking the entire tenderloin, you can use a continuous knot method by once again going underneath the tenderloin to tie a secure knot for the first hold. Wrap the twine around your hands to create a circle, and slide that circle down and around the tenderloin, pull on the line to tighten, and once again create a new circle in your hand and slide that circle down and around the tenderloin, repeating the method until the tenderloin is firmly tied, and finishing the tying with a final knot at the end.

8. Trim into individual steaks or leave whole, as desired.

_______________________

Butcher On The Block is a cookbook of more than 125 everyday specialty recipes plus meaty stories and secret tips from butchers everywhere.

The post A Primer on Butchering at Home appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

Few pastimes are as satisfying as fishing — it’s a great activity to do with your kids, makes for an excellent microadventure, and harkens to our manly imperative to be providers. What makes it even more satisfying is being able to fillet and cook your catch for a real water-to-table experience.

This illustrated guide is a useful starting point that will be accurate for most fish; some varieties have unique methods, but in those instances you’ll likely have someone with more expertise with you. Get out there and bring some dinner home!

Hat tip to chef Matt Moore for consulting on this piece.

Like this illustrated guide? Buy the poster!

The post Skill of the Week: Fillet a Fish appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

With St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow, people’s thoughts are turning to potatoes a little more than usual.

The rest of the year, however, people don’t think too much about these humble tubers. They hold such a ubiquitous place on our tables that we take them for granted.

So let’s take a moment today to celebrate this underrated foodstuff by unpacking four reasons potatoes are awesome. 

1. Potatoes Are Cheap

On average, a pound of potatoes costs .95 cents. In contrast, a pound of ground beef costs over $5. Adding potatoes to your meals is a great way to stretch your grocery budget. 

2. Potatoes Can Help You Lose Weight

People started getting down on potatoes a couple decades back as the low-carb movement gained steam. Potatoes are starchy tubers. Starch is a carbohydrate made up of numerous glucose units. Our bodies can quickly break down the starch in a potato and convert it into glucose. The fear is that this glucose will spike blood sugar, and high blood sugar will leave you feeling hungry and cause weight gain. 

But carbs don’t necessarily make you fat; it’s eating a caloric surplus of any food that causes weight gain (and eating a caloric deficit of any food that causes weight loss). Thus a better metric for a food’s “healthiness” than its macro breakdown is its volume relative to its calories. Calorically dense foods give you a lot of calories without filling you up, leaving you feeling hungry and more prone to overeating. Foods that are higher in volume relative to their calories leave you feeling satiated, making it easier to eat less. 

Potatoes fall into that latter, filling category. While deep-frying and covering taters in butter, cream, and cheese does turn them into an unhealthy, calorically dense food, pure potatoes are high in volume and low in calories: an ounce of Oreos has 140 calories; an ounce of potatoes has 22. It’s hard to overeat plain baked potatoes.  

Indeed, in one study on satiety, potatoes were found to be the most satiating of foods, even more so than high-protein foods like steak.

3. Potatoes Are Nutrient-Packed

Brightly colored vegetables get all the “it’s good for you” attention, while the brown tuber is assumed to be a nutritional slouch. But it isn’t so; potatoes are surprisingly rich in nutrients. A skin-on, medium-sized white baked potato contains: 

• Vitamin C: 28% of your recommended daily intake — more than an orange!
• Vitamin B6: 27% of your RDI
• Potassium: 26% of your RDI — more than a banana!
• Magnesium: 12% of your RDI
• Fiber: ~3.8 grams

White potatoes and sweet potatoes are pretty nutritionally comparable, by the way. White potatoes have a little more protein; sweet potatoes have a little more fiber. White potatoes contain more potassium and magnesium; sweet potatoes have more calcium and a big spike of vitamin A. White potatoes have a few more carbs; sweet potatoes contain more sugar. Both are similar in terms of calories. Both are nutritious vegetables, and one isn’t really better for you than the other.

4. Potatoes May Be Good for Your Gut Biome

Gut health and gut bacteria are getting a lot of attention these days. Potatoes may contribute to a healthy gut thanks to their resistant starch. Resistant starch is a type of carb that can’t be broken down and digested by the small intestine. Instead, it makes its way through to the large intestine, where it’s then broken down by gut bacteria. This process also helps produce short-chain fatty acids that help nourish the gut microbiome.

I eat potatoes with a protein like chicken breast nearly every day for lunch. They fit my macros and are cheap, filling, tasty, and nutritious. So I say on St. Patrick’s Day, and every day: All hail the humble potato!

The post All Hail the Humble Potato! appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

What albums and songs are getting a lot of play on your Spotify or iTunes app currently? My guest would say that the music you put in heavy rotation comes down to your unique “listener profile.”

Her name is Susan Rogers, and she’s a music producer-turned-neuroscientist as well as the co-author of This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You. Today on the show, Susan unpacks the seven dimensions of music and how they show up along a varying spectrum in every song. She explains how everyone has an individualized taste for the configuration of these dimensions, and that how closely a particular song aligns with this pattern of sweet spots accounts for whether you like it or not. Along the way, we discuss artists that exemplify these dimensions, how Frank Sinatra injected virility into his music, how part of your musical taste has to do with the way you prefer to move your body, and much more.

Artists and Songs Mentioned in the Episode

• Prince’s Purple Rain
• Barenaked Ladies
• The Shaggs
• Ella Fitzgerald
• The Rentals
• The Killers
• Tame Impala
• Steven Page
• Johnny Cash
• Cake
• James Brown’s “Hot Pants”
• Yes’ “Roundabout”
• Pharrell Williams’ “Happy”
• Carly Rae Jepson’s “Call Me Maybe”
• Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool and Kind of Blue
• Frank Sinatra’s first hit song “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” (1940) vs. “It Was a Very Good Year” (1965)

Connect With Susan Rogers

The post Podcast #876: Why You Like the Music You Do appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

An important part of manhood has always been about having the competence to be effective in the world — having the breadth of skills, the savoir-faire, to handle any situation you find yourself in. With that in mind, each Sunday we’ll be republishing one of the illustrated guides from our archives, so you can hone your manly know-how week by week.

