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No, your eyes do not deceive you—this is a new episode of Rite Gud in your podcast feed. But it’s also NOT a new episode. We’re finally taking the best of our Book Club episodes from behind the paywall. This was originally released May 26, 2024.

In this edition of the Book Club, we talk about Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

About Rite Gud: R. S. Benedict is an author, appearing in Fantasy and Science Fiction and Gardner Dozois’ The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction. Matt Keeley, founder of Kittysneezes, is producing Rite Gud for KS Media, LLC. Rite Gud is a Kittysneezes production. If you have questions, comments and concerns, email ritegud – at – kittysneezes – dot – com. Rite Gud is also on Patreon, at http://patreon.kittysneezes.com/. Patrons receive access to the official Kittysneezes Discord, exclusive episodes and more.

The Rite Gud theme is by OK Glass. Follow them on Twitter, YouTube and Bandcamp, and at OK.Glass.

The post Book Club: In Cold Blood by Matt Keeley appeared first on Kittysneezes.

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RS: Welcome to this month’s bonus episode of Rite Gud, the podcast that helps you write good. For this edition of the Book Club, we’re dipping our toes into the world of nonfiction with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Joining me is producer Matt Keeley.

Matt: Hello, how’s it going?

RS: Hello. So this is a very important book. It transformed the true crime genre. [00:01:00] It was a big part of launching New Journalism. Originally, it ran as a four part series in The New Yorker in, I think, 1966, I believe.

Matt: The book was 66 and the movie was 67, right?

RS: Yeah, they didn’t, they didn’t waste any time. They were quick.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, I think, I think The New Yorker might have been like the tail end of 65.

RS: Right. Which is right after the killers were executed.

Matt: Yeah, their bodies were barely cold.

RS: Yeah, I get the impression though that Capote, he started writing this, well at least he started working on it and researching it before the murderers were identified. It was just after this murder took place and it made really big, big news. So he headed out there with, I believe, with Harper Lee and took like shitloads of notes, just thousands of pages of notes or something crazy like that.

Matt: And he didn’t give Harper Lee any credit.

RS: Didn’t give her any fucking credit [00:02:00] because, because that’s Truman Capote. That’s Truman Capote. He was a piece of shit. Oh, God.

Matt: High droopy dog sounding motherfucker,

RS: Just absolute trash human. And, and fascinating though, because of what a big piece of shit he was.

Matt: Oh, I know, I know. It’s like, I mean, we’ve, I know that we’ve both fallen into a Capote hole after this

RS: I am currently watching that series Feud, Capote vs. The Swans, because I want more Capote content.

Matt: same, same

RS: I cannot get enough of this horrible little man.

Matt: Have you seen Murder by Death?

RS: Yes, but that was a long time ago.

Matt: Yeah, well it’s just funny because there’s that one scene of him disassociating while during the filming and stuff, so.

RS: Right, I’d forgotten that he was in it. I think because I watched it when I was a kid and I didn’t know who Truman Capote was.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With me, I watched it as a kid and I re watched it relatively [00:03:00] recently, a couple years ago.

RS: Yeah, now that you can actually get the jokes.

Matt: Exactly, exactly.

RS: So anyway, let’s start off. Speaking of Truman Capote, it’s kind of inevitable as you’re reading this, but as you’re reading this, you really get the sense that Truman Capote was thirsting for murderer Perry Smith really, really fucking hard in this book.

Matt: Oh my god, totally. It is almost absurd about how much he leans into Perry being, you know, ooh, soft boy, sad, and except that, you know, he’s the dude who blew them all away.

RS: Yeah, there’s this very, “he’s neurodivergent and a minor,” well not really a minor, but minor coded because he’s only 5’3 inches tall. Perry, in a lot of ways, is the protagonist of this book. I know it’s not a novel, but it really takes the structure of a novel with Perry as the protagonist and Perry’s internal, if there is anything, [00:04:00] sort of internal conflict and Perry’s trauma and Perry’s many, many issues in his relationship with Dick. And I was reading this thinking, why is he so sympathetic for Perry? The story went that he fell in, that Capote kind of fell in love with Perry while he was writing this article. There, there was a movie about that called Capote, where he sneaks into the prison cell to hand feed him baby food while he’s on a hunger strike.

I don’t know if that really happened, probably not,

Matt: Yeah, yeah, I saw that movie too when it came out and. I, I didn’t know the exact stuff. I just basically knew that’s kind of the thumbnail version of In Cold Blood. Cause even though like my mom has always hated Truman Capote, she always is fascinated by him basically. So we’re kind of following in the tradition because he was a phenomenal writer and very, very interesting, but such a prick.

Oh my God.

RS: Yeah, yeah, just, just wretched. Just [00:05:00] wretched. But, one of those you love to hate him types, and at the same time he was, he was very talented at what he did. What he did was usually completely amoral and selfish and cruel, but he was good at it, he was really fucking good at it, and he was catty and mean and nasty in some very appealing ways.

It’s this sort of junk food for the soul thing, where like, his anecdotes are really great and really entertaining.

In part they’re so mean and because it’s this like oh, I’m being so bad listening to this, you know

Matt: Even though he never really wrote anything after In Cold Blood. I mean, other than, you know, like, he had been working on Answered Prayers for the rest of his life, which is what The Swans is about. But I mean, at a certain point, he became a professional talk show guest. And so, he was on Carson all the time.

And stuff, and my mom was always like, “oh, I have to watch Truman Capote’s on. Fuck him.”

RS: [00:06:00] Yeah Yeah, he was good at that. So he built this career out of this story about murder. Which feels a little a little gross and is very appropriate for Capote, but I just found it very compelling because I looked this up while watching the movie Because I’d known that Capote had fallen in love with Perry Smith supposedly and I noticed in the movie less than five minutes in they’re showing Perry and In his underwear, wet,

Matt: Yes.

RS: and they’re like, I’m like, they’re really fucking leaning into this.

They keep showing this guy pantsless. What did he look like? And I looked it up, the, the, the mug shots, and while Dick Hickok looks like a typical kind of 1950s guy who was probably malnourished as a kid, Perry was a looker. He, he was a looker, and I realized, really? That the only reason Hmm You felt so compelled for this.

Wasn’t anything like charisma or intelligence or some deeper anything. It was literally just, well, he’s kinda hot.

Matt: Yeah. When [00:07:00] you posted the, uh, pictures in the, the discord, it was honestly before I’d really gotten into the meat of it because I, I, I admit I’ve got the procrastinator gene, but a weird, variety of it where I will do everything to beat the deadline, but I won’t do anything until enough before the deadline that you know. So basically you you said, you know, oh, well, why don’t we record next week?

I went okay It’s time to read the book and I plowed through it in four days, Watch the movie and you know Because I I can’t miss the deadline because I hate missing deadlines even though sometimes I have to but

RS: Yeah.

Matt: But yeah, but um, it was just kind of funny because I’m going looking at those like and yeah You like you say Dick is just a dude. I didn’t even notice like his fucked up eye that much that Truman makes a big deal out of

RS: Yeah.

Matt: But but with Perry it’s like dude, you’re not a murderer You’re the star of a bunch of like Frankie and Annette knockoff movies[00:08:00]

RS: Yeah, he legit looks like he, and he played guitar too, so you just know Truman’s having fantasies about this guy launching into a Latin love ballad or something, like, goddammit.

Matt: Short dark and handsome

RS: it’s so funny, but also so sad that that’s the sole reason, really, you made this guy your protagonist, cause you thought he was sort of good looking.

Matt: Yeah,

RS: that’s literally it.

Matt: yeah.

RS: If Herb Clutter had been hot,

Matt: I know,

RS: would have been written in a completely different way.

Matt: Yes, yes, it’d be like, this is the tragedy of our times. A hot dude died.

RS: if Herb Clutter had been a daddy.

Matt: but I could fix him. I, I

RS: Like a, like a big midwestern daddy with broad shoulders and farmer muscles.

Matt: yeah, yeah.

RS: No, he wasn’t. So this is not, this is the book we got. We didn’t get that book. We didn’t get Hot Herb book, unfortunately. So it’s so strange, and it’s very odd reading this. There’s so much Perry [00:09:00] apologia in this book. The book makes a very big deal about the fact that Dick Hickok was a rapist and a pedophile and, and, But Perry, the very sensitive Perry, he was not.

And Perry had no patience for Dick’s lack of self control. Like, well, congratulations, you’re not a rapist, but you’re still a murderer, dude. That’s significantly worse.

Matt: I know, I

RS: that is way worse!

Matt: yeah, yeah, it’s like, yeah, at least a lot of Dick’s victims survived.

RS: Yeah, like, not to, not to, you know, undercut how horrible the act of rape is,

Matt: Yeah,

RS: murder is objectively worse.

Matt: yeah,

RS: Like, murder is objectively worse, because you can’t ever heal from that, you know? And that’s it, you’re just gone.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s weird reading the book that’s between the lines of In Cold Blood. Just because it really is like, the fact that both Perry and [00:10:00] Dick are pieces of shit comes through,

RS: Yeah.

Matt: Capote is trying to convince you that Perry isn’t quite a piece of shit.

RS: Yeah.

Matt: a very odd situation because He’s doing his best to, like, kind of go, Oh, poor Perry, if only things had been different, I could fix him.

But,

RS: “I can fix him.” That wasn’t a very

Matt: I can, I can fix him.

Truman is a hard voice

RS: He, it is!

Matt: you start it like droopy dog,

and then you go up, but then you over enunciate everything. He’s like that.

RS: Yeah.

Matt: It’s, it’s this weird combination that it’s kinda hard to pull off.

RS: Yeah. It’s fun to try though, and I love watching actors attempt to do the Truman Capote voice because it’s great.

Matt: Yes, yes.

RS: But there really is this “I can fix him” thing going through it. There’s much [00:11:00] made of his traumatic background, his terrible upbringing, his injury. He’s portrayed in this very childlike way.

There’s so much emphasis on how small his feet are. There’s all this talk about the His fantasy of a big yellow bird coming and rescuing him. And there’s this implication that if he’d found another man to guide him, instead of Dick Hickok, maybe he’d be okay. But I’m very, very skeptical of that, simply because of Perry’s sister.

There’s a, there’s a chapter, or, not a chapter, there’s a part where the police talk to Perry’s sister, who seems very well adjusted, she’s normal, she’s nice, she’s stable, and she’s She’s terrified of him. She’s straight up terrified of him. She insists to the police, “Please do not let him know where I live.

I’d prefer if he doesn’t even know that I’m alive or not. Like, I want nothing to do with him. I’m terrified of this man.” And if, if the guy’s own sister, who knows him probably the best, is frightened of him, That tells us that he’s, he’s [00:12:00] dangerous. He’s, he’s bad news.

Matt: exactly. And I mean it’s, it is said that she’s like the only one who seems to have made it out of that family.

RS: Yeah.

Matt: Because their brother kills himself and after his wife kills herself because he was like,

RS: He was abusive to her.

Matt: abusive. And also, you know. One of those, “you’re cheating on me.” “No, I’m not.” “You’re cheating on me.

I know it all” type of assholes. And then his sister who apparently he the the other sister the one he loved, uh, either fell or jumped from a uh building after potentially being drunk or high but. And And I mean to his mom drank herself to death and The dad basically seems like kind of at best a dipshit.

RS: at him.[00:13:00]

Matt: Exactly, yeah.

RS: So there’s a lot of mental illness in this family. There’s a lot of traumatic upbringing in there, and that’s true. But also, he’s still a piece of shit.

Matt: exactly, and he’s super sensitive about his legs, uh, in the motorcycle wreck that got tore up. And it’s implied that that might be the reason why he’s short, like they might have had, I don’t know, like take some bone out or something. I don’t, I don’t know.

RS: I don’t know how medicine worked back then. I don’t know what the hell they were doing. Right.

Matt: So, I mean, it could just be that, he was short, but it needed an excuse.

So “it was the, it was the crack up that shortened me. Yes.”

RS: of this long running true crime tradition of thirsting after serial killers and murderers. Ted Bundy, of course, had his whole fan club. Jeffrey Dahmer. And yes, of course, there are fics about Jeffrey Dahmer on AO3. White women are extraordinary.[00:14:00]

Richard Ramirez, even though he had really fucked up teeth, managed to get married while in prison. And that there’s this long running True crime tradition of thirsting after really, really vicious murderers.

Matt: And it’s, and it’s funny too, because like they always with Ted Bundy, they would talk about how hot he was, and I finally saw him, as an adult, and I was like, he’s kind of mid, I mean, he, he’s, he’s put together, but I mean, he’s like,

RS: Yeah.

Matt: he’s like, okay, normal dude, he’s not anything, like, I mean, Perry, I, I at least get it.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Like I can kind of go like, yeah, okay, Truman, I, I get where you’re coming from. I mean, aim a little higher next time, but I mean, at least I get it. But like, you know, Ted Bundy was just a

RS: He was sort of generic college Republican man.

Matt: Exactly. Yeah. Just, you know, central casting young Republican.

You could pick pretty much any law student. At least half of them are gonna [00:15:00] look like that guy. It’s just not really, just not that special. I don’t know. Not that special.

RS: Anyway. Yeah. But this book really focuses on Perry and on Perry’s relationship with Dick. And it is this very, very interesting, there’s this I, I, I’m not the only one who saw this.

Granted, this is our Discord, where people are rather special. But, there is definitely this sort of, I don’t know, sexual tension or homoerotic tension between the two leads. Dick comes across as more of a beast to me than Perry. He’s impulsive, he’s stupid, he’s operating on this like, animal instinct. But that somehow makes him less scary to me than Perry, even knowing that Dick was, you know, a massive, a massive rapist.

But there’s this strange sort of admiration and frustration and These feelings that Perry has for Dick, where he sort of adores Dick and idolizes him in some ways, but is also incredibly frustrated with him over and over again. And his frustrations with Dick [00:16:00] spending so much of their mon– so much of the time, uh, chasing girls.

And it’s this unclear idea of, is Perry really frustrated by his lack of self control? Or is it like, dude, you’re spending all our money on whores, you dumbass. Or is it this this envy? You know, like why are you chasing them when I’m right here?

Matt: yeah, it’s a, it’s a very odd ad just because, yeah, like you say, Dick comes off as this just dipshit lummox, just, “oh, I want to either sell it or stick my dick in it.”

RS: Yeah.

Matt: And that’s, that’s basically Dick. And that’s one of the things I do also find kind of funny is that there’s a thing where, um, Dick also had a crash and Dick’s dad, says that he wasn’t the same after that, after he hit his head and stuff.

And, but that is, seems more dismissed by, in the [00:17:00] book. And while, you know, Perry had a similar thing, but, you know, ooh, soft boy, you

RS: Yeah.

Matt: you know, it’s, it’s just interesting, but there is like a lot of that where it is like, , I know we’re going to talk about the movie more later, but it seems that the book really leans more into the, the gay coupleness of it.

Where the movie seems a bit more, you know, two straight dudes.

RS: Mm.

Matt: At least to me, you know, I don’t

RS: Yeah, I don’t know about Perry, but

Matt: But, but okay, but I mean it seems at least like there’s less of a chance that they’re doing makeouts between the scenes, you know,

RS: Between the murders and, and check frauds and so on and so

Matt: Yeah, where in the book it’s very much like Are they a couple? Especially just because everything that Dick especially says, but I think Perry like, uh, does this too, where [00:18:00] everything is, honey, or sweetie, or, or, you know, ” what babe?” And it’s like, yeah, did straight dudes actually call each other honey, like this?

Is this some beatnik shit

RS: Yeah, was that some, some, some slang thing from back then? Yeah, Truman Capote. “Yeah, heterosexual men call each other baby all the time, right? That’s what happens. That’s how it”

Matt: “I, I write like real life.”

RS: Yeah,

“this is how men talk to each other, isn’t it? I don’t know.”

Matt: But yeah, it’s, it’s an odd, it’s odd because it’s sort of like, Okay. This, this book is very gay, but how gay was the actual , you know,

RS: Right,

Matt: I’m

RS: much of this is Truman projecting on here?

Matt: Yeah, exactly. And I’m not saying the the, the real life gay meter was necessarily zero, but

RS: Right.

Matt: but Truman really kinda leaned into it.

RS: [00:19:00] Yeah, and that is this big aspect of the book is that as much as this is true crime and journalism, this is really more of a novel based on facts than necessarily on a dispassionate, realistic portrayal. And in some ways, that’s great because it is very engagingly written and it’s, it is, it’s well written.

It’s a terrific read. But novels, the structure of a novel, the way novels are written, doesn’t really, that doesn’t line up with real life particularly well. So how much was Truman nudging? I mean, there’s tons and tons of dialogue in this book that Capote was not there to witness. He could not have heard, he, he had to have made a good bit of it up.

So how much of it was it made up? And maybe that doesn’t sound like that big a deal, but it’s not just the information being conveyed, but how the two people talk to each other, that conveys a lot beyond just the facts stated, right? [00:20:00] So, how much of this is just Truman sticking himself into it and, and nudging things to make them more compelling to him, to the readers, him projecting his desires and feelings onto it?

And, and of course, uh, There, there were criticisms of the book by some, some people said, Okay, this didn’t happen, that didn’t happen, this thing you said that I said, I didn’t say that. And that’s not, that’s not necessarily meaning that it was completely inaccurate, because witnesses are also unreliable in, in terms of memory.

Be, everybody’s memories are kind of shaky. But this, this, this book, Coda of this book, the last bit where the uh, policeman Dewey goes to visit the graves of the family and runs into their old friend Susan. Not Susan,

Matt: Oh, um,

RS: I think it was Susan.

Matt: Yeah.

RS: Yeah, that never fucking happened.

Matt: Yeah, and, uh, apparently the, you know the scenes when they’re in the small town prison where they’re separated and, like, Dick is in the general population [00:21:00] but Perry is in the apartment cell?

RS: Yeah, it’s weird, there’s this cell in the apartment of the sheriff or something like that where he and his wife live

Matt: And his wife really bonds with him and cri and he cries in front of her and stuff, and she says, like, “Yeah, no, I would cook for him because that’s what we have to do, but I mean, Otherwise, like, he didn’t he never cried in front of me. We never really,

RS: yeah.

Matt: You know, went beyond, you know, Hey, it’s this dude that’s in my house.”

RS: Yeah, they didn’t bond. There wasn’t this, Oh, he was this special little boy and I held his hand while he wept. Just, here’s breakfast. There you go.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, I know that when, he was working on this, it was called a, uh, nonfiction novel. And I, and I think that does get to, what you were getting at earlier with, the new journalism where things were not necessarily true, but got to the truth of things.

Like Hunter S. Thompson famously, would [00:22:00] make a ton of shit up. Like, I mean, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I think is maybe, I don’t know, 25 percent true? I don’t really know, but it, it also gets to the truth, or the broader truth, I guess you’d call it.

RS: So we were talking about Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. We had a little bit of technical difficulties and you were sort of talking about how new journalism was taking the Herodotus approach rather than the Thucydides approach to history. A little joke for you classical nerds, but, uh, Thucydides and Herodotus were both ancient Greek historians, and Thucydides tried to actually tell history, while [00:23:00] Herodotus, the father of history, just fuckin made shit up, like a complete chad.

Matt: Well, yeah, and that’s what I was kind of getting at with Hunter S. Thompson’s, Fear and Loathing, you know, well actually both Fear and Loathing books, but especially Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, where the book was ostensibly a diary and a companion piece to The Boys on the Bus by uh, I’ve got a copy across the room, but I can’t see that far to say who wrote it. Anyway, though like even though it was supposed to be, you know an actual tour diary of following the campaign, he, he, uh, would, uh, confabulate things like there was this like runner in there of, I, and this has been like, it’s been about like 15, 20 years since I read the book.

So I, I’m a little bit hazy, but you know, my point is that, uh, he had this whole runner in there about, and I think it was McGovern’s vice presidential candidate whose name I don’t remember being addicted to [00:24:00] Ibogaine, which A, he wasn’t, and B, I don’t even know if that’s a real drug. Considering, considering that how in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he has the whole thing about adrenochrome, which is yes, where the QAnon bullshit comes

RS: Whaaat?

Matt: Yeah, he invented the idea of adrenochrome as, this intense Satanist drug that, it’s harvested from kids pineal glands and all this bullshit.

And no, like, adrenochrome is real, but it’s just a hormone and it doesn’t really do shit. I mean, at least not if you take it recreationally. I don’t remember what exactly it does in the body, but I mean. You don’t need extra. If you take extra, it’s not gonna make you, like, I don’t know, rip off a kid’s face and wear it as a mask or whatever QAnon bullshit you

RS: Oh my god, I had no idea that came from [00:25:00] Hunter Thompson.

Matt: Yeah, yeah. As far as I know, that is like the first instance of adrenochrome as a thing. Other than just, you know, whatever it actually does in your body, you know.

RS: my god, that is crazy.

Matt: I know, I know, right? Holy shit, it’s, who knew that this, like, riff in a, in a book from 50 some odd years ago would,

RS: show up to a pizza parlor with a gun.

Matt: I know, exactly, it’s, it’s that meme with the, the dominoes and,

RS: Yeah!

Matt: Low, low tax, you know, or moot bans child porn on 4chan and Trump, you know?

RS: It’s so crazy. Goddamn. Goddamn.

Matt: is weird.

RS: History is nonsense. Jesus Christ.

Matt: But, but my, my original point was that new journalism was more about not necessarily eschewing the [00:26:00] real facts, but playing fast and lose them to get to a broader truth. I. e. like, the monologue of, with the right kind of eyes, you can see where the wave crested in, in, uh, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

I mean, that’s a great piece of writing and honestly does get to something about that, that time and place and history. But yeah, but again, too, it’s also in a book where they talk about getting adrenochrome from satanists. So, Heh heh

RS: Oh, wow. Right. Now, there is an implication in this book that’s explored, I think, more in the movie, which we’ll talk about more, that this relationship between Perry and Dick kind of became more than them. I think it’s explicit in the movie that neither of these guys could have done this stuff on their own, but their two personalities melded together to create a third and more dangerous personality.

And that’s what did it. And I’m thinking of something similar in the friendship [00:27:00] between Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, which was depicted in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, where these two girls created a friendship. A very, very intense, really extreme friendship that ended up resulting in a murder where neither of them could have really done this on their own, but they just had some kind of strange folie a deux, I suppose, to, To quote the title of the new Joker movie with fuckin Lady Gaga in it, um,

Matt: hope it buys Lady Gaga a nice house because Joker 1

RS: for her.

Matt: I will die on this hill, that movie was a piece of shit. It was like, What if a man made a movie about a Joker that ripped off King of Comedy while getting neither? Pfft. Heh heh heh.

RS: was okay. It was, it very much ripped something off, but at least it ripped off something good. I’ll give it credit for that.[00:28:00]

Matt: Yeah,

RS: You ripped off a good movie instead of a shitty movie, I’ll give you credit for that.

Matt: Yeah.

RS: I don’t know. But anyway,

Matt: But yeah,

RS: sort of implication, and I’m having to wonder, Did Dick make Perry more dangerous? Or was it just that Dick saw this guy and recognized, Oh, wow, this guy is nuts. This guy is a fuckin murderer. I’m just gonna direct that where I want it to go. Because he’s going to kill someone anyway.

Let me just fuckin use this. Because I noticed, not just, with the Clutters, but also in their scheme to Ooh, excuse me. In their scheme to kill people while hitchhiking, it’s Perry who’s supposed to carry it out. Perry is the one who’s supposed to strangle people when Dick gives him the signal. And that’s kind of their relationship.

So is it like, is Perry just a pair of hired hands? Is he just being told what to do and misled by Dick, or is it just Dick recognizing that he’s got this, this thing? This fucking force of nature for murder and saying, [00:29:00] all right, cool. I’m gonna use this, you know?

Matt: Yeah, I mean, I think it is interesting to point out that, even though they bonded over Perry’s story of having killed a black guy in Vegas. That was a pure fabrication meant to get Dick to like him.

RS: Right.

Matt: And that Perry actually hadn’t killed anybody before the Clutters.

RS: Yeah.

Matt: Which I mean, I guess like, great way to start, geez.

You know, but

RS: Yeah.

Matt: I mean, cause that was like a vicious crime. And, but, so yeah, I think there is something to that idea of them feeding off each other and making this horrible thing instead of just, you know, Because I, I mean, honestly, I’m not going to say that Perry wouldn’t have killed anybody left to his own devices.

But I, I see them more as basically, if they had never, if they had never met, both Dick and Perry would just be low level scummy hoodlums who’ve, you know, [00:30:00] rolling people all the time and stealing all sorts of shit and, never doing anything good. But I don’t see, I don’t necessarily see them as becoming Dick and Perry if that, if that makes sense.

RS: Yeah, doing something this big, I guess.

Matt: exactly. Yeah. I think like, uh, Floyd kind of had it right. Yeah. Or Floyd Wells, who was the jailhouse snitch where it’s like, yeah, Dick was constantly talking about how he’s gonna kill the Clutters and steal their shit. Yeah. But he just kind of assumed it was talk. I, I get the impression that if Dick had never met Perry or presumably like another Perry, that he would have just been that guy being all like, yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna get a big score.

I’m gonna kill these dudes. While he’s in jail for the 500th time for bouncing checks all over town again.

RS: Right.

Matt: Because, because, [00:31:00] yeah, and, and Perry, I don’t know, I, I kind of see him kind of like his dad going off into random things, having various dumb ideas like the hunting lodge in the middle of nowhere that’s gonna

RS: Right, he had that dream of we’re gonna hunt for buried treasure in Mexico. No the fuck you’re not, you dipshit.

Matt: Yeah, you’re not, like Dick even says, he can’t swim. How are you gonna get, how are you gonna get the sunken treasure of Captain Cortez if you can’t go in the fucking water?

That’s kind of a big, a big first step.

RS: Yeah, Perry’s weird little fixations about, oh, I’ve got to have the, these, this box of stuff. I’ve got to have all these boxes of luggage and Dick is all, kind of being portrayed as an insensitive jerk for wanting to get rid of him. But he’s right. He’s like, dude, we got to move. Fuck your suitcase. Why do you have notebooks and shit, dude?

“Oh, these are my old pictures.” Yeah, of your family that you hate.

Matt: [00:32:00] yeah, and I mean, too, it’s like, That’s the thing that gets them.

RS: It is, which is so good.

Matt: like if

RS: The way it’s set

Matt: his box full of bullshit, including the murder boots, why are

RS: could have tossed the murder boots, Perry. Dick could have stolen you a new pair of boots. You did not need to hold on to those.

Matt: know. What are they fucking sentimental?

RS: Just Perry.

Matt: going to get in his old age? Go. Oh, you know, him and Dick sitting in rocking chairs being all, Hey, Dick, you remember that time we killed that family? Ah, good times, you

RS: And the way Capote sets it up is brilliant too, that he makes a very big deal about how the only bit of physical evidence we have is this distinct boot print.

Matt: Yes.

RS: then, of course, when picking up, picking up the suitcase shipped in from Mexico which had the pair of boots in it that if [00:33:00] they hadn’t bothered to pick it up, the cops never would have had this bit of physical evidence.

Ah, I have no idea how much of that is true. It feels too perfect.

Matt: Yeah. But, but I mean, as you’ve said, these guys are total fucking morons. So, Oh,

RS: idiots, which I quite liked. I mean, we have that cliche in so many thrillers where it’s this deadly game of cat and mouse and the brilliant detective is up against an equally brilliant murderer with an erudite, twisted, brilliant mind, and like, no, these guys are fucking dumb as shit. They are absolute oafs.

They are fucking morons. Complete morons. They think about getting black stockings to use as masks, but really go, Eh, it’s too hard, nevermind. That is the amount of effort they put into this crime.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, it’s like, it’s the bare minimum of covering their tracks. They were smart enough to pick up the shells and bury them in the, out in the prairie wherever, but not smart [00:34:00] enough to ditch the fucking gun and knife or the boots.

RS: Yeah.

Matt: It’s like, come on, guys. Yeah,

RS: dumb.

Matt: it’s,

RS: also that they were doing this, this crime at the time they did, I mean, they were doing it not that long before Christmas.

Matt: yeah.

RS: like, family tends to visit that time of year. You got Thanksgiving, you got, you got Christmas coming up.

Like, this is a time of year when there are a lot of people around a house. You might want to pick it in January when there’s fucking nobody around. No one’s doing shit.

Matt: Exactly. And, but yeah, no, it’s like, oh yeah, the week before Thanksgiving, perfect time to, come on a family and kill them. And I mean, like

RS: When there’s a non zero chance that there’s already an auntie or grandma staying there.

Matt: exactly. Yeah. I mean, I guess part of the whole thing of it being the perfect big score or whatever, is that they had no connection, but I mean, They [00:35:00] didn’t even bother to case the joint or anything. It was,

RS: Nothing.

Matt: you know,

RS: We just assume there’s gonna be a safe there, right? No there fucking wasn’t, you dumb shits.

Matt: Yeah, and everybody knew that there wasn’t a safe in the town,

RS: And everybody knew that Clutter didn’t carry cash either. Not only was there no safe, he didn’t even have money in his wallet. He conducted every business transaction by check, including paying for a haircut.

Matt: He offered to give them a check. I mean

You do the the bare minimum and I mean too I, I, I gotta admit that, or I gotta think that even Floyd knew this, and just, it was like, Well, you didn’t ask, and I didn’t think you were actually gonna do this stupid

RS: “I was just shit talking in the cell, man. I didn’t fucking mean it, Jesus Christ.”

What, are you gonna go find the lost gold of the dude Perry killed in Vegas?

RS: No, they’re gonna go find the lost gold of Cortez. It’s a solid plan. It’s a really good idea.

Matt: Yeah, yeah. Cause [00:36:00] no one’s thought of looking for the, what was it, 60 million dollars of Spanish gold before. I’m sure that’s out there still,

RS: and, and I’m sure that, while a bunch of really talented, experienced divers and treasure hunters haven’t found it, you two fucking dudes, you’ll do fine.

Matt: yeah.

RS: You can’t swim, it doesn’t matter.

Matt: Yeah. And I like, too, the thing of like, you know, Oh, well, I guess we’ll have to cut in the kid and the guy who owns the boat and be like, A, obviously this isn’t gonna do anything, but I mean B, a quarter of 60 million dollars in Spanish gold is still pretty fucking good. Oh,

RS: dude? Some European dude in

Matt: yeah, Otto,

RS: there. I got Otto, is this a creepy sex tourist? This is a creepy sex tourist, isn’t it? This guy’s gotta be a creepy sex tourist.

Matt: Totally. I, I mean, yeah, no, I, I totally got

RS: There’s no way that that relationship between Otto and the [00:37:00] handsome, uh,

Matt: Handsome Kid, yeah.

RS: was, in any way appropriate.

Matt: Yeah, yeah.

RS: Gross. It’s just a gross book. This book is gross and intense. And I mean, it’s good. It’s just, there’s so, even as much horrible shit goes on, there’s even more horrific shit hinted at just under the surface where you’re going, uh, gross, gross, gross,

Matt: like it’s, I mean, in a fucked up sort of way, it’s almost a very dark comedy just in terms of how ill equipped these idiots were to do it. Any sort of big score beyond bouncing checks.

RS: Right. They made more money bouncing checks. They made more money pretending to buy a suit.

Matt: Yes, yes.

RS: It’s just, oh god damn, man.

Matt: if, yeah, if, if they had kept on that one, they would have been ahead of the game, which, some people are born low level dirtbags and you don’t have to, you, you, hey, hey. [00:38:00] Some people are born in the gutter, lying, gazing up at the stars, and

some people are born in the gutter just to stay in the gutter because they’re too fucking stupid to do anything else.

RS: These guys are basically Ricky and Julian from Trailer Park Boys, man. Only way worse, way scarier.

Matt: needed a Bubbles.

RS: They needed a Bubbles. They needed a Mr. Lahey to fuckin calm them down. They needed a Randy. To fight him.

Matt: Yeah.

RS: So, you know what? Notably, we have spent this, almost this entire time talking about the killers Dick and Perry, and that is a big feature of the book. I will give credit to the book that it actually does spend time with the family. This victimized family, and it goes through their last day alive, and talks a bit about the family dynamic and everybody’s individual personalities, like the mother very clearly suffers from some sort of mental illness, the son is kind of a [00:39:00] nerd but a sweet kid, Herb is this extremely upstanding, wholesome, decent man who’s very strict but very good in that German Protestant way.

The daughter, Nancy, is the most pure hearted 16 year old girl who ever lived, and there’s a bit where you’re going, Okay, you’ve gotta be ironing some stuff out to make them even more wholesome and lovable and cute so that it’s extra sad when they get murdered, even though, like, if they were just sort of average, it would still be really, really, really sad.

And I know when we talk about crime reporting, when we talk about true crime, a lot of people do rightfully point out, Hey, you’re kind of making celebrities out of these murderers and giving them the big emphasis and not talking very much about the victims, but I mean, you know what I mean? There is the simple truth, which is that murder victims are normal people, and murderers, at least as far as I can tell, aren’t.

Like, I’ve never murdered anyone, I don’t think I could do it. I wanna know, what is it [00:40:00] that makes a person do that? Cause I can’t imagine myself doing something that terrible. As angry as I’ve been at people before, I couldn’t actually imagine planning out a murder and doing something like that. That is the more novel and unique thing versus being murdered.

Yeah, I could imagine being murdered. Sure. Hope, sure hope it doesn’t happen, but you know, you’re, you’re a regular person and then something real fucked up happens to you and, and there it is. And there’s also this reality, which is respecting the dead often means we’re going to iron out a person’s flaws, which means we’re going to portray like a flatter, less complicated person.

Because if we talk about their flaws, it’ll look insulting, or like we’re blaming them. You know, what if it turned out Nancy had some kind of flaw? I’d be like, you, how could you say that about Nancy after what she’s been through? You can’t, don’t trash talk Nancy. You gotta talk about how wholesome and good these people are so that it’s extra sad when they’re murdered.

Matt: exactly. Yeah. I mean, you have Nancy making the pie with the neighbor girl [00:41:00] and then, Herb picking up, going to the 4 H meeting and then picking up the Japanese family and taking them home because, you know, Unlike our murderers, they’re not racist pieces of shit.

They’re, they’re the good folks. And then you have,

And Dick and Perry are incredibly racist. They’ve got like, it’s the slur a palooza with them. But, you know, but the Clutters are very, yes, they, they might be a, you know, small town white family, but they’re good folk who love you for who you are and not, you know,

RS: Unless you’re a filthy Catholic.

Like Bobby Rupp. Unless you’re a fucking catholic.

Then don’t you marry my daughter!

Matt: Yeah,

And even then, they’ll, they’ll let you in the house to watch TV with them, but, make sure it doesn’t get further than that, you know. No make outs. Oh,

RS: no, you can’t, you can’t marry him. You can’t marry a catholic.

Matt: [00:42:00] know. Yeah.

RS: dude. Oh, man. Oh, fuckin There’s that chapter where it just goes over Bobby’s grief, and it is really harrowing, because this is a teenager whose girlfriend was murdered. He was at the house on the day. He probably drove past the murderer’s car, where they were like hiding in the darkness, on his way home.

So you know that guy’s gonna have some terrible Survivor’s Guild.

Matt: Oh god, yeah, I mean, I, I really hope Bobby turned out okay. I, uh, yeah, because, uh,

RS: It sounds like he got married at the end of the

Matt: yeah, yeah,

RS: good. Like, okay, good. Good for him. Good for him.

You know, hope it was a happy relationship. Yeah.

Matt: But, but yeah, but I, I, I hope that it’s one sentence because nothing else interesting happened and he just got to have a happy life, you know?

RS: cause god damn, dude. That is rough. So there is a little bit of that. The book does give us that of the victims and things, but there’s, um, [00:43:00] there’s this tendency in the novel, and I think way more so in the movie, to make this family, particularly Nancy, into this symbol of America’s lost innocence.

This is, you gotta consider when this was made. This murder happened at the end of the 1950s. This book, it was happening in the 60s during a time of massive, massive social change. There is this feeling of a loss of, like, American innocence. And, and, and I feel a little weird about that, cause these were people who didn’t want to be symbols, you know?

Nancy probably just wanted to be a regular girl doing girl stuff. Making out with her forbidden catholic boyfriend and stuff. Not like, becoming a symbol of America’s tainted innocence. And, and I get it, like, we, we like, we’re pattern recognizing creatures. We look for patterns even when they’re not real. And I’m, I’m wondering how much of this is, are we looking into the symbolism of this act to try to give it some kind of meaning, when so much of the horror of it is how senseless and [00:44:00] awful it was. Like Dick and, Dick Hickok and Perry Smith murdered a perfectly nice family with four people, hoping to rob a safe in the house that did not exist, and ended up getting just forty dollars.

Like, four people got murdered for 40 bucks.

Matt: yeah, and the thing with getting the, when he’s getting Nancy’s silver dollar and it falls, and it’s like, come on. I know a buck was worth more then, but I mean, it’s still like, it’s kinda pathetic, you know? I’m gonna, you know, I’m gonna kill you for a buck.

RS: Yeah, he’s on his hands and knees scrabbling around for a silver dollar under the bed. And they, they also make out with, or they make off with a little radio or something, and that’s it.

40 bucks and a radio is what they get.

Matt: and the, uh, the, um, binoculars with the case with the, uh, uh, hilarious initials [00:45:00] on there if you happen to be a fan of Liz Phair’s self titled record. I,

RS: get that reference.

Matt: uh, there’s a song on there called HWC, which is Herb Clutter’s initials, but it also stands for Hot White Cum. Yeah. Yeah. Then, then, then, then, then, the, the, the, the chorus of the song is, you know, “give me your hot white cum”

RS: Goddammit.

Matt: and I, and I, I like, I like got that. It’s like, you know, oh, and then Perry opened or not Perry but Dick opened the binocular case with the legend HWC written on it. I’m just,

RS: Oh no! That and the cat named Boobs, you know, I know.

concerned.

Matt: Justice for Boobs!

RS: Yeah, Nancy had a cat named Boobs. That, that something terrible happened to this poor cat.

Matt: Poor cat. Poor boobs. I really felt for boobs. [00:46:00] Ba dump dump.

RS: So there is something that I found kind of interesting, too, is that there’s a lot in this book about how the trial they got was really slanted and biased. I would not say that that’s necessarily being sympathetic to the killers, though.

Matt: Yeah, and,

RS: everyone deserves competent legal representation, even if they’re obviously murderers.

Matt: And honestly, too, I think, I think even though, Truman gets into that, I don’t even think that he really thinks that the trial was slanted. It, it’s, like, he wrote it pretty straight, and I, I think he framed Dick’s constant trying to reedle his way out as kind of a, a doomed quest, you know, like,

RS: There was a lot made, though, about how the psychiatrist was not really able to actually testify.

Matt: True, true.

RS: And how one of the jurors knew the Clutters, which, that’s a no no.

Matt: Yeah, yeah. And, but, but yeah, I was sort of, I, I don’t know. It was, there, there [00:47:00] seems to have been, like, more kangaroo y trials than that one.

RS: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And, and I mean, it’s small town Kansas, so, what are you fuckin gonna expect? Not that it’s better anywhere else.

But there was, there was that in there, but without too much making it so that, oh, poor Perry again.

RS: Poor Perry, the trial wasn’t fair. Like, well, buddy, I don’t know what you expected there.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, I, I, and I mean, the, the lawyers for them weren’t very good, but it was also sort of like, well, how are you going to defend this? I mean,

RS: Yeah.

Matt: there’s all this evidence,

RS: Yeah, you got nothing to work with here.

Matt: yeah. I mean, like, maybe the Dream Team could have got him off, but even then,

RS: yeah, maybe if he had one of Robert Durst’s lawyers or something, but even then, I don’t know, but

Matt: Well, I mean, considering that, you know, Season 2 of the Jinx,

RS: yeah,

Matt: there.

RS: if [00:48:00] it had been in Galveston,

he would have been okay

Matt: yes.

RS: But

Matt: even with Galveston, I get the impression that, like, there was a chunk of it that, of that douchebag juror who just wanted to befriend Durst to get his money.

RS: That fucking juror,

Matt: Oh my

RS: of, um, how is that legal? What the fuck?

Matt: know it’s like, do you, do you watch on cinema at the cinema with Tim Heidecker and stuff?

Okay there, because there’s this whole thing where Tim holds this thing in the desert and ends up killing 20 kids with these like horrible bait pens and basically, you know, spoilers for a 10 year old arc, you know, on, on this, but.

