I'm Wesley Morris. I'm a culture writer at The New York Times. And I've been thinking

a lot about the ways in which culture is a kind of parent. And the idea that both art

and culture basically help us show us who we are. And in the middle of thinking about all

of this, an amazing book came into my life that performs and interrogates and inhabits

all of these questions. And so today on the show, we're going to hear about understanding

one's cultural self from the author of that book, The Great American Critic Margot

Jefferson.

This is still processing.

Margot. Yes, hello, Wesley. I was a little overwhelmed temporarily. You needn't. It is

all true. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Glad to be here.

I want to start with a cultural memory. You write so beautifully about Ella Fitzgerald.

And I want to focus on one extremely distinctive and surprising aspect of Ella Fitzgerald

that relates to her perspiration. I don't know. Would you call it an irony that one of the

most eloquent sounding women in the history of recorded sound also sweats like a pitcher

of water in July? There we go. I like that you use an object rather than a gender. Yeah,

yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's what we think of as a masculine, right, almost. They

men have license, whether they're, you know, laboring on a railroad or creating beautiful

dazzling music in a concert hall or a cup. They can sweat. They can grimace. They can twist

themselves into all those laborious positions. They can, yeah, they get exposed because

the genius is what we're looking for and everything, including beads of sweat, you know,

and a grimace become signs of that genius in process. Women have a whole series of rituals,

demands, requirements for how they look, conduct themselves, comport themselves, even

...