The omelet is really the star of the egg-centric breakfast dishes. And while it’s often the highlight of any good restaurant breakfast buffet, it can easily be made at home with a little practice; omelets are awesome for both the bachelor looking for a quick and healthy breakfast (or breakfast for dinner) and the dad making some Saturday morning goodness for his family.

What’s great about the omelet, is that you can make it your own: Keep it simple with just ham and cheddar or branch out and add various meats, cheeses, and vegetables. Whatever you add to yours, follow the step-by-step instructions above, and your omelet will turn out just as good as those made by the cooks who man the buffet line.

Like this illustrated guide? Then you’re going to love our book The Illustrated Art of Manliness! Pick up a copy on Amazon.

The post Skill of the Week: Make the Perfect Omelet appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Years ago, I was flipping through TV channels and came across Hugh Laurie, of Dr. House fame, decked out in 19th-century English gentleman garb. Because I was a House fan, I was curious about what Hugh Laurie sounded like with his native British accent, so I paused my channel surfing to find out.

Then I brought up the title and saw that I was watching Sense and Sensibility. “Ugh. Jane Austen. No way I would enjoy that,” I thought. I associated Jane Austen with foo-fooey lady stuff. So my plan was to flip the channel as soon as I heard Dr. House talk British.

Two hours later, the end credits for Sense and Sensibility scrolled down the screen. I had watched the entire thing. Didn’t even get up to go the bathroom.

Not only did I watch the whole movie, I remember thinking, “Man, that was really good.”

Thanks to Dr. House, my resistance to Austen was broken, and I found myself genuinely curious about her books. So I got the free version of her collected works and slowly started working my way through what are arguably her three best: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. And I’ll be darned if I didn’t truly enjoy them all.

If you’re a dude who’s written off Jane Austen’s work as I once did, perhaps today’s podcast will convince you that there’s something in it for women and men alike and encourage you to give her novels a try. My guest is John Mullan, a professor of English and the author of What Matters in Jane Austen? John and I discuss the literary innovation Austen pioneered that influenced the likes of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and will give your social agility a healthy workout. John then explains why soldiers and Winston Churchill turned to Austen during the world wars. We also discuss the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument that Austen’s work was “the last great representative of the classical tradition of virtues,” Austen’s idea of manliness, and how a man’s choice of a wife will shape his character. And John shares his recommendation for which Austen novel men should read first.

Resources Related to the Episode

• AoM Article: Why Every Man Should Read Jane Austen
• Editions of Jane Austen‘s works available in the public domain
• Editions of Sense and Sensibility and Emma with introductions by John
• AoM Podcast #824: Lonesome Dove and Life’s Journey Through Uncertainty
• Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Janeites”
• After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre

Connect With John Mullan

• John’s Faculty Page

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Years ago, I was flipping through TV channels and came across Hugh Laurie of Dr. House fame decked out in 19th century English gentleman garb. Because I was a House fan, I was curious about what Hugh Laurie sounded like with his native British accent, so I paused my channel surfing to find out. Then I brought up the title, saw that I was watching Sense and Sensibility. “Ugh, Jane Austen, no way am I gonna like this,” I thought. I associated Jane Austen with froufrou lady stuff. So my plan was to flip the channel as soon as I heard Dr. House talk British. Two hours later, the end credits for Sense and Sensibility scrolled down the screen. I had watched the entire thing, didn’t even get up to go to the bathroom. Not only did I watch the whole movie, I remember thinking, “Man, that was really good.”

Thanks to Dr. House, my resistance to Austen was broken and I found myself genuinely curious about her books. So I got the free version of her collected works and slowly started working my way through what are arguably her three best, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. And I’ll be darned if I didn’t truly enjoy them all. If you’re a dude who’s written off Jane Austen’s work as I once did, perhaps today’s podcast will convince you there’s something in it for women and men alike, and encourage you to give her novels a try. My guest is John Mullan, professor of English and the author of What Matters in Jane Austen? John and I discussed the literary innovation Austen pioneered that influenced the likes of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, and will give your social agility a healthy workout. John then explains why soldiers in Winston Churchill turned to Austen during the World Wars. We also discussed the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument that Austen’s work was the last great representative of the classic tradition of virtues, Austen’s idea of manliness and how a man’s choice of wife will shape his character. And John shares his recommendation for which Austen novel men should read first. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/austen.

John Mullan, welcome to the show.

John Mullan: Ah, it’s good to be with you.

Brett McKay: So you are a professor of English and you specialize in one of my favorite writers, Jane Austen. You’ve written a lot about her, researched a lot about her. But I read an interview as I was prepping for this, our conversation that when you were a young man, you blew her off as an author.

So when did you discover Austen and change your view of her?

John Mullan: I think I remember I first read her because I had to read her in school and I was probably in my… I was probably 16 or 17 and I had to do a Jane Austen novel for A Levels which are exams you do at the end of high school and [chuckle] I realize now I was very fortunate, I had a very good teacher who actually used to get us to read books which weren’t on the syllabus. And so I read Persuasion because I had to and Emma as a backup. And I think I thought two things. I thought, “Well, these are rather substance-less stories. They’re just stories about genteel young women trying to find a husband. How important is that?” The implied answer being not very important ’cause I was 16 or 17 and I liked stories about people, I don’t know, hunting whales or going up the Congo River or committing suicide at the end of the play or real stuff.

Brett McKay: Right.

John Mullan: Hamlet, Heart Of Darkness, Moby-Dick, that stuff. But I would say in my defense, [laughter] that I had some literary sensibility I think, and I did even then recognize that they were really well written. [laughter] So I didn’t blow her off really. And I didn’t think this is valueless. I just thought what she wrote about didn’t matter very much. And to put it very succinctly, I changed my mind because as the years went by, mostly it was because I had to teach it. And what I noticed was a kind of simple thing, but it’s a really extraordinary thing. And it happens with other really wonderful, complex, rich literature. And that was, I got it from my students, that each time you went back to it, the students on my behalf [chuckle] noticed stuff I hadn’t noticed before. So it just kept rewarding more and more, the more often you read it, the more you saw. And that’s never disappeared for me, even though there were Jane Austen novels I’ve read a dozen, 15 times, I still see things that I hadn’t seen before.

