Lucy Sante joins us for the finale of Season 8. The Belgian-born American critic, writer, and artist talks about her lifelong textual engagement with an extraordinary miscellany of culture and history. Sante shares the figures that have shaped her work, from a grade-school report on Nostradamus to Barbara Epstein, her editor at the New York Review of Books, to her various writing students across twenty years of teaching at Columbia and Bard. For her “meaningful text,” Sante focuses on Manny Farber, an early inspiration whose writing “infected me from the word go.” She reads from his essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (Film Culture, No. 27, Winter 1962/63), an electric ode to “termite tapeworm-fungus-moss art … that goes always forward eating its own boundaries.”

Momus: The Podcast is edited by Jacob Irish, with production assistance from Chris Andrews.

Thanks to this episode’s sponsors, Rabkin Foundation, PHI, and Esker Foundation, for supporting our work.

Thanks to Lucy Sante for her contribution to this season.