That’s how he gets off is that one of the jurors has a crush on him and they later

Get married and I’m just thinking of thinking of of that with The Jinx

RS: Right, right. Anyway, but back to In Cold Blood, we will probably talk about the Jinx later. Another thing that this book does is talk about the [00:49:00] community and the lingering effects of grief on the community and the effects on the community of how this was this nice little small town and now everybody locks their doors and they’re afraid as this sort of symbol of this growing mood throughout the United States of, oh, this used to be a nice simple place and now it’s scarier and bad.

And there were some parts that really do hit though, like the part about where the town auctions off all the Clutters’ stuff, cause that’s inevitable, they’re a farm family, there’s farm equipment, unless they’re relatives or farmers, there’s, you don’t really have much use for a tractor.

Matt: yeah,

RS: And just, where they, where they auction off Nancy’s beloved fat ass horse, Babe.

Matt: Oh, I felt

RS: It really is sad. It really is tragic. Oh, that’s, that’s the end of it. And it does capture that feeling you have when you’re getting rid of dividing a person’s stuff after they die. It feels so strange reading this, because I know that Capote was from a small, rural town. He [00:50:00] grew up in the same little town as Harper Lee.

They were friends as kids. Dill from To Kill a Mockingbird is based on him, which blows my fucking

mind. But I can’t, I can’t help but think about how this was originally written for the New Yorker. So here’s this story about this innocent little Midwestern town torn apart by a terrible crime, and it’s written for this metropolitan, big city, New York audience.

And so I’m, I’m How much of this is, I can’t help but feel this tone. I don’t know whether I’m getting it from Truman or whether I’m getting it for Here’s who he’s writing it for of like, “oh these poor little corn shucking crackers, you know, these sad little peasants Oh, they’re having to deal with the crime,” you know, it feels a little odd

Matt: no, I, I get that too. It’s like, even though Herb Clutter was an educated guy who even served with, like, under, uh, Eisenhower on a, farming

RS: Right he had a degree he was he was not just

some He was not a [00:51:00] dirt farmer. He was a prominent guy. He had a good bit of money. He was a well to do businessman.

Matt: Yeah, and it’s really made up as, Oh, he fulfilled the American dream. He worked up from nothing and made this like big clap Big farm. I don’t know why he almost said clown. He mailed a big clown

RS: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah in cold honk. But uh, he built his farm from nothing and it It ended up being this huge farm that made 10, 000 a week and da da da da da da da and But it really did feel like Local boy makes good kind of stuff rather than anything else. It was again kind of like you’re getting out with symbols, but also with that corn kind of corny big city patronization

RS: Kind of not getting that running a successful, significantly sized farm requires a fair bit of [00:52:00] know how. And the guy had a degree in agricultural studies. He was not just some, some doofus squatting in the dirt going, “well, I suppose an almanac says plant this time of year.” Like he was a pretty sharp guy.

He had a lot of people working for him. He was a businessman. It’s just, that’s how you do business in Kansas at that time.

Matt: Right, right. And one thing I also think kind of interesting is that near the end of the book, and I think this gets a shout out in the movie too, is that, that it’s kind of written that this is almost the damn break for other similar murders. I mean, there’s that one murder in Tallahassee that

they try to kind of pin on Perry and Dick, but I, like, it’s kind, it’s definitely written that it wasn’t them. It was copycats, and I’m inclined to agree just because you would think that, like, if it were real, or if it were them, Truman would have gone harder on that, too, you [00:53:00] know?

RS: Yeah.

Matt: But, And then like at the end, there’s this thing about oh, after that there were like, you know, four similar murders the next year, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

And I mean, I know that that is like a real thing. I mean, that’s one of the things that crime analysis or analysts and stuff have been saying for years is that by make, by reporting on murderers in this way, it makes it more attractive for other.

RS: Yeah, I could see some criminal type guys going, “Well, I could do that, but I could get it right.”

Matt: Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, like I said, that’s like a real phenomenon. And that’s why there’s every, I don’t know, every ten or twenty years, it seems that there’s like a flare up of the, you know, don’t name the murderers discourse and honestly, I kinda, even though we’re doing, you know, In Cold Blood,

I kind of agree with that. I, I like, what I always call the Some Asshole Rule, you know, Oh, this school was shot up by some asshole.[00:54:00]

RS: Yeah.

Matt: But, the thing is too, is people are interested in these and as, as high minded as the Some Asshole rule sounds, I don’t know if we’ll ever get there just because the.

The interest, it’s, like, yes, we’re, yes, you know, speaking as, journalist, yes, there is that temptation to dive into this because, journalists are explainers and we want to explain things to people and people want to know because, we were getting at the beginning of the thing, like, I couldn’t kill anybody, you couldn’t kill anybody. What’s it like to be a dude who can kill people, I guess, you

know. This probably goes beyond the purview of this podcast, but it’s something to think about. And,

RS: Yeah. Yeah.

Matt: you know, is, how, how complicit is journalism in this? And I mean, I’m not saying it’s a lot, but I, it can’t be zero either.

RS: Right, which, we’re gonna skip the talk [00:55:00] about the movie for a moment and talk about, I guess, nicely into “I have mixed feelings about true crime as a genre.” I have mixed feelings about it. I absolutely do watch or listen to true crime. I

watched that dramatized miniseries about Gypsy Rose Blanchard. I’m on season two of The Jinx.

I fucking love it. The latest episode, the prosecutor just, just got Robert Durst on a bunch of Encyclopedia Brown shit and it rocks. It’s really, really good. “Mr. Durst, you say you played this game with your mother, but your mother died a

Matt: Yeah. Oh, no, was it?

RS: and this game wasn’t invented until 1971.” Like, oh shit, I didn’t know the law actually happened that

Matt: I know, I

RS: I didn’t know

knowing this shit would help.

Matt: Yeah, like, I fucking love The Jinx. I mean, that’s like one of the things that we’ve been talking about for the past month. Is as soon as a new Jinx drops, we’re like, Oh, shit, did you see? Did you see?

RS: Did you see this? Did you see this weird fucking thing? And, [00:56:00] and, like, I listen to true crime podcasts at my boring day job, and I can tell myself, oh, well, I only listen to the classy ones that have something to say about society, but, you know. The truth is, this is morbid fascination. Part of the reason I’m watching The Jinx is, it’s entertaining, you know, that Robert Durst is an entertaining figure because of what a fucking weirdo he is.

He’s fascinating. Every time they play a recorded phone call with him, and it starts with, call from

Matt: Bob!

RS: It’s, like, it’s funny! It’s fucking funny the way this guy answers the phone, that he just cannot do a single goddamn thing like a normal human being, just including answering the phone. Call from, Bob. Call from, Robert.

No, call from BBBBOOOOOOOOBBBBBBBB It’s just insane!

Matt: I.

RS: And like, it’s great. It’s fucking, it is really entertaining. But at the same time, there, I do draw a line, [00:57:00] like, I’ll listen to In the Dark, you know, that season two of that genuinely did like help an innocent man get out of jail. And these are, these things are, some of these are genuinely classy, and they’re trying to educate people or bring justice.

At least this isn’t like a fucking true crime mukbang, where somebody eats 17 hamburgers while talking about the Golden State Killer or something.

Matt: Yeah.

RS: entertainment, I’m watching this for entertainment.

Matt: Yeah. Let, let me do my makeup while I talk about how someone was had their head blown off and painting the, painting the walls with hair.

RS: yeah,

Matt: and

speaking of hair, you know,

RS: and in fact, true crime mukbang is a genre.

True crime mukbang, true crime ASMR, true crime makeup tutorials, this is, that’s a little distasteful, that’s a little, this isn’t education, this is just, I don’t like this, you’re a bad person, you’re eating a pound of cheese while talking about the fuckin Heaven’s Gate suicides, I don’t like this.

Matt: Yeah, [00:58:00] yeah. And I mean, too, I, I have a soft spot for this. My mom loves Crude Shrime and I grew up with her. And so like. Like, one of the, the, like, when I went to the UK, one of the things I found for her was an encyclopedia of murder that I bought, and she loved it, you know? I’ve got a signed copy of Helter Skelter.

I’m not

above this.

RS: Yeah.

Matt: I, I’m, I’m not above this. And I mean, that’s the thing too, is like, In Cold Blood really is a page turner. Yeah,

RS: it’s well, it’s, it’s a terrific book. It’s very well done, but there’s this part of me going, Is this disrespectful to the victims? Does it fuck up our brains to watch this? How much of this is copaganda? I mean obviously if you’re, if you’re Dewey and it’s your job to solve a quadruple murder, you’re, you’re by default, you’re the good guy. Perry and Dick are the bad guys.

They murdered four people. And you kind of feel bad for the cops, because like, how the fuck do you [00:59:00] solve a crime like this in 1959 with the forensic technology available? You got fuck all. If the killer isn’t known by the locals and had enough sense to like, wear gloves, you got nothing. You got nothing to work with.

Matt: yeah, yeah. And, and I mean, too, it’s like, that’s one of the big things I think in this country too, is like, not only just like the distrust of lawyers, but like defense attorneys, in particular. It’s always, you know, ah, they’re getting them killers off just because of all of our stories, are here’s like, I mean, In Cold Blood.

Here are these clear, obvious murderers who couldn’t be more guilt, or obviously guilty if they were wearing shirts saying ” I, I did it, and by it, I mean blew the Clutters away with a shotgun,” you know? So, I mean, of course you’re gonna see the, the defense attorneys, or again with The Jinx, where you have Bob Durst who, again, very obviously [01:00:00] killed everybody even it was obvious before he even said “I killed them all” And you’re

RS: is insanely guilty.

Matt: you and you watch it you watch this layers being like “well We doot doot” and you’re like “fuck you you’re getting a rich guy off a murder.”

Fuck you. Just because That those stories are more interesting and the stories of people being railroaded which happens a lot are sad. You don’t like those stories. They’re sad. They’re harder to watch. These

RS: And they don’t really have happy endings, even when the guy gets out of prison. It’s like, well, 20 years later, he was freed from this crime he didn’t commit. Like, god damn, he still had to spend 20 years in fuckin prison. That sucks ass.

Matt: exactly. But these ones, they, they feed our sense of justice. We can be like, yeah, these obviously bad dudes got, got, you know, punished for being obviously bad dudes. And it makes us feel good. Like, yeah, [01:01:00] system works. You might kill somebody horribly, But you’re gonna hang. And that’s not real life. And it’s so frustrating, watching, NCIS type shows where it’s very much, ” the fucking defense attorney got him off again,” even though

RS: Yeah.

Matt: a that,

RS: That is the job of a defense attorney. They’re supposed to do this.

Matt: And too, there’s a lot of times like there are a lot of cases of cops just deciding, “oh well that’s our guy. We’re gonna make the evidence fit the obvious guy even though he’s not a guy.” Like, uh, did you ever watch the documentary on Amanda Knox?

RS: Right.

Matt: it’s clear there that the dipshit cops think they’re fucking Matlock. And it’s all this shit of, ” well, when her roommate was murdered. She wasn’t sad enough. So obviously she did it.” I’m like

You you get [01:02:00] your roommate dies horribly There’s gonna be a lot of complex feelings. It’s not just gonna be boohoo, you know rending of clothing and whatnot. But and I mean that one that that case was particularly mishandled but it’s still it’s like you know just because These, Italian cops were such dipshits that they ended up fucking themselves over. A lot of times they don’t, just because people are inclined to believe cops. There’s very much, like, I remember, like, a long time ago when I was taking the bus into work, I was reading this book of stories from the Innocence Project of people doing stuff, and I was, and like, someone on the bus was trying to make small talk, and I, And they asked what I was reading, and I told them, and they go like, “Yeah, but I mean, you gotta think if there was something there, they wouldn’t have, or if there wasn’t anything there, they wouldn’t have been

arrested.” And I’m like, no, that’s what this book is about. There was [01:03:00] nothing there, but they got arrested anyway, you know. Yeah,

RS: Dewey was Reasonably, I think, had a theory that this was someone who was pissed off at the Clutters, because, I mean, when you make a lot of money, you’re probably gonna have, have, you’re probably gonna have enemies, maybe someone who got the raw end of a business deal you were on, or maybe a disgruntled former employee or something, and I have to wonder if it wasn’t for this jailhouse confession, with all the pressure they were under to solve this crime, would they have just found a guy?

Could they have just found some guy who used to work for Herb Clutter and got fired for being a dipshit and be like, Maybe this is the dude who did it, maybe this is him, maybe this is the And get, you know, someone who was an asshole but innocent and just fuckin railroad him.

Matt: exactly, yeah. I mean. It’s hard to tell, you don’t know and, and I mean, even then, like, Oh, asshole who kills [01:04:00] Clutter for vengeance is a good story too. And people will be inclined to believe it, you know?

RS: Yeah, yeah, that’s a very, that’s a very compelling narrative. It’s a very compelling

Matt: Yeah, he, he fired him for, for drinking because he was a teetotaler and didn’t deal with drinkers.

So obviously this was unjust and he was mad about it and he stewed and got drunk and blasted him.

RS: Right.

Matt: That’s a totally believable story. Bullshit, but it’s believable.

RS: I’d believe it. I could see that, yeah. Just, or, or, envy. Some less successful farmer who envied them and wanted to teach them. So, so many things. If, if Dewey had gotten a real hair up his ass about one of these theories, you gotta wonder, would they have just found someone to railroad?

Because that happened like the, the Richard Jewell story.

Matt: Yeah.

RS: The bombing of the Atlanta Olympics, there was this,

Matt: I think he

RS: I think the 90s. Yeah, he [01:05:00] was a security guard working at the Atlanta Olympics, and he’s the guy who actually discovered this bomb that was planted there. And he, like, warned everybody, managed to get an evacuation, and saved a lot of lives.

But the FBI hadn’t He legit was a hero, but the FBI didn’t know who planted this bomb, so they just got it in their heads that actually Richard Jewell planted the

Matt: Yeah, he’s been

RS: he pretended, he pretended that he found it because he was this loser who wanted to look cool, and they did like everything they could to pin it on this fucking guy, and he didn’t do it.

He just straight up didn’t do it. It turned out years later they found out it was some like, weirdo extremist who’d also like, bombed abortion clinics and shit like that. Just some, some right wing psycho.

Matt: Yeah, but they had made up this whole thing of that like while richard jewell’s been doing a lot of like tv lately He clearly wants to be famous and the thing is is like wasn’t he

RS: he collects guns, like, well yeah, he’s a midwestern

Matt: Yeah, yeah, and I mean wasn’t the thing that he kind of actually hated doing all the press but you know, [01:06:00] whatever

RS: Yeah. Well, I’m sure, I’m sure he likes being called a

Matt: Well, yeah, I mean who

RS: being called a hero, that feels pretty

Matt: gets old It gets old after a while having to like, you know, go on a Good Morning America for the 50th time,

RS: Uh, I wouldn’t get tired of that. I would not get tired of people calling me a hero. Hi, would you like to go on our show and get your makeup done and we’ll give you some nice snacks and tell you you’re cool? Like, yes! Yes, I would! Please do! I would not ever get tired of that shit. That would rock. Butter me up. Pat me on the head and tell me how I’m good and cool. Absolutely. Fuck yeah.

Matt: But yeah, but I think that was like the main reason why the FBI focused on him is because he was in the news all the time, so Obviously it was a case of setting something up so he could be the hero and get attention instead of actually just

RS: Just right place, right time. Dude just, just followed his training [01:07:00] and did what he was supposed to do. And plus, I mean, a bomb at the Olympics, you gotta figure out who the fuck did that. That’s so, that’s so bad, that’s so scary. You gotta bust somebody. Here’s this fucking guy, let’s get him, you know. So, so, there’s this eerie situation there where you’re wondering, like, well, what if, what if this dude hadn’t confessed?

Cause they had no, they had nothing else to go on.

Matt: Yeah, like honestly I think if it hadn’t been for Floyd Nothing would have happened with this. Like, in terms of Barry and Dick, they would have got away with it.

RS: Oh yeah. Yeah. Unless, like, maybe years later, I could kind of see Dick bragging about

Matt: Oh, yeah.

RS: that’s Dick, that’s a Dick move, ha ha. He would fuckin do that, he’s, he was a piece of shit, but, yeah.

Matt: Yeah, I could easily see Dick being in prison for hanging checks and then getting, like, You know that Clutter thing? That was totally me.

RS: Gettin drunk, gettin drunk at a bar and yelling it, “oh, watch out, or my friend Perry’ll beat you up. Maybe he’s short, but he killed four people.”

Matt: [01:08:00] Exactly, yeah.

RS: Trying to say it to impress some underage girl he’s hitting on. We don’t know. Dick Dick sucks, dude. We don’t like Dick. Dick is very bad.

But, before we end up, let’s talk a little bit about the movie. Because, this was a book, and it was made very quickly into a movie. The movie was made two years after the killers were executed. Which is real quick. Uh, what did you say? That is, Made for TV, movie

Matt: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that, that is Long Island Lolita turnaround almost.

RS: Yeah, that

Matt: who grew up in the

RS: that is a Lifetime original movie, turnaround

Matt: Yes, yes.

RS: a very good

movie. It’s very well shot, edited,

Matt: the editing is amazing.

RS: It’s stylish, it’s brilliantly done. It spends even less time with the Clutters. We had very little time with them. It really leans much harder into the THIS IS SYMBOLIC OF AMERICA’S LOST INNOCENCE THING.

It’s a stylish [01:09:00] neo noir, and it was made in a post Code era so they can talk about sex and use swears in a way that, like, 1940s noir couldn’t do. And the whole time I’m watching it, I’m going, Oh, fuck, this is Twin Peaks. This, this movie is Twin Peaks. Nice little town, torn about by a horrible murder. The jazzy soundtrack is very Twin Peaks.

You got a lot of upright bass.

Matt: Yeah, I think that Quincy Jones guy who scored, I think he’s gonna go places.

RS: I think so. I think so. The, there’s the focus on Nancy in particular as this symbol of America’s innocence destroyed. And I think that an interesting choice is that in, in the book, it says that the mother was the last one to get shot. And in the movie, it’s Nancy. Is the last one. And there’s the very quirky small town characters emphasized in the book.

They’re very Twin Peaks. It’s less so much in the movie. You don’t spend as much time with these quirky rural people. But the whole time I’m watching it, I feel weird about how stylish and slick this is.

Matt: Yeah.

RS: really slick and stylish. And the [01:10:00] way they introduce Perry is this very dramatic shot of, like, a lighter in the darkness and then these, these cool boots.

It’s,

Matt: I was very glad that they actually showed the cat’s paw boots because that’s one of those cultural things that is completely gone.

And so, Yeah, I had no idea. And so, since Perry has introduced boot first, It was nice that, you know, go, Oh, okay. That’s what they’re talking about.

RS: Right. And it is a very good movie, but at the same time I feel very strange about how stylish and slick it is. Like, alright, let’s get this peppy bongo soundtrack to this true story about a bunch of people who died incredibly recently.

I mean, the murder occurred in 1959, this movie came out in 1967.

That’s not that

Matt: no.

RS: That’s fast.

Matt: I mean, they, you know, especially too, I mean, since Perry and Dick had been dead for barely two years,

RS: Yeah.

Matt: it’s like,

RS: So I, I feel strange about it, and I’ve, I’ve gotta know how many times did David Lynch [01:11:00] watch this

Matt: Oh, I know. I mean, Robert Blake alone. Oh God. It’s like. I, I know that this is mean, and I mean, I, I think it’s probably tempered by having recently watched Lost Highway, but I mean, Robert Blake is nowhere near hot enough to be Perry. Nowhere near,

RS: Goddamn.

Matt: but,

RS: It’s 1960s hot, okay? There’s,

there’s like been a hotness inflation.

Matt: I guess, but I still see this, like, you know, the weird little gremlin dude in, in Lost Highway,

you

RS: with the videotape.

Matt: Yeah, but I do have to say that this is good casting because Blake did probably kill his wife in real life. So, you know, he, you

RS: it’s well done.

Matt: he, he went future method. Yeah, he never left the role of Perry. Yeah.

RS: Oh my [01:12:00] god. So there’s this queasy feeling of, while you’re doing this, it is vicariously enjoying this terrible act of violence, and I mean, I can cluck my tongue and scold about it, but I’m doing it too. We’re doing it right

now. We’re recording this. And we’re monetizing this.

Matt: yes, this is the one that you have to pay three dollars to get. You know,

RS: Yeah.

Matt: you know, like, no one is innocent, especially not us.

RS: Yeah, and my question is, but there is a line. I would not do in aforementioned mukbang. I feel it is a little distasteful. The, “Stay sexy and don’t get murdered.” My Favorite murder podcast. That feels a little like, uh,

Matt: a little gross. Yeah.

RS: that’s a little gross. That’s a little much. Maybe, maybe don’t be that peppy and bubbly.

But then again, am I, When we’re putting on our little solemn faces to talk about murder, are we just sort of doing it as a matter of politeness, and how sincere is it?

Matt: I [01:13:00] mean, too, I mean, we’ve been making jokes all through this, too. I

RS: Oh yeah. We opened it up with, literally our first segment was, let’s talk about how Perry Smith was kind of hot.

Matt: exactly. Yeah, that’s, yeah, it’s, It, it, it’s the, the water we’re swimming in, you know?

RS: Yeah, we posted about this in the Discord. And one of our members, who shall remain nameless, their first response was, “Okay, that harness they got Perry in when they’re hanging him. How can I get one of

Matt: I know. And

RS: God damn it. You people.

Matt: I mean, they’re

RS: Dammit. So,

in conclusion, how, how do, what do we say about mixed, what do we say about true crime? I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. I

Matt: Yeah, it, it’s, it’s a kind of fucked up that We, we like. It’s, it’s, it’s, [01:14:00] it’s the, it’s huffing the gas that we shouldn’t huff, but it tastes so sweet. Yes,

RS: thing I do want to give the movie credit for is it does a lot less sad boy Perry. There’s a lot less of like, “oh, feel sorry for Perry.” It really, I think, makes the choice that Perry’s, the reason Perry does not permit Dick to rape Nancy is not any kind of nobility, but just that Perry has a lot of, a lot of hang ups and mommy

Matt: exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s his own thing. It’s not any sense of nobility.

RS: Which I do really respect that as a choice,

Matt: yes, and and honestly, I mean, even though I joked about Robert Blake not being hot enough, I think that is a good directorial decision just because, through time immemorial, people feel more sympathy for pretty people. Even though Robert Blake isn’t as, like, isn’t the, the Lost Highway troll guy I was [01:15:00] joking about at this time. He, you know, Perry

RS: He has weird little guy

Matt: Exactly, exactly, exactly. And It makes it a little bit easier to be like, yeah, this guy’s a piece of shit dirtbag. That if they had cast, like, Rock Hudson.

RS: Yeah.

Matt: They’d get Rock Hudson to do Dorf, kind of thing, on his, like, knees,

RS: Oh god dammit.

Matt: Dorf on

RS: This isn’t Gary Oldman, we’re not doing that.

Matt: But, but yeah, it’s, it, I don’t know, it, it, I, I was honestly, like, really impressed with the film, even if it did get a little bit, Here is our point in three little monologues at the end, you know, like I think they could have probably cut some of that because I think a lot of it was a little obvious. And that was what they were going for.

RS: I’m kind of wondering if part of it is we need to say this moral point we’re making to justify this as a work of art because we are making art out of human suffering and a really awful tragedy that was quite recent and had [01:16:00] a lot of, a lot of bereaved people still around to remember it and probably feel pretty bad about seeing it.

At the movie. “Oh, here’s the Coming Soon marquee at our local movie theater. What’s coming up? Oh, fuck. That movie

Matt: it’s the movie about

RS: oh, they made a movie about my ex girlfriend getting murdered. That’s cool. Not a fan of that.”

Matt: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was definitely in living memory. I mean, considering it, it wasn’t even a decade.

RS: Yeah.

And it was right after the execution. The execution was in 1965.

Matt: Exactly, yeah. So yeah, I mean, like, it was probably a little bit of a fig leaf, but it’s And, I mean, kind of, you know You can argue about whether, how necessarily the fig leaf is, but I mean It probably should be addressed that it is kind of a creepy fucked up thing to To do, even if it is, like Even if, you know, and I mean the book too, like, even if it is great art, but it’s still built on puddles of blood.

It, it is [01:17:00] the, it, it is the, you know, the house on the burial ground

RS: Yeah, and we can be pretty confident saying that Truman Capote did not have noble ambitions while making this. One, because he fell in love with Perry Smith, and two, because he was Truman Capote.

Matt: I don’t think the dude did a noble thing in his life.

RS: He was just trash. Just, just absolute trash from beginning to end.

Matt: Yes. Yes. Such a piece of shit, but such a fascinating piece of shit.

RS: Oh yeah,

Matt: He, he’s the, he’s the piece of shit you want to know but not very well.

RS: Yeah, you want to know of

Matt: Yeah, and maybe bump into him at a party but at a point where he knows nothing about you.

RS: Yeah, cause he will gossip about you and tell everybody all your fucking business and ruin your life.

Matt: Yeah, like, he, he was basically like, I don’t know, 1950s and 60s kiwi farms almost.

RS: Oh, gosh. Oh, God.

Matt: You know if he were alive today, he would be [01:18:00] doxing people and being all like, “Well, the people have a right to know.”

RS: The most extraordinary thing is after just selling out all of his friends and writing gossip columns about their terrible secrets, him getting really shocked that they,

Matt: They were mad.

RS: they disinvited him from Thanksgiving. “Are you mad at me?” Yes, Truman. Yes, you’ve told everybody that my husband cheated on me. I’m very upset, Truman.

Matt: “I have no morals, so I assume you had no morals. Oops a doodle.”

RS: Yeah, yeah. So, we’ve been talking for well over an hour, so why don’t we wind down? Is there anything we want to plug? I don’t, I don’t know. Is there any more Capote content?

Matt: I mean, honestly, you know, I’m halfway through The Swan or Capote Versus The Swans and it’s a fun watch. I do it, you know, if you to get the Capote bug or got the Capote bug from reading this book, check it out. There’s lots of interviews with him online because, like I said, he was a talk [01:19:00] show, a professional talk show guest for the last, 20 years of his life. But, yeah, I don’t know. I, I think I’m, like, tapped out of

more things to say about Capote other than him being a piece of shit.

RS: yeah. So, uh, In conclusion, stay sexy and don’t be Truman Capote. And thank you for listening and thank you for supporting us. If you haven’t already, check out our Discord. Until next time, keep reading and keep writing good.

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In this month’s bonus episode, Langdon joins us to talk about Koji Suzuki’s Ring.

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RS: Welcome to this month’s bonus episode of Rite Gud. For this edition of the Book Club, we’re talking about Koji Suzuki’s 1991 novel, Ring, or Ringu, if you prefer. Joining us is Langdon of Death Sentence. You’re back, and it sounds like you’re vacuuming?

Langdon: I’m, well, no? Well, I’m not vacuuming, so I don’t know where that sound’s coming from.

RS: I don’t know where that [00:01:00] sound’s coming from. Okay,

Langdon: That’s good.

RS: be gone now. So when I said I wanted to do Ringu, you jumped on it, you got very excited, you’re like, Fuck yeah! Because this is a book that’s compelling, this is a book I read many, many years ago in college, and occasionally I’ll just, it’ll just pop into my head again, and just be like, “Sadako’s smallpox!” Like, what, what, what?

Langdon: I

RS: an intrusive thought, it’ll just come up in there. This book has spawned so many spin offs and sequels and adaptations. It’s made this massive franchise, and it’s really, really compelling. What is it about this book that has such a hold on people, do you think?

Langdon: I think for, speaking mostly people in the West, because obviously neither of us are Japanese, um,

RS: is Japanese.

Langdon: Like we all find out about it pretty much from the what was it a 90 98 that the american film came out 99 something like it’s late. Um And honest to god one of the best horror films of the 90s, legitimately [00:02:00] a fucking brilliant film um, and so for a while most people I think just think of it as You know a movie if you’re deep enough into either the science fiction slash horror um, like readership world or just I got the cool kind of autism, where if I go to a record shop or a bookstore, I will look at every book on the shelf.

Everyone. Um, which is normal. That’s how normal people, that’s normal to do that. It’s, I’m normal,

RS: Everyone does

Langdon: Yes. Uh, go

RS: you? Don’t you, listeners? If you don’t do this, listeners, you’re the weird one, and you should be embarrassed.

Langdon: Go to a record shop and I would literally look at… and this was even as far back as when I was like seven or eight. I would look at every single album in the entire store to figure out the ones I wanted to buy. But, it turns out that helps you know a lot about books and music to, you know, have a sociopathic level of autism.

At some point, these got [00:03:00] translated by, um, Kodakawa, I think, are the people who did the English, translation. Who uh, solicited the English translations of them. But, had a really catching cover. That all the English editions have. And it’s one of those things where I think, I first ran into these books because I saw it in a bookstore and I was like, “Huh, that’s weird.

They stole that name from the movie.” and you pick up the book and you look at it, And you go, “wait, wait.” Cause it’s not the kind of movie that makes you think this was a novel first. There’s nothing about it that feels, converted from a novel. Where if you’ve seen enough movies, you kind of start to get a sense of like, Oh, this probably is an adaptation.

Cause of just slight weirdnesses in how things move. That feel more like, okay, that was a book that you had to turn into a movie. Me, you, and pretty much everyone else who ran into this book shortly after it got translated. You know, you go and you read it expecting like, Oh, this is probably gonna be some, some hogwash shit.

I’m gonna laugh a little [00:04:00] bit. The movie’s gonna be way better or something. And then you read it, and it’s, it’s so fucking bizarre. Like there’s no– It’s happened for the years that I’ve tried to tell people about these books. We both saw it happen in the Discord when you mentioned, like, Hey, we’re gonna be covering The Ring.

RS: worth reading the book because it’s so much weirder. It is significantly weirder.

Langdon: People who are like, Oh, I love the movie. And you go, you should read the book. The book’s fucking crazy. They go, ha ha, okay. And they just, like, they don’t… and you’re like, no, I can’t stress this enough. You really need to read it. And they go, ha, sure, yeah, ha ha. And you go, no, it’s like 200 pages, a little more than that.

They get a death grip on you because it’s like, There’s, there’s this thing I think that everyone knows within the world of horror at least, that like, J horror moves in a very different way from western horror. And a lot of that’s Because they’ve had horror stories, you know, for the entire, uh, time that their culture’s been [00:05:00] around.

So even when they adapted more Western bracketings of the narrative form, like, it’s still It’s approaching what is horrific and how does it embody horror from a very different place. So it has this really exciting energy to it. And going, like, what if the whole book was like that? And then leaning forward and being like what if the book also can’t tell if it wants to be a sci fi novel or not So it sometimes is and sometimes isn’t? And yeah, as you mentioned like especially I think it probably if i just watched the ring then watch a lot of people Um, I I assume you probably did the same thing you find out It’s an adaptation of a japanese movie before knowing it’s a book So you go watch

RS: Yeah, I watched the Japanese movie.

Langdon: And you go, oh, that’s also dope.

That’s the other thing is that all three of them feel different. They don’t feel contradictory, but they none of them are one to one adaptations of another. Which is exciting to me. I mean, I [00:06:00] think that’s actually a really cool thing about them because it feels like each director of a project when I want to make my Ring and keep all the raw DNA, but But it’s really

RS: there’s gonna be horses in mine.

Langdon: if you, if you read past this book everyone gets exponentially crazier.

To the point where if I start dropping factoids about book 2 or, my god, the 3rd one, Um, it straight up sounds like I’m lying. It’s that ver the verve of the overall… franchise feels like the wrong word, although technically that’s true because that feels a bit more Capitalistic compared to what is like what it feels like is actually going on with it Which is much more artist driven in a lot of ways.

Each work like radically recontextualizes all of the other ones to just do a completely different thing. And that kind of It amounts to this hyper, zany level of, like, encyclopedic [00:07:00] nonsense in such a dope way it’s so fucking good. Like, uh,

RS: Nice. So this book’s fucking weird. But I feel like it’s gotta, you gotta have more than just being fucking weird to, to

Langdon: Yeah.

RS: many people into it as possible. ’cause there are a lot of very weird books that do not have the hold on, on the culture of the way that this one did and, and granted, um, Koji Suzuki was a very prominent novelist and also a very interesting person who’s had a very interesting life, it sounds like, in Japan, but even then, like, why does this translate so well across the world?

Why, why has it had such a spread that it has and why does it hit so well? And I don’t think that it’s just because it’s fucking weird, but I think it really captures a kind of mood. And, and the time it came out, first of all, the time the book was written, it feels [00:08:00] so, like, a prophecy in many ways. It was written in the early 90s, and it, and then the time when the movie, at least the American movie, came out in, like, the late 90s, which is Right before social media was really big, this book, like, it feels like it captured the sense that we were all about to have our brains melted by the internet, but like, before the internet melted all of our brains, it was just like, this is what it’s gonna do to you. He somehow knew, and I mean, that this this book is all about virality in multiple ways.

Langdon: I mean,

RS: In a way that is nonsense, but it completely works somehow.

Langdon: there’s something, it makes it not surprising in a certain sense when later on, these books become straight up cyberpunk. I’m not making that up, by the way. I won’t spoil it for you all. I’m not making it up, though. They become literal cyberpunk novels. But, you look back at this one, and like you were saying, like, the notions of that are embedded in [00:09:00] it.

He clearly was reading, I mean, remembering, like, in Japanese horror and science fiction, this is right around the time that, Battle Angel Alita, and I’m trying to remember the name of, Ghost in the Shell, uh, Akira has come out. So, like, there’s a bunch of stuff sitting in the zeitgeist, especially if you are a politically active artist on the edge of the avant garde.

Not necessarily strictly deep into avant garde stuff, but especially early on, cyberpunk was sitting at a more avant garde edge. You were expected to be reading some, like, theory in order to make compelling cyberpunk because of all the references like Baudrillard and Foucault and all that kind of baked into it.

So, like, clearly he was thinking about the same kinds of stuff of, both virality and virtuality, of, like, the superimposition of things over other things. You can kind of trace it back lineage wise to anxieties in the early 20th century about like… because conformity used [00:10:00] to not be this big Terror for people because if you know, you’re part of your community and you know Maybe every now and again you get the weirdo in the 17 or 1800s who’s like “liberty! The enlightened self,” but otherwise people were like “shut up nerd.

Go farm.” but then somewhere around the rise of real bodies of socialism and then parallel to it fascism and then the rise of sort of the modern shape of capitalism, all three of them, at least to people outside of them, present this image of conformity as the thing that crushes and annihilates the self.

And in order to do that, you kind of have to overlay the image of the ideal self over the real self and flatten the real for the ideal. This shows up in all kinds of like Anything that’s punk adjacent. For better and for worse. Cause there are some weirdnesses around that where like, especially I think a lot of us get to adulthood and go, No, there’s a degree of hating conformity where you’re [00:11:00] deliberately alienating yourself from all your friends and peers, and that’s not very good.

Like, actually my life’s worse from that. Clearly he was like, thinking about a lot of this stuff. But, yeah, encodes it in this like, There’s something ingenious about it, right? Looking back it feels a little bit quaint that he uses, VHSs but I think people who weren’t alive in the 80s and early 90s forget that like VHSs were, for a while, insanely expensive.

Like insanely expensive. It would be like 500 for a VHS player in the mid 80s. And like 500 in mid 80s dollars, so it’s like you’re paying– Imagine buying four ps5s in order to watch a VHS of like Murder She Wrote episodes. So like it did have this sort of science fictional edge, but then His his notion of the virus is this weird combination of like… there’s the technological metaphor of the replication of videotapes, which everyone [00:12:00] kind of knows, even from the movie, and how he, he hints at, and makes far more explicit in later books than this, that that’s a virus replicating itself, that that’s its taking its DNA.

Actually, no, he does first say that in this book, that it’s a, a digitalized encoding of a kind of DNA. But, in the book version, he has this absolutely batshit fucking crazy origin of that notion of Sadako and her mom are kinda, sorta, real psychics? That, like, embed their consciousness can embed their consciousness in photogra photographs that they can also witness from a distance?

As a dying act, Sadako embeds herself using that into, into a VHS, because what is a VHS but thousands of photographs? So she can exponentiate her consciousness. You’re like, what the fuck? Yeah,

RS: but [00:13:00] Smallpox.

They make a tie at the end where they say that she functionally is a reborn version of Smallpox.

RS: Because she had the last case of Smallpox in Japan. And as she was dying, the Smallpox virus was dying inside of her. And they kind of mixed together, to carry on their existence together.

Langdon: It’s this really ingenious thing that like, I think a lot of, as much as we can talk about how there’s a lot of instances of bad horror, bad fantasy, kind of leaning way too heavily on a didactic wing of allegory,

RS: Yeah.

Langdon: I think, I think that has to be said more not to dissuade people from either didacticism or allegory because horror requires you to be horrified by something and most of the horror isn’t like, “Oh, that’s nasty because that’s, that’s being grossed out.”

That’s not horrified. Most horror is more like a moral revulsion. Like you see something that’s reprehensible and you find that [00:14:00] horrific. He invokes the smallpox thing in the same, like he mentions offhandedly things like America’s usage of smallpox against communities of color and it’s used as a bioweapon as like this embodiment of social cruelty that gets passed on because yeah in the book, they omit from every fucking film version Sadako is also, Sadako is intersex, and shockingly for a book that came out in 1991, it states that Sadako is a woman and never misgenders her, but has other people commit violence against her, both physical and implied sexual violence as well, based on this.

The level of her rage becomes a bit more Totally understandable in terms of like the volume of it compared to the film where it’s just like “Girl in well,” I granted i’d be i’d be pissed if I

RS: I would also be upset about being a girl in a well.

Langdon: Yeah, i’m [00:15:00] I you know not not to diminish that one i’d be pretty bad Girls don’t belong in wells.

That’s you can quote me on that

RS: I think that, that the fact that it’s, that it’s, That it’s a rape, too, is missing from both of the film adaptations, that she gets smallpox by being raped by a doctor who has a mild case of smallpox.

Langdon: That doctor is, if I remember correctly, he’s like, kinda sorta a father figure as well, And he’s exploiting her and her mother for their psychic abilities,

RS: No, that’s a different

Langdon: that’s a different doctor,

RS: That’s her, her, her father figure, the, the professor, like, the psychic researcher guy, is exploiting her and her mother. But that’s the guy who’s dying in the hospital, and while she’s visiting him in the sanitarium or whatever, this other doctor, who works at the sanitarium, who she’s been hanging out with, he, Goes on a walk with her, leads her into the woods, and, and violates her, and kills, and throws her in a well.

Langdon: If, if, if, if when you’re [00:16:00] hearing this, you’re thinking, God, those guys sound pretty terrible. We’ll get there. Don’t worry.

RS: Yeah.

Langdon: these episodes have outlines. Don’t worry, we’ll get there.

RS: yeah, eventually.

Langdon: It, it’s, it’s this really intriguing. Set, uh, because it’s also structured more like a detective novel than like a horror novel most of the time, which is, I think, an interesting tonal shift, if you’re not, one, if you’re not

RS: it’s a bit like a noir.

Langdon: Yeah.

RS: It’s a lot like a noir. I’m thinking of that, that Otto Preminger film, where most of the story, most of the film is, The beginning, I think, starts with them getting news that she’s died in a car accident, and they’re all telling their stories , and it kind of takes that tone, that structure of here’s a lot of people.

I mean, we get this videotape, we figure out that It’s by someone named Sadako Yamamura. And now we try and figure out who was Sadako Yamamura, why did she create this tape, and we’re getting stories about her and her family from these outside [00:17:00] perspectives. And nearly every outside perspective is from someone who was hostile.

I mean, one of the people who knew her when she was a young woman was another member of this theater troupe. She was trying to be an actress, but it just didn’t quite work out. And, I mean, the other member of the theater troupe who knew her just only said, like, “Uh, she was weird and gross,” you know.

Langdon: I forget whether it’s in this book or in a later one, it’s implied as well that she was sexually taken

RS: Yes, some creepy guy from the theater group paid her a visit, and the next thing that happened is he showed up the next day at the, at the company and just fell down and fucking died. Just dropped dead, so it’s like, okay, you, you, you deserve that, fucker. He did something real bad, or at least tried to do something real bad, and then he just collapsed and fucking died.

Mm.

Langdon: something that I think is really interesting about the structure of this book is we get, unlike in a lot of the film versions, I think it does actually show up [00:18:00] in the initial TV film version of The Ring that predated Ringu. But we get a brief, I think two chapters of the first people who watched the video, or not the first, the people who watched the video immediately before Ringu.

the main character and it It’s funny because on one hand it does the pretty standard horror trope of a bunch of

RS: Yeah, the opening kill, especially if it’s a teen girl. It’s a teen girl minding her own business, and then, ah, dead.