Brett McKay: So before we get into Austen’s work, let’s talk about a little bit about her background.

John Mullan: Sure.

Brett McKay: When did she live? What was her life like and how did that influence her writing?

John Mullan: Okay, so she’s born in 1775. She was a vicar’s daughter from Hampshire, which is kind of rural area, but I mean it’s not the back of beyond it’s… Even in her day in the late 18th, early 19th century, it was perfectly feasible to go and travel to London if you had a little bit of money to pay for the carriage. And she came from… It’s difficult not to use rather anachronistic words, but you would say in those days they would’ve said a genteel middling folk, we might say middle class. And she was one of eight siblings. So she had six brothers, five of whom were older than her, one younger, and she had one sister to whom she was… With whom she was very, very close, Cassandra, who was a couple of years older than her. And she grew up in this family.

And her brothers became things like vicars, two of them became vicars, and two of them became admirals in the navy and the church and the navy both figure in her novels. And I guess I’d say two things about her growing up, which I think are important, first of all, the more I just get into her family life, I mean the more admirable I think they are. I think they were open-minded, educated, tolerant, lively, optimistic people, so they weren’t rich enough so that they didn’t have to do jobs… One of Austen’s brothers, we might come to, inherited… Came upon an inheritance which was very important for her later on, but the rest of them, they had to get jobs, which in the late 18th century wasn’t what all gentlemen have to do. Mr. Darcy doesn’t need a job, Mr. Knightley doesn’t need a job, but they needed jobs. And I think that they were a good family for her to grow up in. And it… She loved her brother, she loved her father, she loved her mother, although her mother was a very irritating hypochondriac, but still it was a happy and enlightened family.

But it’s very important that… She had hardly any formal schooling. She went to school for a year and a half, didn’t learn much there. She learned it all from her brothers and especially from her father who’d… He was a university-educated man, he had a good book collection, she was very close with him. And just the second thing I will just say about her life is that I think it’s really important that although her novels were quite successful in her own lifetime, they were all published anonymously, the ones… Two of them were only published after she died, but four of them were published in her lifetime and her name wasn’t on them. So even though they were relatively successful actually, and she earned a bit of money, most people didn’t know who she was, she wasn’t a name. And she published all her novels right near the end of her life.

And she died very sadly when she was only 41 in 1817. She wrote some novels in the 1790s when she was in her 20s, tried to get them published without success. And then she was discouraged by that. And then her father died when she was 29. And for the next few years, she and her mother and her sister had this… A really difficult existence because they depended on her father’s pension basically and it disappeared when he died. And they traveled around, staying with various relations and various brothers and luckily… Don’t worry, I’ll bring this story to a halt quite soon. But luckily one of her brothers, Edward, had been… You might find this weird, Brett, but it not uncommon at the time, he’d been given to childless rich relations. And Edward was brought up by a very rich family in Kent called the Knights and he took their name and he became their heir. And after they died, he inherited all sorts of land and property and that included a manor house in a place called Chawton in Hampshire, which anybody who visits England, you can go and visit it. And even better, you can visit the house that he gave rent free to Jane, Cassandra and her mother to live in, which was in the village where the manor house was and it was part of the estate. And she moved there in 1809, so she’s 34 years old, 33, 34 years old.

And in the next eight years, she produced her six novels, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Because suddenly she had somewhere secure and her brothers clubbed together to give them enough to live on and she could go back to some of the drafts she’d made in her early 20s and she could write these novels. And so, extraordinary in the… She basically wrote a novel a year until she died in 1817. And [chuckle] the family had a special agreement that… Because they did have some servants who came in to help, but a lot of the domestic economy was done by the women themselves, and the deal was that Jane Austen had to do breakfast, okay. So she had to get the breakfast ready and clear it and make the coffee, make the tea, do all that stuff, and clear it up afterwards, and after that she was done for the day. [chuckle] And whilst her sister was making butter, or bread, or whatever, Jane Austen could write her novels because her family did realize that they got somebody quite talented on their hands or in their house, so that’s a sort of sketch, I hope that tells you something about her.

Brett McKay: So Austen, we talk about her today ’cause her stories, they’re good, they’re just really good stories, lots of characters. But one of the reasons why people are still talking about her is that she made a lot of literary innovations that contributed to the novel. And you still see novelists use the things that she came up with when she’s writing her stuff.

John Mullan: Yes.

Brett McKay: You still see them using today. One of those innovations you talk about is free indirect speech. What is that? Can you give us an example of that?

John Mullan: Okay. So yeah, I’ll give you a little example. What it is in general, it’s a technique whereby… You probably know… Novels can be… Stories can be told in all sorts of ways, but a lot of novels, and majority of them actually can be divided up into either told in the third person, he did this, she did that, he thought this, she thought that, or the first person, where the whole novel is… The protagonist owner can. Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, what have you, Catcher in the Rye. And what Jane Austen I think more or less invented, although rarely got the credit for it, ’cause in the English novel it didn’t exist before her, was this technique, which as you rightly say Brett, is called free indirect speech or free indirect style. And the actual name for it wasn’t coined until the 1920s, but it existed before the name. And what it is, is narrating in the third person, as all her novels are, but with the narration, the storytelling percolated through the consciousness of one of the characters, or a better metaphor maybe, bent through the lens of a character’s way of seeing the world, so sharing their prejudices, their fears, their pre-occupations, their delusions sometimes.

