Love & Its Discontents: Recent Episodes
Adnan Mahmutovic
Love & Its Discontents is a podcast on the topic of LOVE and LOVE STORIES.
Starting with Jeffrey Eugenides's claim, in My Mistress Sparrow is Dead, “Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name,” the podcast will take you on a journey through literature from antiquity to contemporary stories, wrestling with notions such as romantic love and altruism, deep diving into ecstatic love and solidarity. It asks, Can love be examined like an object? What on earth is love? Where in the world is love? Are we born to love, born with a natural sense of certain things like goodness, and beauty? Is love, like Rumi said, perfect thirst? But most importantly it will follow the question: can there be love without love stories?
The host, Adnan Mahmutović is a Bosnian-Swedish writer and lecturer in English literature and creative writing at Stockholm University.
If you have a particular story you want to talk about send us your pitch to: lovediscontents@gmail.com.
Today I'm joined by Yusuf Jones. We're digging into the way Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we love.
Yusuf Jones is a visionary AI Prompt Engineer/Architect and Technology Integrationist at the forefront of the AI revolution in mental health, community development, and spiritual technology.
Facebook: @yusuf.journeyman.jones Instagram: @yusuf.is.just.dust
In this episode, we explore love in the new adaptation of James Clavell's Shōgun with John Austin.
John Austin is an interactive designer, independent researcher, author, filmmaker, cultural critic, and entrepreneur.
For over fifteen years, he has worked in augmented reality/virtual reality. Between 2007 and 2009 he divided his time living between the US and Japan where he helped found Autism Family Network. Austin founded Fresh Pulp Magazine, dedicated to "theoretical" science fiction from marginalized communities.
He leads Dark Matters, a weekly podcast discussing the latest Sci-fi series through a critical race lens. Among other things, Austin has written "How to be Black and Muslim in America” on Muslim futurism, and "Practical approaches to space travel for Muslims" Austin won the Comcast Award for short films in 2008 for the film, "The Jersey Devil."
Twitter: @austinyoshino
Instagram: @austinyoshino
Join me for a deep conversation on love in times and aftermath of traumatic historical events. How do our history and heritage make us and how do they shape the way we love? Focusing on the unique work of poetic theater, A Short History of Anger, about the genocide in Smyrna and the massive movements of peoples across borders of modern Turkey and Greece, we dig into things that help us live meaningful lives, overcome traumas and define love in ways that are healing.
Joy Manesiotis is the author of three collections of poems, A Short History of Anger, which won The New Measure Poetry Prize, Revoke, and They Sing to Her Bones, which won the New Issues Poetry Prize.
Currently, she is staging A Short History of Anger: A Hybrid Work of Poetry & Theatre at international festivals and universities in the U.S. and Europe.
Poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Poetry International, as well as in translation.
Previously the Edith R. White Distinguished Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Redlands, she teaches in the MFA in Writing program at OSU/Cascades and serves on the editorial board of Airlie Press.
Join me in this unique conversation on love spells and potions with Dr. Amila Buturovic.
Buturovic was born in Sarajevo. She works at the Dept of Humanities and Religious Studies at York University. Her interest lies in the cultural history of Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans, specifically Bosnia. Her major works are Stone Speaker: Bosnian Tombstones, Landscape and Identity in the Poetry of Mak Dizdar (2002), Carved in Stone, Etched in Memory: Tombstones and Commemoration in Bosnian Islam (2016). She is a co-editor with Irvin Schick of Women in the Ottoman Balkans (2008).
Her most recent project focuses on the culture of health and healing in Ottoman Bosnia, especially in relation to esoteric teachings and occult practices. As part of this project, she has teamed up with the National Museum of BiH to research and help curate their collection of artifacts that speak to the rich and interconfessional heritage of magic and healing in Ottoman Bosnia.
Follow Buturovic at https://twitter.com/amila295
In this episode, we delve into the amazing worlds of the African-American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. We go in-depth on her masterpiece Beloved but also trace the theme of love throughout her oeuvre.
Alice Sundman is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English, at Stockholm University. Her book Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place (Routledge, 2022) explores the creation and presentation of Toni Morrison’s literary places. Her research interests include Toni Morrison, ecocriticism, place and space studies, genetic criticism, phenomenology, and the intersections between literature and philosophy.
Join me for a truly unique and rewarding conversation with Professor Mieke Bal about one of the most captivating stories of all time, the story of Joseph and Potiphar's Wife. Bal is a Dutch cultural theorist, video artist, and Professor Emerita in Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of more than 40 books, many films, and video installations. Her work is often course literature in a wide range of disciplines. Her "Narratology# is a must for all students of narrative.
Conversation with Mohsin Hamid the globally loved author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Exit West, and many more novels.