Langdon: But it’s funny because like in this case, again testament to the fact that koji suzuki Similar to Wes Craven when he was at his peak is clearly thinking very consciously about how he’s structuring it Because. At first you’re going, oh, it’s a stereotypical opening. Oh, it’s just teens or whatever, but then it becomes pressingly dark and cruel that of all people that we get direct depictions of the death of it is [00:19:00] itself A young girl who almost got taken advantage of by her boyfriend in a distant place Doing absolutely nothing and just being presented this tape. There are these echoes of Sadako’s base trauma, or at least most, most eruptive trauma.

I mean, definitely not the base one now that I think about it, but that are repeated by Sadako, which is this, a really potent image that, it’s, it’s interesting because it fits both the noir archetype of fucked up people fucking up other people, Some, some of whom are fucked up and some of whom aren’t yet.

As well as the more This is also where I uh pooh pooh the people who are like, “I don’t like the whole elevated horror thing Horror doesn’t always have to be about trauma.” Well, I don’t know what you thought horror was about prior to these things Um, because it sounds like you’re illiterate because horror is largely almost always about trauma. I’m, not sure if people know this but getting murdered by [00:20:00] monsters is traumatic. And normally we’re scared of that because it would be really bad.

RS: Elevated horror is when they talk about it in therapy, which I prefer the kind where they don’t.

Langdon: The root function though of like, we’re talking about, because that’s another thing that sort of provokes horror is not only a primal pain, but a primal pain that we will subconsciously begin inflicting on, on others, uh, wittingly or not. And having Sadako act, live that out, where it’s like, Whenever we get evidence of her, even when we’re being presented, It’s funny because even when we’re being presented testimony of her life from people who hate her or view her with suspicion or things like that, They can’t help but half confess their own cruelty.

They’ll, like, try to justify it, but then they’re like, ” Yeah, I, I, I hid the fact that my, my co worker, uh, my co worker raped her, But you have to realize, she was weird.”

RS: Yeah.

Langdon: That it’s then of all things to have that person, [00:21:00] carry out mirrors of her own pain to people who don’t deserve it.

There are many people that she doesn’t do who do. When the one, uh, rapist, uh, Doctor just kind of dies for no clear reason. I don’t think there’s a reader in the world who’s like, “oh No,” you’re like, well, I mean Yep. Yeah, you played with fire buddy. But it’s just it’s a really interesting way to make that specific opening scene, especially if you reread it sting in a really specific way and him deliberately picking something where you’re not gonna pick it up as you’re

RS: Wait, I don’t believe the rapist doctor dies.

Langdon: Oh, I, oh, I thought, I thought

RS: There was the theater, the guy who just dropped dead was the theater guy, right?

Langdon: Uh,

RS: theater guy. But I think, I believe the doctor, all that happens is that like, Ryuji just tweaks his nose like a 1950s greaser. And says like, “hey, fuck you buddy,” and then they just leave.

Langdon: I had forgotten that part. That’s way funnier in a, a bleak does nothing [00:22:00] kind of way.

RS: Because there’s a whole description, there’s a whole discussion that they have is like, well, why didn’t she kill the doctor? If she has this power, why wouldn’t she kill her rapist? Why wouldn’t she kill him? And it’s like, well, hmm, I don’t know,

Langdon: That’s a good question. Hmm. That’s sort of.

RS: Yeah, they puzzled it out. Well, Ryuji comes to a conclusion, which is that she didn’t will him to rape her, but she did will him to kill her because she was just fucking done. And she wanted to be killed in a way that would like, allow her to create this immortality. But this is coming from Ryuji, though.

Langdon: And it’s,

RS: take that with a grain of salt because it’s Ryuji

Langdon: Yeah, so I think at this point it’s worth us maybe mentioning that the two main characters who are different

RS: terrible

Langdon: insane

RS: Asakawa is a very bland character. He’s just kind of there, but, but despite his blandness, he manages to be a terrible husband and father. And then his friend [00:23:00] Ryuji is, like I mentioned before, that this book is somehow the internet before the internet exists. Ryuji is like Reddit. Like if Reddit gave birth to one of those Tibetan thought forms, like a, like a, oh god, what do you, what do you call it?

A tulpa, yeah. He’s like a tulpa made out of Reddit, in that he’s very knowledgeable and very useful, and also the creepiest motherfucker on earth. Just, yeah. A horrible weird little man who is introduced by telling Asakawa about a time that he raped a girl using psychic powers or something. He has the worst vibes. Asakawa’s wife is just like, “please don’t bring that fucking guy into our house, like, ever.

Just please don’t fucking bring that guy into our house.” All he can say is, yeah,

Langdon: At one point he kind of thinks to himself I’m glad I never brought up that Ryuji raped someone to my wife because she’d be really mad about that and then just sort Of moves on and you’re like what? What,

RS: Yeah, and this whole [00:24:00] book, you’re like, what the fuck?

Langdon: Asakawa is a speci– in a certain way Asakawa is worse in ways than Ryuji ’cause Ryuji gives off ” sociopath, I’m gonna wear your skin” vibes, all the time. That’s bad, but there’s, we’ve gotten a lot of like social discourse about this. The kind of person who signals very clearly, I’m an evil, insane piece of shit.

That sucks, but that’s easier to avoid. Asakawa is like Martin Luther King Jr’s white liberal, but like on steroids in that he just passively acknowledges, but just continues to allow incredibly horrible things to happen because he can’t be moved to give a shit about anything. He serves in a lot of ways as almost like another, the way that noir

really fucking hates detectives. It’s really funny that in certain neo noir people kind of think of them as like “Oh these cool suave characters” and then you watch a classic noir and you go. I think they hate everyone on the screen[00:25:00]

RS: yeah, this guy’s a piece of shit.

Langdon: Because it’s like Asakawa only cares about detective stuff. That’s it.

He’s a journalist. But he only cares about journalism. He it seemingly doesn’t give a shit about his wife or his kid. Like it every now and again, he’ll go. Oh shit. Yeah, I have a baby. Oh, whatever. I keep going

RS: he, he, he goes out to help for his, for this colleague, only when it becomes obvious that he’ll literally die without his help. The whole time he’s just thinking like, well, he might, he might get the scoop. Yeah. I don’t want him to get the scoop before me. Like, literally, this is a haunted videotape that killed four people.

Can you maybe think a little bit about more than getting the right scoop? And he’s like, I guess if I die, I won’t be able to get my head, my name on the byline.

Langdon: and it’s it’s funny because He learns about the tape because he happens to go on vacation sees the tape I don’t I think you watch it’s [00:26:00] like a bit of it and then immediately turns it off and it’s like that’s fucking weird and he mentions it to Ryuji who later goes and I Isn’t it that he goes up alone and watches it himself and is like, haha.

I’m gonna die now. Um,

RS: no, no. In the book, what’s, what’s happening is he hears about it. He hears about the, the death of, like, one of the four kids because a taxi driver witnessed it.

Langdon: Yeah

RS: And he hears about it from the cab driver and he goes and investigates and finds out, like, wow, all these, these four kids who were young and healthy all died of a heart attack at the exact same time.

Finds out that they all took a vacation together at this one place, this one little cabin, and he thinks, like, maybe it was some kind of virus, so he goes out there and while he’s there, he watches this videotape. And he watches the whole thing, but the bit, the bit at the end where it says, like, “the only way to save yourself is…” the bit is taped over, as a little prank, because the teenagers were being little assholes.

Langdon: and so most most of the book [00:27:00] is him trying to figure out like what did I see and then later How do I what how do I not die? Um,

RS: what’s the charm? How do I fix this?

Langdon: And so Ryuji winds up Also like Ryuji watches it too just sort of like I forget exactly why he does it, but he’s just sort of like, Ha ha, now we’re both gonna die, so we both have to solve this mystery.

Unless, you’re like, you’re a

RS: doesn’t give a fuck.

Langdon: person! This is where we get some of the stuff that’s like Two facts about Ryuji that condemn Asakawa substantially more than Ryuji. So, early in the book, Ryuji confesses to him like, I raped a person, as we’d mentioned, and Asakawa’s like, I hate this guy, he’s so weird and creepy, but I can’t just let him get away or whatever.

He tells himself all this stuff, and it’s only near the very end of the book that Ryuji says explicitly to him, I never actually did any of that, and it gets revealed that he’s functionally [00:28:00] asexual from, like, his

RS: No, that, he, Ryuji doesn’t reveal that.

It’s his girlfriend.

Langdon: Oh yeah, sorry, that’s what it was, it was, uh,

RS: It’s after Ryuji dies, uh, Asakawa goes to his house or something and his girlfriend’s there and she says, “Let me clear the air about what you think our relationship was. He, he was actually very innocent and I don’t know if he’d ever even been with a woman at all.”

Langdon: And then there’s this bit where, he lied about committing a rape because he knew that Asakawa craved someone else living out the bleak reality. almost sociopathic thrill that Asakawa feels is lacking from his life, and it’s the same, it’s clearly the same thing that drives him to be a journalist, is precisely the, and again, this functionally feels like a critique of um, social media before social media, granted this is like tabloids and like yellow journalism and all that going back, way way way back, of like, my bland life causes me to crave witnessing a kind of [00:29:00] primal violence being enacted because that makes me feel alive in a way that I Just don’t feel alive in my day to day life. And so I will feign disgust at this stuff, but I will never ever look away I will never try to stop any of this stuff.

I just want to feel this like moral indignation as a mask to a perpetual witness of of violence Like horrible violence. And Ryuji just calling him on his shit being like, “you like this. i’m pretending. You like this though.”

RS: And Ryuji this whole time is kind of portrayed as just stronger in every way. He’s better at the detective work. He’s physically stronger than Asakawa. Asakawa, as much as he hates him, also really does admire him in a lot of ways. He’s, and has admired him ever since they were schoolmates because he was this very athletic guy or something that Asakawa kind of thought was cool when he was a kid.

He was like gymcel or something, I [00:30:00] guess.

Langdon: I really like how the book never draws direct attention to the fact that If there is a male character and they are not literally just a passerby They are HUGE piece of garbage.

RS: Except for the one fisherman. There’s a bit where Sadako’s mother has a vision and dredges like a possibly cursed religious statue out of the sea. The fisherman who gives her a ride out to the ocean, he seems okay. He seems like an okay guy. He’s got a major crush on her, he doesn’t take advantage, he averts his eyes respectfully, even though he is, is very, very attracted to this girl.

He seems okay.

Langdon: And it’s like,

RS: if she’d married him, things would have been fine. He just seems like the kind of solid, dependable, Samwise Gamgee type husband who is like a very good partner to the crazy goth woman.

Langdon: it becomes this [00:31:00] cutting analogy. So we see a lot of things from, Not just people beholden to second wave feminism, but a pretty common thing of people who have very real and very, like, totally fucking understandable trauma regarding men that then becomes a sort of pathological thing, that the, the realistic traumatic response of, like, this, this thing gave me pain when, at some time gets mapped onto this universalist thing of like, they can’t help but inflict pain.

There’s this animalistic thing that winds up, in a lot of ways, one of the chief critiques of that mode of thought is it cheapens a lot of the actual critique of that kind of violence. Because if you make it pathological, then it’s, it’s like getting mad at a cat for eating meat. Like, if it’s an obligate carnivore, it’s almost like not its fault in a certain way.

And the inclusion, it’s this, this smart, very economical in its narrative, by having just this one person [00:32:00] who’s legitimately a sincere and considerate person, makes all of the other dudes being horrible pieces of shit, Really sting because they’re like, oh these are bad people. This is not the cynical thing that people are bad. This is like there are bad people. And it’s worse that not everyone’s bad. If everyone was bad You could just be a prick all the time. Then Sadako would be kind of right and kind of like ruthlessly killing kind of anyone. But Allowing that complication which is something that a lot of horror that dives into stuff that’s this relatively dark can lean on, I think, the trite and easy, overly cynical position.

Which, again, it oversimplifies stuff to the point where it’s like, okay, now it’s not really horror anymore. In a certain way, I Spit on Your Grave almost isn’t a horror film, especially most, modern feminist reads of it, because it’s like, yeah, these guys, sexually violate a woman and then she murders all of them.

That’s just dope. Like that’s dope. She kills a bunch of horrible people. Versus in this where you’re like, I [00:33:00] feel bad I feel bad almost every page like

RS: and that Sadako’s violence isn’t focused in a way that’s fair or just, it just radiates out to anyone who’s kind of within reach, anyone who’s vulnerable. Well, that’s how it fucking goes, man.

Langdon: Yeah, and

RS: That’s just real.

Langdon: it That’s the thing that makes it sting more is that sense of it because that’s the other thing that

RS: Cause she’s absolutely right to be angry at the world. The world treated her and her mom so bad. God. All she’s ever known is this, like, misery and cruelty and suffering. Just, everyone’s just been shitty to her and her mom her entire fucking life. Just for, like, just for existing, not even for, doing anything wrong.

It’s just, well, she’s weird. Like, you know, okay.

Langdon: I mean, it’s,

RS: so fucking what?

Langdon: it’s a

RS: “She’s weird, but also she’s hot, which makes me madder.” All

Langdon: sexy and I want to have sex with her and that makes me feel weird. You’re like, why? Just be attracted to her. Why is that, why are you so fucking bizarre? It touches on the thing that I think a lot of people in [00:34:00] certain, The more liberal wing of even leftist space tend to be wary of, which is a kind of, Obligate sympathy, to certain figures like the school shooter or the incel or things like that.

Not so much that you think, when they reach that point, now I’m sympathetic to them because that, that, that is weird. But more that, people like that don’t emerge from nothing. They aren’t like born ontologically evil and then it’s just a matter of time. Especially if you hold to like a materialist like, I I don’t believe in weird supernatural shit So I don’t think that a weird ghost inhabits their brain. Things happen in their life that lead them there which means that other things could have happened that wouldn’t have led them there. So there’s always a kind of tragedy, even if it’s not a personal tragedy It can maybe just even be a sociological or cultural one that like we have a culture that generates these figures. Where pain, whether deserved or not, transforms into sort of [00:35:00] a mass social violence.

And that’s really disturbing. Once you get past sort of, again, the easy armchair moralizing of like, people who do bad things are bad. Yeah, no, no fuck, no fucking shit. Jesus, that’s, that’s not insightful. That instead, taking the step further of like, well, the classic thing of like, how come, we know some of the answers to this, but how come mass gun violence is, one, predominantly American, we know some of the answers to that, but it’s also predominantly male, and predominantly cis male as well, and these become, there aren’t clear answers for that, and this is where I think sometimes if we merely look for Just structural oppression, which is obviously very fucking real and very horrible, it doesn’t make any sense.

You have to kind of look beyond that to like Generators of pain and isolation and alienation that maybe don’t come from those axes. I don’t know. it’s a very fruitful [00:36:00] and ugly challenge, which is again something that I feel like we’ve probably not only speak for both of us, but like anyone who likes horror. I like when it challenges me in a really ugly difficult way. That’s something I really treasure about like good horror

RS: Mm.

Langdon: But it’s like not giving me the easy like pat me on the back you think racism’s bad. And i’m like I do.

Yeah. Thanks. Which a lot of stuff sort of solids itself with. Again, you don’t need to be an ethical genius to be like, racial antipathy is wrong. That’s just correct. It is really insane though, how the handling of, supernatural elements in this work, which also are, technically they’re in the film because like there’s no clear… they never say how the tape works and she she crawls out of the tv in the film. But she doesn’t do in this at any point.

Uh,

RS: Right. There’s just a smell, there’s just sort of a citrus smell, and you feel like there’s something behind you, and you’re super scared, and then you’re dead.

Langdon: There is [00:37:00] the prophecy from the island that Sadako’s mom is born on and the weird idol that gets thrown into the ocean. And it’s like if something ever happens to this idol, a horrible thing will happen, like, classic thing, and then immediately after it’s thrown into the ocean, now this psychic bitch gets born.

They do have real psychic powers that are rigorously tested, and no one else in the novel does. It’s not like this is a widespread thing. It’s very strange, but it’s also well documented. And just, I really like that valence of weirding that’s a little bit more on the science fictional end than the film, in that , it dives into a bit more of the inquiry, the skeptical inquiry into it, but deliberately doesn’t do the cornball shit of like, nailing down the mechanics of it.

RS: No, thank god.

Langdon: Yeah, right?

RS: It’s vague enough to be, everybody has a little psychic energy. She just has more. That’s it.

Langdon: it’s just, huh, that’s, that’s crazy. When [00:38:00] they’re mulling over, like, do you think, do you think if we’d fuck around with a statue we could make this stop? I’m like, I don’t know, man. I’m gonna be honest, I don’t know. Couldn’t hurt, though. I’m scared of a statue being psychic and evil, though.

It lives in the ocean and is mad. Again, all of this stuff is, It’s interesting comparing this to the film, I think, in a lot of ways, because Asakawa in the book has a wife and a kid and then they have parents and and it At one point, I forget whether, so I know in this one, it’s revealed that the wife watches the video with the child. Um, I forget

RS: because Asakawa left the tape in the fucking VCR.

Langdon: I,

RS: He’s so bad at this. Even Ryuji’s like, bro, you fucked up. Come on, man. What were you doing

Langdon: he goes to, which is like such an on the nose metaphor for not caring about his, uh, his family and like allowing harm to come to them because he’s so obsessed with his own career path, which is [00:39:00] also most of the other, awful men in this can be sort of, summed up in that way of like, they’re so focused on achieving themselves that they just don’t give a fuck about

RS: father? Question mark? I feel like it’s implied in at least one of the adaptations that he’s not her biological father, this sort of professor dude who Sadako’s mother is with. I mean, originally I think she’s his side piece or something like that. He’s this professor of psychic research who’s much older than her and he ends up just sort of exploiting her and isn’t really interested in her well being.

I feel like in one of the adaptations it’s implied that, like, he’s really more like a stepdad and was fathered by something else.

Langdon: Uh, yeah, it’s like

RS: don’t think it appears in this book.

Langdon: There’s a lot of implication in I think it’s later books that her mom kind of like parthenogenesis Sadako. And then I it it it This shit gets crazy. There’s in later books Sadako straight up becomes Tomie. Those [00:40:00] who know know.

I think in a later one it also implies that Asakawa’s mom’s parents watched the tape as well. There’s just some weird, Shit that goes on with that. Like the the final scene being him racing home having acquired a VHS player that had like a dual deck so he could rub he could dupe the tape. And just racing home to do that is this really weird narratively weird place to end. Because it’s like it’s very high tension. But it’s also in a certain way very bland because he’s just driving. There’s no traffic or anything, it’s just like, God, I gotta dupe this tape.

I have like, two hours, and home’s thirty minutes away. But compared to the films, where, even in the, even in Ringu, they collapse all of Asakawa’s family in, into him, and make him into a woman. Which I think tilts the story in an interesting

RS: I [00:41:00] believe he has a kid, though. Well, she has a kid in Ringu,

in the Japanese film. Yeah,

Langdon: And then, and then in the American version, they make the Ryuji character

RS: Her ex husband or something, right?

Langdon: And it’s like, it’s funny because like, I, normally you look at adaptations and, whatever, we have all the tropes about that. But looking at that one, those are really smart things,

narrative choices, I think, especially if you aren’t intending if you aren’t intending to do the increasingly batshit sequels. Making this into a marital relation, mirrors Sadako’s life in such a satisfying way, even as they cut some of those elements from the film itself, like the resonant echo of that knife twist as well.

It’s piquant.

RS: Mm.

Langdon: Yeah, my shocking hot take The Ring is a good film

RS: Yeah, my shocking take that I, that I will tell anyone is that the American version of the movie’s better than the Japanese one. [00:42:00] Come fucking fight me. I’ll do it. Having a psychic character, putting a psychic character in a mystery is some bullshit. That is, no, you, you gotta like figure out the clues on your own.

You cannot just have a vision. Fuck you.

Langdon: Or if you do that, you gotta have more weird shit. So it’s like there’s con there’s constant disruption

RS: yeah.

Langdon: Like if it’s just one level of disruption then it feels like deus ex machina But if it’s like constant weird shit going on you’re like, whatever. I don’t I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next

RS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, uh, let’s talk a little bit about the structure of the book. It’s interesting that this book, it’s called Ring, and I mean it can refer to that ring of light that’s at the top of the well when when the cover’s on it and you can see a little bit there. But there’s this very cyclical structure in this book. I mean, there’s the the fact that it begins and where it ends It begins where Asakawa’s theory is that these kids caught some kind of virus and that’s where it ends. They did catch a [00:43:00] virus.

They caught, like, Psychic Smallpox Ghost. It begins at this cabin, and then it ends at It turns out, oh shit, we gotta go back to the cabin, cause that’s where Sadako is. There’s even like a structure. I don’t know if you notice, but he’s driving around in circles throughout the city on this ring road constantly.

He’s just going in circles while he’s driving, which is a really, really big part of this book, which is how it ends. It begins with him in a taxi cab and it ends with him again, driving on this, driving in fucking circles. And it’s this videotape of copying and sending. Copying it and showing it to someone else, which, again, is circling around, repeating this cycle, repeating this cycle, repeating this cycle, Sadako repeating the cycle of violence that has been done to her, this cyclic structure of something that’s just never gonna fucking end.

I think it’s perfect that the book ends where it is because it’s like, alright, we’re at the beginning of a new cycle. We don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen the next time, but we can kinda [00:44:00] guess. This is just the first cycle that’s, that’s played out in this way.

Langdon: It’s there’s something

RS: with my cat, so that’s why my chair is squeaking.

Hello, Harley.

Langdon: there’s something really brilliant about as well the way that um… so this ties into how in the midst of trying to solve their curse, Asakawa and Ryuji do a million different things that if… if Sadako was a reasonable ghost, so to speak, you would imagine would quell things. They find out, oh, she was just left in this well, and the, this cabin was built on top of the well.

That’s the other thing, is that, the tape seems to have literally emerged from Sadako, projecting her con her dead consciousness upward from the well, into the room that had videotapes, and just overwritten one random videotape, with her mind. Um, so they’re like, oh, let’s, let’s dig her up, and find her home, like the island she was born on, and let’s give, [00:45:00] give, properly inter her, and give her a burial with rites, let’s get the statue and put it back on the island, let’s, like, let’s right all of these wrongs that we found that are, cruel and unjust. And none of those are the thing.

The

RS: I know, it’s such a good twist. It’s so mean.

Langdon: It’s specifically that, and it goes back to that, that ring structure, it’s that she doesn’t want closure. She doesn’t want to break the cycle. That’s not what’s desired. It is just to repeat and replicate. That sense of replication is what, he does a pretty ingenious thing.

The next, the next book is called Loop, which I think fits. Because that’s like a circle of directionality, right? That’s like you are going in one of the two directions around a circle, but cycling forever, like it makes literal that the cycle rather than sort of the static object of a ring. And then the last one is called spiral, which is a loop that is then projected along [00:46:00] a second dimension.

So you’re not just circling around. But it’s it’s exactly that thing where it’s like this constant repetition of… and obviously on one hand , I think if someone were boring they’d be like, oh, well, that’s just sort of a gimmick and it’s like yeah You’ve you’ve cracked the code. Literature and art use artifice to uh, structurally embody themselves.

You’ve figured it out. I, I get annoyed with people who refer to like, structural motifs or organizing patterns as gimmicks. ’cause I’m like, you, you just don’t like books. I don’t, “oh, use chapters? How quaint,” like,

RS: When people say, “ah, this, this story used tropes.” Like, yeah, they all do that.

Langdon: that’s,

RS: That’s kind of what stories are made of, man.

Langdon: that’s an archetype. Sorry. You can,

RS: This song has notes in it.

Langdon: If you took one class on literature, including high school, you would know this. Like you were saying, he uses it to a narrative [00:47:00] end to specifically… there are points where you go, oh, there’s a Terminus here, and there was obvious Termini that show up, and deliberately crossing them out to go, no, this isn’t a story that ends.

This isn’t a story that, has closure. And there there’s something I especially find that kind of thing satisfying in In something like horror where I think sometimes we’re pushed to have a really pat ending to things. Like we even get this in general as writers being told like have an ending in mind, give a sense of closure and you know, have your denouement and all that kind of stuff that Typically gets broken in literary fiction because that’s not that’s not how life works ever like

RS: Yeah.

I mean we’re recording this on Juneteenth.

Langdon: The wounds of slavery have super duper not gone away, like ultra crazy hyper not gone away at all. And that’s picking something from You know at this point [00:48:00] nearing 200 years like 100 60 years ago now. You go further and further and you can still find these ugly repeating echoes of things.

And so it’s like it’s there’s something really satisfying about literalizing that.

RS: Yeah.

Langdon: He uses this analogy later on, he picks up the DNA thread in the immediate sequel, without getting too deep into that one. The chain and helical structure of DNA DNA as replicas of the ring and the loop and the spiral. He does this really ingenious like extrapolation of image metaphor for both narrative information, but then also structural organizational methodology, it’s just it it’s One of those things you go, uh, we were talking about this literally right before we hit record where it’s like damn this guy can actually write though

RS: He’s good at it. And I think the fact that the story ends the way it is is part of why it hits so hard because I mean, we’re all expecting this the first time you read it or the first time you watch the movie to [00:49:00] be like, okay. Okay, it’s done. It’s fine. They figured out what went on.

They, they’re giving her a proper burial. They set everything right, and then the dude dies anyway, and it’s like, what the fuck? No! No!

Langdon: other thing is that like so if I can give a a

RS: It’s so mean, it rocks.

Langdon: if I can give an immediate spoiler of something that happens early on in the second book because I think it like really deepens this point Is one of the first things they reveal? Asakawa’s family dies. They copy the tape and they die

RS: sucks

Langdon: is an extra level of like what the fuck. And again, that focus on constant knife twists.

Because again, if merely replicating the tape preserves you, okay, now you have closure. And even Asakawa’s thinking of it. It’s like, eventually, you’re replicating tape on tape on tape on tape, but if everyone’s seen the tape and everyone’s copied it, then, we’re all good. [00:50:00] And deliberately, again, seeking out any possible end to the narrative, per se, it does In a, like, again, deeply cruel way.

In the opening of the second book, Asakawa is fully catatonic and hasn’t spoken for months to anyone, cause his whole family died, even though in his mind he did everything right. And he lived. Is the other thing.

RS: Oh God, like the one who really doesn’t deserve to live,

Langdon: yeah, he’s

RS: going in terms of innocence,

Langdon: His family didn’t deserve to be brought into this and in his mind he’s like I don’t even really deserve to come out. He’s like “my best friend who’s awful.” Still his

RS: Or is he?

Langdon: yeah, that’s the other thing is

RS: That’s the other thing. Is that the truth, or is that thing that Ryuji’s student slash girlfriend said, is that also bullshit? Like, what we don’t really know, we don’t know from– I do find it interesting, though, that the way his death sequence At the end, so mirrors [00:51:00] the teen girl’s death at the beginning.

Here’s this innocent teen girl getting ready for her studies, trying to study for an exam, and she dies alone in the apartment. And here’s him, this potentially very innocent? Question mark? We don’t know. Person who, who dies in very much the same way, while trying to call his girlfriend for help, and all he can get out of the phone is to yell, to scream, because like, he’s getting attacked by whatever it is.

The question is, was his story about being a serial rapist bullshit? Was his girlfriend’s story also bullshit?

Langdon: There’s

RS: what is your deal? It is, okay, for Pride Month. In your opinion, is Ryuji an egg?

Langdon: Absolutely, there’s

RS: there is a, there are multiple moments where, like, out of the blue, in response to nothing and no one, he starts talking about how the ideal human being is neither male nor female, and non binary people are all incredibly hot.

They are just on a boat, they’re just traveling. And all of a sudden he just [00:52:00] says, “You know what? L Let me talk about how intersex people are all incredibly, insanely hot and completely flawless.” Like, Okay, Ryuji, those are very cisgender thoughts to have. Thank

Langdon: And it’s, it,

RS: this with me.

Langdon: it’s funny because I’ve seen some really callous interpretations of that, but it feels to me, especially if you know, kind of the political trajectory of a lot of the writers in this, this sort of sector of Japanese art. Unsurprisingly, it’s not really promoted very much that Hayao Miyazaki was a member of the Youth Communist League when he was younger.

And like, various things like that. They’re they’re not just a little political. They’re like very political , and some of them had fallings out with say the Japanese communist party and things like that, but It’s still fallings out based on like I have a political directionality and i’m not sure that we’re doing it versus like i’ve become bored of politics as I get older. That the more you know that the more apparent it is that the valence of inexplicable violence against queer people and specifically [00:53:00] using Sadako as coming from it’s implied that she’s Ryukyuan rather than um Japanese because of roughly where the islands would be which is Without– I only know this because my spouse is Ryukyuan.

Otherwise, I would not have known this at all. But like Okinawa Up until like the mid 1800s was not part of Japan. It was the capital island of a completely different kingdom called Ryukyu. And Japan, in one of their earlier bits of imperialism, just kinda invaded it out of nowhere. And eventually they were like, fine, fuck it, you can annex us.

And it’s viewed as in Japan is similar to the issues with the Ainu, where if you ask like a regular Japanese person, they may or may not be aware or even really care, but if you ask people like from Okinawa, they go, I’m not Japanese, I’m Okinawan. Or if you ask someone from one of the smaller Ryukyuan islands, they’re like, I’m Ryukyuan, I’m not Japanese.

Stuff like that. That to have basically a Ryukyuan intersex person, [00:54:00] experience this kind of violence, both physical and sexual, and then have Ryuji pontificate on this. He’s really trying to make sure that you understand that he’s like, it’s not incidental that she’s queer, and she’s not queer and intersects in like a monstrous way, it’s that everyone treats her like it’s monstrous, and it’s not.

RS: Yeah.

She’s just this hot girl who just wants to be an actress, man.

Langdon: In future books in the series, every now and again you’ll get some further information about her past, especially in the acting troupe. And it’s, it’s all heartbreaking shit. It’s like, oh yeah, she left this really abusive and exploitative thing and was really committed to acting. And everyone treated her like garbage because of it, because they thought she was weird and sexy, but because she was intersex they had like gay panic even though she’s like, “I don’t I’m I’m just a woman. That’s just the conditions of my birth, but I’m a woman. You can be normal.” And like really horrible cruel shit. It’s [00:55:00] likewise.

I think really fascinating to me that And for people who’ve only read Ring, I think their reticence to find this interesting is fair, but Like, it’s one of those things that you have to just be assured it is very compelling. Ryuji becomes the counterpoint to Sadako as sort of the structural pole, and it’s, it’s, I, going back to your comment about his pontification about non binary and intersex people, I don’t think it’s incidental that these two figures who represent either embodied or deep pontification of that kind of embodied queerness become the two poles of this story overall .

I was telling you some of it in private. I’m not gonna repeat it here Y’all just gotta

RS: he somehow gets weirder in the sequels to this book, which is, which is quite, which, given who he is in this book, is quite an accomplishment to say, to take this guy and make him even fucking weirder.

Langdon: It radically re [00:56:00] It makes you go back and reinterpret again like All of what you know about Ryuji. Oh, another fun factoid about the second book that I just remembered. His assistant, is revealed to have watched the tape, while it was in his, while it was in Ryuji’s office, but she was ovulating.

So she gives virgin birth to Sadako, who grows to a fully grown woman, in less than a week. Oh, that’s so crazy.

RS: course. Yeah. Mm hmm.

Langdon: Yeah, this shit’s so fire. You read it and you go immediately, Oh, I know why people were bending over backwards to make films out of this, because like, before the American one came out, there was the TV version, then the Japanese version, then I think the Korean version got made next, then the American version.

There have been, as people know, they made, the film version of like Ring 2 [00:57:00] which is completely unrelated. There’s uh Ring the Final Chapter, which was a tv series in Japan. There was The Ring Virus, which I think was the oh, that was a Korean one. The fact there’s something also satisfying given the notion of Sadako as this literally this virus that replicates and mutates. That there are so many adaptations that are so different from one another and like discontiguous, It’s one of the few times that that feels like structurally satisfying

RS: hmm.

Langdon: Like it’d be way less interesting if it was just a continuous series. Like if it was the sequel is part two of a never ending Whatever. One of the one of the big critiques not the biggest one But one of the big critiques of the marvel films when they hopefully they seem like they’re dying.

Hopefully they’re dying. Is that none of them feel like they have a beginning or end. They all feel like the middle part of a perpetual [00:58:00] telescoping thing so like you never get any sense of narrative closure from anything. And these feel uh, almost like the opposite. In that you never get closure because it constantly fully upends what you think you know about it and then just stops and you go “certainly the next one will answer these questions” and No, it just gives you new different questions. What’s so dope? I’m such a big fan. I can’t I could talk

about these

RS: it’s a very good book. Highly recommended, if, even though we’ve spoiled all of it, if you haven’t read the book, read the book! It’s, it’s a really quick read. It’s short, it’s tight, it feels very dense, even though it’s very short, and it’s, it is a real page turner. It’s extremely compelling.

Langdon: And it’s

RS: Absolutely read this crazy ass book.

Langdon: And one of the great benefits of it Even if like even if this part’s spoiled is read the book and then the minute it’s done I promise, you’ll go onto the wiki for The Ring and look at how many other [00:59:00] stuff there is and how wildly different all of it is. And if you have even a modicum of good taste, you’ll be like, Holy shit, I have to check this shit out, like, I have to know what else gets done with this.

RS: Yeah. You really do. You really do.

Langdon: It’s

RS: In conclusion, Ryuji, what is your deal?

Langdon: You fucking wacko.

RS: You strange little creature. You weird little man.

Langdon: He’s kinda like if a goblin was the size of a fully grown guy.

RS: Just a strange little man.

Langdon: Yeah,

RS: uh, Yeah, I, I don’t even know what else to say about him, man. Every, everything, every line of dialogue, he’s just like, What the fuck were you doing? That he, that he’s introduced by saying, like, What is it? ” I want to witness the end of the world, dig a hole into the earth, and ejaculate into it over and over again.”

Langdon: he’s just like that, the whole, the whole book too. Like

RS: The whole entire book.

Langdon: be just chilling and he’ll be like, Asakawa. I was, I [01:00:00] was thinking of something and he is like, is it normal or crazy? Like the, like the classic thing is this, is the gym creepy or wet?

RS: Yeah,

Langdon: It is like, oh, it’s normal and uh, it’s crazy.

RS: of course. It’s always something fucking insane.

Langdon: like,

he leaves a suicide note for Asakawa, not, not, not the, the, the person who he, he says is his girlfriend and then isn’t? Just at all?

RS: Yeah. Or is she? But they do have a close relationship, obviously.

Langdon: It’s such a,

RS: It’s so strange.

Langdon: Again, people, people who’ve only read a bit will not love it. God, I love Ryuji. What a wild character. You, you know, you get in a thrill when he shows up.

RS: Yes. I mean, Asakawa’s, Asakawa’s reasoning of, ” I’m gonna get this guy involved in it, cause one, he’ll be super into it, and two, it’s, I’m okay with it if he dies.” Like, that’s pretty sound reasoning, I have to admit. Just, just, this fucking guy. This, that fucking [01:01:00] guy. Ryuji.

Langdon: I think the thing that I like most about the book and there’s all this like interior stuff that that’s just a reader is satisfying and then as a writer is a really great way to show that like you can do these somewhat higher minded structural image symbolic, uh, motifs and pull them out and extrapolate them in all these different ways, but still have like a really compelling, super high intensity, like plot forward thriller feeling.

Like you don’t have to go abstract with it. It’s cool to go abstract too. Not knocking or literary stuff, but you can still be very thoughtful and make like a fucking thrill ride of a book. But it’s, it’s specifically, and uh, I’ve read the book three times now. Over the course of my life, and I’m always left in just a gibbering, salivating mess by the end.

I’m like, oh, I gotta tell more people about this book, it’s so fucking sick. And it’s, especially the more stuff you read, I’m not sure if this has happened for you, but like, it’s not that I like less stuff, cause I [01:02:00] deliberately, I deliberately try not to read stuff that I think just fucking sucks.

Cause I’ve hate read enough stuff in my life.

RS: Yeah, I can’t do that.

Langdon: I can do it if it’s gonna be like that, like that book Trigger Warning in which a right winger presents, uh, Antifa’s literal super soldiers, which is, frankly, kind of dope. Um,

RS: awesome. Good for them.

Langdon: Yeah, it’s very sick. He thinks it’s bad, but it’s instead very sick, but like, it’s still hard sometimes to find a book that like gets me

thrilled like a 14 year old that just heard death metal for the first time. You’re like, yo! But this book always gets me amped like that. Cause it’s brainy and psychotic.

RS: It sure is.

Langdon: If that’s not a pitch, I don’t know what is.

RS: Yeah, so definitely read Ring. Read it. It’s good. You will not regret reading Ring. You might feel very weird after you read it, but you will not regret reading it. It will stay in your head for a long time, though. And [01:03:00] also, I remember reading this a second time and going, You will “Okay, how does Ryuji know the average blink speed of a woman versus a man?”

And then I realized, you know, Ryuji would just happen to fucking know this. He, he just would just happen to have this information in his brain, because remember this is 1991, you couldn’t google it yet. I, I do believe that Ryuji is the kind of guy who would just know the average human blink speed by gender.

Langdon: I, I also like how he brings it up kind of Not out of nowhere, it’s That’s not really what I mean. I’m trying to figure it out. He’s so nonchalant with the information, he doesn’t elaborate where he gets it. Where you say, oh yeah, of course it’s that. That’s the average blink speed of a, of a, of an adult woman.

And you’re like, oh. And also Asakawa’s like, oh yeah, of course, yeah, thanks.

RS: Right,

Langdon: And you’re like

RS: you Of course you know that, Ryuji. Why would you not know that? Why would anyone not happen to know that information? [01:04:00] He’s a strange man.

Langdon: So people within a certain age range, I think, view things like Reddit or TikTok or even big chunks of Twitter and stuff like that as a way to get real information that hasn’t been filtered by X or Y kind of immediately and have like immediate access to it.

But kind of. The older you get, intellectually, not necessarily by age, the more you go, no, these are just charlatans who speak with insane levels of confidence. And sometimes they are right, but sometimes they’re insanely wrong, but the tone is always the same. Like it’s never delivered with any level of doubt.

And it comes across so natural that unless you train yourself to like pause for a second, you, you’re very inclined to just believe it. Which is like in a certain way, that’s Ryoji’s whole thing. He just says fucking whatever, but with a level of calm confidence that you just go, yeah, of course.

RS: Yeah, and it’s like, well, [01:05:00] okay, Asakawa, are you gonna go spend the limited time you have because you have this tight deadline to fucking go to the library and look up blinkspeed? Are you gonna do that? No, you’re fucking not. So just, when I tell you that this is a woman blinking, you’re gonna fucking believe me.

Langdon: It also reminds me of the way that um, a lot of people Not just get away with acting smarter than other people, but the also the mechanic for why so many people feel insecure when someone’s just talking and they interpret them as significantly smarter than them even if it’s not strictly true. Because it seems to follow that same thing of like you witness someone speaking with a level of confidence about some topic And it provokes either An adoration or like a complete dismissal and resentment which is Also a really insane thing.

RS: Sorry, I was wrestling with the cat again. He’s, he’s being annoying.

Langdon: No one needs to complain about, or apologize rather, about wrestling with a cat. [01:06:00] That’s very important work.

RS: Yeah, yeah. It is, isn’t it? I gotta make sure he doesn’t hit the power button on this computer again like he did that one time. During a previous book club. He just turned off my computer midway through recording the Geek Love episode.

Langdon: well, he was done.

RS: Yeah. We were not done, however. We were not done,

Langdon: yeah, but he was done.

RS: He was done. Alright, but I think we are done, because we’ve been talking for about an hour and fifteen minutes, and we’re running out of speed, and it is time for me to give my kitty cats their treats. So before we go, Langdon, what do you have to promote?

Langdon: Uh, really just, uh, my continued work over at Death Sentence. Gareth rejoined us a little over a year ago now, I think maybe, maybe around two years

now. And we’ve just been cooking as a three man team. Just a lot of different all of us sort of have different directions that we want to point in and some that overlap. So it’s just the show has a lot more variety now. Which makes us all really happy.

We have a [01:07:00] discord now as well Where we talk about dope books, dope music and if you talk about whack shit, we’ll ban you and ideally ideally sic super soldiers on you to burn your home down. You That’s ideal, the Patreon money is limited so super soldier budget Less than what i’d want.

And aside from that I have continued work over at uh, treblezine. com doing a bunch of music criticism and a Uh extreme metal column on consequence of sound called mining metal where I talk about dope death metal every month

RS: Very nice. Alright, well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Langdon: Yeah, no problem

RS: And thank you all for supporting us. Until next time, keep reading and keep writing good.