And in some novels like Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen will do that mostly through the consciousness of the heroine Elizabeth Bennet, but not entirely. So you get bits through where the narrative is affected by one of the other characters. And in one of her novels, Emma, almost the whole novel, bar two chapters, very carefully placed chapters, is through the eyes, through the consciousness of Emma. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s about a young woman who is handsome, clever, and rich, we’re told in the very first sentence of the novel, and she meddles in other people’s lives with sort of good intentions.

She wants to make matches for them, marry them off. And almost the whole novel is seen through her eyes, although it’s narrated in the third person. And she has lots and lots of views about what other people are thinking and they’re mostly wrong, but nobody ever tells you she’s wrong, you have to work it out. So there were lots of great novelists like Dickens or George Eliot who are there in their novels talking to you, telling you, guiding you, ruminating, philosophizing, and that’s often if a novelist is good enough, a wonderful experience. But Virginia Woolf once said, who was a huge Austin fan, said the brilliant thing about Jane Austin is she’s not there at all. And I think there’s a lot of truth in that because of this technique, she can leave you following the story through the track of the character, and see what you make of it.

Brett McKay: So I was gonna give you a little example. So Emma, near the beginning of the novel, she’s got this little protege called Harriet Smith, who’s three years younger than her. And Harriet Smith is a nobody who’s being dumped at the local little school for ladies in the village because her father is some well-to-do businessman and she’s his illegitimate child, and he’s paying for her to be looked after, but Harriet doesn’t even know who he is. And so she’s called Smith, the most common English name, and she is very sweet natured, very pretty, and really quite stupid. [laughter] And Emma takes her on as a sort of Pygmalion thing. She’s going to mold her, she’s going to be… Harriet’s going to be her project if you like. So it’s this very, very unequal friendship between the two. Emma persuades Harriet to turn down a proposal of marriage from a reasonably well-off gentleman farmer who she thinks is not good enough for Harriet, but who the reader can see is in love with her.

John Mullan: And what’s more, the reader can intuit that Harriet loves him back, but Emma thinks he’s not good enough and persuades Harriet to turn him down and instead encourages Harriet to think that the really smooth, good looking genteel local vicar, Mr. Elton, is keen on her and a likely prospect, okay. So one day, they’re out in the lane and Emma is thinking how can we get into Mr. Elton’s house? How can we get into the vicarage so that they can have a little tête-à-tête? And she sees Mr. Elton coming down the lane, she pretends to break her lace in her boot. “Oh, my lace is broken,” and Mr. Elton invites them in the house. And Emma leaves Mr. Elton and Harriet alone together in the sitting room, very difficult in the Jane Austin world in these novels for a man and a woman to be alone together. And Emma’s off with the housekeeper talking very loudly so that Mr. Elton can hear, she’s down, not in the room, she’s not coming, about the lace. And…

Sorry, I have such a long description, but in Jane Austin novels, there’s always so much going on. [chuckle] And she comes back into the room, and I’ll just read you a couple of sentences, okay. She says, “It could be protracted, no longer, this business with the lace. She was then obliged to be finished and make her appearance. The lovers were standing together at one of the windows. It had a most favorable aspect. And for half a minute, Emma felt the glory of having schemed successfully, but it would not do. He had not come to the point. He had been most agreeable, most delightful. He told Harriet that he’d seen them go by and had purposely followed them. Other little gallantries and illusions had been dropped, but nothing serious.” So what Emma is actually hoping is that by leaving them alone, Mr. Elton was actually gonna propose marriage, this is his chance. But if you think about that very first sentence in that little bit that I’ve read out, is terribly simple. The words in it are terribly simple, anybody could have written it. “The lovers were standing together at one of the windows,” but they’re not lovers. They’re not lovers at all. And in fact, the reader already has been given plenty of evidence to allow him or her to work out but of course, Mr. Elton’s interested in Emma, not in Harriet.

And actually, it turns out that not only are they not lovers, but you’ll find out, spoiler alert, a few chapters later, from Mr. Elton’s own lips, that he despises Harriet. He absolutely despises her as beneath him. And he only pretends to be nice to her because he’s trying to get Emma. But it’s all keyed on that little sentence, “The lovers were standing together at one of the windows.” And the funny thing is, it’s such a simple sentence, and yet, until Jane Austin came along, nobody could have written it.

Brett McKay: So yeah, it’s still third person, but it’s third person with Emma’s filter.

John Mullan: Yes.

Brett McKay: Right. And what’s interesting when I…

John Mullan:: It totally adopts her delusion.

Brett McKay: Right, yeah.

John Mullan: It doesn’t say, “Those whom Emma thought were lovers,” or it doesn’t say what another novelist might say, “Emma came in and thought, “Ah, the lovers are standing together at one of the windows.”” That says it were direct speech or direct thought. Just the lovers were standing together at one of the windows.

Brett McKay: And what it does is it makes you feel more connected to the characters. And when I… It’s interesting, you see this free indirect style, once you learn about it, you see it everywhere.

John Mullan: Yes.

Brett McKay: My favorite novel of all time is Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.

John Mullan: Oh, I’ve never read it. I’ve never read it, I’m afraid.

Brett McKay: Okay. I’m gonna send you a copy.

John Mullan: Okay, do.

Brett McKay: It’s about a bunch of cowboys who take a cattle drive from South Texas to Montana.

John Mullan: Yes. No, I’ve heard it, I’ve often heard of it. Yes.

Brett McKay: And I love it. And I did an interview with American literary scholar, Stephen Fry about Lonesome Dove, and one thing he said that really blew me away, and I find… When he said it’s like, “That’s why… ” Of course this is why I like Jane Austen too, and I like Lonesome Dove. He said Larry McMurtry was heavily influenced by the social novel of the 19th century, so like the… Particularly Jane Austen, and when you… If you read Lonesome Dove, he does the free indirect style, he’ll… And he switches. It’s like you hear the… You’re looking at the character and then you’re doing this third person thing, but it’s like the person is thinking, it’s almost first person but not. And that’s Jane Austen, she invented that.

John Mullan: Yes, she did, she did. I mean, it’s obviously… What’s he called? Larry McMurty?

Brett McKay: Larry McMurtry.

