SUBTEXT Literature and Film Podcast: Recent Episodes
Wes Alwan and Erin O'Luanaigh
The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1999 film, “The Mummy.”
Upcoming Episodes: Elizabeth Bishop poetry, including “The Moose”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
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As a cinematic monster, the mummy seems less an embodiment of revenge against colonial forces than a figure invented by colonialism itself. On the one hand, the mummy represents mystery, romance, magic, and the East. His wrappings suggest to the imagination that he’s not just dead, but wounded—ripped from a lost time and a broken narrative. Conveniently for the colonizer’s psyche, the mummy actually longs for someone to violate his tomb and wake him—not least so that his curse can lay systematic waste to its victims. And that brings us to the other hand: the mummy as a scientific and historical artifact, an ancient puzzle which requires anthropological, archeological, and linguistic knowledge to solve. The very apparatus of the mummy’s tomb—his body locked in box upon box, his organs apportioned to canopic jars, hieroglyphic inscriptions on every surface—suggest the complexity of the undertaking. What might these two strands of the mummy’s DNA—in Shakespearean terms, part-Antony, part-Cleopatra—reveal about the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and about our own desires, fears, and guilt? Wes & Erin discuss the 1999 film, “The Mummy.”
Upcoming Episodes: Elizabeth Bishop poetry, including “The Moose”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Who is Godot? Whether God, objet a, or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation (even if they can’t remember exactly what it is that needs saving). Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy—aspirational, libidinal, political, or religious—insofar they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible. Except, arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Erin & Wes pass time by discussing “Waiting for Godot,” and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them.
Upcoming Episodes: The Mummy
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Who is Godot? Whether God, objet a, or an abstraction from any object that is supposed to resolve dramatic suspense, it is clear that Vladimir and Estragon imagine him to be an agent of salvation (even if they can’t remember exactly what it is that needs saving). Perhaps the name is meant to satirize any states of expectancy—aspirational, libidinal, political, or religious—insofar they seem to be a means to a kind of spiritual completion that is impossible. Except, arguably, in the imagination, including its refinements in the products of the arts. If Samuel Beckett is too cool to provide us with ordinary entertainment and edification, does he mean to bore us, berate us, or do nothing at all? Erin & Wes pass time by discussing “Waiting for Godot,” and whether frustrating expectations is sometimes better than either violating or gratifying them.
Upcoming Episodes: The Mummy
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the cult classic “Withnail and I,” and whether our capacity for sublimation suffers less from the crisis of modernity than from our attempts to transcend it.
Upcoming Episodes: Waiting for Godot, The Mummy
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
It’s 1969, and as drug guru Danny tells us, “the greatest decade in the history of mankind is over.” There will, he says, be many refugees, and the film’s implication is that Withnail—who combines self-importance and lofty ambition with substance abuse and urban squalor—will not be one of them. Marwood, by contrast, has seen the writing on the wall, in the form of the salacious tabloid stories that, while they threaten to outcompete the world’s attention for the arts, ultimately can’t be used to excuse the pair’s failure to find work as actors. Countering this attentional collapse perhaps requires getting serious: leaving bohemian pretensions behind—and along with them, as Marwood finds out in their jaunt to the countryside—a backward-looking romanticism that can be used as a cover not just for artistic paralysis but upper class predations, both economic and sexual. Wes & Erin discuss the cult classic “Withnail and I,” and whether our capacity for sublimation suffers less from the crisis of modernity than from our attempts to transcend it.
Upcoming Episodes: Waiting for Godot, The Mummy
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof but can’t, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which, paradoxically, atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile-world in his or her head. Wes & Erin discuss two essays from Susan Sontag’s collection, “On Photography,” “In Plato’s Cave” and “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” and ask what constitutes photography’s “ethics of seeing,” and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image.
Upcoming Episodes: Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Photography is a technology of contradictions. It is at once mechanical and mysterious, even magical. It furnishes evidence of presence while being a token of absence. It can show us proof but can’t, without accompanying narration or context, make us understand. And perhaps most perplexing of all, it is an imperialistic technology which, paradoxically, atomizes the world and democratizes all events and experiences, making each viewer of photographs the owner of a facsimile-world in his or her head. Wes & Erin discuss two essays from Susan Sontag’s collection, “On Photography,” “In Plato’s Cave” and “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly,” and ask what constitutes photography’s “ethics of seeing,” and whether Sontag suggests an alternative comportment towards the camera, the subject, and the photographic image.
Upcoming Episodes: Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Are Mozart’s gifts a glitch in divine accounting? Or are his flaws attendant on or even the result of his genius? And how can we account for the glitch in Salieri’s design, which permits longing to go unanswered by talent? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1984 film “Amadeus,” directed by Milos Forman.