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For this month’s edition of the Book Club, we discuss Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. Joining us is Stephen Mazur.

The Rite Gud theme is by OK Glass. Follow them on Twitter, YouTube and Bandcamp, and at OK.Glass.

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[00:00:00]

RS: Welcome to this month’s bonus episode of Rite Gud. In this edition of the Book Club, we’re discussing Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. Joining us once again is Stephen Mazur. Uh, Stephen, given your tendency to over prepare for all of your guest spots on the show, I fully expect that you’ve prepped for this episode by joining a Jesuit order, learning Latin, and taking a vow of chastity.

Stephen: If only I had the time, I could have done all [00:01:00] those things. sadly, I, I only Have in front of me, uh, 18, yes, not 17, 18 pages of typed notes. Uh, I wasn’t even able to read everything that I wanted to read in preparation for the episode. Didn’t get around to finishing the Book of Job, or, one of the papal encyclicals that I thought might be good just for, like, background prep.

And also, I didn’t get a chance to read, What’s the name of the book? It is A Case of Conscience by James Blish, which came out in like, I want to say 1958 or so. It was the late 50s, won the Hugo award, and also is coincidentally enough, about Jesuits in space who make first contact. Yeah, I, I don’t, that’s basically all I know about it.

It’s not my impression that the books are any more similar [00:02:00] than just that superficial, yet very specific, um, premise. But that was always kind of a, a stretch goal, let’s say. I didn’t think I would have time for that, and I didn’t.

RS: Yeah, no kidding. Uh, so as listeners have probably guessed, you are Catholic. I’m very much not. I guess I’m an agnostic, which is a very, very lazy philosophy, I think, of just, I don’t know, man. That’s, that is my understanding of the universe. But I, definitely wanted a Catholic guest because it would be very, very easy to read a sci fi book about religion and go at it as, an early 2000s, Reddit atheist talking about flying spaghetti monsters or something. And I was wondering if this book would end up taking that position and I think so were you. It sounded like both of us went into this thinking, is this going to be Fedora y? Is this going to be Is this going to be a Fedora book? Where, where some people get [00:03:00] owned with facts and logic. And it’s not. But at the same time it’s not this, I felt, not this evangelical book about some wonderful religious people showing a superior way and saving the souls of an inferior culture. Exactly. Something a lot more nuanced and rather interesting than that, which I really appreciate, uh, this book being.

Stephen: I agree. First of all, yes, Catholic, born and raised. I even went to, Catholic schools for almost my whole education, nearly all of grammar school and high school as well, and somehow still with it as a friend of the show, Tai. Tai would say he, he’s kind of surprised that, You know, still Catholic even though I went to Catholic school.

I’ll do my, I’ll do my best to, uh, represent the religion. Although, although as I was reading it, I realized that I’m actually not, not the best person to like judge specifically, Jesuit aspects of the book because, uh, I, I don’t know any [00:04:00] Jesuits. I didn’t go to Jesuit schools.

The two schools that I went to, were nominally staffed by, religious sisters. St. Lucy Filippini for grammar school and, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary for high school. But that doesn’t really matter. As far as the book itself, yeah, I agree. I don’t know I don’t really know where I picked up this idea about the book, but when I started, I’d wanted to read it, before, you said that, uh, you were gonna do it for the book club, like, I’d had it on my mind, and I actually owned the book as, like, something to get around to eventually.

I had this vague idea that it was, like an anti Catholic science fiction book, and like you said, like, like a kind of Reddit atheist book. I don’t know where I picked up that impression, because, like you said, it’s not like that. I kind of, I guess I kind of thought it was gonna be, it was gonna go one of two routes.

Either that it would be kind of like a, uh, I [00:05:00] guess you could say a sort of childish, like, you know, screw you, mom and dad, kind of book, the way that, Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock is, uh, which I haven’t read, but I did read a, a rather in depth essay about it on, Paperback Paradise, I think is the, the website.

And so I read that and I was like, oh, geez, one of those books. I mean, it also sounds kind of funny, but, you know, whatever, It seems like the kind of book that Michael Moorcock maybe might write. Or, I thought that it might, I thought it might grind a certain kind of axe the way that, His Dark Materials does.

You know, the, the Philip Pullman,

RS: Right.

Stephen: The Northern Lights trilogy. Which, you know, great fantasy. I read it in college, actually for an English class. Great fantasy books, but they definitely have a certain point of view.

RS: They sure do, from what I understand. It’s not subtle.

Stephen: yeah, it’s, it’s not. But so this, The Sparrow, uh, is neither one of those.

It’s, uh, doesn’t really come off as, as, as childish towards [00:06:00] religion. And it’s not even, specifically anti Catholic or even really anti clerical in, in the way that, uh, a lot of other, well, a lot, but like, Some other books can be when they take that. I thought it was, uh, I mean, I disagree with some of the points that it comes up with, but, I thought it was a fairly nuanced book.

RS: Yeah, which I think is for its strengths. It’s a lot stronger than if it, had been this sort of one note screed in any direction. Mm hmm. Which I really appreciate. I actually quite liked that about it. At the same time, it’s not portraying the Catholic Church as this perfectly wonderful thing. There are a lot of sections where Father Sandoz is in front of a sort of tribunal, and it’s not great.

It’s not a good time.

It’s pretty rough. He’s not having a good time.

Stephen: Yeah, I, uh, I even liked the way that, that Russell portrayed the, the tribunal. I, I thought it was a, a pretty good mix of, of characters and personality types. And, both, well, it’s not really a tribunal, it’s more of an inquiry. But, you know, both with the inquiry and I guess you could say like [00:07:00] the whole organization writ large.

There’s some good, some bad. People try, people make mistakes. but so, uh, where do you want to start?

RS: Well, I guess I’ll start by talking a little bit about why I was interested in this. My old linguistics professor, way back in my undergrad days, said that this was his favorite novel because it dealt with linguistics in a way that was true to linguistics. A lot of people don’t quite understand what linguistics is.

They think it’s just learning a lot of languages, but it’s more about the study of Language as a science, as a soft science akin to, like, uh, anthropology or something. And trying to create a cognitive model for understanding how language works. It’s not just learning a bunch of languages. And this is something that so, so, so many novels mishandle and so much pop culture mishandles. They kind of treat language as this magical thing and not as a sort of system to be sussed out, and the main [00:08:00] character, on top of being a Jesuit, is a linguist. He is not just a guy who speaks many languages, but it’s a linguist. He’s a guy who can sort of take language apart and figure out how it works and understand it a lot better and teach others better. He has an incredible talent for learning languages, which is why he’s the guy to go to this new alien society, because he’s the guy who could figure out how to speak the language very, very quickly.

Stephen: Cool. Yeah.

RS: Docs, Dr. Ernst, this is your fault. I don’t know. Or thanks, I’m not sure. The Discord fucking loved this book, man. People went crazy for it.

Stephen: I know, I

RS: it and had a terrible time. That, cause that, that is another thing about this book. Of course, we’re going to spoil it as always.

But you’re in for a bad time when you’re reading this book. Very, very unpleasant things happen. And, and the book sets you up for that in a, perfectly, within the very first page. When it says, ” They meant no harm.” Which is, I thought was a perfect way to open it. Just, [00:09:00] “they meant no harm.” You read that and you go, oh fuck.

Oh no.

Stephen: yeah, here we

RS: oh no. Shit.

Stephen: What’s gonna happen?

RS: You can’t say they didn’t warn us, because they warned us. You are here for a bad time today when you were reading The Sparrow.

Stephen: I was a little worried as I was, uh, cause you, You gave me a little, uh, head start to start reading because I knew I would need extra time. So I was farther ahead when everybody started on the Discord talking about how much they loved it, and I got a little worried because I was thinking like, Oh boy, actually I’m I’m not really, I’m not loving the book just as like a reading experience.

So, usually like when I’ve come on before, they’ve always been for, for books that like, I already knew. So it was definitely interesting to, to go into it cold for this.

RS: Yeah.

Stephen: agree. It’s a, it’s a great first page. It’s,

RS: love a bad time. Our Discord people love a book that just kicks you in the dick over and over [00:10:00] again. And this book does it. It’s so grim when you’re getting near the end, you’re like, I remember reaching a point where I go, I think there’s maybe four chapters left, and most of these people are still alive.

And I,

know that Father Sandoz is the only one left at the end.

Oh no.

Stephen: I had the same thoughts. It’s like, gosh, there’s 40 pages left in the book. They’ve gotta like, you know, how is she gonna cram it in here? I’m still getting the wind up, like, when am I gonna get the punch? And then it just, it just, at first it was like, oh, okay, so that’s what it is.

That’s it?

RS: fucking wiped out so quickly, so, it’s so cruel. This is a mean book, by the way. This is a mean, mean, mean

book. It is mean to its characters.

It’s mean to you for liking the characters.

It is, it is mean.

And I don’t mean that as a criticism. I mean, that can be a great thing. It’s just, there it is. It is rare for me to find a book that’s that fucking mean.

Stephen: Yeah, like the first [00:11:00] thing towards the end of the book happened and I kind of felt like, Oh, well, that’s it, like, eh, okay, kind of weak sauce. And then like, another thing happened, so I, oh, well, okay, and then another thing happened, and another thing happened, and it just, she just kept piling on.

RS: Yeah, it’s interesting because the pace, the pace, it takes so much time at the beginning, just setting everything up,

gathering these characters together, establishing the relationships, and then everything goes really, really, really fucking bad in the span of about 30 pages.

Stephen: Yep.

RS: And, and we’re talking like hundreds of, at least a hundred pages to just get everybody together.

Stephen: I do have to say, the, the structure of the, of the novel is, Well, odd’s kind of a weighted word. Let’s just say unusual. I do have to give it to Mary Russell. She did a great job of building up tension, because, you know, looking at your outline and stuff that you wanted to talk about, I feel like I noticed, or I was focused on different things, Mostly which [00:12:00] to, to my chagrin, I feel like I wasn’t that careful a reader because I feel like a big part of my brain, I was just reading to be like, okay, but when am I going to get to it?

When are we going to get to it? When’s it going to happen? She did a great job of like really keeping, really keeping that tension and like really saving it until like almost the very end of the book. It,

I enjoyed the wait.

RS: Yeah, and I mean the way it’s structured, we start really with, with Emilio’s return. We, we start after most of the stuff is happening, happened, and we’re picking together, or we’re picking apart how it came to be. Which tells us exactly, here’s how it’s gonna end. We know from the beginning how it’s gonna end.

We know there’s only gonna be one survivor. His hands are gonna be fucked up. Shit, he’s gonna be really messed up. Some real bad shit happened. This is a foregone conclusion. So what’s gonna happen is not exactly that much of, of attention here. The tension is, how are we gonna get there?

Because we’re already there.

And I, the way it plays with time is so interesting too, in terms of space travel. [00:13:00] This is a guy who’s In his mind, he’s only been gone for a couple years, but because of the way time travel, or space travel fucks with time, he’s been gone for about 40 years, there and back. So he’s this man out of time, and because, again, of how space travel works, the broadcasts that he’s sent home by radio have gotten there years and years and years before him. So again, everybody already knows. What happened to him. They just want to hear it from him and hear more of the details, or at least they hear a version of the truth. So we’re already playing with this distortion of time and this… it almost feels like a possible idea on fate or predetermination and that there is no tension as to what is happening, going to happen. It’s predetermined. But how did we get here? Let’s look at, let’s examine it more closely. Which, I always, I don’t know, wondering if that has to do with the idea of God having a plan and things like that.

Everything being [00:14:00] set out in advance. It’s just you, the guy it happens to, are kind of the last to know. Sorry! Sorry, dude!

Stephen: yeah, well that’s getting kind of close to predestination. I mean, theologically speaking, at least from certain Christian view, you know, God is outside of, of time, so we experience things, differently than He does.

It could be, I, I, I just, I feel like I don’t want to, like, go on about predestination, which is more of a Calvinist thing. It’s not a Catholic idea.

RS: Oh shit, sorry. I don’t know these things, man. I’m a heathen.

I was raised Unitarian. I know nothing.

Stephen: I don’t know very much about it either, and I certainly don’t know where to begin. But that’s, that’s an interesting idea that I hadn’t thought about before.

That like you said, it’s, it is predetermined because of where we’re starting. And, it’s all just gonna play out the way that it plays out. So yeah, actually I like that. That, that is more from like, I guess you could say a God’s eye [00:15:00] view, as opposed to if it, if she’d written it linearly. So, you know, we wouldn’t have that same sense. I like that. See, that’s what I was getting at before. I, I was reading it for, what happens, and then I spent all my time reading, like, things trying to come up with an answer to the problem of why do bad things happen to good people.

I’ll give you a spoiler, there isn’t, nobody’s really come up with a good answer. Uh, so those were, those were my big, uh, preoccupations.

RS: Yeah, yeah, I’m trying to look at it. Trying to look at it a little bit structurally and, and, and just in terms of craft and how it’s put together, which I find interesting. Now, I liked a lot of this book, but before we get out of the way, I, I have to talk about what, for me, was one of the most frustrating aspects of it, which is the dialogue.

Stephen: Yeah.

RS: dialogue in this book is not great, and there’s a lot of it. I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be a hater, but it is very, like, it struck me as very 1990s [00:16:00] TV dialogue. In a way, and part of that, I know you had issues with how Ann and George, the sort of older boomer couple talked, but then again, these are wealthy boomers living in Puerto Rico.

I can absolutely 100 percent see them talking like that and acting like that. That that’s just what older white people who live in Puerto Rico are like, that’s how they are man. That’s spot on. But Oh man, the. A lot of the dialogue was, was not the greatest and one of the, I think we both were not very fond of the use of pop culture references and impressions.

Stephen: There’s, there’s a moment where, one of the Jesuits, uh, Father John Candotti is talking to, to, to Father Sandoz and Candotti jokingly speaks in a German accent about, you know, following the orders. Clearly a World War II Nazi reference, but this is in 2060. Like, for him, World War II was 115 years ago.

Why would it have the same [00:17:00] cultural valence as it, you know, had for people in the 1990s?

RS: There’s, there are parts where he’s quipping and quoting from the Princess Bride and

Young Frankenstein in 2060 and the, and the references hit and it’s like, bro, no one’s gonna quote Young Frankenstein in the year 2060. No one’s gonna remember that shit. It’d be like me and you casually referencing, I don’t know, Train Arrives At Station

Stephen: Yeah, or

RS: or, or fucking. You know, let’s quote from the Testament of Dr. Mabuse, like, no, we’re not doing that now. That’s too old.

No one’s going to remember that shit.

Stephen: People don’t even really quote from, like, Gone with the Wind or, uh, or Casablanca anymore, you know. And that was, that was getting to be like, what, 60, 70 years ago? So, like, annoying. And also, I, uh, the impressions that Father Sandoz does, they just It was an annoying choice to have a [00:18:00] character do impressions through the medium of the written word on the page, because how can those impressions possibly come through?

I’m just reading the words . But that’s all I want to say about

RS: Here’s something that I think could have worked really well. If, if his impressions went over really, really well in 2019, which is when the sort of, when the book starts, it starts in 2019, which at the time this was written was the future. But he keeps trying those little impressions and references when he returns home in 2060 and people just stare blankly at him.

And I think that could, like, emphasize how out of time he is, how lost he is, and how alone and lonely he is. And that, this way that he would connect with people by doing these funny little impressions. That even doesn’t work anymore, and it’s just like “oh fuck” like I think that could have been so effective and like heartbreaking And you know he he does a little drawl John Wayne drawl and people are like “who the fuck is John Wayne, man It’s 2060.

I don’t know that is” [00:19:00] I

Stephen: wrinkle.

RS: Think that would have worked really really well, but no they haven’t like quoting like the Princess Bride or young Frankenstein in 2060 They’re going “haha. Yeah, I recognize that” like no you don’t. You’re you’re not gonna recognize this. I’m sorry, they’re great movies, but people are gonna forget them.

Stephen: Yeah, I, I have, I have mixed feelings about the way that Russell portrays the characters because on the one hand I find it, it’s, it’s kind of annoying, or maybe not annoying, I guess I just personally don’t like her portrayals that much because like the characters to me, the main characters, they don’t, feel, like, very natural.

They’re all, like you said, it’s like a, 90s sitcom dialogue, so everybody’s like a capital C character. It’s kind of cheesy to me, but at the same

RS: there’s this very outsized sort of Again, 1990s TV diversity, where it’s like the French Canadian calls everyone Mon [00:20:00] Cheri constantly.

Stephen: Oh gosh,

RS: How, like everybody is their ti Everybody is diverse in a type of way that is very very like, “I’m the blah blah blah guy.” I fucking love it how There’s a bit where it says, “Oh, it’s a shame that Alan, the English guy, died so quickly because as an Englishman, he would instinctively hate the lower class Supari and recognize that he is dangerous.”

Because British people just instinctively, genetically hate the lower classes, I

guess. That

Stephen: that was another fun wrinkle. Jumping, jumping off that, I also felt like a lot of the, a lot of the ways that, Sofia was, portrayed,

RS: Yeah, yeah, where it’s constantly about her, her

Stephen: heritage

RS: Right.

Stephen: uh, was kept references, it was, it was almost like, you know, I guess like stereotype as the, the character herself, it’s like, oh, you know, we’re like this, we’re like [00:21:00] that, I embody all this stuff.

And like, it’s not like anything was really, negative per se, but I guess it just

RS: Yeah,

philo semitism, I’ve heard people call it, where it’s like, almost this fetishization of the concept of Judaism as it’s almost a superpower, in a way, which, granted, the author of this book, what used to be Catholic. Excuse me, I think became an atheist and while writing it started converting to Judaism.

So I think there’s a little bit in there of her

being in awe of this, this, Jewish tradition and, and really having, “I’m falling in love with it,” falling into almost an infatuation with it to the point where it’s a little like, are you fetishizing this a little bit? But I, I mean, I can’t, I don’t think I can like dunk on her for stereotyping Judaism because she’s Jewish, you know.

Stephen: Yeah, yeah, it’s, like, it’s, it’s not a, it’s not a big complaint. It’s, it’s not even something that I probably would have even noticed even, like, ten years ago. But just somehow reading it [00:22:00] now, it, it just stuck out a little. It felt old fashioned to me. But what I was, to circle back around to what I was getting at before, in spite of my thoughts on how I, how I feel about her characterization, I, I have to hand it to her again, because as everybody started dropping like flies, we’d, I’d spent so long with all these characters, I really, uh, I really did start to feel concerned for them, even though I knew it wasn’t going to end well, cause, you know, I’d, I’d gotten to, to, to know them and sort of live with them for a while, so it was

RS: Yeah, they stand out and they’re memorable.

Each of them at least, “That’s the guy who blah blah blah. That’s the guy who’s like this. That’s That’s the guy who’s closeted gay. That’s That’s That’s the massive Irishman who can eat anything.”

Stephen: And this is the guy, and this is the guy who was a last minute replacement, and the second she said that, I thought to myself, well, somebody has to go first, we hardly knew ye,

RS: Yeah, sorry Alan R. I. P. I do love that. I do love that when they get to the planet, they [00:23:00] immediately start putting things in their mouths, and they’re like, Jimmy, you’re the guy who’s gonna eat the alien food, cause you’re tall. You’re young. You’ll be okay.

You can do it. That’s great. Put a lizard in your mouth, Jimmy.

Just do it. That’s incredible to me, the idea of just going to an alien world and just putting lizards in your mouth.

Stephen: They have a very breezy attitude towards interstellar travel, which nobody had ever done before, and going to a planet that nobody had ever been before to make first contact with an alien species. It, honestly, it kind of felt like they were just, like, planning a trip to New Zealand,

RS: They’re not worried about germs at all. It’s

crazy. They’re like, well, the

atmosphere is breathable enough. Let’s go outside. Like, what the fuck? Do you know how terrified I’d be of everything?

Stephen: What, what if What if the Runa were like wasp monsters or something? Ugh.

RS: you don’t [00:24:00] know or just what if there’s there’s got to be space germs there’s got– I mean that there is this implication to the crew members get sick and one of them dies immediately and the other is just sick for a long long time and I guess that is a suggestion that there’s some kind of pathogen or something in the food or something that some of them have a resistance to and others just don’t. And they don’t know how to test for it, which I get, again, I rather appreciated that Anne is a doctor, but she’s not super doctor medical researcher lady.

She’s not like, “ah, yes, I can immediately identify what weird alien thing fucking killed this guy.” Cause like, man, there’s too many factors in this. There’s too many things that it could be.

Stephen: Right, and, and, you know, she’s basically unsupported. I mean, you know, she, it’s just her and she only has whatever they were able to bring with her.

RS: Yeah.

Stephen: with them, so. But that, well, it, as long as we’re like, bouncing around, the, the fact that, you know, Alan Pace just dies and we never really, we, well, we don’t know what happens to him and we don’t [00:25:00] find out.

Like, you know, why was D. W. wasting away? Was it, something that was going to happen to him on Earth? Or was it something to do with the, the, the environment on Rakhat? I feel like this, I, I have a section of my notes that’s just called Red Herrings. Because I feel like there are, I don’t know how to feel, I still don’t know how to feel about this aspect of the novel. You know, I, I don’t know if it

RS: Yeah, a lot of plot threads are set up and then immediately severed

instead of tied off over

Stephen: either severed, or they’re just like, I guess you could call them Chekhov’s guns that don’t go off. And I don’t know if it’s, uh, like, inexperience on the author’s part because it was Russell’s first novel, or if it was something more deliberate that, you know, I’m just not picking up.

Cause a lot of the A lot of these plot threads, they’re both, like, things that just never pay off, but they’re also subversions of various, genre subtropes,

RS: Right.

Stephen: uh, you [00:26:00] know, related to, exploration and first contact, and also related to the, the, the fact that it’s a, A book dealing with religious matters.

Like, for one thing, I thought that, going into it, one of the ways that I thought the book was going to be was, I thought it was going to be a, you know, I thought it was going to be a conversion gone wrong narrative, you know, like, oh, they introduced their Christianity to this great planet and these great people and it ruined everything and, you know, it, it doesn’t do that at all.

RS: yeah. At the same time, though, it wasn’t necessarily this thing where, ah, this evil society needs the light of Jesus. I mean, their society’s fucked up. Not gonna deny that.

It’s a fucked up society. It’s very fucked up. But the book takes great pain to the beginning to establish that things are really, really fucked up on Earth.

I mean, one of the characters, Sofia, is basically a slave. Who was sex trafficked as a child. And that’s just sort of tolerated. That’s just sort of how it [00:27:00] is. So it’s not like, uh, our superior society is enlightening this inferior one. No, it’s just, there’s, there are two societies that are fucked up in different ways.

Stephen: have you ever considered that really they’re just giving these, disadvantaged youths jobs and futures and educations?

RS: was, that, that, that bit of, little bit of, uh, world building. Uh oh, we’re using that term. Sophia is basically an orphan who is kind of like a slave, and in this future 2019 in here, basically venture capital firms can invest in orphans. And invest in individual orphans futures. And it’s horrifying, but it felt so real.

I’m sure some Silicon Valley person is right now putting together a fucking PowerPoint presentation on, on doing exactly this and is going to propose it. It just felt so incredibly realistic to me and, and, and it was horrifying. So, so this isn’t necessarily like, Oh, this species needs us to save them [00:28:00] or, or, or anything like that. It’s just, hey, this, this stuff’s different, which I really appreciated, too, because on the one hand, I don’t want one of those classic sort of sci fi fantasy racism things from, from the olden days about, oh, we need to, we need to save the society from themselves with our superior culture. But at the same time, I don’t like the overcorrection of the sort of well meaning liberal that ends up, I feel like, Kind of infantilizing other people and saying, “Oh, the only cultures that have ever done anything wrong were white cultures.”

Like, no, come on, come on, grow the fuck up.

Stephen: Yeah,

RS: Like, that, that kind of rubs me the wrong way too, because it does rob other people of their agency, and it’s a little infantilizing in, in, in a way. Okay, come, like, I can acknowledge that, You know, the Conquistadors were monsters without saying, “Oh, the Aztecs did nothing wrong.” I’m not that crazy.

Stephen: I [00:29:00] agree. It does a good job of not straying into either of those extremes. But I still, on that topic, I still kind of feel like The novel is a, I kind of want to say a little confused, that might be a little strong, just in how it sets up the premise of what happens and how, I think anyway, the novel seems to view what happens. Because, right there on the first page, like you said, the last sentence of that page is, “they meant no harm.” Great sentence, so much foreboding, but I feel like, since it doesn’t turn out to be like an ironic, Columbus contact, tragedy story, I sort of feel like it, uh, to like load it up to the Jesuit mission was this, you know, huge tragedy and they meant no harm, like the saying that like you meant no harm, Kind of feels to me like, oh man, they like really screwed this place up, which, in a way, they kinda do.

Not [00:30:00] revealed so much in this book, but I read a little bit of

RS: I mean, it did result in a in a huge massacre, in a, in a huge fucking massacre.

Stephen: Yes, a huge massacre. But, I guess what I mean is like, I feel like if you accept what It seems to be the novel’s premise that the human mission was a tragedy, and an inadvertent one, and caused ruin and harm to, the native Rakatis, and all that was caused by, maybe a foolish belief in, like, a benevolent deity.

And I feel like, in a way, you’re also kind of accepting that, Rakati civilization is okay, the way it is, like not, not perfect, but just like, you know, sure they, I, I guess, you know, it’s like you said, like, yeah, they caused harm, but also it’s, it’s a messed up world. That world is so messed up the way that she wrote it.

It’s so cool.

RS: Yeah, yeah, she sets it up where you know something’s really fucked up and I love that as you’re reading [00:31:00] it you know how, you can smell, like, oh this is fucked, this is real fucked, this is gonna go real bad and the character’s going, “everything’s fine! We’re building gardens, it’s great!” I really like the bit where they’re starting gardens and the Runa are just going, “yeah, yeah, dirt looks way better over there, good job guys. Good job!” It’s really kind of a great play– I loved that bit,

but to me, it felt very real of this idea of “hey, you can go into a foreign culture you don’t understand with the best of intentions and accidentally fuck things up without meaning to while doing something that is innocent” is just planting some vegetables like that’s all they did that caused a huge fucking problem was to plant some vegetables which Any, any human being would think, yeah, this is fine, like, this is what you do.

But, the idea of, “we meant no harm and it was a disaster” felt very true to me in terms of the way that missions do sometimes go. As I was reading this book, I was thinking about that incident in 2018, I think, where a young Evangelical man decided that he was going to bring the [00:32:00] word of the gospel to North Sentinel Island, which is this island that has not had any contact with the modern world and in fact, it is illegal to go there because they probably don’t have antibodies against our germs and like literally one of us going there and sneezing on someone could wipe out at least a third of the population. It’s it’s real fucking bad. But this guy got it in his head where the idea like “no i’m gonna do it. This is what God wants me to do.” and he went there once. The uh, North Sentinelese shot his Bible with an arrow and chased him away. And instead of taking the fucking hint, he went back, and that time they fucking killed him.

And that’s kind of what I was thinking of while reading this, this, this kind of, this real naivete that sometimes missionaries will have, where they’re like, “oh, I can, I can handle this,” and they might go with really, they might have great intentions, they might be evil, you know, the thought imperialists, I don’t know, I’m not gonna, decide [00:33:00] that.

It depends on the person, I suppose. It depends on what’s going on. But you can, sometimes they’ll go at this with these, this really naive, simple minded idea of like, “it’s just gonna be an adventure. It’s gonna be fun. It’s gonna be awesome.” Without recognizing like, hey, you’re going to a culture that is so radically different from yours.

You are fucking out of your depth. You have no idea what you’re doing here. You’re probably gonna get killed with a spear at some point, man. Like, you really don’t understand seem to appreciate how fucking dangerous this is. Which, that that does happen to this day, with missions who go out into, like, the Amazon and try to contact uncontacted tribes, and tell them about Jesus, and then get killed.

That’s kind of what I was thinking of while reading this book, was that particular dude who got shot with a volley of arrows while trying to visit North Sentinel Island.

Stephen: Yeah, I’d, I’d, I’d forgotten about him, actually.

RS: yeah, yeah, it is, it is, [00:34:00] heartbreaking. I watched a documentary about him on Hulu and it was really, really good. And they interview his dad, and his dad is very religious too, but he felt like his son just got almost seduced by this, like, mania

for being, you know, wanting to have this, this boyish adventure without really understanding just how dangerous it was and how, how much of a risk it is and how, like, Have you considered if this culture is ready for you?

If they’re gonna want you, buddy? You were not invited.

Stephen: Yeah, yeah, it’s, uh, yeah. I don’t know, I guess I just, the only thing I felt about it is, like, I kind of felt like if I were, like, if you wrote a book that was about aliens coming to, like, the antebellum south, and contacting, and like, they make first contact with slaves on a big im– uh plantation, and then through, you know, not really understanding what the situation is, they, inadvertently cause like a whole bunch of slaves to get killed, but then just having the [00:35:00] book being like, treating it all like, oh, what a huge tragedy, it’s like, is that the right way to think about it though?

Like, isn’t slavery fucked up, shouldn’t we be, shouldn’t we have like a slightly different take on this?

RS: Yeah.

Stephen: It was so much of a gut punch at first when we get towards the end of the novel when, you know, we finally, it’s revealed to us what the relationship is between the Runa, the, the, the species that they, that they are. That the, the mission first makes contact with and lives with, and the, the Jana’ata, the, the other alien species on the planet, when it’s revealed to us what the relationship is between these two species, uh, it was, it was so much of a gut punch that I didn’t even realize it at first. And like, all the various knock on implications of all the things that the mission had been doing and things that they had witnessed and then misinterpreted and the way that, especially the way that Sam, that, uh, Emilio [00:36:00] felt about, his First contact with the Runa and, you know, how he felt that, like, God had led him to these people.

And, you know, it’s, it’s basically almost like, I feel bad saying it, but it’s almost as if he, he had made first contact with sentient cows. It’s so mean.

RS: Right. I mean, there is that thing throughout Christianity about the lamb and the lion shall lie with the lamb and all that stuff that I’m kind of thinking about here. When you have these two species that are sort of the lion and the lamb.

Though they both look like cats. They both look like alien cats. They’re cat people. They all look like Na’vi. Yeah,

Stephen: have to apologize. I, I’m not very good at like, picking up on Christian symbolism for most of grammar school in religion class. Like, I sat in the back in the row, like [00:37:00] farthest away from the teachers.

So a lot of the times I just wasn’t paying attention. So, I’m a poor student. As far as, like, other red herrings, the, the Jimmy Emilio, uh, Sophia love triangle, that gets diffused. There’s no, infidelity, well, not infidelity, there’s no, like, breaking of, Sandoz’s, priestly vows as far as chastity goes.

There are these tension points, but then they just don’t, so they just don’t release.

RS: there’s a lot of things set up. Like, DW talked, and Anne had that talk about how, like, “Hey, DW, you should maybe be open about your sexuality with, uh, Just tell Emilio you’re gay, it’s cool. He’ll deal with it, he’ll be over it.” And DW’s like, “I don’t know about that.” And his, that talk about, the vacuum of power that’s gonna happen after he dies, and then it’s just completely cut down short. And it happens over and over and over again in the book to the point where, to me, it’s very clearly intentional. I don’t [00:38:00] see these as mistakes. I mean, she’s a writer. She knows

what she’s doing here. You can’t do that much accidentally. I think it is very deliberate as a way to maybe make it hurt more.

Where, These, all these un these things don’t get resolved because these people are just straight up murdered.

Stephen: Murdered and eaten.

RS: Murdered and eaten, man. Including a pregnant woman, that’s dark, dude.

Stephen: Yeah.

RS: That’s dark.

Stephen: Do you, do you want to talk about, like, what happens, or is that just, plot wheel spinning? I mean, people, people have read the book. Okay.

RS: Yeah,

people have read the book or you’ll figure out what happens from reading the first chapter. Oh, everybody fucking dies. Everybody dies super hard. I’m sorry. Great. I think examining more of the details is a little bit more interesting. And something I noticed about this book, which I found interesting, is the parallels between the Jana’ata or Rakat society versus Earth society in terms of controlling or siphoning [00:39:00] off or quarantining or whatever you want to call the sexuality of indesirable aspects of society.

We have this major character, the first Jana’ata, sort of, carnivore class alien who meets up with the humans and immediately tries to decapitate them. Emilio Santos until Emilio knocks him down with his fierce Puerto Rican fightin strength. Um, Sipaari’s great. He’s a stupid bitch, and he rocks as a character. His motivation is greed and horniness. His entire driving force is that feel when no girlfriend. He’s ludicrously petty and short sighted. He’s a great fucking character. He’s just an absolute bitch. He rocks. Um, I fucking love it. He’s great. He’s great. He’s this petty little bitch. Little shit, but he is what’s called a Third because this is a society that practices strict population control and eugenics so basically Only the first two children in in a [00:40:00] family get to reproduce. The third is kind of on the margin of society. The first two are there’s it’s like you’re a bureaucrat or basically a fascist cop. And then the third is just kind of surplus, and maybe you can be a merchant, or some of them become artists, and it’s almost like, this, it feels like this parallel to the priesthood, in a way, in that you are this non reproductive class, that’s focusing maybe on intellectual pursuits, maybe, or, or, or just money, and, and whores, if you’re Supaari. Um, Although it’s handled differently in that they aren’t expected to remain celibate, they’re required instead to have like a harem of sterile concubines or something like that. And then on the other side, you’ve got obviously the priesthood, which requires chastity or celibacy. But then also Sophia, who, as a minority and a war orphan, is this undesirable segment of society and how her sexuality is not necessarily, [00:41:00] suppressed, but just completely commodified and becomes an object for other people to use. Right,

Stephen: see this is just another thing that I didn’t really pick up on when I was reading it, but I’m, I’m glad you did because I agree with you. I did feel like there were, like you said, parallels between Earth Society and, and Rakat Society. I, I was kind of getting more of like a medieval, um, It kind of felt like almost like a, like a, a medieval vibe to it, in that sense of like, you know, uh, like,

RS: the oldest son takes over the business, the second son becomes maybe a soldier, then

Stephen: Yep.

RS: the kind of loser kid who can’t get married, like, uh, you go to the clergy.

Stephen: Right, yeah, exactly. And then the Runa are, are the productive classes, kind of like the peasants, you know. So it kind of reminded me of that like, medieval sort of tiering of society. And the fact that the, the Jana’ata are only about three or [00:42:00] four percent of the population, and they keep the Runa down by repression.

So, you know, sim, sim, actually similar to, to, to the Runa. Uh, knights, I think we’re also, generally speaking, depending on where you went, around like, you know, 5 or so percent of the general, population. I just wonder, how many other, like, what deeper, I’m struggling to think of a deeper thing that I could, add to, to, to your observation about the parallels between, uh, Supari and, and, and Emilio and, and Sophia.

RS: Right.

Stephen: I did think it was, I thought it was funny when he first, meets them because it’s like his immediate reaction is like, “Oh, what are these? I’m going to kill them.” It’s like, yeah, you know, how, how would you react if all of a sudden you just saw some, like an alien that you’d never seen before?

RS: What if he just fucking hated Van Halen?

Stephen: Could be.

RS: They were playing Van Halen then, and he’s like, “Oh, fuck this shit.”

Stephen: Oh right, yeah. I, I,

RS: a Depeche Mode guy.

Stephen: I also liked how, uh, at the, the, the meeting of, uh, between Supari and, and the mission, I liked how [00:43:00] we don’t, cause we, we meet the mission. There are a couple of chapters from Supaari’s point of view before that time, and I like how we don’t get the full description of the Jana’ata at size and physicality until he meets the humans, because, you know, when he is among his regular society, there’s no reason for why would it be commented on?

There’s no reason for it. So that was, I, I liked that that was a, that was a good, detail to the story.

RS: Yeah, that we get a few chapters showing how he operates with other people, and kinda what his deal is. I I rather like that. Right. So there’s this wonderful contrast over and over again about how he sees society and how then when he meets the humans how fucking naive these people are with like, “Oh my god, how are you handling handing me a gift directly?

You’re not supposed to do that, you fucking dipshits. You have no idea how many errors you’re committing right now. I’ll overlook it because I like you, Ann. I’ll overlook it because I like you. But man, you’re fucking this up.”

Stephen: So something, something that I feel. [00:44:00] To me it is sort of like a, guess you could say a vaguely Catholic viewpoint to the book that I enjoy. In, is in the character of Supari, like you said, like how, He is like a dumb bastard and you know, all he cares about is like, “Oh, how can this improve my position?

Like, oh, maybe I’ll get to mate.” And, self serving, short sighted. But at the same time, he does have good qualities to him. He seems to be, like, literally the only Jana’ata on the planet who, has like kind of a good relationship with the Runa and sees them as like a little bit more than just, oh, you know, these are our prey, like whatever, you know, like the Runa of his village, actually seemed to like and respect him and he seems to, respect them and in turn in his way.

And I just, getting to why I feel like that’s, kind of Catholic in a way, is just that I feel like he’s a character who’s both very flawed, [00:45:00] but also you can see that he has good points and, except for the fact that we know that it’s all going to end horribly, you can kind of see these like back and forth points where you kind of think like, oh, like, you know, he could make the right choice.

Like, anybody at any time could just, you know, decide to do good. We all have that within us, you know, good or bad one way or the other. It’s, it’s not predetermined. It kind of reminds me, it reminds me of, um, you saw uh Barbarian, right?

RS: Yeah, yeah,

Stephen: Yeah, so without saying hardly anything about that movie, because I loved it,

RS: Cause it’s

Stephen: don’t, yeah, don’t, don’t, don’t spoil anything about it, even though it’s like three years old.

But so, Justin Long’s character, I feel like, is a similar dipshitty kind of guy, but you can also see where, like, there’s good in him, and it’s all just a question of, the choice [00:46:00] is always his to make, as to whether, are you going to choose to do good, or to do something bad. And, you know, I won’t say anything more about what he does or does not do, but I feel like it’s that same kind of setup, and that’s something that I always tend to notice in, in books that construct those kinds of characters.

It always feels kind of Catholic to me.

RS: Hmm.

Stephen: Just in the way that, like, you’re not predestined or, predamned to be bad one way or another. We all have, free will.

RS: Right. I feel like we need to get to the, the, issue of sexual violence, cause that is a huge section in this book. I mean, our main character, Emilio, he’s a priest who, at the beginning of the book, we find out he’s been in an alien brothel. The book, or at least the characters, seem to treat it as a surprise that this was not a voluntary arrangement.

To me, that did not come as a surprise. Like, he’s a [00:47:00] foreigner with a severe disability. Yeah, of course he’s being trafficked. I mean, I’m, I’m a cynic, but I don’t know, for me, this was one of the most disappointing parts of the book where it kind of, the climax where he’s in front of this, this panel, it almost turns into an episode of Law and Order SVU, Space Victims Unit.

This is where we really could use Elliott Stabler. He is Catholic. He would punch the aliens and glower a lot and say, “I did what I had to do.” While flexing, I just, I don’t know about, I know there were some folks in our Discord who had a very different response to it. And I’m not like, I’m not trying to take that away from anyone.

I mean, we all bring our own personal baggage into something like this. If you have any experience with sexual violence, you’re gonna bring your own baggage, your own issues into it. So, I’m not gonna, like, tell someone, “You are wrong! You can’t, you’re not allowed to see it that way.” For me, I just, I found that section of it to be [00:48:00] absolutely horrific. where he’s being ordered to say that he was raped, but he has to use the words, I was raped, or it doesn’t count. Basically, like you have to say, “I was raped” and I don’t know, I feel like the book is treating this as a form of like, “ah, this was, this was a necessary step to admit to that and get over your, your Hispanic machismo to admit that you’re a victim”

Stephen: Yeah,

RS: in order to heal. But for me, that That, for me, what this felt like was, I feel like a lot of sexual violence victims are kind of expected to perform victimhood in a certain way, and that’s not necessarily the best thing for the victim, and demanding that performance and demanding, “you have to say it the way we want you to, and you have to express it the way we want you to on our timeline and not on yours.” To me, that feels like another level of violation and another level of trauma, uh, re traumatization and not necessarily like, [00:49:00] Oh, we’ve had a real breakthrough today. Like, no, that, that’s not a breakthrough. Like, you just fucking re traumatized that guy. I just kept thinking of that bit in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where like, Charlie Day has to touch the doll while his family, including his creepy uncle, watches. Like, that’s what was going through my mind during that scene, and I just fucking hated reading it. It was, it just made me, it was upsetting to read. I know that’s my own issue, that I’m bringing a lot of my own issues into it, but, but, that that kind of became the emotional climax of the book was like, Oh, man.