John Mullan: McMurtry. I mean he obviously was… Sounds like he was quite conscious of literary technique. One of the weird things about the history of free indirect style is actually… And I’ve talked to novelists about it, living, practising novelists, it entered the bloodstream of the European novel so completely that novelists do it without even knowing they’re doing it. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Yeah.

John Mullan: I talked to a contemporary novelist called John Lanchester who wrote a great novel called Mr. Phillips. And I was solemnly interviewing him in my academic way and saying, “Oh yeah, this is one of the most interesting exercises in free indirect style.” And he said, “What’s that?” And I told him and he said, “Oh yes, I suppose that’s what I was doing. I’ve never heard of it before.”

Brett McKay: And the other thing about Austen that makes her fun to read, ’cause as you were just doing that setup for Emma, there was a lot of well, he was thinking this and she was thinking that, and he was actually thinking this, it’s a workout for your social mind.

John Mullan: Totally.

Brett McKay: And one thing I’ve read is that reading Austen can help you develop what psychologists call a theory of mind, right, it’s…

John Mullan: Yes, yes, yes.

Brett McKay: Right, it’s understanding… You make guesses of what other people are thinking based on body language or actions, and that’s all Jane Austen’s all theory of mind all the time.

John Mullan: I agree. I think that’s a really good way of seeing it. I mean Jane Austen didn’t say very much about her novel writing. Most of her letters were letters to her sister and they’re all about the weather and getting colds and how difficult it is to travel to Guildford and things. [chuckle] But she does say that the things she expects from her reader is ingenuity, it’s quite an interesting word. So a novel like Emma, you have to be switched on. And the theory of mind you mentioned, I think the fascinating thing with Jane Austen is that it works in a double way, on the one hand, you look at the character saying and doing things and you see their consciousness of each other. So she’s a wonderful, wonderful writer of dialogue. And the thing about Jane Austen novels is that when people say things to other people, everything they say and do is shaped by their assumptions about what the other person is thinking.

Which is the way life is, but it’s not the way that all dialogue and novels is, not many novelists can do it as well as her. But also there’s this second theory of mind aspect, which is the one in a way we’ve just been talking about, that as a reader, you have to be… She’s not gonna do it all for you, you have to work it out. So you have to, in that bit that I’ve just read out, you have to be up to noticing that you’re inhabiting a delusional state here in that simple little sentence, the lovers, and the really clever thing about her novels is some of the time it’s not so hard to pick out what assumptions are shaping the character… The sentences and sometimes you have to be really clever. [chuckle] And that’s one of the reasons… It’s back to where we started, Brett, that’s one of the reasons they so much repay rereading ’cause there are things you’re never clever enough to notice at all.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So I imagine there’s a lot of men listening to this podcast that might have written off Jane Austen as a sentimental writer that’s geared primarily towards a female audience. But what’s interesting is I’ve been surprised to learn if you go back in history, it’s men who often turned to Austen during times of war and adversity. So I know during World War I, a lot of the British soldiers, they read Austen when they were in the trenches. And I know during World War II, Winston Churchill, during the Blitz, he was reading Jane Austen.

So I mean, what is it about Austen’s writing that caused these men to turn to her during times of war?

John Mullan: Okay, well, I mean, that’s a really interesting question, but yeah, there’s a really good… Your listeners might want to chase it down. There’s a really good, Kipling short story called The Janeites, he invented the word Janeites I think, which is exactly about it’s set after the First World War, but it’s about men meeting up again because they were united in the trenches by exactly what you’ve just said, their enthusiasm for Jane Austen. I think it’s two things coming together, one is that it is a… I imagine if you’re at the Somme, I mean mean obviously I’m just imagining, but my grandfather was there, my grandfather was at the Battle of the Somme and was indeed badly injured at it, Jane Austen’s world must seem a blessed relief. It is this elegantly circumscribed world of as she said, three or four families in a village, so nobody’s gonna get shot in a Jane Austen novel. But I think very often people just focus on that and assume that means the pleasure for some of those male readers in difficult situations or dangerous situations was one of escapism. And I just think judging from accounts people give as well as from her novels, that’s not true. Because within these worlds, lots of the people, [laughter] lots of the characters are behaving in the most monstrous and selfish and absurd ways. Her novels… Here’s a pitch for them, they’re terribly, terribly funny.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

John Mullan: And you can enter them and become absorbed and find them really, really funny, evidently, from what people said, as the shells are going overhead. And so, it’s a mixture, you escape into her world, but it’s not an escape really, because the people there are as complicated and ridiculous and their feelings and desires are as ignoble or absurd as in any other, as in life. So I think it’s that doubleness of them. Harold MacMillan, when he was prime minister, he said the same thing as Churchill, I think being Prime Minister was a bit different in those days from what it is now. But in the 1950s, he said at least once a week on a weekday, he would make an hour or two after lunch to go into the garden of Downing Street and read Jane Austen. And then he would come back as it were setup for the rest of the working week.

Brett McKay: So the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, he called Jane Austen one of the last great representatives of the classical tradition of the virtues. I mean MacIntyre thinks that Austen was an Aristotelian virtue ethicist. What do you make of that description?

John Mullan: Oh gosh. Well, I mean, that’s really… I need to… [laughter] The honest answer would be I need to run away and think about it because I wonder… For instance… And it’s probably possible to find the answer to this, whether she ever read any Aristotle in translation, but whether she did, because it’s likely that her father might have had it in his library. But also, the trouble is the question is designed to test my very thin knowledge of Aristotle. But as I understand it, I mean I think there are certain things which are as I understand it, yes, quite Aristotelian about her novels which… One thing I associate with Aristotle is the notion that the ethics are a practical business that you start with life, you don’t start with a theory.

Brett McKay: Right.