In this special episode, I interview my old teacher and mentor Ishrat Lindblad, an expert on Shakespearean drama. But we also get personal on the way love shaped us.
Shakespeare's Othello is one of the most tragic heroes, famous for his excessive jealousy. And yet, he thought of himself as not easily jealous? In this episode, we find out how split he was and what ruined love for him.
Can romantic love and friendship exist at the same time? Find out in this reflection on this classical romantic drama that shaped us as teenagers.
Join me and Dr. Paul Jaussen as we dig into Mary Shelley's classic Frankenstein, one the most influential stories of all time. Let us see what it says about love.
Everyone knows the story of Frankenstein and his Creation, the Wretch, the Monster. But do they? Let's dig into it from a different angle. What if it is, ultimately, a love story?
Let's follow the Sufi path to discover what love is in Islamic mysticism and what diverse expressions it found in some of the key figures that defined it. Our guest is Filip Almansour Holm the host of the erudite and fun podcast Let's Talk Religion (https://www.youtube.com/ @LetsTalkReligion )
Islam is one of the biggest religions in the world and at its core is The Holy Qur'an. What does it say about love? In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Celine Ibrahime on a journey through the holy text of Islam to explore the multitude of ways in which it evokes, defines, and prescribes love.
What if there was no tomorrow? What would that do to love? Is love eternal? Find out in this fun episode on the classic romantic comedy "Groundhog Day."
Join me as I dig into Jean Rhys' amazing novel Wide Sargasso Sea and explore the relationship between love and madness and the harms of colonialism.
In this episode, we introduce the burning love and the debilitating madness of Bertha a.k.a. "madwoman in the attic." Jean Rhy's prequel to the classic Jane Eyre takes us all the way to the Caribbean and explores how he came to marry a creole woman who would later come to go crazy, be locked up in his attic, and eventually burn down his estate.
Join us for an in-depth conversation on love, marriage, and the constraints of the Victorian age in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre with Dr. Lisa Ann Robertson.
Dr. Robertson is an Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century British Literature with expertise in Romanticism and eighteenth-century literature and culture at the University of South Dakota.
Jane Eyre, the classical Bildungsroman, established some of the key definitions of love and marriage that still affect the way we think about modern Western love. In this episode, we lay some grounds for future interviews on rebellious love in the Victorian period.
In this episode, we are joined by Prof. Peter Adamson, from the podcast History of Philosophy without any Gaps, to discuss the philosophy of love in presocratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian thought.
What was love for the father of Western philosophy, Plato? Why do we think of "platonic love" as divorced from erotic feelings?
How does a sheet with a small hole make people fall in love? Is it a blessed or a cursed sheet and how long does the magic last? Find out in this episode on Salman Rushdie's magical realist novel Midnight's Children.
How do we define love? Is love that which kicks in after that initial chemistry has faded? Is love that which happens between the extremes of spirituality and materiality?
Join us in a conversation with Dr. Lucy Durneen from the University of Cambridge as we discuss these issues using Raymond Carver's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love."
“Better a sparrow, living or dead, than no birdsong at all.”
In this episode, we dig into the story of the Latin poet Catullus and his beloved Lesbia and the mysterious sparrow which stood between them. The sparrow is an obstacle, but when the bird dies, its ghostly presence remains to haunt Catullus' desire. Jeffrey Eugenides uses this to claim that a love story is defined by the presence of an obstacle to a character’s desire. What is more, love itself depends on there being some discontent, something that makes it out of reach, not fully possessed, not fully claimed, not fully tamed.
Love & Its Discontents is a podcast on the topic of LOVE and LOVE STORIES.
Host: Adnan Mahmutović is Bosnian-Swedish writer and lecturer in English literature and creative writing at Stockholm University.
The podcast is based on his university module in which students travel through literature from the Bible and the ancient Greeks to contemporary stories, wrestling with notions such as romantic love and altruism, deep diving into ecstatic love and solidarity, asking, Can love be examined like an object? What on earth is love? Where in the world is love?
This podcast will ask if we are born to love, born with a natural sense of certain things like goodness, beauty, which the prophet of Islam called fitra, which is then distorted by our environments. Is it, like Rumi said, perfect thirst? But most importantly it will follow the question: can there be love without love stories?
The Greek-American author Jeffrey Eugenides, in My Mistress' Sparrow is Dead, claims, “Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.” Love stories are based on discontent: “When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. … Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart.”
This podcast will consist of two types of episodes: short talks on selected stories and theories by the host, Adnan Mahmutović, and longer conversations with invited guests and viewers who have an opportunity to pitch an idea they want to talk about.
Contact: lovediscontents@gmail.com.
This episode filmed and edited by Mosa Mian Instagram @mosa.mian
Music: Bacalao, "Trumpet Tune"
Title Sequence made by Esmir Prlja @esmalehorrible