Stephen: Yeah, it’s definitely, I can see what you’re saying, and it’s definitely constructed as like, the big set piece, like, here’s like, the reveal. For, for my own self, at the, at the beginning of the book, I, I did, I did, I was kind of, I was kind of surprised by, you know, the revelation that, that he was, that, he was in sex slavery.

Of course, it’s one of those things where, like, once it, it happens, like, oh, right, yeah, of [00:50:00] course, how could it be another way? I guess I was trying not to, I guess I was just trying not to, make like a, a predetermination on what exactly happened to him. There’s a, a, a phrase that, Kurt, the, the the publisher of Bloodknife, I’ve heard him say on various podcasts where he says that he reads, uh, “eyes open, head empty,” and, and that’s how I was taking that particular aspect of the book, you know, of like, you know, the capital W, what happened, because I knew it’s like, they’ll tell, she’ll tell me, let me just get to it.

I can see how it could be cathartic in, in a certain way, uh, but like, as far as like particulars, the inquiry isn’t like fully antagonistic, but it’s also not, fully, supportive either.

RS: Yeah, it takes the, it, to me, it really does feel like the dramatic courtroom scene.[00:51:00]

Or something which, actually going through court, again, as a sexual abuse victim can re traumatize you in horrific ways. Like, it is a horrible, horrible emotional and psychological trial to have to go through court, even if you win.

Even if the perp gets busted and goes to prison, it is a horrific experience for the victim to have to go through that. And that’s kind of what I’m thinking of here. That’s what I’m bringing to it. I don’t know if that’s intentional. Maybe it is intentional! Because, I mean, this, the court, so to speak, the, the the Inquisition here is not necessarily portrayed as benevolent, a lot of it, but there’s just this moment afterward where I think it’s Father John Candotti afterward goes, “Ah, alright, you know, confession is healing, now, now we can heal.”

I would not feel healed by having to go through that, at least, is what I could say, I would be immensely more fucked up afterward.[00:52:00]

Stephen: Yeah,

RS: I’d be picking up more rocks and throwing them very poorly.

Stephen: this feels like such a quibble now, but in that same scene, I also, it’s definitely a courtroom drama, like, you know, this is the moment. I feel like Russell writes the, uh, the rest of the characters as, uh, obligingly speechless. Which, I feel like never happens in real life, that’s only in TV, like, in real life, no to my eternal disappointment, in real life, nobody ever just, just lets you drop a cutting remark without any kind of rejoinder.

RS: Mm hmm.

Yeah,

Stephen: let you have the last word.

RS: Or that the response is this total shock and flabbergastedness. It strikes me as being a little naive. I

mean, these are I know these are these are These men are cloistered in some ways, but like, they They know what the world is. They know that shit happens. Surely they understand that, like, bad things happen to [00:53:00] people, and the idea that rape is a thing that happens probably, it shouldn’t shock them. I don’t know, and, I don’t know, it feels like this naivete of how people being shocked at the idea of sexual violence when the reality is that it’s horribly depressingly common. And often the response to a big confession or a big, um, disclosure is, is not dramatic, but this sort of “Oh. Oh, alright. Uh You want a snack?”

Stephen: Yeah,

RS: You know?

Stephen: what to do with this.

RS: Oh.

Stephen: Maybe I partially rescind my earlier, uh,

quibble about people not knowing what to say.

RS: Cuz they don’t, I mean they, well they might not know what to say cuz I don’t know what the script is, but that doesn’t mean they’re not gonna say anything. It’s just,

the thing they do say is, the majority of the time, is incredibly disappointing.

Stephen: Yeah. Part of me, I feel like part of it could be, just in the way that there are [00:54:00] like, That Russell writes the, the other priests as, flabbergasted is because, at the beginning of the book, some of them, not all of the four or five of them, but a couple of them, the father General included, do harbor this suspicion that, like, maybe he really was a whore there.

Maybe he wanted to be there. Maybe he’s fallen. And, uh, I feel like Russell does a good job of setting up at the beginning. Because she does give us the bare bone facts of what happens, but, she withholds details and she disguises the facts in such a way that, to me at least, it’s like, you know, well, okay, I don’t know if I really, well, I don’t know, maybe I did think that, that he wanted to be there and we were going to get like, this story of, of how he, falls into depravity or whatever.

But I do think she does a good job of withholding details and disguising the facts at the, of what happened at the beginning of the novel so that you can either, if you choose to, read your own things into, well, you know, what did [00:55:00] happen. So that was another good point, to me of, of tension.

RS: Hmm. Yeah, I guess so. I guess. I mean this was written in the 1990s.

So I’m wondering if an audience of the day might, might think differently of it, for them, the, the revelation that, Emilio was, was gay space raped was, might, maybe would have been a lot more of a surprise, which, when now, I think that doesn’t come as, as shocking

Stephen: Yeah. And, and, and just to be clear, I’m not, I, you know, I’m. Just, like, struggling for, for things to say. I’m, I’m not contending your, your reading of the, of the scene. It, it, it is kind of cruel. Well, kind of cruel. It is cruel.

RS: Yeah, I just don’t know if it’s intentionally so or not. I’m, I’m having trouble, I’m having trouble with it. I’m not sure if it is meant to be that way, how, how it’s supposed to be taken. I, I just found it a little, I just found it, [00:56:00] again, too Law and Order.

Which is just such a bummer because this is where the novel reaches this emotional climax after, after all of this.

Just after all of this nightmare, and this is what it leads to.

Stephen: Yeah, it’s, it’s both the, it’s at once the emotional, the physical, and, the, the theological heart of the book. Because he’s not only, you know, not only is, is, is he raped, but he’s Well, he’s raped, you know, many times, but the first time, it’s by the um, the the Reshtar, who is, you know, the

RS: the singer!

Stephen: right, the singer artist, elite person who is, the author and the originator of the, the songs that, uh, that Sandoz and the his friends, first heard, they picked up on the, on their transmissions and is what.

Inspired him to suggest, like, we gotta go to this planet, God is leading us there. And, you know, he thinks, like, Oh, I’ve come through all this, I’m gonna meet this [00:57:00] guy, it was, it was all, like, a tribulation, and, like, And now I’m having, like, this deep spiritual moment, and, you know, then this deeply horrible and deeply personal thing happens to him, it’s, There are, uh, a lot of, uh, ironic punishments in, in the novel,

RS: I mean, I don’t necessarily see that part of it as a flaw, that how these things happen

Stephen: Oh yeah, no, I didn’t mean it was a flaw.

RS: yeah, yeah, yeah. Not, yeah, I guess I want to stress that this isn’t necessarily a criticism, like, the fact that the narrative, the fact that things that happen in it are incredibly cruel, that’s not necessarily like, oh, that’s bad, because I mean, that’s real life,

Stephen: Yeah,

RS: a lot of the

Stephen: not, not at all. I’m, I’m, I’m glad, I’m glad that she went as far as she did because as, like I was saying, at, at first I kind of felt like, Oh, is that it? And then, but, but no, it just, it kept on happening. It’s like, Oh, well, okay. Both, both from, I feel [00:58:00] like, I guess from, you could say from like an entertainment point of view, like, you know, Russell delivered the goods, but also from, I feel like, Her, the novel’s own stated goals, I feel like if you’re, if I think if you’re going to try to make this kind of theological argument, personally, I, I disagree with, uh, I disagree with it.

But, you know, I, I think you really have to, you have to try and push it. And especially since every, you know, it’s not a novel based on, on, true to life events. Everything is, is made up and, it’s like I, we’ve been saying this whole time, it is, it’s a mean book, it’s a cruel book, and I think that is to, to Russell’s credit.

Because also, I’ve like, I’ve tried to write a few things here and there and like, it’s, uh, it’s kind of tough to write, uh, to, to be cruel to your characters and just describe all these things, at least I feel

RS: Yeah, it’s hard not to let up and give them a little bit of, “well, I’ll give you a little bit of a, I’ll give you, I’ll give you a little relief.”

Stephen: Yeah, just cut him a break, yeah. Yeah, and

RS: she does not.

[00:59:00] She does, she is unwavering. She goes hardcore, and I do respect that. And I think it is part of the point that she’s making here about, okay, how do we handle the, the concept of immense arbitrary cruelty and suffering and the senselessness of it, how do we come to terms with that? How do we fit that into our idea of justice or our idea of God or what have you?

I mean you have to go that hard

Because if you had these little nice little bits where things turned out, okay, then it Kind of would not get to her point as well

Stephen: Or even if you could say, yeah, or even if you could say that like, Well, but this happened for that reason. A lot of the cruelty is, in the novel, is pretty pointless. Yeah, I agree. It’s a tough question to answer, and there’s Not a, uh, a great one. Like as I’ve said before, I, I still don’t agree with what I think, anyway, is her [01:00:00] assertion that is kind of embodied by, uh, well, both by, uh, Sandoz at the end of the novel where, you know, he says that, That, you know, either God doesn’t exist and, I was just a foolish dope who, led myself and my friends to ruin, or God does exist and he’s the author of all of my woes. Uh, and also in, Anne’s conception of God, which she delivers at some point earlier in the novel, Again, saying that, either there’s, there’s no God or, if you ascribe, good things to, to God, then, you know, then he has to be responsible for the, the bad things as well.

Well, I mean, I, again, see, when we’re talking about, like, you know, suffering and the, the problem of evil and, and why do we suffer? I don’t know. Part of the reason that I had to read a lot of things, in fact, like the Pope John Paul II literally [01:01:00] wrote an encyclical just all about the problem of suffering and why do we suffer.

There’s also no pat answer in that either. But I feel like the reason that I had to read all these things is because I can’t approach it, um, from my own personal point of view, because, uh, to be perfectly honest, nothing bad has ever happened to me in my entire life. Uh, I have

RS: Wow

Stephen: it’s true,

RS: That is a bold statement

Stephen: I have, I had a very nice, uh, family life growing up. I have never broken a bone. I have all my organs. I even have all my wisdom teeth. I’ve never had an operation. I’ve never lost anybody, tragically. Everybody who has passed, it was, you know, it’s like, well, you know, that’s sad, but they were old, or something like that.

Even people, like, even the bad funerals that I’ve gone to, [01:02:00] they, they weren’t, it was like, somebody, like a friend lost somebody, or a family member lost somebody, but it wasn’t like directly my family member. So, just like, I don’t really have An experience of capital S suffering where I can like, put it to myself.

So I guess I can just say that, uh, Catholic teaching would say that, uh, Ann’s and Sandoz’s uh, conceptions of, uh, God and, uh, evil, that’s not what, what we teach. God is not the author or the originator of, of evil, uh, but he does for whatever unimaginable reason, since, people don’t know everything, he does, permit it to happen in this life at least. By happenstance, I happened to read a different novel, earlier this year, back in, April, that, covers a lot of the same ground and, uh, I feel like, well, personally, I liked the novel better and it takes a different tack, [01:03:00] uh, and so, I don’t want to put, like, a value on it, like, oh, it did it better, well, of course, I think that this novel did a better job with the question because it delivered an answer that was more in line with Catholic teaching.

And the novel is Silence by, um, Shusaku Endo. He was a Japanese novelist, in the, uh, Middle of the 20th century. And he was also a Catholic. Martin Scorsese, uh, adapted it into a film back in 2017. Uh, I haven’t seen it, uh, yet. I want to, but you know, it, it starred Liam Neeson and, Andy Garfield.

And I, I think, who’s the guy who was Kylo Ren? Uh, he was in it too. So that novel, it’s based on historical events. It takes place during the, the Japanese crackdown on Christianity in the, the, the Tokugawa Shogunate, their crackdown in the 1600s on the, uh, the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Jesuits and the, the native Japanese population. So I feel like one way that [01:04:00] Silence is, is a better, examination of the question of, why doesn’t God do anything? Why does he let bad and senseless things happen to people who, who don’t deserve it? Is that, um, The Sparrow is all made up.

Everything in it is contrived by Mary Doria Russell, and even if, we can say that like, well, it takes certain things from, Columbian contact and, the European colonization of the new world in the global South. Like, you know, it’s still a made up story. It’s people in space.

Go into another planet. Whereas, Silence, this is a real historical period. And, uh, a lot of, of Japanese Christians, you know, suffered a lot of things very horribly, like it’s real stuff that happens. So you, the reader, don’t just have to sit with the narrative. You also have to sit with the uncomfortable fact that what you’re reading is, is true.

It actually happened. And why did God let it happen? Uh, and just to sort of like, try to very Briefly wrap it all up. Like what is the, the message [01:05:00] and the, the, the viewpoint of the, of, of Endo’s, uh, novel, at least as, as I understand it, I, I’ll have to read it again. It, it was kind of a complex, subtle novel.

I don’t feel like I have everything. So at the end of the Sparrow, when, when Sandoz, when he asks the other Jesuits, you know, like, was God with me? You know, it’s clear the way he says it that his answer, and maybe Russell’s answer as well, I’m not sure, is no, God was not with him.

But for Shusaku Endo, in silence, the answer for him would have been yes, that God is with Sandoz. In all of those, uh, moments, and that he is suffering alongside of him, that he’s with him the whole time, even though he is silent. It’s kind of like a more mature, not as, um, cloying version of, you know, the Footprints prayer.

You know, it’s like, oh, when you only saw one. You’ve heard of [01:06:00] that, right? You’ve

RS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Onion had a really great op ed parody of it called, like, “Bullshit, Jesus. Those were my footprints.”

Stephen: yeah.

RS: yours going over to a picnic table. There were several cigarettes in the ashtray over there. Looks like you were having a smoke. Thanks a lot!

Stephen: Right, yeah, I mean, like, the prints thing sort of gets at, like, a true thing, but it’s sort of inartfully, inartfully written, or it sounds great at first, but then you start thinking about it, and it sort of opens itself up to, you know, a lot of criticisms. But so anyway, To me personally, if you, if you want to read a novel that deals with the question of, why does God just let all these horrible things happen?

Like, where is he? I would, I would recommend, uh, checking out Silence. I feel like it’s a more, um, mature novel. I feel like it, it handles it better. Something

RS: is very much the Bullshit Jesus, Those Were My Footprints version of that, of that. This is “Bullshit [01:07:00] Jesus, These Were My Footprints, You were in that bar getting wasted on space edibles.”

Stephen: Yeah.

RS: and George, or whatever.

Stephen: Yeah. Um,

RS: That was a great bit.

Stephen: but, uh,

RS: I can’t believe they didn’t get harmed by that. That is crazy. Let us go to a space bar and do space drugs. And not test it. Let’s just fucking eat them. Let’s do it. And

nothing went

Stephen: biggest guy. He’s, he’ll be fine.

RS: large, he’s Irish, he’s okay. It’s just, that’s wild that that didn’t kill them. That that’s not what killed them. I thought that’s what was gonna kill

Stephen: I thought it was gonna be the

RS: I thought they were gonna overdose.

Stephen: I, I thought it was just more red herrings.

I thought it was gonna be the food, the water, you know,

just all

RS: up on Runa gummies.

Stephen: any of the typical space explorers land on a planet and what is it that does them in, you know, or like, like a reverse, uh, War of the Worlds.

Like, it was the germs! The ricotti germs! [01:08:00] I

RS: Except maybe maybe Space Germs gave DW diarrhea.

That is a possibility.

Stephen: Maybe.

RS: Or, or, or it was being sad about being gay. He had porai.

Stephen: Honestly, I didn’t I didn’t like that hippy dippy Runa, like, “oh, his heart doesn’t have something that it wants.” Like, that’s not what it is! There’s a medical reason! I’m dead.

RS: He’s got an amoeba. Come on.

Stephen: Get

RS: That, that kinda, that he, that he immediately falls ill right after he’s revealed to be gay is a little, it’s a little LGBTQ representation 1990 style there. Like,

yeah, yeah, but he specifically got sick after admitting he was gay. Which,

like, alright. Alright, okay. Are you doing that? Are we really doing this? We really giving them space AIDS? Is that what’s happening here? Come on, man. Don’t do this.

Stephen: The, the other, the thing that I had a little bit of trouble [01:09:00] squaring with the book as I was trying to read it in terms of, of like, a Christian understanding of suffering is that, to its core I think Russell was wise in, I guess, not playing, not playing on, on Christian turf because a lot, not, not all, but a lot of what I was, uh, reading in, uh, on, on that subject, suffering is usually framed in like a Christian understanding in that You suffer for Christ for some kind of reason, like maybe people are persecuting you because of your faith, for one reason or another, it, it happens today, it’s, it, and it’s certainly happened historically, but that’s not, that’s not the narrative that, uh, that The Sparrow gives

RS: No, they’re not really,

Stephen: They don’t proselytize.

They’re not, they don’t even really talk to the Runa or to the Janata about God. They, they’re [01:10:00] more just like lay people and Jesuits who just happen to be Priests, but they’re really just more like they’re on an anthropological mission. Like, they don’t tell the Runa about Christianity. The Janata don’t oppress them.

Because they’re like, what’s this, what are these wacky ideas you’re telling them where we don’t, we don’t like this, right? The bad things that happen to them, except for the fact that, like, they, they felt that God was calling them to, to go, and, and do these things, the stuff that happens to them, it’s, it’s not, it’s not really about faith or proselytization or conversion.

Even though they’re missionaries, it sidesteps this common missionary narrative of like, you’re going to go somewhere to preach to people. And, you know, some people are going to like that and, and convert. And then some people are really, really not going to like that.

And they’re going to persecute you for that, but that’s. So, like, that’s kind of the model that a lot, and not all, but that a lot of what I was reading [01:11:00] in, in prep, that’s how it frames it, but that’s not how The Sparrow frames it.

But, uh, yeah, as far as anything else Gosh, I wrote, I typed up so many notes from, if anybody feels like reading more about this, you could try reading the, uh, papal apostolic letter, uh, Salvivici Doloris, uh, it literally means savior of pain. It’s on the Christian meaning of suffering by Pope John Paul II. I found that kind of, uh, interesting.

Uh, I also liked the, uh, papal encyclical, uh, by, uh, Pope Benedict XVI, uh, Deus Caritas Est, um, God is Love, which was mostly just about how, uh, I tried to read that to be like, no, God isn’t a mean guy who does bad things to all these characters in the book. But it’s also an interesting, uh, look [01:12:00] at, um, uh, that idea that God is love, but it all Both of, that encyclical also touches on like, you know, Hey, uh, why do we suffer?

Why does God let us suffer? And, uh, honestly you could even say that like the whole Catholic religion is trying to answer, if God is there and he loves us, uh, why is everything such a bummer all the time? And, uh, there’s, really isn’t a good answer. Uh, it basically just comes down to, uh, it’s a mystery. We’ll find out. After we die,

RS: Ah.

Stephen: uh, you could all, I’m being glib now on this last point, but you could always try to find the good in suffering, which, is true, can be true. Not a great, you

RS: a certain extent.

Stephen: to a certain extent, but it’s, it’s not a great answer. Basically, there are no great answers.

I guess Catholics just, uh, try to have faith that,

RS: Speaking of suffering, you can hear my [01:13:00] cat in the background. He’s having a bad time.

Stephen: Well, God

is with the cat, I guess. I guess it’s just the idea of, like,

the idea that ultimate justice Is Is not ever going to be found in this life, and there’s nothing that, uh, any person or any group or government of people can do to bring that about on Earth. It’s just something that, can only be found in the next life.

These are things that I try to believe and, uh, try to tell myself. It’s a hard thing to believe, don’t take me for, like, some sort of, fundamentalist, like, oh, well, God only gives you the problems you can handle, or whatever it is, what other, other platitudes that people spout, that’s not actually what the Catholic Church teaches.

RS: we all know that’s bullshit. God totally gives you more than you can handle.

Stephen: Well, somebody does. [01:14:00] Oh, the other thing that I feel like Okay, that I felt was an odd thing for Russell to do in the novel. She name drops, I don’t know if you remember, but there’s a certain point where she name drops and references a, uh, a Jesuit named, uh, Isaac Jogues, who, uh, went to the New World and was martyred by, um, the, uh, the Mohawk, uh, Native Americans.

RS: Mm.

Stephen: So, it’s kind of in passing and it’s, it’s somewhere in the first half of the novel. It’s just sort of like, it’s a reference and then we move on. But I felt that was an odd thing for her to do in a novel where she’s, where she’s setting up that like, Look at all these horrible things that God either lets happen or like, or, or authors, or rather what I should try and say.

So, The Sparrow is a novel about a Jesuit priest who, on a mission, [01:15:00] undergoes all these horrible emotional and physical tortures, including the permanent maiming of his hands. In which the novel name drops a real life Jesuit, he was a French Jesuit from the 1600s went to New France, you know, to Canada and like Northern New York in the 1600s to minister to the Native American tribes there, and he was there for, you know, several years.

Eventually he was, he and, uh, a couple of other Europeans and a party of, of, of Christian Huron Native Americans were captured by a Mohawk war party, and he was held in captivity for a year, and his, like, specifically, like, his hands were maimed. I was reading on Wikipedia about him. And they, like, uh, a woman cut off his thumb, and, Some people gnawed on the ends of his fingers until, like, they got down to the bone.

Like, a lot of horrible things happened [01:16:00] to him. He lost two fingers. He was, like, in captivity for a year in the cold. So just, like, a lot, like, I don’t think he was, um, sexually abused, Wikipedia didn’t say so. But, you know, anyway, a Jesuit in real life who all these

RS: Yeah, he went through a lot of the same stuff

Stephen: Yeah, he Exactly, but he didn’t lose his faith, he didn’t despair, uh, he eventually escaped and went back to France, but then after about a year and a half, he went back to the New World.

Yeah, because, you know, he, it was what he wanted to do, he had a lot of zeal to, to, to minister and, and to, to live with these people, and the second time he went back, he got a tomahawk to the head from the, the same group of people, so I just feel like it’s an odd choice to, set up this Jesu this fake Jesuit Jesuit.

Who loses his faith because of all these tribulations he undergoes when at the same time Like like you’re trying to make some kind of point [01:17:00] But then at the same time you reference a real life Jesuit who undergoes a lot of the same stuff doesn’t so I just I don’t know what the answer is to the the Questioning tone of voice that I’m that I have right now.

It just seemed like an odd choice

RS: Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, I, I don’t know. I mean, I can’t, I can’t, really comment on that because I’m, I’m not Catholic and I have a, a different viewpoint on, on religion, definitely. I would immediately lose faith. I don’t have any. I would despair super hard. I would, I would just despair so hard, dude.

I’d be all about it. I

Stephen: Honestly, I probably would, too.

RS: Yeah, yeah, totally. I would, I would, that’s me. I would immediately sink into despair.

Stephen: Yeah,

RS: be like, Oh man, we only got instant coffee. I’m despairing. I’m not

Stephen: to be Yeah, I’m not looking to be tested by any of

RS: I would not. I’d get a fucking hangnail and immediately [01:18:00] despair.

Stephen: Although that Just to bring it quickly back to Silence, that’s There’s a character in the book who is, like, just constantly breaking faith, and the narrator, who’s a character in the novel, things to himself more than once, that like, you know, if this guy lived in a different time, in a different context, that wasn’t in the age of persecution, he’d probably, like, he’d live his life, as a good Catholic, and, you know, so it’s all just, I guess all I’m just saying is like, yeah, I’m, uh, I am not looking to be tested whatsoever.

Uh,

RS: fuck that. It’s terrible. It’s not great. I don’t recommend it.

Stephen: I, I could blather on forever, I want, I want you to, to guide what we do, because like I said, I have more notes than would be prudent to reference. Yeah,

RS: book. I, I have mixed feelings, and in some way I appreciate the fact that it doesn’t point to one very easy thing you can say about, Ah, this is what the book is saying. Because the book would be a lot [01:19:00] weaker, I think, if it had a very obvious, blatant thesis.

It seems like more of just thinking about it without necessarily coming to a conclusion, which I, which I respect a great deal. And there’s a lot in this book that I think is really, really terrific. I, I, I dread the term world building, but it’s good. It’s solid, it fucking works, I really like how it’s handled. Both Future Earth and Rakat. I really love the way she, the author, portrays things with a real economy of details.

Stephen: yeah,

RS: That you get a sense of what things look like generally, but without Here, 5, 000 words to describe what the lizards look like. There are a lot of really wonderful, funny moments in it.

There are some really phenomenally powerful, horrifying images. For me, the image that grossed me out and bothered, upset me the most, like, I say this as a compliment, was Father Emilio in 2060, [01:20:00] lounging across the bed in this mock sexy pose with his fucked up hands draped across, like, the bed frame.

Stephen: oh,

RS: Just like, hey, come here,

Stephen: heh

RS: Like, it was so upsetting and gross and grotesque and horrifying. I thought it was great. It was incredibly effective. And a lot of the way that he handles things after what he’s gone through do feel very truthful to me in terms of someone who has really, really serious PTSD from a series of just horrific experiences.

Cheers. Like, that did strike me as very truthful, and I do appreciate the fact that this novel starts off in Puerto Rico and that the main character is Puerto Rican, as, well, this is a story about missionaries and first contact and clash of cultures. Like, well, that’s a fucking perfect place to put it. You know, I feel like a lot of first contact alien stories, Should happen in Latin America. Should happen in the Caribbean, because that’s where it [01:21:00] happened, and Puerto Rico especially is a place where a long series of empires have left their footprints. This is a Puerto Rican character written by a non Puerto Rican writer, to the best of my knowledge.

I don’t think she does a bad job of it. There is a little bit of like, “Ah, he’s this, he’s this angry, scrappy, little Puerto Rican guy in there,” but it’s not bad. I’ve certainly seen it handled worse. I, I fucking loved the fact that the Runa immediately assumed he is a child because he is of average Puerto Rican height. That is very true to life.

Stephen: Yes, I was, I was curious to know your, your thoughts on, um, on the, the Puerto Rican aspects of, of, of the novel.

RS: Yeah, I think, I think it was, uh, well handled from what I could see. It’s, it’s not, you know, he’s had a rough life, but again, this is also implied. 2019, there’s this implication that poverty is even more rampant and [01:22:00] just horrific in the future 2019 of this novel. I mean, we’ve got the character Sophia, who was a trafficked child and is now basically a kind of computer slave. Oh God, the bit about AI stealing everyone’s jobs. We didn’t even talk about

Stephen: Oh, yeah. Well, like that, that’s what I meant about like,

RS: Fuck!

Stephen: You know, it’s just like, I noted it, and I really do, like you said, there are a lot of great science fiction y world building details that, she puts in there, and they’re true to the novel, and it’s, um, Very authentically placed. I just sort of passed over it though because like I could you know, it’s like okay.

Okay. She’s a slave I know that that’s not like it but but that’s not what the book is about. It’s not about AI. It’s not about You the you know that that fun Science fiction books written in the 80s and 90s like oh the Japanese have replaced the America as the preeminent economic power. Like I I know it’s this is about good and evil like let me get [01:23:00] to the theological parts. But they’re great parts of the book and they and they make it they make it a better richer reading experience. Like you I I also have Conflicting thoughts about the novel. Looking back through all my notes, I feel like I was harder on it than the novel deserved, and I really wish that I didn’t have, I wish that I didn’t come to it with like a preconceived, uh, well I guess you could say prejudice about the novel.

I, you know, I came to it with, I started off with like an antagonistic reading, like, you know, I was like looking for things to, to fight over. And, uh, like I said, I don’t know where I got that idea about the book, but it’s, uh, I was wrong. It’s not really that kind of a book. I wish I’d come to it with somewhat more, uh, open reading experience, cause the, the novel does have a lot of good things going for it. And I did like it, but yeah, so just all those, uh, fun little, I, I felt like, uh, Sando’s,

RS: are picking at it a lot,

Stephen: I felt

RS: that we’ve been [01:24:00] talking about it this long, I think, says that it’s a very compelling book. Yeah. Yeah, right, Harley? Yeah, that’s right. He agrees. Supari. He’s also not allowed to reproduce. He is, he’s also the third of his litter. I suppose, I mean, there were, he had, there were four littermates altogether.

Stephen: He gets away with it though,

RS: He does, because he’s so handsome. And he’s dumb and selfish, just like Supari. Yeah. The star of the show. Oh. Yes, my little man. Yes, my little man. Take it easy. Take it easy. Sorry. It’s officially an episode of Rite Gud. He’s, the cat is, is intervening. Hold on. Let me get the toy. Give me the toy so I can throw it.

Ow. That was mean.

Stephen: Yeah, I agree with you. I thought Sandoz’s, um, [01:25:00] his depictions as, as a survivor, you know, especially looking back at the beginning of the novel after we know what happens to him, that, that all felt, that felt true to life. Yeah.

RS: the parts I’m picking at is that the rest of it is so strong. And it’s kind of like when, if you’re a smart kid, your parents yell at you for getting a B. Because they know you can do better, they know you could have gotten an A. Versus, like, if you’re, you’ve got a little brother who’s a fucking dipshit, and they’re happy that he gets a C.

And you’re like, “what the fuck, come on!” And they’re like, “look. This is the best he can do, okay? This is good for him.” It’s kind of like that. I feel, I feel like the staunch parent complaining like, why only a B? Come on, fucking chill. I think that’s probably why I’m being unreasonably harsh on this book. Because so much of this book is like A A A that when it goes down to just, Ugh, this is a B part of the book, I [01:26:00] go, “Ugh. Ugh, I’m so disappointed in you. Why don’t you apply yourself?” Why don’t you apply yourself, Harley? Yeah, that’s right.

Oh,

RS: Okay, we’ve been talking for an hour and 40 minutes so we’d really better wrap it up, I think.

Stephen: Yeah, I’m sorry. I feel like I always make you go long.

RS: No, that’s okay. It’s content. It’s a lot of content. People are getting their money’s worth.

Stephen: The, last, um, two things I’ll, I’ll say is just as like a summation. I feel like the conception of, the Christian conception of God that Russell is arguing against it. is, feels to me more like, uh, kind of like a, an American Protestant fundamentalist [01:27:00] understanding of it. Like, Oh, if I do all these right things and if I’m part of the right denomination or congregation, then like, you know, like God’s got my back.

But that’s,

RS: it does strike me as a very American Protestant y type of religion.

Stephen: yeah. But that’s not Catholic teaching.

RS: yeah,

Stephen: that’s, not, that’s not what we, I mean, like, you might find it there in church just because, that’s just sort of, like, it’s bled into American culture. I feel like that’s kind of what anybody in America thinks about, even if, even if you’re not Christian, right?

It’s just sort of in the water, but, but that’s not Catholic teaching. And then, I’ll once again recommend, uh, Silence, as a book to read if, if you’re, if anybody’s interested, in reading about, uh, a novel that deals with the problem of evil and theodicy and, and losing your faith.

Uh, I think a friend of the, of the Discord, writer and artist Hazel Zorn, has, she likes that book a lot and, and she’s said to, to me that, Silence is a book that, makes people with faith feel broken and people without [01:28:00] faith long for it so they can experience it. And, uh, it’s a really good book.

It’s short too, about half the length of The Sparrow. I feel like a used car salesman now. Um, and just one final book recommendation. If anybody is interested in reading a novel that deals with the examination of being angry at God, then I would recommend Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis.

It’s not like his Narnia books. I think it might be the last novel he ever wrote. He wrote, he wrote it in collaboration with his wife, Joy Davidman. And it’s a very mature and very interesting and just a very good fantasy novel. I liked it a lot. I read that earlier this year as well.

Um, so that’s another good one.

And

RS: well.

Stephen: just both [01:29:00] books that, uh. Both books that treat these problems from a more, uh, either Christian or Catholic, uh, perspective. I liked The Sparrow. I was a little too judgy about it in, in, in reading it. And I’m glad we had this conversation about it.

You’ve, uh, made me reconsider a, a few opinions that I had about it. And only her first novel, too.

RS: Yeah, that’s a hell of a first novel. Damn. That’s really ambitious.

Stephen: Won a lot of awards.

RS: Good for her. Alright. Well, I think that’s it. Uh, thank you for coming on. And thank you all for supporting us. Uh, if you like what you heard, think of joining the Discord. You’re already supporting us because you’re in the book club. Until next time, keep reading and keep writing good.

announcer: This has been Rite Gud with RS Benedict. It was hosted by RS Benedict and produced by Matt Keeley for KS Media LLC theme song by Okay Glass. For comments and concerns, please write to us at [01:30:00] ritegud@kittysneezes.com That’s R-I-T-E-G-U d@kittysneezes.com. If you’d like to support us, please visit our Patreon at patreon.com/ritegud This has been a Kitty Sneezes production. KittySneezes. com in color.

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In this edition of the Book Club, Gwen C. Katz joins us to talk about Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet and the true purpose of post-menopausal women (crimes and bees, obviously).

Links:* Surradia: An Art Retrospective (Gwen’s mystery game inspired by Carrington and other women surrealists) * Nightwell Games * Gwen on Bluesky * Gwen on Instagram

The Rite Gud theme is by OK Glass. Follow them on Twitter, YouTube and Bandcamp, and at OK.Glass.

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R.S. Benedict

Welcome to this month’s bonus episode of Rite Gud, the podcast that helps you write good for this edition of the book club, we’re talking about Leonora carrington’s The hearing trumpet. Joining me is Gwen C Katz. Gwen, you recommended this book. Would you like to tell us why?

Gwen C. Katz

Well, Leonora Carrington is an artist who I’ve been really interested in ever since I studied pottery in college, and she’s one of those people who just her work is so magnetically fascinating, you just get drawn into it. But her literary career, I feel like, is a lot less known. I think it exists in this kind of interesting space between like fantasy and literary fiction that I find really fascinating and also just really, really fun. Yeah, this

R.S. Benedict

is a really fun book to read. Everything that happens is a big surprise. You don’t really see anything coming in this book.

Gwen C. Katz

No, no. Like you’re preparing yourself, if you’re reading this, preparing yourself for, like, what wacky thing is going to happen. I assure you, the actual stuff that happens is wilder than what you’re thinking. Yeah,

R.S. Benedict

it’s it’s fun. And putting together an outline, because I always put together an outline for every episode. It was kind of difficult for this book because I don’t know how to outline a work like this, I kind of scrawled out some some disoriented notes. I feel like I maybe did a disservice to the book by using Google Documents instead of, like scrolling it on a napkin in crayon or something that would have might have been more appropriate. Well,

Gwen C. Katz

the unruliness is definitely like very much part of it, right? It’s like even the structure of the book just refuses to obey your social strictures about how things

R.S. Benedict

work. Yeah, the structure of this book is wild. It’s all over the place. Crazy shit just keeps happening. There are illustrations, some really, I think, deliberately shitty illustrations, for no reason. There’s there. Do they add anything? I don’t know, but they’re there. I appreciate them. It just gets weirder and crazier and crazier in unexpected ways as it goes on, it starts off as a story about an old woman whose kids, whose ungrateful son dumps her in a nursing home. Then it ends up being about a weird cult like nursing home. And then it goes even wackier. But even throughout this progression, like there’s a huge section where it’s very obvious that someone has just accidentally ingested poison, and then we just taken aside for like, what is it? 75 pages to talk about a horny pagan nun,

Gwen C. Katz

right? It’s this enormous filibuster that’s also itself equally wacky and completely off the rails, but yes, it’s just this wild diversion from the main story.

R.S. Benedict

I think you you made a note that there were a lot of discarded plot threads, like there’s the whole thing about this institution. We sort of expect in this kind of story that the the heroine will sort of triumph over the institution and put the crappy doctors in their place and beat them up. And that doesn’t really happen. We don’t they just sort of go away.

Gwen C. Katz

We eventually expect like we’re gonna expose the institution, right? Yeah, weird, and we’re not really sure what they’re making these ladies do these weird exercises and stuff. And then we’re gonna figure out what, what, what they’re trying to accomplish. And it’s gonna be something nefarious, like she certainly goes in there, certain that they’re up to something very, very dark, right? And and we just don’t, they just, they just become irrelevant. And then there’s this other part where Natasha, one of the women there, is doing her own occult stuff that’s secret from the people who are running the institution. She’s doing this on her own, and she invites the protagonist to join in, and we just never find out what she was doing. Yeah, it feels

R.S. Benedict

like the setup for some sort. Gothic horror story, but then where it’s gonna you’re gonna find out they’re trying to summon some evil gut. But no, just it just stops. They just leave. She just leaves, and that’s how she just leaves, because because of poisoning. Mod,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah, the best character. Oh, poor mod. Poor

R.S. Benedict

mod got done. So, dirty man,

Gwen C. Katz

she did. She did, yeah,

R.S. Benedict

I am. I am upset for mod. I am. She just wanted some fudge. She just wanted fudge and weed. I mean, whom among us?

Gwen C. Katz

Yeah, mod is, and she is interesting because she is the kind of, the most feminine of the women, right? She’s the one who does all the, all the classic old lady stuff her knitting, and her little frilly Lacey, you

R.S. Benedict

know, and she’s very demure, too. And, yeah, you know, whereas the other old women, there’s like a, there’s like a super horny G mill, if there’s the Marquise who sees herself as, like a word general, there’s, you know, all these really wild characters. And then Paul is just who

Gwen C. Katz

just never stops talking.

R.S. Benedict

She cannot stop talking,

Gwen C. Katz

just a constant monolog. And you just have to just leave at some point, just let her keep talking.

R.S. Benedict

And then Maude is just this sweet old lady doing needlework. And her name, Maude is the most like little old lady name ever. And then you find out that she’s got this secret double life as like a weed dealer hiding from the cops.

Gwen C. Katz

Yeah, yeah. So it’s kind of interesting that we have this cast of all these women who old ladies, who are so different, and that they’re kind of the the entire main cast of the story. Because I think in most works, you know, old women don’t appear at all in the cast of most fiction. And if they do, usually their role is like the old lady, like that’s their personality. She’s

R.S. Benedict

the little old lady who like bakes cookies and it says, Hello, dear everywhere this

Gwen C. Katz

and so seeing them present here as the all these very distinct people who are all really unique is really kind of pushing back against kind of our cultural idea that old ladies are irrelevant, that they don’t have individuality. They’re not people. You can there’s any reason you’d like get to know who might be interesting, who might be individual,

R.S. Benedict

yeah, just thinking about JD Vance’s whole weird spiel about what is the purpose of post menopausal women? The purpose of post menopausal women is to raise their grandchildren, basically, and that’s it. Well, I can’t impregnate you anymore. I don’t want to sexually objectify you anymore. Go raise children. This is why you exist. Fuck you don’t. That’s it. That’s, that’s all. And I’m not trying to knock like, taking care of your grandkids, that’s, that’s a beautiful, wonderful thing. But, like, that’s not, that’s not the only thing.

Gwen C. Katz

Well, and these women, we see the what do you then? What are you when you get to the point where you can’t do that or don’t need to do that anymore, right?

R.S. Benedict

Because she has a grandson, he’s an at he’s a failed son, he’s a failed grandson, He’s trash, and her son is trash, and her daughter in law is trash who won’t share her fucking candy. No one in this book is sharing candy with anyone else, unless there’s rat poison in it and it’s some shit.

Gwen C. Katz

This book does kind of give you mixed messages about sharing candy, doesn’t it? Like,

R.S. Benedict

yeah, yeah. I mean, Carmela shares chocolate biscuits, and she’s a queen. She’s the best fucking character in this book. She rocks. I fucking love Carmella. Carmela, so fucking cool. I love a bit everything she says is insane, and it all turns out to be true. I loved her. A bit about her, she’s like, Oh, police dogs aren’t animals. What do you mean they’re not animals? Well, policemen aren’t people, so police dogs aren’t animals. God did Hell yeah, impeccable

Gwen C. Katz

logic, Carmela.

Gwen C. Katz

Carmela, like we’ve all had, like the Dottie great aunt or something, who’s always going off on some weird nabbing about something weird. But what I love about Carmilla is that she’s very Batty, but she also feels very powerful to me because she goes off on these weird tangents of imaginary ideas about what the institute is going to be like, or writing a letter to a complete stranger and making up this elaborate backstory about what this guy is like, and giving their entire personality and stuff. But when she does is it draws people in like she forces people to engage with her imaginary world on her terms, right? Yeah, and nobody just tells her, or they don’t succeed at telling her, like, okay, but this is nonsense. They end up being like, what are we gonna do about the police dogs? The 40 police dogs that are gonna attack me while you’re busting me out of the day the Institute, in some sense,

R.S. Benedict

I’ll get a tommy gun. Obviously,

Gwen C. Katz

R.S. Benedict

love that too. That her plan to dig a tunnel, you know, to The Great Escape. It like it doesn’t work out, but not because it’s impossible, but because she simply stumbles upon a uranium mine and becomes fabulously rich in the process, and just pays a guy to drive her in.

Gwen C. Katz

It feels like her, like imagination has just kind of warped the actual world, ultimately, and kind of created her own reality just out of all this totally wild stuff she’s been saying,

R.S. Benedict

God, Carmel is so fucking cool. I love Carmel.