John Mullan: And that it’s the choices that human beings make practically in their lives which reveal their capacity for particular virtues. And Jane Austen, people sometimes write about her and try to work out what her beliefs were. Her father was a clergyman, two of her brothers, was she a very keen Anglican? Was she very devout? Was she very religious? How much are her novels Christian? And that’s all a bit of a fool’s errand really because of this thing Woolf mentioned that Jane Austen absents herself and lets the characters takeover. I think MacIntyre… I don’t know about Aristotelian, but I mean I do think he’s got a point in that you can, it’s one way to read them, you can read them as characters constantly being presented, especially the heroines with ethical choices. And it’s no bad schooling in ethical choices and no bad schooling because these are very ordinary choices. And you and I may not live in the Jane Austin world of a Hampshire village in the early 19th century, but most of the choices, they’re not much to do with the society of the times actually, they’re to do with things that we would all recognize about selflessness and selfishness, about envy and magnanimity. I mean magnanimity’s a good one, I think that is an Aristotelian virtue. There’s an amazing moment, could I give you an example?

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’d be great.

John Mullan: Which Aristotle would have recognized. Okay, so again, as I’ve done so much plot summary of Emma, let’s stick with that for a second. Harriet is schooled by Emma to have ideas above her station, and to put it bluntly, this comes back to bite Emma, because Emma gets completely wrong who Harriet has her eyes on as a possible husband. They quite soon find out the truth about Mr. Elton’s feelings. But a lot later on in the novel, there’s a character called Mr. Knightley, who’s the male lead and who has a certain tenderness for Emma and whose judgment is quite important to Emma, but he’s quite a lot older than her, Emma is 20, he’s 36, 37, and she’s used to having him as a friend and advisor. And anyway, there comes a point late in the novel where Emma has encouraged Harriet to think about this man, Frank Churchill as a possible husband, but she hasn’t mentioned his name. And essentially, Harriet has got the wrong end of the stick and has assumed that Emma was encouraging her to think about Mr. Knightley as a potential husband. And there’s a big scene when this is revealed, it’s one of the most brilliant chapters in all fiction I think. And you’re in Emma’s mind really. And Emma has got this wonderful sentence, “Why was it so awful [chuckle] that Harriet was in love with Mr. Knightley rather than Frank Churchill?” And it says something like, “Instantly with the speed of an arrow, it went through Emma’s mind that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself.” [chuckle]

And it’s comic, but it’s also potentially catastrophic because then Emma says to Harriet… You’ve got to remember what she’s like, she’s dull witted, but very sweet natured and goodhearted, Harriet. And so she cannot tell a lie. Yes, you can really rely on what she says, however limited, precisely ’cause she is so limited. And Emma says to Harriet, “Have you any idea that Mr. Knightley returns your affection?” And Harriet says to her, “Yes, I’d rather think I do.” And it’s the most awful moment in the whole novel for Emma because she knows that Harriet wouldn’t say that if Harriet didn’t think it was true, and she knows that Harriet in her naivety must have sense something real. And then there’s this great moment of magnanimity when Harriet then immediately says… While Emma’s thinking, “Oh no, my whole life is falling to pieces,” where Harriet says to Emma, “Would you encourage me? Do you think I’m mad?” Sort of thing, but she doesn’t say that, but something like that. And Emma… It’s this great moment ’cause Emma knows that she has a real thought control over Harriet, and she knows that Harriet’s gonna believe what she tells her.

And she doesn’t say, “Oh, I think you are fantasizing.” [laughter] And she doesn’t say, “Oh, Mr. Knightley is a wealthy landowner, he’s never gonna marry a nobody like you.” She says the truth or a truth, she says, “Harriet, Mr. Knightley is the last man in the world who would ever give a woman the idea that he feels more for her than he does.” And A, that’s completely true, Mr. Knightley is like that. B, it tells you something about Emma’s relationship to Mr. Knightley, even though he’s not there because Emma can talk twaddle about anybody, but she can’t talk twaddle, rubbish, bunkum about Mr. Knightley because actually hardly… Only just acknowledged by herself she loves him. And so she has to speak the truth about him. But also finally, thirdly, C, [chuckle] it’s a magnanimous moment. It’s a really magnanimous moment. And Harriet is duly ecstatic at being told this and kisses her hand and says, “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.” Because Emma has given her the green light. And even though it goes against all her interests, all her feelings, and I would say that’s Aristotelian magnanimity, is it not?

Brett McKay: I think so. And yeah, the way I read it, so Aristotle, he was really concerned about people becoming good people, right, and you did that by doing good things, you became virtuous by doing virtuous things. And like how you said, Aristotle was very workaday, money played into that, social status played into that, love played into that, how you spent your free time played into that, and Jane Austen talks about that. You see characters starting to make decisions with those workaday things that would allow them to become a complete virtuous person.

John Mullan: Yes, yes, yes. And it’s certainly the case in Jane Austen, in really… It’s a case in lots of novels, but it’s the case in Jane Austen in very subtle ways that there are plenty of people, characters in her novels, including sometimes the heroines, ’cause they’re not perfect at all, who are good at talking about being good, talking about Christian virtues, and one of the subtleties of her fiction is that what you and I might call the bad people in her novels think they’re good too, they think they’re good. Mrs. Norris in Mansfield Park, who’s one of the great sadists of world fiction to my mind, who gets her kicks really from tormenting the heroine, Fanny Price, whom she resents for being a poor relation, whom she resents for having been sent to live with the rich Bertrams, her own sister and their family, Lady Bertram and their family, her family. She’s a torturer really. She’s a tormentor of servants who’s always pretending that she’s helping them out, but in fact is making their lives awful but she quotes scripture more frequently than anybody in the novel, and we find out that she thinks of herself as a virtuous person and [laughter], that’s one of the complications of a delightful complication of Austen’s fiction that you don’t get, there’s no cardboard villains.

Brett McKay: No. And what’s interesting too is about that idea of some characters weren’t even aware that they weren’t virtuous. I mean that’s one of the other things you see in her novels, is you see the heroines specifically discover, “I’m not as good as I thought I was,” or “I am… ” Was it… Elizabeth Bennett, “I am prejudiced. I got this… I think this Darcy guy is a prig, but no, actually I just really prejudiced against Marianne,” in Sense and Sensibility where she finally realized, Willoughby, yeah, they had a lot in common with book taste and things like that, or this passion for life, but, “Boy, I was really was dumb. He was a cad.” So all the heroins they had… Or even Emma, there’s a moment of, I guess Aristotle would call peripeteia, self-awareness sort of a, “I am not that great and I need to do better.”

John Mullan: Yeah, absolutely. And I think also, properly Aristotelian is the fact that, say the first example you gave, Brett, of Elizabeth Bennet, it’s not just that she realizes she’s been wrong about Mr. Darcy, but she’s also been wrong about Mr. Wickham, who she took rather a fancy to, who’s actually a bad guy and like a true practical philosopher, she then rehearses in her head the memories of the conversations she’s had with Mr. Wickham, where he’s told her lots of lies basically about Mr. Darcy and about himself. And she realizes that she should have known, just like the reader who read those dialogues should know, because Mr. Wickham, for instance, he tells her loads of stuff that he shouldn’t tell her, he over-confides we might say. And so even if it were true, there’s something wrong about somebody who are a mere acquaintance starts telling you, yes? It’s like the person you meet for the first time and you find you have… Knows somebody in common and this person starts telling you… Slagging that person off, but telling you maybe quite private things that they shouldn’t be telling you about, not on this mere acquaintanceship. And she realizes that if she’d been a proper, as it were, scrutineer of what she was hearing, she would’ve known already without further evidence that there was something wrong about it. I think Aristotle would’ve approved of that.

Brett McKay: I think so too. So you mentioned in an email that the characters, the main characters, they were heroines, they were women, but you make the case that Austen has a lot to say about manliness.

John Mullan: Yes.

Brett McKay: What did manliness mean to her and what was her ideal of a good man?

John Mullan: Well, I think she had several ideals. I mean I could list them as a list of qualities, but that might in a way be quite banal because they’d be unsurprising, one’s kindness, generosity, magnanimity, humor. [laughter] But reading her… I mean if you could… You get ideas of manliness from reading her novels, but I think it’s important to know that you get them in quite indirect ways where they’re exactly the sort of thing you only get on a… Maybe you get more and more on a second or third reading because apart from in Mansfield Park, there are no scenes in Jane Austen’s novels where only men are present. There are couple of short… Two or three short scenes in Mansfield Park where only men are present. There are lots and lots of scenes where only women are present. So you don’t find out what men are like together, what men say to each other, but there’s lots of evidence for it, there’s lots of clues. And what she does most of the time is allow you to find out about the good things about her male leads because they’re the representatives of manliness I suppose, indirectly.

So in Emma, you find out… You hear what Mr. Knightley is like when he speaks and he’s humorous and he’s wise and he’s clever and he’s particularly humorous, wise and clever when it comes to Emma. And he says great things, but also you’re seeing things mostly from Emma’s point of view, so you find out about Mr. Knightley indirectly. And I think that’s the exemplification of manly virtues that you get in Jane Austen’s novels, is all the more enjoyable because you find out about it indirectly so often. So you find out Mr. Knightley is incredibly kind, but he’s secretly kind because he knows that he’s surrounded by people who pretend to be kind. [chuckle] So you find out in the very plot of the novel that he’s done little things which first time round you hardly notice, that he’s arranged for people who can’t… For women, these women who haven’t got enough money to travel anywhere ’cause you have to have a carriage, and he’s arranged for his carriage, which he doesn’t usually use, ’cause he hasn’t got the horses for it.

And he’s hired horses and got a coachman and… You never get told that, you have to work it out from the events in the novel, that he’s doing all these kind things. And each of the men, Captain Wentworth in Persuasion, Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, they’re really different in their aspects of masculinity, but you find out about their virtues indirectly. And I guess one thing they’ve got in common is how they behave, or in Mr. Darcy’s case, how he has to learn to behave [chuckle] ’cause he’s on a learning curve with Elizabeth Bennet towards women. And I would say that, in a way that is not particularly political at all, but is integral to the stories, the men whom are worth admiring or liking or marrying, [chuckle] are ones who treat women as their equals. And I don’t mean that in a sort of rights of woman where… I mean, because… Not because I’ve no idea what Captain Wentworth thought about the rights of women, it’s not part of what the novel’s about, but it’s a really… It’s a rare behavior in the novels and one that these very different men all share. And Mr. Darcy, he’s a tricky customer and he’s partly a tricky customer because he’s handsome and very, very rich and every young woman he meets is having a go at trying to hook him.

And then he meets this woman, Elizabeth Bennet, who is miles below him socially, who has almost no money and who teases him and who doesn’t try to hook him and who amuses him and who sort of fences with him and who brings out the better aspects thereby of his [chuckle] manliness. And that’s a real sort of Jane Austen… I guess it was something she believed, but it was also something she dramatizes in her novels, they’re about love and marriage and it’s true for all men in her novels that if they marry the right women, they become better men. [laughter]

Brett McKay: No, and this is Aristotelian. So another reason I love Jane Austen is even though she never got married, I think she offers some of the best advice out there on romance and marriage and it’s precisely what you were talking about. For Austen, you wanted to find someone that would make you better, make you more virtuous, and that’s an Aristotelian thing. So Aristotle has this idea about the different types of friends you could have, there’s a friend you like to have a good time with, you talk about the things you have in common, there’s a friend that’s useful, there’s a friend who you can go to them ’cause they, I don’t know, they got connections or whatever and help you with a job. But he said that the best ever of friend you wanna look for is those friends of virtue, the friends that make you more virtuous. And for Austen, that’s what you wanna look for in a spouse.