Gwen C. Katz

She’s the rattle. She’s absolutely why she would, you would want her to be your best friend, right?

R.S. Benedict

Absolutely like, but, but so much of this book, this is very much a feminist novel, and much of it is about the way old women are dismissed and discarded when it’s like, you know, you’re not reproductive anymore. Go away now, please. So I feel like the purpose of postmenopausal women in this novel is to do witchcraft and to restore the holy grail to its rightful owner, the, you know, the goddess of bees,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah, try to explain the plot.

R.S. Benedict

I don’t I, I don’t know. I don’t think I can’t, but there’s, there’s a lot of shenanigans. They just become involved in all kinds of feminist pagan witchcraft and go to war against all sorts of patriarchal institutions, including psychiatry and the Knights Templar and, of course, the Catholic Church. It’s kind of funny to follow up a very Catholic ish book with this book, you know, going from the sparrow, which is about a Jesuit who has a very bad time to the hearing trumpet.

Gwen C. Katz

Well, I’m sure the Jesuits were having a bad time here too. Yeah,

R.S. Benedict

they weren’t having a good time in this one either. They did get attacked by bees. Yeah, attacked by bees, which, of course, you know, bees are like a matriarchal species, and the only fertile bee in the hive is the queen. Most worker bees, you know, they’re sterile females. So it’s like, again, non reproductive females, like our like our protagonist and like the main characters. No, they’re getting shit done. They’re making honey. They’re they’re stinging people. They’re reclaiming the holy grail from the sterile, from the sterile male conspiracy. It’s pretty rad. And it’s just like, in a way, obviously, these women are discarded by society, and that’s that’s bad. But also, outside of society, they turn completely feral because there’s no sense in there’s this artificial attempt to get them to conform to this weird cult like self improvement regimen, and they’re just like, No fuck that we’re adopting wolves. We are fucking going for it.

Gwen C. Katz

So there’s definitely this space that we see, you know, a lot of people outside the societal mainstream can capture where it’s just there’s no place for you to exist in society’s framework. And that can be a kind of freedom you can claim, right? Yeah, like she was just minding her own business, living in the back of the house, you know, brushing her cats and bothering nobody. But that was still unacceptable, and so she gets packed off. So, you know, if, if just living in the back of the house, brushing the caps is already like too intrusive on society, like, why would you try to conform to societal rules? You’re clearly never gonna succeed. You’re clearly always, just by your very existence, gonna be a problem and something that needs to be gotten rid of. So you may as well just, you know, find the Bee Goddess and and steal the Holy Grail and revolt against the people running your your old folks home,

R.S. Benedict

right? Destabilize the polar ice caps. It’s fine. Yeah, it’s fine. If they had just given her candy, the equator would have stayed put. Everything would be normal. They just couldn’t share their fucking candy

Gwen C. Katz

or let her walk through the house that she lives in.

R.S. Benedict

I think it’s so interesting that it’s called the hearing trumpet, because that’s like, a lot of horrible stuff happens that isn’t really commented on as being horrible. It’s just treated in this very offhand dismissive way, like the death of Maude, not just that she, she’s, I guess, I don’t know if you’d call it murder, because she wasn’t the target of it, but that she, you know, died in such a she. Be unfair way, but also that the institution just doesn’t give a shit, and is so incredible that she’s treated with so much disrespect after her after she dies, too, that there’s absolutely zero interest in like doing a proper autopsy and finding the culprit and punishing the culprit, that the the women, the other women of the of this institution have to go on a hunger strike to just to get the murderers kicked out, because it’s like, we don’t, we don’t want to hang out with these fucking people who poison and then people we and they get scolded for it, like, you were mean to these people just because they poisoned someone. Like, yeah, yeah, we were. And then

Gwen C. Katz

they ultimately get rid of them. Carmela pays the institution off, and that’s how they’re right. It’s not because they finally decided, like, actually, we don’t want these old ladies to starve to death on their hunger strike or anything like that. No, they don’t give a shit. No, they don’t. Yeah, and the like, oh no. She just died of kidney failure. She’s old, so whatever old people die, right? Who cares? Right? Is very much their attitude, like, we just put these people here as a place to store them until they die. So when they do, like, okay,

R.S. Benedict

okay, bye, whatever. I just want to fudge man. Rip. Mod, Sif, poor. We love you mud. Love so fucking cool stitching marijuana pillows.

Gwen C. Katz

That’s just such a wonderful like the old ladies get up to so many wild shenanigans, and they’re all connected to, like, old lady stuff. It’s kind of amazing sewing, sewing, needlepoint, but it’s poison fudge and weed pillows,

R.S. Benedict

gardening in a uranium mine. You know, just normal things, normal old lady things, like, one of the things in this book that’s not overtly commented on, but when you think about it, is so fucked up. Is okay? This book’s called the hearing trumpet. And it’s called the hearing trumpet because our protagonist is hearing impaired, and it starts with her receiving a very dangerous, in some ways, gift that changes her life, which is the gift from Carmella as always, of a hearing trumpet, one of those like old timey. You know, before you had hearing aids, you just had basically a tube you’d stick to your ears so you could hear good. You know, she gets a hearing trumpet, so now she can actually hear things if she wants to. And she starts hearing how shitty her son’s family actually talks about her, and all the shitty things people say about her or to her. And you sit for a moment, you realize, like, okay, her son didn’t even give her a fucking hearing aid, like her son obviously knew she was half deaf, yeah, because they complained about it her, but it did not occur to him to just get her a hearing trumpet. And this is not an expensive, high tech gadget. This is literally a tube. Is a tube. He couldn’t get her a tube so she could hear. Good, nope,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah. It’s just considered irrelevant. Why would she need to know what’s going on, right? Yeah, as long as she goes with you and doesn’t make a fuss when you when you shove her into the old folks home, like it’s not relevant that she’d be able to, like, be part of your family and communicate, and her speech is another thing, right? She has no teeth. She’s 92 she’s lost all her teeth, and they constantly refer to her family does like gibbering, like this awful, drilling, gibbering, horrific thing and but the thing is, nobody ever actually has trouble understanding her, right? It?

R.S. Benedict

Yeah, it’s

Gwen C. Katz

just they. They don’t like, I guess, the way she talks, but they act like she’s this incomprehensible, like thing that’s beyond being able to communicate. But when she actually does talk to them, they understand her perfectly fine, right? They just kind of want to dismiss what she has to say, because they don’t care.

R.S. Benedict

Yeah, it’s just this real casual cruelty to these old ladies, just so many of them throughout the book, just incredible casual cruelty about how they’re treated in general. But yeah, it God. How do you how do you even talk about this? But how do you even seg from one point to another? All I can think is, I want to know when Yorgos lanthanos is going to turn this book into a movie, because it seems like it was made for him. I don’t know who Emma Stone would play. Maybe he’s gonna wait for her to get really old so she can play the main lady. But like, yeah,

Gwen C. Katz

wait, wait till she turns 90, and then cast her. Yeah,

R.S. Benedict

yeah. Because this book feels very, very much like the sort of thing he would love. And that it’s fucking weird. And it’s about old women, and it just goes completely bonkers.

Gwen C. Katz

Yes, yeah, no. I mean, this will look amazing on the screen some of the stuff that happens in the second half, I definitely want to see, like a big screen version of the

R.S. Benedict

old folks home with the separate bungalows shaped like mushrooms and shoes.

Gwen C. Katz

Yeah, they’re always

R.S. Benedict

fucking mummy.

Gwen C. Katz

There’s like, there’s literally a little old lady who lives in a shoe, yeah? And there’s really no explanation for that. They just show up. And that’s how it is. And you’re living in the lighthouse. That’s that’s your house, okay?

R.S. Benedict

Except somebody’s trapped in a tower.

Gwen C. Katz

Somebody is trapped in the tower, yeah,

R.S. Benedict

which is used in kind of like a fortune cookie joke, because that, you know, there’s a bit where somebody, a character, gives everybody these basically fortune cookies, and each of them has some kind of really well chosen prophecy, or something very relevant to the story, or relevant to each individual character, and then our protagonist gets one that says, Help. I’m trapped in a tower, which is very much one of those old jokes of like this fortune cookie. My fortune is help. I’m a prisoner in a fortune cookie factory. What the but like, there is actually an entity trapped in a tower that that gets out and with an explosion and just sort of goes around as the end of the world happens. And from the center of this institution,

Gwen C. Katz

that aspect is so enigmatic, who or what this creature is, even after we see it like it busts out of the tower and then it just leaves. There’s been a bunch of setup about this creature. And when they’re gonna find out what it is, how they’re gonna get it out of the tower or things, and then just tower blows up, it flies away.

R.S. Benedict

It goes, yeah,

Gwen C. Katz

just, just out there. Now,

R.S. Benedict

just flying around. There it is. It’s also, there’s an immortal postman who just kind of shows up. There’s a werewolf there. There’s a lady werewolf who has puppies Good for her. There’s like an what is it? An atomic arc?

Gwen C. Katz

Oh yeah, yeah. Gosh. There’s so much going on in this book that I forgot about the atomic art.

R.S. Benedict

The atomic art, I know because, like, the atomic arc is just in the background, because its function is to escort the werewolf queen.

Gwen C. Katz

Yeah,

R.S. Benedict

that’s really why it exists.

Gwen C. Katz

The king of wolves,

R.S. Benedict

with the wolf King,

Gwen C. Katz

right? Yeah, all this stuff that just shows up in the third act. And, you know, it really kind of starts with Mod. I think that’s really the moment in the plot where it goes from kind of vaguely following being odd, but vaguely kind of following the structure of a story and having a logical through line to just all bets are off, from the part where, like, mod secret is discovered, and then it’s just like social strictures have been thrown off, and everything goes out the window, and all this stuff that’s like, either been concealed or suppressed or just not had A chance to kind of come to the surface, just all busts out at the same time. And now your your friend’s sister, who you never met, turns out to be a werewolf. And, yeah, there’s this postman and the ice caps shift positions and just everything just goes absolutely haywire, yeah,

R.S. Benedict

and I find it interesting too. It’s the death of Maude, and also that her secret is discovered. And you know, we’re giving away everything in the book, so we might as well give away the fact mod is trans, and she’s not the only gender non conforming character in this book, because around, around the time of the death of Maude, we also get this aside, where we get the this very, very long narrative about a nun who her portrait of this. This winking nun appears on the wall of the dining hall in this old folks home slash cult compound. And our protagonist doesn’t like the nun. She thinks this, this lady sinister. She must be bad. She must have been up to no good. But then we get this long, long, long, long account by a hostile priest about how this nun never should have been sanctified, because she was actually very bad, because she did lots of very, very naughty things. She engaged in witchcraft and anti gravity, or magic sex, yeah, midair orgies and that. Like you gotta fuck in order to fly like you can’t just rub the juice on you. You gotta have sex in order to defy gravity. You gotta do it. You gotta screw around. It’s that, that she you. Kidnapped people, murdered people, and also disguised herself as a man wearing a beard in order to try to steal the holy grail from the Knights Templar and return it to its rightful owner.

Gwen C. Katz

But this very elaborate disguise as a man, he had this whole identity, and he had this very opulent costume and stuff, so you know, outfits and this whole carriage, fancy carriage, and everything. So it didn’t feel totally it was very much like a very full persona she was taking on. It wasn’t just like, you know, put on some dude’s clothes so you can sneak in real quick.

R.S. Benedict

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn’t just draw a mustache on. Like, she was really living as this dude. So there’s, there’s a lot of like right in the center of this book is these two gender non conforming characters who, again, both run afoul of the authorities, although one has an easier time defying the authorities throughout most of their life. And that’s a really big part of this book, not just sort of gender but the blurring of lines, or the breaking down of categories. A lot of what’s happening in this book is categories and established rules becoming broken, established categories becoming completely undone, not just violating gender roles, but also, I mean, we have this interspecies creature, the werewolf. We

Gwen C. Katz

have the werewolf. The nun gets pregnant while she’s infiltrating the Knights Templar, and then has this weirdo pregnancy that leads to her giving birth to this like cherub and then she, like, explodes. She explodes, freaking explodes. She

R.S. Benedict

just fucking explodes and leaves, like some really nice perfume,

Gwen C. Katz

a tiny little rag of flesh is all that’s left of her, and that’s what they bury, and that’s her sanctified, like relic of her that everyone is coming and worshiping it’s

R.S. Benedict

just bananas. She just straight up explodes.

Gwen C. Katz

And then the creature in the tower ends up being this, like six winged, feathery humanoid thing. So there’s another kind of animal, human hybrid creature there. Yeah,

R.S. Benedict

I had trouble figuring this out. Was the creature in the tower, sephirah, because there’s a lot of talk of sephirah. Is that sephirah is, is? I couldn’t help it. They keep making these little, oh, sephirah and his mother. I’m like, well, well, I know about this. I played that game Sephora. He’s mad because the Shinra corporation created Him as the Son of headless clone in order to harness the materia that they are, that they are harvesting from the world. So that’s I don’t, I don’t remember, you know, Final Fantasy seven didn’t make any sense to me either. So made about as much sense as this book, I don’t, I don’t know where Cloud Strife comes into this book. Maybe he’s the immortal postman. I

Gwen C. Katz

mean, the immortal postman, he had quite a long career. He’s been around for, you know, like, 1000 years. So I assume he could, he could have just moonlighted us a lot of things in that time.

R.S. Benedict

I just have to say, What have I just found it absolutely delightful that while he’s out on his rounds, as we’ve entered a new ice age in this book, and he’s still delivering the mail through the snow, through through packs of wolves, the the ladies invite him in for something nice to drink in their cave, because they’re all They’re living in a cave now They’re becoming extremely feral and witchy and, and, you know, living in the heart of the earth here, and his response is to wiggle his fingers and say, Don’t mind if I do,

Gwen C. Katz

you know, I mean, there’s still inviting you in for a cup of raw goat’s milk that just from their goats, that they’re keeping that are, yeah, they got goats. Now there’s goats now, stock on Earth. Who knows, probably billions of people are dead. But you know,

R.S. Benedict

yeah, the postman, very casually, talks about like, Oh yeah, yeah, cities are all dead. Volcanoes everywhere. It’s pretty bad anyway.

Gwen C. Katz

I mean, talk about neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night, like even the freaking polls changing places cannot stop this postman from delivering the mail, right?

R.S. Benedict

But I do kind of like that. I like that. I mean, the messenger God is such a, such a an archetype throughout different cultures, and it’s like, well, yeah, why wouldn’t there be a postman that is a pretty important job. We take it for granted. That’s I, you know what that is? Another like structure of society that we wildly take for granted, like, oh yeah, the Postal Service. Like, it’s a pretty big fucking deal to have that when you read how goddamn hard it was to get a message around, before that existed, before the system existed. It’s like. Holy shit. You just had to find a guy to just go to the place where hopefully you want your shit to go. That’s that was super hard. Imagine if you want on a horse, maybe you’re on a boat, or some shit like every or even back in the day, just on foot. You just had to find a guy like, imagine, every time you wanted to send a message, you just had to fucking find a guy, that’s ridiculous, who happened

Gwen C. Katz

to be going somewhere. Yeah. So these liminal figures, the postman, who can just go across any border, and you just have the sense that, like, they can go anywhere, right? They you can send a letter to any spot in the United States, and a guy will show up there in a little truck and, you know, a little hat, and hand you a letter. And there is a figure, an aspect of that that feels like a lot like those liminal figures like Hermes and everyone who they just go places. Yeah, he just goes places.

R.S. Benedict

He he’s delivering mail to the cave, to the old lady cave, where they’re living with their goats and communing with the bees

Gwen C. Katz

and the and the wolves and the yes, yeah, I love

R.S. Benedict

that. I think it’s Anne just adopts a wolf and refuses to understand that this is, in fact, a

Gwen C. Katz

wolf, right, right? She’s convinced it’s a dog.

R.S. Benedict

She’s a very fluffy dog.

Gwen C. Katz

There’s a pack of very fluffy Alsatians out there, and she doesn’t understand why the goats are suddenly really, really agitated. But I what I like is carmilla’s response, where she is talking about, oh, well, like the tropical and like the elephants are gonna have to grow coats and become wooly mammoths again, and, and some of the tropical animals are probably gonna die or freeze to death, but there’ll be a lot to eat because, you know, all the humans are dying, so, you know, there’s a lot of, yeah,

R.S. Benedict

the remaining animals will have plenty of dead humans to eat. Good for them. She

Gwen C. Katz

just, just does not care at all that, like, civilization is ending here. But, you know, I’m really concerned about how the elephants are doing.

R.S. Benedict

She’s got her lavender limousine and, like, why measures her hair color, which, like, that’s incredible.

Gwen C. Katz

Why should these old ladies care, right? But,

R.S. Benedict

Billy, yeah, why should they give a shit?

Gwen C. Katz

Why should they, like, like,

R.S. Benedict

if any of those people had shared candy with them,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah? Like, clearly the people, like, quite literally, did not give a shit. Like, when one of them dies, yeah, yeah.

R.S. Benedict

Justice for mod, the two, the two poisoners who had to leave the institution. We assume they died. They froze. I hope they were eaten by wolves.

Gwen C. Katz

I guess we just got to assume that anyone who doesn’t actively appear at the end was probably frozen to death. I assume her family was and her her horrible grandson, her

R.S. Benedict

piece of shit grandson, yeah, yeah,

Gwen C. Katz

fine. The cats are carmella’s got the cats and, yeah, the only people she cared about. So yeah, there’s a great bit where her son and daughter in law come to visit her and are telling her, like, oh, Robert’s gotten engaged. Isn’t that wonderful? And and she’s like, I don’t, I don’t care about how my cats, right? Yeah, why would I be happy that Robert got engaged? He’s the asshole who had me kicked out of my house.

R.S. Benedict

Yeah? Fuck Robert, man. He’s terrible. I just love how shitty he is. Love how fucking shitty it’s,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah, yeah. Like so much he did, yeah, riding his loud motorcycle all hours of the day, you know, and he just demands that she get kicked out and sent to a home because she walked through the living room. Well, he was visiting with his friends and like that was so horrible, like she can’t be allowed to do that walk through the living room for 10 seconds.

R.S. Benedict

Yeah,

Gwen C. Katz

what a jerk.

R.S. Benedict

Yeah, I love how there’s absolutely no attempt to make you feel sorry for him. There’s no flashback explaining why any of the assholes are the way they are. There’s like this bitch sucks.

Gwen C. Katz

Yeah? I mean,

R.S. Benedict

she freezes to death. Fuck her, man. They

Gwen C. Katz

die implicitly, like, even the gambit the couple that are, yeah, you

R.S. Benedict

don’t hear anything about them, but we assume they’re buried under the snow. Yeah,

Gwen C. Katz

I think, I think she says, like that. She’s like, Oh yeah, the Institute where the gambits are probably buried under all the rubble from when the tower exploded and the whole place, bros, like, but yeah, there’s no, like, big comeuppance here. Like, the world kicked these ladies out and didn’t care what happened to them. And so, like, in return, the ladies do not care what happens to the entire rest of the world. Yeah,

R.S. Benedict

the world ends. And they’re just like, okay, that’s fine. Let’s kick. We got this, yeah, we got some chocolate biscuits. We’ll be okay for a while, yeah, as long

Gwen C. Katz

as we can keep excavating supplies out of the out of the frozen wastes,

R.S. Benedict

yeah, they’ll be okay. They got Mahjong to help. Mahjong the the the

Gwen C. Katz

chauffeur, yes,

R.S. Benedict

the trusty chauffeur.

Gwen C. Katz

But these ladies who are supposed to be, like, one of them’s 98 like Veronica’s 98 Yeah, they do kind of get more and more powerful as the story goes on, right? Like they’re basically on this Arctic expedition. And they seem fine, right? They seem they seem like they’re just perfectly spry and active, and they’re going around. They’re teaching the little wolf pups to drive a sledge and stuff and or pull a sledge rather,

R.S. Benedict

yeah, and that, Mrs. Leatherby, our protagonist gets better by by killing and eating herself in a cauldron, like a fairy tale that is such a wild scene, she just goes into this tower, or whatever, where she sees herself, but like a little healthier and a little better just being very witchy over a cauldron, and then her other self sticks A big like fork into her, shoves her into the pot, and cooks her and eats her. And then she’s fine. And then she’s, I love the way that happens, where it’s like, she she’s experiencing being speared and shoved into a pot, and then suddenly she’s stirring the pot, and she’s like, which of these was me?

Gwen C. Katz

Which?

R.S. Benedict

I don’t know. I just feel a little better now. I feel pretty good now, I don’t know, into

Gwen C. Katz

the pot with two onions and one carrot, very specific number of vegetables there. Yes, this like alchemical rebirth, where, you know, very, very witchy. There’s so much witchy shit that happens in this, in this book, and the fact that it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I love this because it’s really the opposite of these books that have these very strict, like hard magic systems that operate by rules, and they define here’s how the rules work. Here’s how magic works. You can do this, this and this. You have to do this to make this happen. And then the rest of the book will be them, following and exploiting the rules and using them to do magic and win battles or whatever they’re trying to do. And this idea of magic in surrealist circles is so opposite. This is very wild, untamed, like primal magic, and it does not operate by rules. It does not operate by logic at all. It wouldn’t really be magical. It’s just freaking, you know, a different kind of science, if it is all by rules, right? What makes it magical is just absolutely anything can happen.

R.S. Benedict

Yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned that that this is, there are a lot of fantastic elements, but I don’t think anyone would really call this a fantasy novel, and that is noted in the afterword. In my edition has an afterword by Olga tokarzuk. I’m probably mispronouncing that name. Who notes? Well, part of the reason that this doesn’t get that label is that genre, fantasy genre, speculative fiction, you know, it has certain expectations of structures and rules. What you expect certain things to happen in a fantasy novel, like if there’s if a tower explodes and a beast flies out of it, we expect that our hero is going to have to deal with the beast right? Our hero is going to have to, like, battle the beast, or maybe he’s going to befriend it and ride it, right? And that doesn’t happen. It just fucks off. We expect, you know, all these like, little things happen that are some feel like in a typical genre novel. This would be a setup for a mystery. This would be a setup for a Lovecraftian Horror Story. This would be a setup for this kind of story, that kind of plot, with this kind of structure, and these were going to expect certain beats, and it doesn’t happen. It’s just Nope. There is a monster there. It is,

Gwen C. Katz

like, there’s a bit where one of these other ladies tells the protagonist that she needs to solve three riddles to get into the tower and find out what’s in it. Yeah. And she does solve all three riddles, but she doesn’t need to do so in order to get into the tower, because it just fucking blows up, right? And it just explodes. Yeah. It was not caused by her solving the riddles. Also, I love that these three riddles like the first one is a logical riddle with a solution that makes sense. The second one sort of makes sense, but feels like kind of a reach and has some bits in it that are kind of weird, esoterica. And then the third one is complete non. That’s right. Third one is just complete esoterica that nobody could possibly solve, right?

R.S. Benedict

It’s fantastic. It fucking rocks, and I love it. And I would love to take every like I would love to just force Brandon Sanderson to read this book, to buy a little Vico treatment, you know, just like open, force his eyes open, and be like you’re gonna fucking read this. This is what magic is, piece of shit,

Gwen C. Katz

right? And magic, you know, it ties in really closely with the women’s experience with surrealism. Specifically, right? This was women were kind of believed to have, like this, closer tie to magic, the mystical, mystical. They’re mad women. They’re like, inherently like, less rational, they’re kind of childlike. They’re kind of connected to nature. But this is all you know, the ideas they had at the time in this movement. And that meant that they could access this kind of magical power that men were just like too, too rational and too civilized to connect with, which on the one hand is very powerful, and on the other hand, is very patronizing and obnoxious. But the women who were involved in this movement really, really harnessed the power side of it, and they really rejected the part, really just rejected the male assumed role in that kind of duality entirely. It’s like, nope, nope. We’re just eating that entire concept. You guys can just just just fuck off like you’re not contributing anything here. You know, if we can act like this magical, primal essence, that what do we even need you for?

R.S. Benedict

Yeah, yeah. Like, why we’re the primal essence, you’re there to harness it. What if I don’t want to wear a fucking harness for you? Right? Right?

Gwen C. Katz

Because the idea is like, you know, and then this male artist will date this, you know, creative, wonderful, magical, younger woman, and she’ll inspire him and inspire his art and be his muse. But once women start making art themselves, then it becomes like, well, what? Yeah, this paradigm no longer fits. Like, if the woman can be her own Muse and create her own art, then then it’s like, it just seems like the men are just kind of rubbish at art, right? Yeah, like you’re just, if you guys are cut off from, you know, by your masculinity, from the magic that makes people creative and makes people discover stuff then, like, what are we? What are you even here for? Yeah,

R.S. Benedict

yeah, you mentioned. You’ve mentioned in the discord that Carrington fucking hated the the whole obsession with the female muse. She just hated that shit.

Gwen C. Katz

She hated it. Yeah, yeah, because she had joined the surrealist group she’d run off when she was 19 with Max Ernst, this surrealist artist who was 40 and married at the time, and and they, in one sense, filled this very typical Muse and artist relationship. But on the other hand, she was herself, this really accomplished, talented artist, and she really chafe against the idea that the group had, that women just, you know, you just inspire us. You just sit there and, you know, be pretty and and maybe, like, a little bit odd and

R.S. Benedict

little manic pixie dream girl for me,

Gwen C. Katz

exactly. Yeah. I’m interested in, rather, whether you could think of like surrealism as kind of the roots of the Manic pixie dream girl. I feel like there’s some like investigation that could be done on that front, because there’s, like, a lot of connection there. That’s that said, I’m not positive The Surrealists made that one up. I imagine it’s probably, I’m

R.S. Benedict

sure it’s a much older thing, going back a long way. You also noted that in the little story within a story of the abbess, aka the winking nun that we have sort of a the abbess is kind of creepy friend who has a male muse, like, Who’s this young choir boy, and it’s such an icky relationship,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s

R.S. Benedict

uncomfortable. This

Gwen C. Katz

older bishop who just like, as a recall, just freaking kidnaps this choir boy, pretty much, and is holding him prisoner and definitely having sex with him, like, pretty clearly, and also using him as this source of like, amazing inspiration he’s. So spiritual, you know, and he’s so young and innocent, and it’s so inspiring to, you know, having me in my life. And, yeah, we both see like, it’s interesting how weird that feels when it’s a male character in that role. And it just brings to the surface, this was always a super creepy dynamic, yeah,

R.S. Benedict

and even our abbess almost has that going too with this young prince who she’s kid kidnapped. But he’s like, not cool with this, so her solution is to feed him enough magic juice in the hopes of getting him into her. But it goes very wrong. He becomes can, like, like in a lot of 1960s PSAs against psychedelic drugs, he became, comes convinced that he’s a bird and tries to fly off the towers.

Gwen C. Katz

Yes, another like human animal. Uh, connection there. But,

R.S. Benedict

yeah, he’s too masculine. He can’t do it. He can’t turn into a bird because he’s too manly.

Gwen C. Katz

He doesn’t quite make that connection.

R.S. Benedict

I don’t know. I just saw it as I don’t know if this is intentional, but that is very much the 1960s like this is what happens when you smoke too much marijuana, things like one hippie got two turns on with the devil’s lettuce and thought he was a bird and tried to fly by flapping his arms and jumped off of an overpass. And this one totally groovy babysitter took too much marijuana and put a baby in the oven.

Gwen C. Katz

Well, the connection I made there is Max Ernst. He is like animal Alter Ego. Was a bird, and he had this whole thing it, where he kind of confused humans with birds, and he it was a lifelong thing, like ever since he was a small child, conflating humans and birds. Yeah. So we see that. I’m not sure how much of a direct connection that is to what happens with the the abbesses guy, but that’s definitely something that popped into my mind. Oh, yeah. And then again, with, of course, with so far, the another bird humanoid. It’s got a wings covered with feathers, and, yeah,

R.S. Benedict

yeah, the one winged angel with animator, we gotta flash out a lot of really big summons. But if you get, but if you go through the Knights of the Round subquest, he’s pretty easy to get. Sorry,

Gwen C. Katz

I have absolutely no idea who or what Safira is supposed to be referencing, like, if it’s a thing from folklore, I’m not familiar with it. I

R.S. Benedict

should have looked this up. I assume it’s a thing. I put no effort into this. I’m sorry. No, no, no. I mean, I

Gwen C. Katz

don’t know either. Not, I

R.S. Benedict

just raw dogged this book,

Gwen C. Katz

not that I know of, because, I mean, it would also be very on brand to just straight up makeup. Oh yeah, Zafira. Don’t you know who that is, the six wing bird dude?

R.S. Benedict

Yeah, that’s like, that really expensive makeup counter.

R.S. Benedict

No, I’m sorry.

Gwen C. Katz

No, no, my autocorrect keeps wanting me to say Sephora. Like

exactly,

Gwen C. Katz

actively hard to Google this topic, but Google

R.S. Benedict

right now is just gonna be like you meant Sephiroth, right? Like, no, you meant Sephora, right. No,

R.S. Benedict

I did not mean either of those things.

Gwen C. Katz

But we do see connections to folklore and mythology in here. There’s references to, like, Epona, the Celtic goddess. There’s references to the to the seed. Who are these? Like, it’s Celtic race of, like, elven people who were very magical,

R.S. Benedict

hecka T Goddess of witchcraft, yeah, yeah.

Gwen C. Katz

Because Carrington was, she was raised by this British aristocratic family, and her dad was English, but her mom was Irish, and so she was raised with her grandma telling her all these stories from, oh, hell yeah. Celtic folklore, her awesome, her own awesome, cool old lady, magical, witchy lady who was in her life when she was a child, and she said that she was descended from the from the seed, and that was one of her kind of origin stories about her own magical side.

R.S. Benedict

I Hell yeah,

R.S. Benedict

that’s sick. That’s so fucking cool,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah. And in fact, Carrington lived to be 94 so, and she was doing art and everything straight up to the end of her life. So she. Live to be older than Marion Leatherby, who’s now

R.S. Benedict

you look to be, did she live to be as old as Marion leatherby’s mother?

Gwen C. Katz

No, that’s

R.S. Benedict

an amazing reveal that our heroine, Marion Leatherby, she’s a super old lady, and her mom’s still alive. Her

Gwen C. Katz

mom’s still alive. Her mom’s 110 and according to her caretaker, still quite spry. She’s still kicking it. So cool. Spry in a wheelchair. And, yeah, I love that too, because, you know, it’s like, shoving in your face. Like, oh, our does our society kind of pretend that old ladies don’t exist? Like, we’ll have some even older ladies, right? Like, yeah, yeah. How far back does it go,

R.S. Benedict

yeah, the oldest human alive always ends up being some super old woman, right? Yes. Who’s who’s always, like, the secret to living forever, smoking cigars, drinking whiskey and staying the away from men, yeah? Like, it’s always a super old maid as we we’d call it as, like, a woman’s just like, No, I’ve literally never had a boyfriend. That’s why I’m still alive. What?

Gwen C. Katz

And the the ladies at this institution do all seem to be all in on vices for the most part, right? Yeah, there’s fucking rocks, there’s there’s Georgina, who she’s just

R.S. Benedict

Georgina. She’s really horny, and she’s so caught. I love her confidence. I love her, just being like, yeah, you all want to fuck me, yeah.

Gwen C. Katz

She’s just absolutely convinced that, like, Dr Gambit wants to fuck her. Maybe she’s right.

Gwen C. Katz

She made it, yeah. I mean, we don’t, she’s

R.S. Benedict

probably right. Yeah. I’m picturing like, a Susan Sarandon type, like an older lady who’s legit, like, super fucking hot,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah. Well, we don’t, we don’t know. I mean, she seems like we don’t know. She seems like she’s gotten plenty over the course of her life. She seems like, yeah, she

R.S. Benedict

seems like she has had a very good time. And I am so happy for her.

Gwen C. Katz

Yeah. And some of the women are kind of not, not just mod, but some of the other women are kind of Butch, gender presenting. Oh,

R.S. Benedict

yeah, the Marquise,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah, there’s, there’s, yeah, is it the marquees? Who? Yeah, I think it is. Who kind of dresses in kind of male clothes and and the gambits. Don’t approve of it, but everyone else has

R.S. Benedict

a bunch of war stories, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gwen C. Katz

But everyone else is like, what are you talking about her, her the way she dresses, is totally rad. It’s everyone else just thinks she’s extremely cool and, and even Marion cool. Marion has a beard, so she’s also kind of house, right, a little bit outside of feminine presenting gender space. She has a beard and, and she she likes it, right? She’s, like a lot of people, to find it hideous, but, yeah,

R.S. Benedict

she’s not embarrassed.

Gwen C. Katz

I think it’s really dashing.

R.S. Benedict

She’s so cool. Love the old ladies in this book, except for Natasha. And what’s her face. Natasha’s

Gwen C. Katz

like, torched, who? I

R.S. Benedict

feel like, fuck that bitch.

Gwen C. Katz

I feel like she’s the weakest of the old ladies, like her role is just like, she’s very, very fat, yeah,

R.S. Benedict

yeah. This book is not very size positive. Unfortunately, it’s

Gwen C. Katz

not.

R.S. Benedict

It’s a little mean. It’s a little mean, like, yeah, it’s so savage, though, in that like, old British lady way where it’s talking about, like, Dr gambits lecturing me about self control. But he’s fat as fuck, and I know he’s got a killer snack drawer. Yeah, I did. I admit I did, kind of like the bit where she’s like, imagining what’s in his snack drawer. And it’s like, this two tiered snack drawer system where it’s like, you know, drawer number one is, like, savory, and he’s got, like, a grilled cheese in there, and this and that, and then drawer number two is, like, sweets, and he’s got all these bon bons. And I’m going, like, Damn this. I’m sick. When I get back to the office, I gotta, like, update my snack drawer, man, because I am, I want to be like, Dr Gambit snack shower that is god tier,

Gwen C. Katz

and she’s not getting enough to eat because she doesn’t have meat and they won’t give her extra vegetables, so I assume that this meeting, she’s just really, really hungry, and all she can think about is snacks.

R.S. Benedict

I know you got a grill. She’s in there, you fucker. Yeah, you’re holding out on me.

Gwen C. Katz

And the daughter in law also is also fat, and also, candy, yeah, yeah, that, you know that fat bitch who won’t share her candy? Yeah? It’s definitely, yeah, it’s

R.S. Benedict

not very nice. It’s

Gwen C. Katz

definitely very mean on the on the fat phobia side, of course, Marion’s also a character, right? So that’s also, yeah, we’re capturing the character of this, like, of this super cranky old lady who,

R.S. Benedict

you know that is a very super cranky old lady thing to be absolutely like, savage about other people. Sweet. They do not give a fuck. They will just tell you, damn, you got fat. But they don’t. Don’t care. It’s like Grandma, what

R.S. Benedict

the fuck you can’t just say that? What is true? Yeah, yeah. It is very real.

Gwen C. Katz

So we’re definitely seeing some of that from her perspective, and also in the treatment, I think of christabelle, we see some of that, like old lady gawking at the person who’s different the

R.S. Benedict

fact that the Chinese chauffeur is named Mahjong, oh, my God, that’s a bit mush, yeah,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah,

Gwen C. Katz

that’s a little much.

Gwen C. Katz

Yeah, yeah,

it’s not PC.

Gwen C. Katz

I still fucking love this book for its race representation. Yeah,

R.S. Benedict

I would argue that it is at least as good as the house on the Cerulean sea or whatever I have not actually, honestly, I think it’s as good, at least it’s better written. So you know what, if you’re gonna be problematic, you you need to at least write good yeah, that’s what I say. Yeah, I’ll forgive you if your book is cool and shit as shit and has like, Catholic intrigue. One of our Discord members got so fucking excited there’s Catholic intrigue in this book. Hell yeah,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah, yeah. They all like, what is the church up to? I assume they’re all just doing horrible debauch stuff, which a lot of the time they, in fact, were, you know, you lock a bunch of people up in a building and tell them they can never leave, and they will get up to some stuff in there when nobody’s watching. For sure, definitely did

R.S. Benedict

that. She had that the Knights Templar get attacked by bees. It’s so interesting how, that’s how the great battles is structured, where just so matter of fact and very offhand, there’s no like chapter 12, the the ultimate battle, where they’re talking about how, you know, and then, and then we raised our swords, and this happened, and that happened. It’s just very like in the within the span of a paragraph, we went outside and screamed and pretended we were being attacked by wolves, and then the bees rushed in and stung everybody and took the goblet back, and that was that, like, Oh, all right, yeah.

Gwen C. Katz

But then we’re back. Went back to our cave and had some snacks. Yeah, yeah. Then

R.S. Benedict

we had some then we had some more milk. Yeah. What is happening? What is this book?

Gwen C. Katz

I mean, by the time civilization has fallen, because the polls changed place, I just assume there’s, there’s a less, uh, zealous defense of the Grail anymore, if it’s falling lower on people’s priority list,

R.S. Benedict

yeah. And I just, I love how matter of fact all this strangeness is there’s, I mean, there’s one, one moment where she comments on, oh, at first, it felt a little weird to chant around the B pond and dance and go crazy, but then I started feeling fine, and then everything else is handled with such nonchalance. Oh yeah, yeah, the polar ice caps are shifting. The equator is cold now. Or just how, when she emerges from the tower after like, killing and eating herself, she says, Wow, you guys, crazy thing happens. Oh yeah, you saw yourself right and threw yourself into a giant pot. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that happened, yeah, that’ll happen.

Gwen C. Katz

And they asked him, like, like, did you like the soup?

R.S. Benedict

Was it any good? Like, yeah, it was great. I feel really good now. What God, yeah, we

Gwen C. Katz

talked about. Marion is very judgy, but she’s also not like, great at putting things together. No,

R.S. Benedict

it’s so frustrating how she’s observant, like she she observes that, what is it? Mrs. Van tucked I think you know, is asking for rat poison, but there are no signs of rats and that she could just get a cat. But she says, ah, the Mrs. Gambit is allergic to cats. And Mrs. Gambit is obviously not allergic to cats. And then she observes, and then she observes her making this fudge and poking little holes in it and throwing putting a powder in it and then covering it up with chocolate. And she observes all of these facts, but does not put two and two together until after our poor darling mod sneaks some fudge. Oh yeah, she

Gwen C. Katz

just sits down and reads her book for like hours, just

R.S. Benedict

reads the the story about the winking nun,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah,

R.S. Benedict

no, Marion, Mary, that is Marion’s greatest failure in saving Maude. You could have saved Maude, Marion, come on,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah. You could have, could have found you could have given

R.S. Benedict

her something. You could have given her a head. It’s up there.

Gwen C. Katz

Well, we see this shift, kind of at pretty much at that point in the story, where we go from the first half, where Marion’s just going along with everything, and seemingly all the ladies, other than Carmilla, who’s not institutionalized, she still lives independently, just go along with everything, and they have this societal expectation that, like, Oh, she’s just gonna go along. When we put her in the old folks home, she’s not gonna kick up a fuss. And even if she did, there’s still nothing she can do about it. Yeah? And she believes that as well, right? She just also, and then once you’re in the old folks home, like, okay, there we’re doing weird exercises now. We’re rubbing our tummy and patting our heads, and I’m living in a blank house. And, okay, this is what’s happening, I guess. But then we hit this moment when Maude dies, when they finally revolt against that and become active characters in their own story and start they start telling the gambits like, no, actually, we’re not gonna just go along with you telling us to be nice to the murderers who are who it wasn’t even their chosen victim there

R.S. Benedict

they were trying to kill Georgette for being too sexy. Yeah, and

Gwen C. Katz

and clearly, we’ll probably try again, since they didn’t go the first time. And now that they know that they’re not going to get punished or investigated at all, and they can totally get away with it, right? And they go on their hunger strike, and they start doing all their wacky magical rituals on their own and stuff, and kind of come into their own power. But too late for mod Moore’s the pity,

R.S. Benedict

too late for mod mod who who was a rebel her whole life. Yeah, the death of mod is, like, heartbreaking, legit.

Gwen C. Katz

It is fair. It is I do appreciate that. The big question they have when they all learn, learn mods, old story, the part of it they’re really confused about is just, why would she pick the name mod? That’s a terrible name.