John Mullan: Yes. Yes. I mean, to exemplify what you were saying, Brett, there’s a wonderful moment, a real Jane Austen moment in Persuasion where Anne Elliot, okay, she’s been proposed to when she was 19 by this dashing but impecunious young naval officer, a mere lieutenant called Frederick Wentworth. And although she loves him, disastrously her mum’s dead and it’s not there to advise her, and she’s persuaded by her substitute mother, Lady Russell to turn him down. And he’s got no prospects, you’ll just ruin his career anyway if you encumber him with marriage. And Anne is very young and very unworldly and disastrously, she goes along with Lady Russell and turns him down. And then the beginning of the novel, he’s come back eight years later and he’s now rich, successful, still attractive as hell. [laughter] And she still loves him. And we find out that in the meantime, she did get another proposal, three years later she got a proposal from this local squire or squire’s son called Charles Musgrove.

And Charles Musgrove proposed to her and of course she turned him down because she still loves the absent Captain Wentworth. And Charles Musgrove then goes and says, “Oh, you won’t marry me.” And [laughter] he goes and proposes instead to Anne’s gruesomely selfish hypochondriac sister, Mary and she says yes. And those two become quite big characters in the novel. But anyway, Anne is a really good person. Jane Austen famously said of Anne Elliot, the sixth of her heroines, she’s almost too good for me.

And Anne is endlessly thoughtful and unselfish and to the point sometimes almost of masochism. But you inhabit the novel through her mind, through her consciousness. And there’s one bit where you catch her thinking an extraordinary thing. She thinks something, which she would never say because she’s too generous and kind a person. She’s observing Charles Musgrove, who’s endlessly having slightly petulant little tiffs with his wife Mary and they’re married, they’ve got two kids, they’re gonna be together forever, but they have a slightly low level rancorous relationship. They’re always disagreeing with each other, criticizing each other, when they’re apart, they’re always complaining about each other. And she looks at Charles and she thinks this thing, which a person might think, but a self-respecting person wouldn’t say, she thinks if I’d married him, if I’d said yes five years ago, he would’ve become a much better person than he is now. [laughter]

‘Cause she knows what Mary’s like and she knows that Jane Austen thing, that marriage shapes men. It’s not just they make a choice and that’s that, the choice then ramifies down the years, and she’s right. Charles is not essentially a bad guy, and if he’d married Anne, he would be more thoughtful, he would read more books, which, not a bad thing. [chuckle] He maybe would be a bit more involved with his children. He wouldn’t spend his whole time escaping to do hunting and shooting or shooting and fishing, and he would be a better person because when men make those choices of partners, it shapes their characters.

Brett McKay: Well, we’ve uncovered a lot I feel like in this conversation. For those who are interested in wanting to read Austen, is there a book you’d recommend men starting off with?

John Mullan: Yeah, I would definitely start with Pride and Prejudice. I think… Ah, it’s just a so perfect book. I don’t think it’s the most complicated of her books, but I think it’s the funniest of her books. And I think that also in terms of the… I think it’s got a heroine that… I remember when I first got into Pride of Prejudice, which I think I didn’t read till I was in my 20s, and I sort of thought, “Gosh, I really hope I meet an Elizabeth Bennet.” And then I would pause in my thoughts and think, “But I really hope I could cope with her.” [laughter] And so I think it’s got a heroine who is… I don’t know how to put this except to say, really attractive to a male reader. [chuckle] And I think it’s also got a male lead who is really interesting if you’re thinking what are men like, what should they be like, what are the typical follies of men, even of intelligent, good-hearted, reasonable men. And Mr. Darcy, Jane Austen does this really difficult thing with him, which is to make him worth marrying, he’s worth getting Elizabeth, but also she has to wean him off his self importance really. And usually, self-important characters in novels are really unattractive and Jane Austen does this thing of making his self importance not disgusting and even forgivable. So yeah, I’d definitely start with Pride and Prejudice.

Brett McKay: Awesome. Well John, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your book and your work?

John Mullan: Ah, well, [chuckle] my book, What Matters in Jane Austen, but I’ve read that wrong ’cause it has got a question mark, What matters in Jane Austen? To which I guess the one word answer is everything, everything, every little detail. So that’s widely available. You said at the beginning, I’m a professor of English literature and so I am, but if it doesn’t sound too self flaunting, I wrote this book for people who enjoy reading novels and people who enjoy reading Jane Austen. And I didn’t write it for students or for… Let alone for other academics, although I would hope that they too might want to read it and might find out things about it. But it’s a book which is very much about her novels, not so much about her or the times or the history or the background, although I hope you’ll find out some things about those things. But it’s a book to read once you’ve read a little bit of Jane Austen I think. And I’ve also edited… Done editions of Jane Austen’s novel, I’ve done an edition for Oxford World’s Classics of Sense and Sensibility and Emma.

Brett McKay: Well, John Mullan, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

John Mullan: Been great.

Brett McKay: My guest today was John Mullan. He’s the author of the book, What Matters In Jane Austen? It’s available on amazon.com. Make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is/austen where you’ll find links to resources we’ve delved deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, make sure to sign up for our newsletter. There’s a weekly or daily option and it’s free. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium, head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you’ll start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review of the podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding to all who listen to the AOM podcast, to put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #871: Jane Austen for Dudes appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

There are some foods that are difficult to eat non-awkwardly. They’re hard to pick up with your fork and hard to always get into your mouth in a single clean bite. Salad is one. Pasta, at least of the strand variety, is another.

Whether or not you’re pounding your pasta properly may be of little import when you’re eating in the privacy of your own home. But when you’re on a date, and there’s someone sitting across from you, staring at your mouth, the question takes on a bit more urgency. You don’t want to get food on your face or your shirt. You want to impress, come off as well-mannered, and eat your pasta like a smooth operator.

To do so, the big thing to know is that even if your place setting includes a spoon, knife, and fork, you’ll only be using that last utensil to eat your pasta. You’re not going to cut your spaghetti into pieces, and you’re not going to twirl it on a spoon. That latter point may be controversial, and if you’re an avowed spoon twirler, no one’s going to stop you from continuing the practice. But using a fork alone is the authentic Italian way to do things.

Beyond that, follow the other dos and don’ts illustrated above. And maybe order the soup instead of the salad. 

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