R.S. Benedict

Pick something cooler. Yeah, if

Gwen C. Katz

you’re going to going to live as a woman like surely the the big benefit there is that you could give yourself the raddest name you want. Why would you pick Maude? Yeah, although it didn’t seem to be very good cover, it was. It

R.S. Benedict

was very good cover. It was very effective. A lot of people wanted Maude dead for for her crimes, for her drug smuggling,

Gwen C. Katz

yeah, and she got to spend, spend her twilight years, yeah, secret, secretly hooking up with her girlfriend, who’s who’s also in the institution and and doing needlepoint and being an adorable little old lady, you know,

R.S. Benedict

enviable up until she gets murdered. I guess, you know, up until that it’s a it’s a pretty sick life. It’s pretty sweet. Yeah, war mode.

Gwen C. Katz

So we do see, like really, really strong anti institutional themes in this book, for sure, and it’s both, yeah, yeah, both the institution, also the Knights Templar and the church and the religious orders, like the nuns and all of these institutions are [tape runs out]

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In honor of Super Bowl Sunday, we have football understanders Langdon of Death // Sentence and poem criminal Ashely Adams on to talk about Jon Bois’ unique multimedia sci-fi story 17776.

Links:* 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future * 20020: The Future of College Football * Cherokee Stickball * What the heck is a catch in the NFL, anyway? * 17776: Questions and Answers * Gremlins 2 demonstrates how to deal with annoying story questions * Death // Sentence * Lammergeier Magazine

About Rite Gud: R. S. Benedict is an author, appearing in Fantasy and Science Fiction and Gardner Dozois’ The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction. Matt Keeley, founder of Kittysneezes, is producing Rite Gud for KS Media, LLC. Rite Gud is a Kittysneezes production. If you have questions, comments and concerns, email ritegud – at – kittysneezes – dot – com. Rite Gud is also on Patreon, at http://patreon.kittysneezes.com. Patrons receive access to the official Kittysneezes Discord, exclusive episodes and more.

The Rite Gud theme is by OK Glass. Follow them on Twitter, YouTube and Bandcamp, and at OK.Glass.

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[00:00:00]

R.S.: Welcome to this month’s bonus episode of Rite Gud, the podcast that helps you write good. I’m R. S. Benedict. In honor of Super Bowl Sunday, we’re taking a look at John Bois’ unique online speculative, multimedia project, story, experience thing, 17,776. I don’t [00:01:00]know a thing about sports, so today I have with me Football Understanders Langdon of Death Sentence and poem criminal Ashely Adams. Thank you both for coming on to talk about football. As part of my, uh, I guess, feminine duties,

I will make you both Totino’s Pizza rolls while you talk about the game.

Langdon: I am scared of Totinos. Thank you.

R.S.: Good.

Ashely: John Madden au.

Langdon: Uh, touchdown. Touchdown. There should be an A S M R, football broadcast. I’m like, and he’s passing to number 11,

Ashely: Oh, I don’t like ASMR, but I I might get me into that.

R.S.: Alright,

Ashely: We’re already

R.S.: I brought you two on cuz I figured somebody involved in this should know something about football cuz I, I don’t know very much about it all at all. And that’s not an impediment to enjoying and, and, and to enjoying this story or whatever you wanna call it. It’s fantastic. We’ve got people who [00:02:00]are not American and are used to the kind of football that you play with your feet.

Like a total basic bitch, I guess. And they’re still enjoying it, So you do not have to be a

Ashely: CTE is minimal. They’re minimal CTE. That’s not a sport to me.

Langdon: right?

R.S.: Right.

Langdon: You’re not sacrificing bodies on the altar of football in that dumb scrub ass game. What? You got a bunch of fucking circles. Dumb. We got oval

R.S.: Yeah. Hello? Harley. Harley is also here. He’s

Ashely: Hell yes. Ask Carly what his favorite football team is,

R.S.: Harley, who’s your favorite team? He refuses to answer.

Ashely: or how does he feel about the, the, Eagles versus the Chiefs. Who’s he, who’s he betting on?

R.S.: Who are you betting on? Cat? He’s not a gambler. He’s not a gambling man. just looking up at me with cat eyes. Okay.

Langdon: Risk averse cat,

R.S.: risk averse cat. That’s right. Cat. Watch, my cat turns out to be a total fedora bro. And is like, “oh, the sporps [00:03:00] ball? You’re interested in the sporps ball?”

Ashely: Is

R.S.: “Good .”

Ashely: I dunno if this is silly, but because we do have people that are not in the football or slash or aren’t American, should we briefly just explain the core concept of a football for everybody? Is that silly?

Langdon: I can definitely handle. So you gotta get the, the ball into the point scoring region. And when you do that more times, you’re the winner, baby. And that’s a football.

R.S.: Yeah.

Ashely: And it’s more, it ends up being much more complicated, but just know that is the idea is that you want to… offense tries to get the ball into their end zone, the defense tries to stop them. There’s some kicking sometimes and there’s lots of tackling and

R.S.: Lots of passing,

Ashely: yeah. Oh yeah. Well, good games have lots of passing, you know,

R.S.: lots of things where somehow, despite there being 15 minutes on the clock, the game will last an additional three hours. I’m not really sure how that works.

Langdon: power. True power. [00:04:00] Radiant power.

R.S.: It’s pretty

Langdon: This is, this is a miracle of sports

Ashely: And by the miracle we mean, uh, designated commercial breaks mostly.

R.S.: There’s

Langdon: it’s, um, that, that nature of football of like the, the point, the half joking thing I said about the point scoring region is more that like, that is the fundamental underpinning of 99% of sports. Even something like combat sports, you can phrase almost as though your hands and feet are the ball and the point scoring region is the regions of the body you’re allowed to contact in order to get points in like a, a sparring situation.

But that general fundament. Get ball to point zone. Do that most. You win.

Excepting golf, which isn’t a sport

because points are bad.

Ashely: Yeah. Also, again, as we, I, I think Raquel, you said you, you really don’t need a super great understanding of football too. Like basically if you understand the core concept of Get Ball to point area, you’ll [00:05:00]enjoy a 1,707, is it 1700, 776 specifically? Cause that actually never, we’ll get into it, but that like never happens.

And that’s not even necessarily the goal of most of the games in.

R.S.: Yeah. I don’t think anyone scores a point over the entire thing. I don’t think anybody wins a game. I don’t think anybody scores a point

Ashely: and some of the game structures have nothing to do with getting a, a, b. Some of them are, do you have an end zone? A very ridiculous end zone goal, but some of ’em are just like, collect an object or be there to catch the thing. It’s very silly

Langdon: I can’t wait till we get, I can’t wait till I get to bring up one of my favorite books that I never get to bring up in most contexts, by James Carse. Because I’m god damn certain that either, Bois or his, uh, or his parents read Finite and Infinite Games,

R.S.: Hmm.

Langdon: fucking stoked.

R.S.: Yeah.

Langdon: Let’s get on with it.

R.S.: So let’s get on with it. So this, this story, if you wanna call it a story, it’s hard to call it a story. It came out in, I think [00:06:00]2017, and it got really big on social media. It was really, really popular, and I saw a ton of people from all walks of life getting super into it. It was unsurprisingly ignored by the Hugos.

I think it made the long list at number 11, but was ignored and didn’t make the finalist. And if you’re wondering why, what I will say is that every story but one in the, in its category, the best novella category on the Hugos that year were published by tor.com. The only one that wasn’t published by tor.com was on Uncanny.

So that’s why. Because it wasn’t put out by the inner clique . I’m gonna sound really paranoid when I say that, but I think that’s really the case cuz it absolutely deserved to win it. This story does something fascinating in that it really uses the medium, it uses the platform of the internet in a way that’s incredibly effective.

Most internet fiction is just a story that’s put online. Sometimes you get some hypertext stuff, sometimes you get a little text art. [00:07:00] But this one is, it’s almost an a multimedia project, as corny as that sounds it. The bulk of it is taking the form of chat logs between our three main characters, nine, 10, and Juice, who are all three satellites.

But it also incorporates little YouTube videos, Google Maps, Google Earth, images, animated gifs, sound text art. There’s a lot of really interesting formatting going on, and there’s a real shunning of traditional narrative structure. There’s– this really doesn’t follow, like inciting incident, climax, resolution very much.

It’s, “let’s just look around at some weird fucking shit. What’s what? What’s football gonna look like in the future?” And it’s such a unique and interesting experience and such a unique and wonderfully strange vibe.

Langdon: It structurally is formatted a hell of a lot like if Jennifer Egan made, um, internet fiction. Jennifer Egan is the woman who her huge claim to [00:08:00] fame was A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer and a bunch of other prizes. And famously that one was, um, more of a mosaic novel, which is sort of a formal structure where, you can think of it as halfway between a short story collection and a novel where it’s all these elements linked together.

But there isn’t necessarily an overarching narrative. It’s more images of life. But I mentioned her because structurally a thing that she did in A Visit from the Goon Squad and picked up again in its semi sequel The Candy House was like one chapter in Visit from the Goon Squad is written in the form of printouts of a PowerPoint presentation, as in Jennifer Egan herself, made a PowerPoint presentation and then had screen caps of each of the

Ashely: Oh, that is so fucking cool.

Langdon: And it’s it, it’s done that way because it’s the daughter of a record executive whose brother, who is the son of, of obviously of the record executive as well, has [00:09:00] just committed suicide because of feeling abandoned by their dad. And one daughter has gone off the rails as well. And it’s the one daughter trying to go, like, “you won’t listen to us talking to you as people.

So I’m going to create a business pitch to you about how you’ve been an absentee father that drove our family into ruin.”

R.S.: God damn.

Langdon: Yeah. And so it’s presented as this PowerPoint presentation. Incredible fucking novelist. But it’s, it’s that same kind of thing where it’s like, I think this is ragged or sat in the back of everyone’s head after you read someone like Borges where, who’s writing very much…

there’s been a lot written about how Borges wrote basically hypertext fiction before we had that as a technology, like Library of Babel and The Aleph and all that talking about basically the conditions of the internet age, a post digital panopticon version of cognition. And then, we get the internet and everyone’s like, “oh God, it’s gonna happen.”

And then we get, I don’t know, [00:10:00]David Cage. We get I don’t know, the Last of Us, which is like a pretty dope TV show. But that was not a great game. Mostly cuz you had to chug Vicodin to level up and that was funny as hell. Um, You’re like, I can only get stronger if I have 17 more Vicodin

Ashely: Oh, funnily enough, that’s also how it works in football, I think.

Langdon: That is true. Yeah. Say we all come full

Ashely: that might be the only way to Chiefs win the Super Bowl is to gimo give Mahomes like, uh, here you go. Like, have some,

Langdon: if Mahomes wins the Super Bowl through the God-given talents of the pharmaceutical industry and a lot of, looking the other way in the medical wing, then he will join a wide and esteemed group of quarterbacks who have done exactly the same.

But yeah, the, the formal conceit of 17,776 feels a hell of a lot more, like if someone read Borge and actually went, what if I did that?

Ashely: yeah, and I wanted to

R.S.: for football,

Ashely: Yeah. I just wanna

R.S.: is great.

Ashely: [00:11:00] too for, uh, John Bois. that’s, uh, I think we talked about too, like you read his stuff and you’re like, “how the hell can this exist?” I, I don’t wanna like take away that he is a fantastic writer and craftsperson and doing some really cool stuff.

But I think that example, is a great, like they bringing up examples of author doing similar of things shows that he’s not like uniquely brilliant, but how important it is to find a space that actually can let you do those things and foster that. And

R.S.: it’s incredibly cool that SB Nation

Ashely: Yeah,

R.S.: this is, which is a sport website. It’s a sport journalism website. A sport reporting website says, “yes. We will put your fucking weird ass story up here. We are game. Let’s do”

Ashely: this isn’t the on– this is different, but he’s always doing kind of weird– he’s really interested in the storytelling aspect. and bringing in statistics is a big thing. Definitely go on YouTube and check out, he does videos, I think chart parties is one word.

You will sit there and end up watching a 50 minute video about him justifying what’s the, [00:12:00] the most pathetic punt in N F L history and it’s so good.

Langdon: He makes multi-part mega documentaries about sports teams as well. He made one for the Mariners. It was six hours long. And one for the Falcons. It was about seven hours long. Fucking incredible. It’s the same kind of storytelling, but with all real world details. I mean, there’s, there’s a reason why Best American, which has best American short stories, best American poetry, all that kind of stuff.

They’ve had a best American sports writing volume that comes out every year just the same as all of the others, because I think that that’s mostly for people who live outside of the world of sports. We can understand the notion of really great creative nonfiction about a person’s relationship to quilting, to, to catfish, and to everglade biological preservation and to mountaineering and all these things [00:13:00]that you may not give a shit about, but you’re like, I know “someone can tell me a great compelling human story about their connection to it.” But for whatever– well, we kind of all know the reason.

There’s a whole wing of people that when they hear sports, their brain goes, ” there are no good human stories in that entire world.” Even though sporting is one of the few categories of human play and human interaction that is quite literally pan cultural. The sport may be different, but sporting is universal.

Ashely: I mean, that’s what drives us back to it is always the narrative. That’s what we always look for. Every Super Bowl is the, the good story. You know, the underdog comes up. Yeah. Sports ball can be good writing

Langdon: It’s funny because learning to love something like the N B A or the N F L or something like that is touching on a raw nerve here, a hell of a lot, like learning to love science fiction or fantasy. It doesn’t mean that you ignore all the weird fucked up structural [00:14:00] problems.

Good lord, no. The more you love it, the more painfully apparent all of those are.

R.S.: should talk about a little bit later in, in terms of the wickedness of football. But yeah, sports nerds are a kind of nerd. They’re absolutely a

kind of nerd.

Ashely: Oh, the hugest nerd.

R.S.: You talk to sport guys, they’re all memorizing statistics going on and on and on, about the minutiae and the lore.

Talking to sport, listening to sports guys talk about sports is not that different from listening to a bunch of nerds talk about, don’t know, the Silmarillion or something. It’s just, oh, their thing is in the real world, at least

Langdon: I felt at home when I, it clicked in my head. I’m like, oh, every single person who loves sports is autistic as fuck. Okay. Yeah. No, I actually do belong here. This is, these are my people. It’s just memorizing numbers and doing math. Oh my God. Why didn’t you tell me

Ashely: That’s why girls can’t be in sports. Girls don’t like math. They like to, they like to cook. Totino’s pizza rolls.

R.S.: girls don’t have autism ever, according to [00:15:00]psychologists,

I guess.

Ashely: I was gonna, I was gonna,

Langdon: that’s,

Ashely: When I, when I read something like John Bois’ stuff, it is so permeated with his, and I say this in a very complimentary way as someone that does non-fiction, his weirdness and obsession. And that’s like, I remember, it was the Hugos and Nebulas had one story that was based around solving a math equation.

And I wanted to read something John Bois wrote, which is so weird, so obsessive, so entrenched in the Lang— like everything’s told with that language of statistics and a love for that language. It’s really brilliant. Like I said, if you want, if you wanna learn how to write really compelling hard sci-fi, go listen to John Bois or read 1700,

R.S.: Yeah. It really does have the same tone as hard sci-fi.

Langdon: yeah, I mean that’s sort of the thing that we get to when it comes to… this touches on previous discussions that we’ve had, that you’ve had all over this and that, like I’ve even been part of, of questions about world building, about [00:16:00] talking about how to build the spaceship or how the spaceship works or things like that, which are typical craft problems.

And this is like a sterling example of… This is more a condemnation of a hell of a lot of writers, more than a compliment to anyone else. This kind of proves that you really can get as much into the nitty gritty as you would like. You just have to make me give a fuck.

R.S.: Yeah.

Langdon: And there’s a level of passion and there’s a level of, I’m not telling you this for its own sake.

I also want to make– and this comes from if you do good journalism writing, it naturally overlaps with good creative non-fiction writing, where it’s like, I need to make legible to someone outside of a field why inside baseball matters.

R.S.: Yeah. Here’s why this story’s important. Here’s why you should care about this.

Langdon: Yeah. It’s one of the number one things you learn in a journalism story is, or a, or a school. It’s like, why should I care? That is a fundamental structural component.

R.S.: Why is this [00:17:00] news? Why are we devoting space to this and not to some other story?

Langdon: and it turns out that’s just good writing advice. If you include a detail, I should care about that detail.

R.S.: I think that’s how Kurt Vonnegut learned writing. I think a little bit of how George Orwell learned, I know he’s, he’s canceled for various reasons. But they were journalists. These were people who trained in communicating to broad audiences in really straightforward ways. So it also really affected their prose.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s case, he used a lot of very simple language. He didn’t use a lot of $10 words, but could still get across these really thoughtful, nuanced, complex ideas using incredibly basic vocabulary of, “so it goes.”

Langdon: A classic thing classic thing with Hemingway as well. His best period of fiction writing, that before he went into hyper-masculine as psychosis and killed himself, , um, came right after he was a war [00:18:00]correspondent. That’s where you have his really rich writing about World War, the conditions of World War I and the mindset of people after World War I is, he was still very much in journalism mode and not “my balls don’t work” mode, which would, would kill him later, which is really funny to me.

Ashely: maybe his balls don’t work cuz of World War I. They were gassing up people a lot. Did

Langdon: it, it actually was he, he got hit with grenade. He got hit with grenade shrapnel and it fucked up his dick. That’s why that detail’s in The Sun Also Rises. That’s a semi autobiographical pit.

Ashely: Oh, Well, I was gonna say, I mean, me, me and Langdon have had this conversation, I think multiple times about how getting good at non-fiction, like creative, non-fiction, even, even if you’re like, I will never write it for a career or really make it my central point, it will make you better at everything else.

Because non-fiction really forces you, I think it is the, it lays bare the most, the constructedness of writing. And non-fiction is like, okay, you have a real event, but you have to make it a [00:19:00]compelling story. So it’s the most, like, I have to be aware of fiction constructs and putting stuff together.

Um, and I say that as my thesis was in creative non-fiction, specifically hybrid stuff. So you brought me in as a football understander, but honestly, I’m, I’m also more of this the multimedia stuff and stuff I am really into. And I really appreciated being asked on it because I started this and a while ago and I, I liked it, but it just kind of, it is long, for an online piece.

So it’s really easy to be like, oh, this is so great. Let me come to it later. And then you can forget because you’re like, oh, I gotta open up another tab. It’s

R.S.: yeah. Where am I? Where am I in this? What the hell is going on?

Ashely: It’s 2017, so, uh, Trump is probably tweeting something I gotta go look at, you know, whatever.

R.S.: Yeah. So maybe we should talk a little bit about what this story, if you wanna call it that is.

So the story is 17,776. It is the year 17,776, and people stopped dying in the [00:20:00] year 2026. And a good bit of America’s underwater, of the United States is underwater.

Other countries apparently built sea walls, but we didn’t. We didn’t bother. And no one has died in thousands of years. No one has been born in thousands of years. People don’t get sick anymore. People don’t get hurt anymore, thanks to a bunch of nanobots that take care of us. And I love the detail that you can see them like pollen in the wind.

They’re just ambiently there. So what the fuck do we do with our time now that we’re gonna live forever? We just play football. We just play really big crazy games of football and I, I, I think it’s kind of sharp to have an outsider character being our viewpoint character. In this case, the satellite Pioneer Nine, which was built by NASA in the 1960s awakens because machines all achieve sentience eventually, and it just wakes up and starts watching football cuz there’s nothing else to do.

Langdon: And what’s beautiful is all of that’s sort of presented in the [00:21:00]opening and in terms of narrative forward motion, basically nothing else happens. There are chapter length vignettes that sort of will follow a character as they go about things. There’s eventually a super big tornado that whips a minor character all the way across the United States, and then they have a long trek back.

And you get really cool vignettes from there, but there isn’t really much in the way of, an overarching narrative. It very much feels more like a, a combination of photo montage and travel logue of this fictional future society,

Ashely: It’s basically a story, its structure also replicates, its kind of content, is that what do you do in a post scarcity, post mortality world? And also kind of stymied by the reality of like, they do talk at some point cuz they’re, they’re probes in space.

So it comes up, well why don’t the humans leave? Well, you see how big space is. Even if they left, it’s gonna be a long time before they [00:22:00] see it that they, they ever see anything. So it’s kinda like, I don’t know, why not play football?

R.S.: Yeah.

Langdon: He, he winds up doing a really smart thing that, much worse sci-fi writers tend to miss out, which is– fantasy writers as well. It’s like, why do we write fantasy? Why do we write science fiction? And it’s ultimately because we are not writing about fictional people or the future. We’re writing about our own thoughts and anxieties and concerns and lives and things like that.

But through this kind of valence, it requires a level of self-awareness that that’s what you’re doing. Even when you’re scare, quote, just writing escapism, there’s the invisible object of what you’re escaping from that’s sort of captured in what you’re escaping to. It requires you to actually think about what the fuck you’re doing in order to know that and which a lot of people don’t for some reason.

Um, but he very clearly did. He very clearly. This is sort of the benefit of, it’s fascinating to talk to someone who doesn’t really know about [00:23:00] football with this, because it felt very much to me like football was more the palette and he was more writing about the thought of… so he’s grappling with a general existential thing.

Unless you’re dumb, you have a level of death anxiety. The big spooky one, the thing no one likes thinking about too much, but then it, in the wake of that, in the wake of any kind of awareness of death, anxiety, it becomes like, why do I have the life that I have? Like, why

R.S.: Sorry, I have to ask, I have to interrupt. Is, is somebody’s dog jangling

Langdon: That’s mine. In our

stop in our, she just got a haircut so now she looks like a little bear, um,

R.S.: Oh, is that your tiny cat size dog?

Langdon: That’s right. That’s right. She’s even tinier now.

R.S.: She’s so small.

Langdon: That’s right. Lay down like a little lamb chop.

R.S.: Okay, cool. That’s, that’s just, I thought, are someone’s keys jingling

or is that a dog?

Langdon: No, I just have a very good microphone [00:24:00] and a very beautiful dog

R.S.: Very good.

Langdon: Um, but you start asking the question and after you have that kind of moment of death awareness of like, why am I living the life that I do? Why don’t I just walk out of my job or walk out of these social circles that give me so much anxiety?

Why do I let myself get tied down into, and eventually you get kind of, you get answers to it, but it felt very much like that was what he was looking at. It’s like given our finite time, an interesting way to examine why we do the things we do and why we find meaning from them might be the invert.

What if someone had infinite time, do they do something different, or do they just learn to really dial into why we do the things with finite time that we do. And that’s the kind of thing that literary writers write about all the time, but they don’t have nanobot clouds and infinite football, so they’re worse.

Ashely: Yeah, I was gonna say , this is, this does explore I think some heavy existential things, but also it’s very charming and [00:25:00]humorous. Don’t get so bummed out. I mean, I love Juice so much, which is the, uh, what is it? Jupiter, Icy moon Explorer, which a lot of those names, I, I don’t know why they call it Juice.

Cause I’m like, well Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer has a lot of letters in there that aren’t, wouldn’t equal Juice, but whatever. So his dialogue’s great. The games are very funny. Like I said, even if you don’t really get football, it start, it starts off again. The other playing– all– they have default games, but all of the default games will be like, well, one end zone is in another, across the country.

Another one’s over here. There’s one where they’ve been playing in a, a gorge for like 10,000 years, which I think is super funny.

Langdon: That’s my, that’s my favorite or second favorite one that

they

Ashely: the, they play in a regular stadium, but other people own parts of the stadium, so they have to try to play around this weird… like capitalism doesn’t really exist, but people still kind of play at it because they feel like it. So they’re like, yeah, well we’re gonna do a weird monopoly on this stadium and you have

Langdon: well it’s funny cuz [00:26:00] the, they live in like a post scarcity society. So the threat of , what if we play around with certain, business forms or stuff like that, there isn’t one anymore cuz you’re not actually going to put anyone at risk of unemployment or hunger. So as a result, they have a semi feudalism that’s occurring inside of the stadium.

So you have to go around a chicken restaurant that is fully operational in the middle of the stadium, and talking about how

R.S.: Yeah, and there are condos rented out to tenants or something like that.

Langdon: There’s a house that’s in the middle that wasn’t part of the stadium and due to expanse, there just is a house that is in the middle of a football game.

Ashely: there’s, there’s one game where, there’s a rule that basically if someone holds onto the ball for, in their ed zone for was it like thir like 15,000 years or something like that, they automatically wins. So you find one character who’s basically been in a cave for like 10,000 years. Funny enough is being door to door evangelized, which is very [00:27:00] funny.

And then it kind of falls apart because it’s like, what does God mean when you don’t die?

R.S.: Yeah, no one’s going to Heaven. It doesn’t matter.

Langdon: There’s a beautiful bit where a ball gets whisked away. I, I think the whole, if I remember correctly, the tornado thing was it’s a current player who’s holding the ball, gets hit with the tornado, and that’s why they have to make, the journey, because technically they’re still in play,

Ashely: Yeah.

Langdon: but no one knows where they are or where the

R.S.: just hanging out. She’s just having a beer, taking it easy.

Ashely: And that’s the thing too, is that in this, everybody gets to play football because John Bois was like, I think that, not to get too in the weeds, but I thought the way he handled quote unquote diversity was good. Cuz it’s a, well it’s less that I’m doing a thing cuz I think it’s good.

Which I think he does care about that, but also because duh, that’s this good craft and good world building. Cuz yeah if there was a future where nobody died, why wouldn’t women be playing football? What the fuck else are they? Like why wouldn’t 60? Well, [00:28:00]When they stopped aging, why wouldn’t 60 year old equivalent women be playing football?

Why

R.S.: Yeah, one, one of the star players is this little old lady named Nancy, who just hurls herself, she hurls herself deliberately into the tornado. She’s not just picked up. She like fucking makes a break for it cuz there’s no, she’s surrounded by the opposing team. She’s got nowhere to go except chaos.

Langdon: Yeah, you have players that embrace the whole like, well, I’m small and because football fields will be like thousands of miles long and include whole passages of real just functioning towns and stuff. People will attempt to sneak by by acting completely normal and hiding the football on their person.

R.S.: But, but local people, if they spot you, if you’re sort of in the opposing team’s city or something, people will catch you, try and rat on you or something while you’re trying to be sneaky. It, it’s really great. It’s just this really [00:29:00] detailed, well thought out everything world that’s really funny and strange and, and offbeat. And the way they give us the viewpoint character of Pioneer Nine who has been asleep for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years, I think is well handled because,

well, who would be the viewpoint character? You’d need a viewpoint character who’s not familiar with any of this. Can’t be an alien because we’ve established, at least in this, that we’re not able to make contact. We have not been able to make contact. The universe is just too big, so it’s just satellites who become sentient for no reason and they like football for no reason, and that’s

Ashely: Yeah. makes great sense with the themes cuz a lot of it is exploring , what does it mean to exist and stuff like that. So why not have some things that were not, why not have robots , or at least probes come to life. It fits so well. It doesn’t feel like– it is a device, but it doesn’t feel like– what it feels so naturally ingrained into the [00:30:00] structure of this weird story.

R.S.: and that they’re floating over and sort of looking at the whole world while it’s doing this.

Langdon: yeah, he, he does a very classic science fiction, 1940s, 1950s structural conceit from sci-fi, which is you have the non-human witness, the human in order to see what it is to be human. I’m not gonna say trope. It’s an archetypal form. There we go. I can use my big boy words. I did go into so much debt to learn these words.

um, uh, it’s an archetypal form that’s sort of as old as the genre. And then he pairs it against this very Faulknerian folk narrative. And then this kubrickian bit of, or I like how it goes back and forth with the satellites of, sometimes it feels kubrickian and other times it feels almost like a frat novel.

R.S.: Yeah, it does

Langdon: the boys chilling in space,

R.S.: It absolutely is like Boys Chat, where they’re just dunking on each other. The bulk of this storytelling is done through a chat with these three space [00:31:00] probes that are just dunking on each other and pestering each other and making fun of each other. And then all of a sudden you’ll get a reminder, oh this, this one is millions of miles away and just getting further away, and it’s just floating in the void and it’s just gonna keep floating in the void for another million

Ashely: The structure of how it’s set up on the page, I think does such a good job to give you that feeling. The introduction is like you start you– it’s really brilliant. It’s what I think one of my

R.S.: Yes. It’s so, it just throws you in there

Ashely: Yeah. You start reading something that’s looks like a normal SB article and as soon as you scroll down, all of a sudden it black from the te– it, the text blows up and takes over the screen and it’s like “something is wrong.

Something is wrong,” and you scroll and you finally get to a calendar and it’s just like, uh, Pioneer Nine. Just being like some, what the fuck’s

R.S.: Well, it’s a calendar in ’43, but it doesn’t tell us what century. It’s ’43, so we’re thinking 1943. Okay. And somebody’s talking and some somebody else is talking to them. We don’t know who [00:32:00] it is. We don’t know why. All we know is that they don’t get a message very often.

Ashely: right.

R.S.: And

then many, many decades go by. It’s the seventies.

We don’t know which

Ashely: you’re scrolling. You’re scrolling. So even the text gives you this really empty, lonely kind of creepy feeling. And then when it finally kicks into what most of the thing that’s structured around is like this texty dialogue sort of thing, I feel relieved cuz it’s like, oh people, people quote unquote are here.

They’re talking and it’s not alone anymore. And then, but then you get moments too where they like are reminded , Hey, we’re floating in the dead of space. And you’re like, it Oh, oh, you’re never gonna see anything ever again. Oh my god.

R.S.: Yeah, and, and moments of that with the humans too. People are kind of doing okay. And then occasionally someone will see a picture of a baby and just have a, a difficult time because no one has seen a baby in 15,000 years approximately.

Langdon: I,

R.S.: been no babies.

Langdon: I really love the, how this, so this functions as a [00:33:00]kind of structural sequel to an earlier piece that he made called, ” What in the Hell Is a Catch in the N F L anyway?” That article got written in the midst of, Ashley will remember. There was, a period in which, for non-sports fans, I’m going to describe it in your language.

A man throws a ball. A second man catches the ball and falls down and they declare it an incomplete pass because he didn’t catch the ball. And you watch the footage and you go, “yep, he caught that ball.” And they go, “as you can see, he didn’t catch the ball.” And you’re like, “are the refs gaslighting me?” And this became this huge fervor because it was one of those things where you’re like, “I’ve seen this footage.”

If they had gotten that touchdown, they would’ve won. It becomes this big thing cuz , hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions of people are watching it going, ” isn’t that what a catch is? It’s in his hands, he tucks it to his body and he falls down. That’s a catch, right?”[00:34:00]

And then this gets into the reality of, the rules of the N F L. So, sports bodies have different approaches to the legalist, philosophical approach of rules. God, I love sports . Um, and certain ones are a bit more loosey-goosey, like the, a bit more human interpretive, but football, the N F L, for whatever reason, has really dialed in to strict, almost supreme court level legalist interpretations of the rules of what does the language say, not what does the interpretation say.

And this leads to all the same kinds of legal and linguistic nihilism in football as it does in American politics. Where you go, all it takes is someone to adequately argue, oh, that word that we all know what it means, or that phrase that we all know what it means was never legally defined in the rules.

So a catch. [00:35:00] Isn’t necessarily when your hands go around a ball and you have it. Now we have like

Ashely: it’s about the feet and control and stuff like that,

Langdon: and you’re like, what? No, that’s a catch. I’m looking at it and

Ashely: Uh, well, you all were complaining that it didn’t have enough feet in football. So here you go. Here’s

your feet.

Langdon: And so all of a sudden all these articles are getting written trying to explain to a layperson why that wasn’t technically a catch in football. And John Bois responds to these by doing the only rational thing, writing an existential piece of creative non-fiction, called, “What the Hell is the Catch in the N F L Anyway?”

Where same thing as, as you’re scrolling down, he’s talking about, here’s the history of rule making in the N F L and their philosophical approach to the rules. And you get to a point, and literally he’s coded it so that the H T M L frame for the website breaks and blows off the page.

And then it becomes a picture of the crab nebula, like [00:36:00] literally. And as you keep scrolling, you’re like, what the fuck is happening? It starts popping up words in Courier New and talking about existentialism in the history of games and game making and. Just this really wild piece, a much shorter one.

It’s only the one page, but it basically gets at, there is no reason for something to be or not to be a catch, because football is a game that we play and one of the many meta games wrapped up within the game is the game of rule making about the game. This is one that, again, to touch on, a favorite topic of us shows up also a lot in the world of science fiction and fantasy.

What constitutes a good story craft wise or politically wise? What constitutes an award worthy story? And that’s as much a game of rule making, li literally a game. It’s not objective. It is quite literally a game. And when someone goes, well, that’s why this one beat out that one, you go, [00:37:00] that’s entirely phraseological .

There’s nothing inherent about that. And they, if they’re self-aware, they go, yeah. They never do, but if they were, they would do that. But it’s sort of, it felt like he looked at that and went, “I have two notes for myself. One, it should be way longer. It should be long as fuck. It should be long as fuck.

Two. I should have dudes broing out in it. That’s what I was missing. And Nancy, I need Nancy”

Ashely: I think he does say that there’s a really good interview about his process, which I was so glad Raquel sent us. Cuz I was like, that’s what I want to know. And

Langdon: ha I didn’t know that article was a thing at all yet.

Thank you a lot for sending that Raquel.

Ashely: Because it’s something I, I was like, I need to find, I need the director’s commentary for this. But yeah, he was tooling around with this idea, but he really needed characters to be the narrators and protagonists and that’s what what it finally clicked was when he said he figured out, cuz he was al also upset.

Again, chase your obsessions, chase your weirdness. Cause he is like, I thought space probes were really [00:38:00]cool. So I was like, I’m gonna put that in my story. Just to fucking do it. Be weird for God’s sakes. That’s the thing that, one of the things nonfiction really teaches you is be fucking weird.

Cause that’s what makes it interesting.

Langdon: It also gave him on the craft end all these different vantage points to, for any given. So one of the other creative non-fiction things and journalism things as well that creative writers would be, would behoove themselves to learn is asking yourself what is the story? And then the secondary question that follows up, what is the most interesting or illuminating way to pursue that story.

And when you ask yourself what is the story, you can start finding it anywhere. It’s like, why do I have mismatched China? and you can now all of a sudden explain your weird history with, poverty and conflicting family legacies and inheritance from friends that you can, you can start dialing into this really wild thing about what it is to be human.

Cuz you looked at your China cabinet and went, oh, none of my shit [00:39:00] matches. You just have to know how to look for that story. But then he gave himself on the craft end, the tools of all these different styles and voices that he could tap into and perspectives he could tap into. So it became like, who would be the most interesting person to tell this set of events . And then I’m sitting there thinking, damn, this was so smartly crafted.

And then that gets blown out of my mind when again he starts talking about “yeah, this game got derailed cuz their chicken restaurant became so popular. Even the players were eating there and they forgot that they were playing football. And this went on for hundreds of years. Delicious, delicious chicken.”

And I’m like, oh yeah, I love chicken too, man.

Ashely: There’s a part later on where you get the one real death in this is the… though they’re playing one game, and the idea is like, it’s based on this game where you throw the ball up in the air as high as you go, and whoever catches it, gets the point and eventually can take over.

[00:40:00] And

R.S.: This one’s shot out of a cannon in Alaska.

Ashely: like on fucking Mount McKinley or, uh, sorry, Denali. That’s actually in the story as they mention it being renamed Denali. So,

R.S.: Yeah, cuz being president isn’t a big deal anymore cuz there’s been so many of them. Cuz it’s thousands of years

Ashely: and also McKinley never even fucking visited that mountain. It’s stupid. But they’re on, they’re on Denali and uh, the ball comes down. The ball’s a huge, massive thing, right? Like, it’s not a regular ball,

R.S.: It’s enormous.

Ashely: Right. And so it ends up landing. It’s actually this really, it’s really beautiful bittersweet sort of thing where it’s this person that’s never gotten a point, in the whole history of the game and finally is gonna get it.

And it’s kind of that like, oh, it’s been so long. And the news is coming and it lands on this one building which has the longest running light bulb, and ends up killing the bulb. But it’s the one death we experience and the satellites are crushed cuz they consider it kind of their ancestor.

I don’t know where I was going with this, but I think it’s this, I think [00:41:00] it’s uh, well yeah, cuz John Bois– People were like, well, what’s with the light bulb? And he was like, oh, I read about it and I thought it was cool.

R.S.: Yeah, I mean, it is real.

That is

a real thing. This light bulb that’s been burning since I think 1904 or something ridiculous. Oddly long time like.

Langdon: It’s especially because people have taken it down and looked at it and gone , “I don’t even know why it still works.” They’re like someone, there’s gotta be something. But it looks like it’s a normal ass light bulb that just, it won’t burn out. It just, it keeps working.

R.S.: And it was made by this company that at the time made light bulbs to last, which is probably why they went outta business. Because people would just buy one light bulb from them and then would not have to buy another light bulb ever again.

Langdon: you’re like, fuck, we built a communist, business model on the land of capitalism. We’re stupid. Fuck.

R.S.: Which is so weird to think that. I mean, as a kid, I, growing up with old timey light bulbs, oh yeah. They burn out really soon. It, it didn’t occur to me that that wasn’t necessary, that that’s a deliberate choice by manufacturers. That if [00:42:00] they, if you want to, we know how to make a light bulb that lasts a hundred years.

We just don’t.

Langdon: Yeah. One of the weird things of political awakening for me that eventually turned my brother kind of libertarian and turned me commie. Funny how that happens. um, was finding out, that light bulb lobbies are weirdly big in terms of pushing different regulations through as pork onto bills that basically affect, the viability of different technologies regarded to lighting technology.

That’s one of the reasons why L E D lights got sort of– we’d had the technology for L E D or home halogen lights for a while, but we just didn’t roll them out. Due to basically, market end fear that if you put out a really good light bulb, then every light bulb manufacturer will go out of business.

R.S.: Yeah.

Langdon: There’s a level that he taps into here that feels like it had to have come from, this book, that short version. My dad had the [00:43:00]weirdest scholarly history in the world. He came back from the Vietnam War. He was mad as fuck about having been duped into going to the Vietnam War.

Normal reaction, I think shitty war, bad. You convince a bunch of 18 year olds to go, live through a hellish war game in a jungle for no fucking reason. No. They’re gonna come back mad. Pretty classic. Bounces around college, gets a whole bunch of different classes, never gets a degree.

As a result, had a whole bunch of different books in the house, including a bunch of religious texts from like religious studies. I mentioned that because there was a really big book in religious studies in the eighties that came out that had a weird pop culture or window for like four years and then just disappeared, called Finite and Infinite Games.

And I feel like he must have read this book. The whole thesis of it is basically that there’s two kinds of games, finite and infinite games. A finite game is a game that has rules and the goal is to win the game. And an infinite game of which there’s [00:44:00] only one and that’s being alive, is to play the game.

There isn’t winning. There’s just playing. You lose when you are removed from the game by dying or through social ostracization or things like that. But the goal is just to play. And looking at life as basically a series of, you can use that notion of a finite game as social interactions where there’s rules of acceptable decorum and unacceptable decorum.

And if you violate the rules, you scare, quote, lose by being excluded from the game. And that people think you’re weird and they don’t wanna talk to you. But you can also have games that are wrapped up inside of games or games that intersect with other games where it’s like the game of politics intersects all other games within its society.

The game of rule making for a game is a meta game that wraps up the nominal game that you’re playing. And it’s just seeing a lot of how he literally talked about how these football games overlay [00:45:00] each other. He had to have read that book. He fucking had to . Especially when it’s like the whole thrust is when you think of

life as a game like that, like as an infinite game. The whole thought from the religious studies end is removing the sense of tension from day-to-day life. That it’s like if you’re still alive, if there is a viable future, you are on some level okay. And maybe not the best okay. But you don’t need to fall into dread and despair, which are different from struggle obviously.

And him reframing, Bois reframing , what if everything was the infinite game? What if the infinite game went on forever and now there isn’t even winning or losing in these games? So that you can look at more like the point of play.

Ashely: I was gonna sum it up in the short version. I was suddenly thinking of that meme where it’s the two astronauts in space except replace, it’s Pioneer Nine and Pioneer 10 and it’s Pioneer Nine looking at the earth and being like, “it’s all a game.” And then Pioneer 10 [00:46:00]behind maybe with a gun if you want

to be like, “always has been”

R.S.: Always has been.

Langdon: The beauty of science fiction to me, this is why it’s the best genre in the world. As much as I love literary stuff, and that’s most of what I write now and all that stuff, sci-fi has my heart forever cuz it’s “what if you talked about smart brain stuff like an idiot?”

Ashely: That’s such a good way. Yeah.

Langdon: It’s so beautiful. It’s professional wrestling about philosophy. It’s perfect.

Ashely: you’re fucking right. I was just thinking how wonderfully this pairs with the last book as an examination of the future. And it’s I think one of the most interesting depictions of future cuz it’s not dystopia. Cuz most people are pretty happy, but it’s not

R.S.: are doing okay. Yeah. Not utopia. Cuz people are kind of weird about not

dying or having babies for

Ashely: And not really having a, coming from capitalism, but that drive to some, that forever drive to keep moving into something bigger and [00:47:00]better. But they finally kinda like, “well we don’t have anything bigger and better to move on to at this point.

So, Hmm.”

Langdon: what’s funny is that taps into the negative or inverted Americana

R.S.: Yes. Let us talk about America. Let us

talk about America and football

now because

this is super, super interesting in that this is a version of America with no frontier. No expansion, no manifest destiny, no imperialism. Just fucking kicking it, just hanging out. And it’s hard to imagine that because that’s such a big part of the American character is expansion.

That ravenous expansionism. There’s nowhere to expand to. It’s just, it’s done. Let’s just hang. Let’s just play football.

Langdon: so there’s this, there’s this book by a guy named Steve Erickson called Shadow Bond, which is a, semi experimental novel about Jesse Presley, who is the real identical twin [00:48:00] of Elvis who died in the womb. bunch of your really crazy, weird messianic writing about Elvis will always deal with the shadow of Jesse cuz Elvis talked about being haunted by the thought of his twin brother who died at birth and

nine 11.

And, the town that Elvis was born in was hit by the most deadly tornado in American history, like right when he was born, which

R.S.: Oh

wow.

Langdon: yeah, there’s a reason why there’s a lot of weird dark American messianism tied up with Elvis. Cuz you get these weird things of like the king’s brother dead at birth and the most deadly tornado ripping through town.

And then he creates rock and roll through accidental theft. Because he was always adamant in life to try to credit his band mates, but his managers were like, no, you’re the white face, shut the fuck up pretty boy and play on tv. And then he did, he also, he also married a [00:49:00] 14 year old. He is a bad person, so I’m not saying he’s a good person.

um, not defending Elvis to be clear. But, it’s a book that deals with that and it, it felt very resonant in the same vibe of like, when you look at this is especially apparent to anyone from, speaking kind of Raquel’s language here. Anyone from Puerto Rico can spot pretty quickly how America is an empty shell, a very pretty shell with nothing inside. It would be great if there was evil inside, if there was some actual true negative desire. But it feels like there isn’t. There’s not even enough coherence for that. There’s not even like, if you wanna conquer the world, you’d think you do a better job. You look at colossal obvious fuckups and it’s that weird kind of dread.

We want a super villain because that’s more comforting than idiotic hyper strength just wins. It doesn’t matter how smart or good you are. Just some stupid– and [00:50:00] this inverted version of– why did we– the story feels haunted by this violence. This one feels haunted by like, why did we kill all the Native Americans in order to do this?

R.S.: There’s an echo of that. Yeah, it, they go into it. He goes into it a lot more in the sequel, but he actually overtly draws the comparison that a long time ago, the Cherokees played a sort of stickball game as a substitute for war. It was kinda like lacrosse. It was called anetsa, and it would be played by two teams and men would play it.

But there was a time when women would play it. Old people would play it. And it was kind of a rough game, but they would use it to settle differences without war. It was like a milder version of war, a less violent version of war. Although you’d still get kind of fucked up. People would come home from it

pretty banged up. But it was this really important kind of sacred game that was just played all over the country.

Langdon: We have that kind of the [00:51:00] evil image of the nihilism of all these wars, and it’s sort of the dark version that comes out when you look at this existential viewpoint. On one hand, I think some people read existentialism as being meant to validate people and assuage a kind of anxiety of being. But if you are a bit more sharply self-critical, it takes on this very corrosive aspect really quick.

Cuz it looks at certain very horrible things that we might go, oh, that was a necessary evil. And going like, no, no it wasn’t. And that was just a choice you made. And what’s worse is even a notion of justice doesn’t really, the universe doesn’t care. You just did something horrible for no reason and nothing’s ever gonna happen because of it.

You get to just sit with that. And it’s this weird shadow of an Amer– you can, you can see that in the way that certain people are haunted in their world about the idea that there’s no death anymore. It feels so weird to say out loud that you’ll [00:52:00] just get a character, go, “man, I’m really fucked up about this.”

And they’re like, “shut up, take the ball.” And they’re like, “yeah, yeah, you’re right. Yeah. Gimme the ball. Yeah.” But that kind of thing of you’re, you’re put in this bathysphere where the weird inverted face of the America you made stares back at you and it’s going to be this forever. There’s not gonna be restitution.

It’s just this and the profound but unanswerable discomfort in that.

R.S.: Yeah, I mean by the fact that he calls this 17,776, obviously a riff on 1776. And it’s interesting that the particular probes that he’s using are called The Pioneers. They’re not like Voyager probes, they’re pioneers specifically. They’re Pioneer Nine and Pioneer 10. He could have picked a different one, but he’s very clearly going for something here. And that he picked American style football, which I don’t know if that’s a game played anywhere [00:53:00]else in the world.

Ashely: Uh, in

R.S.: know if anyone plays it the way

Ashely: a par, there’s Canada, there’s European one, but they’re, I think the Canda one is the only one that’s the, it’s not comparable to America, but that’s the only place I would say, people theoretically care. That’s where all the losers end up going to as a C F L. So,

Langdon: so I’m going to tell you two. So one of my favorite, autistic fixations ever since I got into sports was getting really into looking at ancillary sports leagues. Cuz in baseball, they do a really good job of saying that there’s a million in one different minor leagues. Outside of the MLB there’s the Costa Rican League, AAA, AA, single A, the Korean League, there’s a Japanese league, there’s all these different places.

And you’re like, okay, that kind of makes sense. And you look at other sports and you go, I don’t think there’s a football one. You find out there is a summer league and you go, that’s interesting. You find out there’s arena football, two different arena football leagues actually, oh, there’s actually been for over a decade a women’s arena football [00:54:00] league

that is really good. They’re really fascinating and the games are really exciting. There’s a Canadian football league, but I’m not here to talk to you about that. I’m here to talk to you about the Polish American football league

Ashely: Yeah, let’s go.

Langdon: Poland, just Poland, they are called the P L F A had the biggest American football league in the world. 2013, they had 74 teams.

R.S.: What.

Ashely: What the fuck?

Do they even have 74 cities in Poland. What the

Langdon: There are 32 teams in American football.

Ashely: Holy shit.

That

Langdon: were, there were more than double that in Poland. It doesn’t make any sense. There’s a whole beautiful history that you can look up regarding that. But yeah, for whatever reason in Poland, American style football took off. Also, Australia has a weird hybrid game called Australian football that isn’t rugby, but isn’t American football.

It sits in between.[00:55:00]

Ashely: That’s deeply Australian. I bet all the rules and positions have names that sound like vaguely like slurs or something like that. You call it like the quarterback, the the kibaki or something like that.

Langdon: So inexplicably, and I mentioned this because I imagine John Bois would know this being a huge sports nerd as well, inexplicably, there are other American football leagues elsewhere in the world. They’re typically incredibly short-lived because, duh. It’s a game that will kill you. Very few other sports will kill you in the way that American football will.

Ashely: Yeah. I, I can’t think of a sport that’s equivalently so regularly, deadly. Even stuff like race cars, that’s the, probably the closest I can think. That doesn’t, the way cars are designed, those don’t kill you a lot. And,

Langdon: but like to to, to your point, there are definitely, there are two American sports. And that’s baseball and football, and they both are quintessentially American in different ways. Kind of what you were hinting [00:56:00]at Raquel. They, they, they point at different aspects of America. Baseball hits it kind of the weird way that beauty gets wrapped up and caged by the nihilistic bureaucracies of America that mitigate it to eternity.

But every now and again, you get a beautiful home run and you go, “oh.” meanwhile football is the endless waves of brutality.

R.S.: Yeah, so there’s this really great quote from an interview with John Bois where he’s explaining why he did this story the way he did, and here, here it is. “I see a really clear parallel between America and football. Both are beautiful. And both destroy people. This is a recent development in neither case. They are designed to create misery.

They are both institutions that I want to love unconditionally but can’t possibly. I can only appreciate either if I retreat into [00:57:00] fantasy, filter out what I hate about them and present a distillation of what I love about them. If you distill American into the land itself, and if you distill football into the game itself and you populate them with the people who make them both beautiful, you end up with a world I find pretty amazing.”

So it’s almost like the premise of this story is, how could I unconditionally love football and America? Under what conditions would it be possible for me to love these things without feeling kind of gross about it? And this is the condition: we would have to live in the post scarcity society where no one dies.

Ashely: I think too, in an interview, it’s something that’s interesting I think about a lot is, like I said, not to read up Orange Man bad, but this piece was written kind of as a response to election, uh, Trump’s election. I think a lot about how the response of like art and what art can do and how do we respond and how this is probably, it is one of the, the better kind of, it’s not [00:58:00] direct Trump response, but it’s clearly like grappling I think with that what the feeling of the non CHUDs were dealing with. I think it starts the question of that quote you read, it’s like, why football?

And it’s kinda, why not football? It’s the most American thing. It reminds me of, since we’re referencing other works, Angels in America. People ask, why Mormonism? Well cuz it’s the most American religion I could think of. So why not use as a metaphor for exploring America?

And it’s the same thing with football. What’s more American than football? All these people on a field super specialized, they have all these fucking weird rules and this goal that they’re trying to work towards and it’s difficult. And there’s kind of this arbitrary sort of rule structure slapped on to try to keep them from mostly killing each other, not killing each other, in the worst way ever.

It’s like, yeah, that’s very American, isn’t it?

Langdon: He does a smart thing in response to Trump, which is that good art in response to a nihilistically shitty president, has existed since time immemorial. That’s sort of the thing that [00:59:00] any leftist worth their salt will have said, which is that Trump is absolutely not unique in being a wild shit bag of a president and an open fascist of a president.

It was more galling to certain liberal types. Where they had convinced themselves that certain things being scare quote, necessary evils weren’t out and out displays of fascism. But you get information like the wild levels of torture we were doing at Abu Ghraib. And it’s hard not to look at that as , oh yeah, no, no, we’re evil.

You get stuff that came out about Reagan, you get stuff that came out about, the Clinton missile strikes on civilian centers in Sarajevo. Any number of things. If you’re reading stuff, this is not the first bad or evil president in history. He was bad, he was evil. Caveat to the people at home, not a defense of the, the orange man.

Bad man, bad man. But not thought of

Ashely: He didn’t invent racism in [01:00:00] 2017,

is the thing

Langdon: He galvanized it in a certain way, but he’s also not the first one to have galvanized racism in America. And this kind of thing that’s reckoning with what is it about this thing that I love that’s given me the life that I have. Cuz that’s the other thing that you can get from certain kinds of leftists who are still in the, if I’m, if I’m doing a good faith thing, they’re still in the necessary performative aspect of learning about their politics because they need to learn about the perspective outside of themselves.

But they haven’t done the work of now reintegrating of , okay, you’ve learned a perspective that isn’t yours, but that isn’t your perspective. You actually do have a life indebted to the blood that was shed. But you now have to ask and reconcile with yourself whose blood. It, it wasn’t foreign enemies. It was other Americans.

It was slaves. It was people of color that built the railroads. It was the invisible [01:01:00] labor of, Latinos building the infrastructure of the American Southwest that then were driven out by the Mexican-American war. All this stuff, it’s the real question of, who am I indebted to for the world that I inherited?

And it feels much more like him sitting with that, of just being honest about the messy thing of in my gut, I have all these fond memories about what these things mean to me on a personal level, and I have to reconcile that against the weight of what history tells me these were made from. And the not doing to use the Marxist term of liberal, not the CHUD version, not doing the sort of American liberal version of throwing up your hands in defeat, but just being very honest with like, I don’t know how to make sense of that on an emotional end.

I don’t know how to square that. I know I’m looking at the legacy of evil, but I remember fond things with my father and [01:02:00] grandfather. I remember bonding with community and neighbors and cheering for a sports team in a sports bar, but knowing that these men are going to end their careers brutalized in their early thirties, I don’t know how to make sense of that. And just being honest about it, like no more bullshit, no more like I’m gonna take a moral grandstand that I don’t actually feel in my bones just going, I’m gonna show you my conflict and not pretend to a resolution that is, that I haven’t actually had.

Ashely: I think that’s the, that non-fiction instinct coming into, cuz I think about people that only write their response to Trump and, it all becomes like, “I would vote the child from Omelas out of jail.” With non-fiction, I think there is an instinct and I guess to get, get accused of being a little navel gazey, which it is, I don’t know, whatever.

It’s fun sometimes to gaze your navel, shut up. This idea of I think John Bois is grappling with this thing. And I don’t think, and it’s not like there’s an easy answer cuz I think there is a sadness. I felt sad, seeing the [01:03:00] characters struggle with the idea of, this is kind of it for the rest of time.

And I may be like, I’m a little America pilled. And I guess in that way, seeing them sad, not to have kids, not to, the probes can never be next to each other. But there’s still beauty and it’s a much better future than maybe what we have now or a dystopia.

Yeah, I think the idea of grappling with a thing rather than an easy answer is really what intrigues me about this and what I think is good about it and maybe not so good about other pieces that try to kind of grapple with a post-Trump America,

Langdon: Well, if I can inappropriately go in on Squee bullshit, cause I haven’t had my turn sharpen my blades, . Um, there’s, there’s a, there’s a, there’s a false version of worldliness that we see people present, which again, in all fairness, they’re not doing it, for the most part they’re not doing it cynically.

I think there’s a cynical urge that can be present in people and can be leaned on, but they’re doing it because they see, okay, no, this thing is actually obviously bad. But I feel ashamed of [01:04:00]saying that I treasure this thing . Squaring, having all these fond memories of the music of the Beatles and what that means on like, oh, my dad showed me Eleanor Rigby– real story.

My dad showed me Eleanor Rigby. And that was the first time that I understood one that I was dealing with a kind of deep kind of sadness that I didn’t have a name for. And two, that music could be art. Not just a fun song . and I was like six. And it was this epiphany moment. Then you find out they all beat the fuck out of their wives and it’s like, how do you square that?

The real emotional connection to something with the painful reality of what these things are in material history. And again, it takes a humility to go, I’m not gonna grandstand and pretend that I’ve solved this dilemma. I’m just going to honestly tell you that I’m experiencing that dilemma. And that’s. That’s a thing that I think is eminently worth, commendable or worth, commending or eminently is commendable and worth [01:05:00] commending. There we go. I can do words. I went into too much debt not to do words. Fuck me. But

Ashely: there

could be a lot of comfort in just saying , “Hey, there’s this grappling, there’s this thing that sucks. We’re all kind of in it together. You’re not a crazy lonely person. You may be crazy, I don’t know, but you’re not the only person that grapples with this.”

And I think there could be, there could be comfort just in that act.

Langdon: It’s definitionally what makes something non didactic or non polemical, but still dealing with those questions is it isn’t about coming in with, “I’ve answered the question, and if you don’t agree, you are wrong and a bad person.” It’s going, “I’m thinking on the page, I, as I am writing, I’m feeling out this question and I’m putting my own thoughts into the voices of other characters because it’s really me analyzing my own thoughts and feelings through this to see what’s there.”

And so like that sense of vitality of, “oh, that’s what people mean when they talk about honest fiction. You [01:06:00]were thinking on the page and feeling on the page. So if you land on an answer, you are not preaching at me.” It’s, it’s like when you hear someone spilling their guts, when they’re drunk out of their mind at 2:00 AM about a thing they sincerely regret.

And you go, “I never really thought of you as capable of remorse for that, but I witnessed a two and a half hour drunken breakdown. You sure as hell don’t feel great about it. Now I see this all in a different light.” that’s what people like us have really just been asking for about fiction or from fiction in general.

I really don’t care if it’s written for a young adult audience. I don’t, that’s, that’s whatever. It’s, I just want that, I want that structural bit that I’m like, I felt like I witnessed the re witnessed and felt a real thing. And I’m grateful that he did that with really sick sports ball.

Ashely: Isn’t that kind of the joke that sports are one of the few things that men can be vulnerable with and have those true, genuine, vulnerable emotions? Again, I think [01:07:00] football, like why football? Football is the perfect, crystallization of so much of what we’re dealing with.

I mean, this piece feels so timely considering, the state of labor and what happened with Damar Hamlin, for you that

Damar Hamlin is a, uh, a Buffalo Bills player. He was doing a tackle, it was a totally fine, typical tackle and he got hit in the chest and sometimes when you get hard enough in a chest at the right time, you can, um, basically have

cardiac arrests. Yeah.

It was a miracle. He survived. Basically the first responders saved his life and then that generated a whole bunch of conversations about… I, I’ve never in my life seen so much conversation about labor rights and the labor of these workers, cuz it’s very easy to dismiss them cuz they, they do make more than the average worker, but, What do, what do they actually make it and what do they pay for that?

And then of course the legacy of racism. It, it is super in tied in as well. So like again, if you’re sitting there being like, why football? Why some piece like this about football? Well cuz it’s just as much [01:08:00] in the struggle as everyone else and it’s probably one of the most accessible ways for a lot of people to do it.

Cuz all of a sudden, I remember when that happened with Damar Hamlin, you saw everybody, from all kind of political spectrums coming together and being like, “this isn’t right. What’s happening to these people? We need to do something about this.” So sports can be a very powerful, because it’s so popular, it can be a very uniting feature.

I mean there’s a reason why, I mean, not so much in America, but you got in Europe, their football clubs are like, some of them are actually political forces a lot of times for fascism, but not always. So,

Langdon: I mean we, we wind up getting as a Marxist, it’s very easy to use sports teams as a really great visualization for what people mean by ownership of the means of production and who is the proletariat versus not. It would be hard, you’d be hard pressed to ask a regular person is an N F L player, a member of the proletariat.

And technically if you get into Orthodox Marxist terms, they’d have a slightly different designation. [01:09:00] I will not bore you with that shit, but the short version, the short version is you go, oh, they make, millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars over the course of their career.

I can’t believe that they, and you go, yeah, but they have a career window that if they’re lucky is 15 years and when they end, they will never be insured again. Well, until one of the few good bits of Obamacare, of, annihilating preexisting conditions prior to that, they literally could not qualify for private insurance.

Ashely: Right, because their body is destroyed. Nobody

would ever insure

Langdon: you’re re you’re retiring in your thirties because your body is destroyed and now all of that money has to pay for all of your medical care for the rest of your life because it will all be

out of pocket.

R.S.: and not to mention the brain damage, the horrible amounts of brain

Langdon: We have, people like to bring up, there actually is a weird, I’ll, I’ll put a flag in that mentally for a second, but there’s also the bit of how owners, owners walk away [01:10:00] making billions,

Ashely: oh, they’re, they make so much.

Langdon: they’re not retiring at 35.

They’re alive and active in their seventies, in their

Ashely: Most owners are like old as balls.

Langdon: and then again, you had the racial component of what’s the color composition of the bodies being destroyed for entertainment for white owners.

Ashely: I think a lot too about the fact that in football, for the most part, there’s some exceptions, but there isn’t the nepotism path. The people that join are some of the most vulnerable peoples in society. And of course they would say yes because oh my God, this is suddenly a way to access so much wealth and power.

They wouldn’t necessarily, but then they don’t necessarily– they, they have a career that maybe lasts for usually less than 10 years and they have usually, they don’t have very many, they don’t have a lot of education. They get through it as fast as they can. No one gives a shit. They don’t necessarily have life skills and they don’t necessarily come from great support networks when they go back.

what do you do then?

Langdon: We also have this, treadmill that… The professional sports player, their life does [01:11:00] not begin in college as a professional sports player. It begins at eight or nine, and you’re put on that track. And if something happens and you get knocked off at any point, all of a sudden, bit of the support and community that had built around you literally evaporates.

They’re like, I don’t give a fuck about you. You’re not part of this world anymore. And so you just get left adrift, which hits it that previous bit you brought up of the way that there are, without belaboring the point, there are a lot of elements of what would constitutes men’s rights under patriarchy, which is laughable, fascist, bullshit, laughable on a good day, horrifying and nihilistic destructive on a bad day.

But there are certain obvious bits of , how do things affect, queer men, trans men, men of color. There are certain pockets where you go, okay. There is something though heinously tragic and it makes sense. Does not justify to be clear, but doesn’t make sense [01:12:00] why certain horrible shapes take place when you go, oh, these sort of structures of what constitute positive self-image and a sense of a place within the world in this hyper pa patriarchal, hyper masculinist approach to things is the brutal sacrifice of your body, and that you aren’t allowed access to any kind of real emotional intimacy with even your own male peers, except by breaking your body. It is at the breaking point of your body, literally, that you are allowed to emote and build this sense of, of unity.

You then add the level of C T E and the way that that increases aggressive behavior on violent behavior and you, it, it dawns on you , oh, we’ve built a death cult. It’s not surprising that this ends in horrible violence as often as it does.

Ashely: Yeah, I think going back to your motion, I think, I think about, again, I’m going back to Damar Hamlin, the teammates were clearly upset [01:13:00]as they should be.

This isn’t me saying, but

Langdon: That’s their friend as much as it is their

Ashely: And then I think the next week or the weeks afterwards where you have, um, Stefon Diggs who’s been emotional and he doesn’t necessarily behave the most gracious after they end up losing their, their playoff game, but then people treat him like shit.

And that happens a lot, especially with black players, that they get really, they’re very easily dismissed for showing passion and not being the gracious player or the sore loser or something like that. And it’s not even necessarily that did anything wrong or did violence or hurt anybody, it’s just they didn’t act emotional in the right way.

It’s frustrating, yeah. To see that in,

Langdon: It’s, it’s, it’s obviously no comment on similar but differently accentuated, brutal emotional nihilism that are foisted upon women and non men under patriarchy. It. It’s more that we’ve built a bunch of parallel fucked up engines and then are constantly surprised that only horrible things come out of them.

[01:14:00] Is everyone fucking stupid? I mean, I’m preaching to the choir here, but you know,

Ashely: But I also not, I don’t know if this is quite connected, but I’m thinking then again how brilliant John Bois is. He’s looking at all of this society and how you do it. He’s so focused, just like I’m gonna focus in on football basically as my means of exploring this whole world.

Cuz other times, you see something like a dystopian, a lot of times you’ll read dystopian and be like, why isn’t anything but America mentioned? Is everyone else fine? Or something like that. But in this case, no, this piece is doing something very specific and that’s very smart, that we’re not necessarily dealing with the rest of the world.

Cause it’s not really what the piece is about. It’s about being a fucking American forever.

Langdon: I I mean, it’s the classic thing about good sports movies, which I think if you like movies in general, you’ll be good– like Rocky isn’t about the boxing match. The boxing match is the organizing event about a person, about their circumstance, about why does this mean so much to them about becoming a person.

Remember the [01:15:00] Titans isn’t about the football game. It’s about a sense of community and a sense of unity, especially in a, a deeply racist, and very recently integrated school going up against racists. Cinderella Man also isn’t about boxing. It’s about– so you have the classic in, in, in the world of, novels, the boxing novel is about as much of a trope in certain spaces as the masculine novel about the ocean.

But it’s the same thing. You use this image as a way to talk about the people associated with it and why this matters and what it brings to them. And yeah, it’s not shocking to me that someone who’s written about sports as much as he has, and credit to John Bois. He’s not an untrained writer either. If I remember correctly, I think he went to school for writing.

And he intended to become a novelist for a while. And like he, he has a long history of, of writing, which is painfully apparent. This man is,

Ashely: He, he’s,

Langdon: can’t, emphasize enough. His [01:16:00] prose is so good. It makes me angry.

Ashely: Yeah. Well, also, John Bois is again, a great represent– I guess if we’re talking about labor, like how important it is to give people this nice, safe places to actually explore the art. Because you get, like I said, I don’t think John Bois is the only person making weird stuff, but how many people don’t get to have that?

Langdon: Credit to him, he shirks off levels of praise in a resolutely, classic Kansas boy, Midwestern humble way where it’s like, I write the kind of things that I think are cool based on even cooler shit that I’ve run into in life. So if you’re, complimenting me, I take that as a credit to all the things that I built off of.

And you’re like, you’re, you’re a sweetheart, John, you’re sweetheart. It reminds me of the same kind of thing there, there’s, there is buzz about this, about being groundbreaking, which again, credit to him, he’s sort of hand waved. He’s like, “I’m not breaking ground. I think you guys just hadn’t seen the stuff that did break it.

But if I’m your introduction to it, I’m very proud.” It reminds me of [01:17:00] the same thing with House of Leaves, where in the grad school literature world, people were like, oh, they, he’s ripping off The Tunnel. He just took The Tunnel and rewrote it. Which credit, if you’ve never read the book, The Tunnel, fucking great novel. Plays with similar meta textual stuff.

Really awesome. Mark Danielewski was pretty open about , “no, I don’t think I invented this. I just wrote a book I thought was cool. And then people liked it.”

Ashely: That’s not about, I think there could be an attitude with some people of beating your predecessors and doing it better. We’ve talked about how I think it’s better to engage in a conversation about who’s around you and how you, you, you add to it and, challenge it where you can.

Langdon: And this this doesn’t have, that, the story doesn’t give that sense of presumptuous or narrative ownership over itself. That’s a thing that’s only gonna make sense to a certain kind of weirdo reader like us. So maybe that’s inside baseball commentary. But there’s something about the way that he writes it, it doesn’t feel like if someone else wrote [01:18:00]something in this style that he’d be like, “Hey, you’re ripping me off.”

It would be more like, “oh, cool. I’m glad that I, I’m glad I opened a door for someone that maybe didn’t realize that there even was a door there.” Which is a really fucking refreshing thing in especially a world where people get incre increasingly touchy over, like, “I’m the one who came up with, what if wizards wear hats?

And now you have wizards that wear hats,”

Ashely: Personally as someone that’s working on a novel that’s based around Finnish fantasy, I, I welcome them to please take it up. Read the Kalevala. That’s what I’m always saying. You guys can say that you, you guys know. Um, I always

R.S.: You know what? No, I’m gonna gate keep, I’m gonna say no else in S F F can learn anything about Sumerian culture cuz they wouldn’t do a very good job. And I don’t wanna see these fuckers ruin the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Langdon: That’s fair.

Ashely: Fair enough.

R.S.: I, I I will gate keep, I will gate keep.

Ashely: I don’t have to worry cuz nobody’s gonna fucking do that. So I’m like, go for it. The [01:19:00] motherfuckers. I wanna see you write about Väinämöinen in his quest for a wife. Okay. I’d love to see you write a YA book about that. Go for it.

Langdon: As someone who’s been dealing with, I mean the, I’m gonna. I am gonna say the most classically online thing of all, if someone’s been dealing with a bit of online drama again recently, the fact I have a renewed weariness of the phrase touch grass. Cuz , no, that’s where I go to get away from you people.

Do not touch grass. Stay inside. Stay on the internet. Do not follow me. Like when I’m walking my dog, I don’t wanna see anyone

R.S.: don’t touch my grass. Hands off my grass.

Ashely: go tr go trust, touch some sedges or some rushes. I always say, here’s my thing. There are 14,000 species in the, the family of Poaceae, which in which is the grass family. That’s not enough species for you to touch at this point. You are too online. That’s what I tell people is like

Langdon: That’s good.

R.S.: Mm,

Ashely: That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s me using my, my fisheries and wildlife knowledge. I’m a, I’m [01:20:00] a, I’m really into grasses, so.

R.S.: so

Langdon: I love your nerd

R.S.: football!

Ashely: Thank you. Oh yeah, football. Did I, this has nothing to, well, football play on grass, so it, it’s the ultimate touch grass. Did I tell you guys. I forgot to say at the beginning, but I was gonna tell you, I am wearing my Bills shirt. I’m wearing camo cargo shorts, and I’m wearing knockoff crocs. I could not be more in the spirit of America right now.

And I just want

everyone to

R.S.: pretty cool.

Langdon: I I’m wearing a queer, Canadian super goth, micro press t-shirt, so I’m not really in the football spirit. I am, I’m one of the people, people are confused by when they’re like, you mean the person who listens exclusively to avant jazz and talks about weird obscure literary fiction?

I’m like, yeah, I fucking love sports. Fucking love

R.S.: You’re from the south, you’re required.

Langdon: It’s so tight. You drink beer and watch the game.

God, I

Ashely: love, I do too. Okay, so here’s, here’s our football question. What, what did we, I [01:21:00] know we talked about before, how we feel in Super Bowl. Raquel, go. What’s, what’s your, what’s your super, where’s your Super Bowl take?

R.S.: I have zero opinions. I’m

Ashely: to, you so

so, quiet. I didn’t

R.S.: I’m so sorry.

Langdon: you gotta be the

R.S.: That’s why I invited people on. I don’t fucking know. I know nothing.

Langdon: Pick them. Weirdly racist name football team or anything from Philadelphia.

Ashely: It’s gotta be the birds. Go birds.

Langdon: No, I will never support Philadelphia in my life. That’s never going to

Ashely: What’s your problem with Philadelphia?

Langdon: Fuck you. You’re all, you’re, you’re trash people. Trash city. I hope that you were destroyed in the floods.

Anyone?

Ashely: do it themselves and that, that’s why they’re cool.

If you could rat.

No,

R.S.: you know what? I respect a city where whenever there’s a football game, they have to grease the light poles because people will try to climb them and they just lick the grease off and climb them anyway. So I’m gonna go with the [01:22:00] Eagles.

Langdon: as a sports fan, not from Philly. I can’t respect Philly. As a sports fan from DC I super can’t support Philly. My Nats, fuck you Philies. Fuck you. Fuck the Philies and

Ashely: I can’t be

Langdon: Harper. fuck you. Bryce

Ashely: you’re . So, but Langdon, listen, you’re a communist, right? Do you like the idea of a revolution? Right? Do you, what if you, what if you radicalized the Eagles? In a week you would have the revolution.

Langdon: not them. Gulag.

Ashely: well,

Langdon: Gulag.

Ashely: no, we’re gonna use

the link to, we’re gonna use the link to like, because they got a jail underneath.

They’re already underneath the Eagles stadium. We’re gonna use that to put the non-believers. People are not let you better hope nobody, we cannot actually release this episode because the Eagles fans fucking hear you say that they’re gonna come to all our houses and beat us

with bags

Langdon: No, I’m,

R.S.: No. You know what, Goose, you and I, you and I, Ashley and I are pro Eagles, so if you’re gonna fuck anyone up, just get Langdon.

I am officially throwing Langdon under the [01:23:00] bus.

Langdon: I’m the Washington fan. We are the only N F C east team that didn’t even make it to the playoffs. Literally all three of the other ones did. So I’m eating shit regardless. You literally can ignore me. like

I’m bitter. I’m so bitter.

Ashely: Lou, do you wanna talk about Bitter? I’m a Bills fan, which is like, boy, I love

losing. Yeah, but we fucking, we could have gone, we could have done it this year. I don’t, how the fuck are we gonna come back next year?

Langdon: Ancillary,

Ancillary,

Ashely: I know, I know. Uh,

Langdon: but yeah, he like to go to, go

briefly back to the story,

Ashely: Okay.

Here’s what I wanna know, and I’m gonna write, this is my fan fiction of seven of uh, of the, of John Bois’ story. Is that I’m gonna write a, a fan fiction where Tom, where we’ve tried to figure out what Tom Brady’s been up to in this future, like as he, does

R.S.: Oh shit.

Yeah.

Ashely: he back and play for every team?

Langdon: removing enough buccal fat that he looks exactly like Skeletor

Ashely: that’s the game they play with on Tom Brady’s buccal fat. [01:24:00]They try to find it buried across America,

Langdon: I did really love how to emphasize sort of the existential commentary on play and what does play tell us about ourselves. He mentions this in the Q and A, the, the confirmation of the thing you said earlier, Raquel, that no one scores a touchdown in the whole story. And he did that deliberately cuz he is like, I want it to be about the game and life, not about, you

know, and it’s just like, oh, oh that’s really smart.

Reading that Q and A really just sort of brought into focus a lot of things. If you learn to be a good reader, you’ll have your list of mental questions and go, oh, I wonder how many of these are me pondering and how much are one seeded by the author? And there’s something really affirming to know that. [01:25:00] The, the classic thing in any creative writing class, they tell you that the kind of thing you want is to have a reader walk away with questions and thoughts that they think are theirs, but that you have subconsciously pointed them to and that you kind of know that you succeeded.

When they tell you their question and it’s your question that you wanted them to have, then that’s a, then it doesn’t matter how they answer it, just the fact that they’re thinking in the right direction. You’re like, I did my thing. And so it was really like, damn, you write good as fuck, you played me motherfucker.

Damn.

Ashely: Not to be as smart as– to follow up, but I wanted to– one of the questions I really loved and just the little thoughts they adored, is somebody asked about the game that’s in the gorge. Like won’t at some point they start wearing down the gorge? And he was like, oh shit, I didn’t think about that.

That rules, I love that. I also love the questions where, he just doesn’t answer. Cause they’re, somebody asks , “what happened to dogs?” And he [01:26:00] is like, “I don’t wanna think about that. So, uh, that’s, I’m not gonna answer that.” And I’m like, yeah.

R.S.: Yeah. And I find it so funny how around the end of the story, he finally goes, okay, yeah, here’s the answer to the annoying questions that you’re probably gonna ask. Yeah, other countries are fine and the Caribbean’s flooded, but everyone’s okay. So don’t worry about it.

Ashely: yeah. I love, I do, I do love, the “I hear you fucking nerds. Okay. Yeah, it’s fine.” Shut up

R.S.: I hear your little Cinema Sins ding sound queuing up. Fuck

Ashely: that’s really how you can, as

somebody that like the whole two and a half hour thing about K P S, which whole– Kaiju Preservation Society, which is the whole thing is answering to nerd, but not in like a shut the fuck up way.

I think that’s what, if you’re gonna do it, that’s what you should do is be like, yeah, whatever. That’s not the point. Asshole. Shut the fuck up. Yeah. Like everyone thinks fine. We’re trying to talk about the fucking, existentialism and

R.S.: I’m, I’m a, I’m a fan of the Gremlins 2 approach where there’s a scene where these two security guards asking, ” well, what if you’re on a plane and you cross into a different time zone when you’re feeding ’em and it suddenly becomes midnight? Or what if you get [01:27:00]something stuck in your teeth and after you’d fed ’em before midnight, but there’s a little something stuck in their teeth and they eat it after midnight?” And in the middle of these questions, just a gremlin pops out and kills them. And it’s like, “we’re not having that. That is what I think of your questions. We are not talking about

this. Fuck you. ”

Ashely: also, what I’ve discovered is every genre, so spec fic would, would become better if it included football. I think. I wanna see, I wanna see a, I would Brandon Sanderson books become better with football? They

Langdon: No. No, no.

No!

He must never be allowed to touch my beautiful game!

Ashely: Fair enough, fair enough. I’m just, I’m just wondering. I’m reading MistBorn right now and I’m like, it might be better if there was some football in it that, I mean, it couldn’t make it worse,

Langdon: I hate Brandon Sanderson so much. Not even talking about the Mormon stuff, not talking politically. I mean books that are so bad that I want to kill myself.

Ashely: Oh my God.

Langdon: Just what I’m, I’m, this is [01:28:00] purely personal. This is just me talking sincerely. I would rather be in a war than read one of your books. Brandon. You, you ending the Wheel of Time series is, like resurrecting Hitler to see out the end of Trump’s presidency.

Ashely: gonna, my God,

R.S.: Oh

Ashely: Jesus Christ. I was gonna, I was gonna say that’s like Langdon’s 9/11. Was

that? Oh my God. The

Langdon: I’m not scared of Brandon Sanderson. What’s he gonna do? Be really Mormon at me? Pray for me after death? You will probably outlive me. I live a very bad life, Brandon

Ashely: So how about them? Uh, how about them chiefs? You know?

Langdon: You know they’re gonna win.

Ashely: No, they’re not.

Langdon: My boy doesn’t even need ankles. One. Most importantly, he’s got a law and that’s the Lord. So, you know, put that down on paper. Two. He’s the king of football.

Ashely: The whole king. Well, it’s America bitch. And we don’t have a king.

Langdon: Uh, apparently [01:29:00] football does.

And it was Tom Brady, which sucked. I hate saying that, but numbers don’t lie. I wish they lied. They don’t lie though.

Ashely: He w we have no king. And they’re playing Philly, which is where there’s no, they don’t believe in God. God does not touch Philadelphia . So

Langdon: true. God does not touch Philadelphia.

Ashely: so they can pray as much as they want.

and thank the Lord as much as they want.

Langdon: we’re gonna see if Mahomes can put down the evil djinn, sent by, Shaitan himself, Philadelphia in the name of Goku. I hope that they’re purified by a spirit

R.S.: Okay, Okay, so we, we’ve been talking for a while and we’re, we’re going off the field. We are, we are out of play. I don’t know what the fuck is going on, so why don’t we,

Ashely: It’s a, it’s a sa, we’re doing a safety or

R.S.: we’re, we’re we’re out of Totino’s Pizza rolls. So I’m gonna wind things down and let either of you plug your work.

Langdon: I am currently, [01:30:00] neck deep in doing stuff for Death Sentence. We recently got Gareth back after a prolonged hiatus from him.

R.S.: Oh

Langdon: me, me, Gareth, and Eden. Been absolutely loving our output Recently. I also have been writing a hell of a lot for, for Treble. We recently, this year started a series called The Treble 100, which was instead of a listicle about like best blah, which, which can be fun.

This one was just what are the records that are most important to us, not the best, and not being worried about like, are they too poppy? Just what is the most emotionally meaningful to us? And then writing basically creative non-fiction, like miniature 33 and a third books. Those records and why we, why they mean so much to us.

Um, and I recently add my one about, Zen Arcade by Hüsker Dü, this classic hardcore alternative rock record drop. Just absolutely love working for Treble. I’ll, I’ll work for them until [01:31:00]I die, or until Jeff kills me. And that’s pretty much it. I’ve also been, finishing off a novel and putting together a short story collection, but we’ll see if that all happens this year.

Publication gets wacky.

Ashely: I don’t really have anything to plug. I live, I’m in Florida and in hell. Can I, can we link to my, co Kofi because I’m missing a, a piece of my tooth and I’m probably gonna have to move soon out of this cursed state. So if anyone wants to gimme money, I’d, I’d sure like it.

R.S.: Okay. You know what, just send me a link to your, send me a link and I’ll fucking put it in the episode description. We do not care.

Langdon: Look, they don’t have to like, this touches

R.S.: Yeah. Speaking of America. No dental insurance.

Ashely: I have dental insurance, but it doesn’t cover shit.

Langdon: some people bring up the shit when they’re like, it’s grifting cuz this person had a GoFundMe and I don’t think they need it. Bitch, it’s voluntary. No one’s holding a gun to your head, making you donate money to all these GoFundMe.

What kinda weird America are you talking about? [01:32:00] Just stop giving them money if you don’t want to.

Ashely: Oh my God. I’m just, I, I, I’m just watching the audio, like fucking peg. Um, yeah, so I’ll

Langdon: It makes me so mad. They’re like, this person is an abuser, manipulator,

Ashely: that, this is my plug, shut up

Langdon: You’re right.

Ashely: So I’ll give you the link to that, uh, if you want or not. I don’t care. Everything’s tight at, and then, also if you wanna see my, uh, tweets, I am at weather goose 1 because I guess weather goose without the one was taken. So, you can see my, my bits there.

So that’s it.

Langdon: Your bits as in like comedic bits.

Ashely: I.

Langdon: Got it.

Ashely: I, I,

I’m

Langdon: it’s the internet. We need, we need to clarify if some, if someone says, you can see my bits, just

need, you

know,

Ashely: enough. No, no. My, uh, comedic bits.

Langdon: You know, we’re just, we’re, shoot, we’re straight shooters here.

Ashely: Okay.

R.S.: Yes. Okay. Well,

Ashely: this

R.S.: I I don’t know what [01:33:00] happened. This this episode went off the rails about, as well as football went off the rails in 17,776, which was delightful. But thank you again for coming on to talk about football and thank you all for listening. Uh, until next time, keep reading and keep writing good.

I’m gonna hit stop now.

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In this month’s book club episode, Kurt Schiller and Stephen Mazur join us to talk about Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man.

About Rite Gud: R. S. Benedict is an author, appearing in Fantasy and Science Fiction and Gardner Dozois’ The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction. Matt Keeley, founder of Kittysneezes, is producing Rite Gud for KS Media, LLC. Rite Gud is a Kittysneezes production. If you have questions, comments and concerns, email ritegud – at – kittysneezes – dot – com. Rite Gud is also on Patreon, at http://patreon.kittysneezes.com. Patrons receive access to the official Kittysneezes Discord, exclusive episodes and more.

The Rite Gud theme is by OK Glass. Follow them on Twitter, YouTube and Bandcamp, and at OK.Glass.

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R.S. Benedict