Upcoming Episodes: Susan Sontag’s On Photography; Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
If an understanding of music implies a love of structure, perhaps the musician’s relationship to his art mirrors the one he has with authority, both human and divine. Salieri, whose father was a man of commerce, sees God as a kind of bank manager who records prayers and sacrifices as payments on a long-term loan of musical talent. Salieri’s economics work just fine until the arrival of Mozart, who seems to have put up no collateral—he’s ”a giggling, dirty creature” in the words of Salieri—but has received the equivalent of a billion-dollar loan. Are Mozart’s gifts a glitch in divine accounting? Or are his flaws attendant on or even the result of his genius? And how can we account for the glitch in Salieri’s design, which permits longing to go unanswered by talent? Wes & Erin discuss the 1984 film “Amadeus,” directed by Milos Forman.
Upcoming Episodes: Susan Sontag’s On Photography; Withnail & I; Waiting for Godot
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated.
Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated.
Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated.
Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated.
Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag’s “On Photography.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated.
Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag.
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Brutus is an honorable man, but Caesar is Caesar: at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play, his name is near the point of becoming synonymous with dictatorial power, and his every wish, as Mark Antony points out, has the substance of a command. For the rebels who oppose him, this identification of political authority with personal will is a perversion of republican institutions, and a form of corruption that justifies any means of putting an end to it, even if that means killing a friend. Yet Brutus’s conception of himself as unflaggingly virtuous is one he in fact shares with Caesar, and perhaps reflects the same authoritarian tendency, in grounding the legitimacy of political action in the character of a particular actor. Then again, it is not clear that democratic institutions will always forestall authoritarian tendencies, rather than enable the masses to sanction absolute power in a charismatic leader. Wes & Erin discuss Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” and its sustained reflection on how political power is constructed, located, and legitimated.
Upcoming Episodes: “Amadeus,” Susan Sontag.
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1949 classic film “The Third Man,” about friendship and betrayal, and about the stories we tell ourselves in order to love, survive, kill, or even die.
Upcoming Episodes: “Julius Caesar.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
The so-called “third man factor” is a phenomenon in which people in dire circumstances experience the presence of an extra person in their midst who gives comfort and aid when it’s most needed—a guardian angel, perhaps, or some figure of divine intervention. Harry Lime seems to have played just such a role in the lives of Holly Martins and Anna Schmidt. But is Lime from heaven or from hell? Perhaps a less-than-angelic third man might estrange rather than bring together, muddle rather than clarify, adulterate rather than help. And indeed, as a black market middle-man, Lime has the devilish power to intervene in people’s lives for the worse—like a narrator who edits out characters and manipulates the plot. Wes & Erin discuss the 1949 classic film “The Third Man,” about friendship and betrayal, and about the stories we tell ourselves in order to love, survive, kill, or even die.
Upcoming Episodes: “Julius Caesar.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Like many of its genre, the film “Elf” connects Christmas spirit to the sorts of bonds that hold together families and communities, despite their inevitable tendencies towards conflict and dissolution. Wes & Erin discuss this 2003 classic, what it means to believe in Christmas, and how this is connected to the possibility of a genuine community.
Upcoming Episodes: “Julius Caesar.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
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Half the plot involves a man reuniting with his father—and his species—after being raised by Christmas elves. The other involves saving Christmas itself from the growing cynicism of humanity. And so like many of its genre, the film “Elf” connects Christmas spirit to the sorts of bonds that hold together families and communities, despite their inevitable tendencies towards conflict and dissolution. Indeed, there’s a sense in which Christmas elves are, in making gifts, hard at work maintaining the social fabric against the forces of individual selfishness. But in this story, the elf in question turns out to be a bumbling man-child—a holy fool of sorts—who helps re-enchant communal life by holding up its social deficits to a naive mirror. Wes & Erin discuss this 2003 classic, what it means to believe in Christmas, and how this is connected to the possibility of a genuine community.
Upcoming Episodes: “Julius Caesar.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
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Erin just published her first book, “Avail,” which you can order here: https://www.pauldrybooks.com/products/avail
“Avail” features a long prose-poem which titles the book and winds through sections of lineated, often formal poems. The prose-poem comprises a series of lyric meditations on the image of the veil—from religious and cultural veils, to veils imbedded in idiom and metaphor, to veiled women in art and classic films, to veils drawn and parted by illness and death—which slowly divulge the harrowing details of the poet’s blood disorder.
Throughout, allusions to classic film, literature, and art serve as the “veils” with which the poet attempts to obscure the self-estrangement and vulnerability her illness has induced—insecurities which follow her long after her recovery. In a poem about a break-up set during her career as a jazz singer and against the backdrop of a 1930s screwball comedy, she longs “to shake life by the martini (but stay self- / possessed), to star in the movie of myself / instead of playing second lead.” During a visit to Naples, Mt. Vesuvius becomes “a Crawford eyebrow / arched over the bay.” And in California, after a trip to the Getty Villa, she recalls Sontag’s “missive on allusion, that no part / of any work is new, that all is reproduction.” By the end of the collection, O’Luanaigh has fashioned from the sum of these various allusions her own poetic identity, unveiled in the poems themselves.
Upcoming Episodes: “The Third Man,” “Elf,” “Julius Caesar.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
What happens when the Godzilla of superegos takes on a libidinal King Kong? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Upcoming Episodes: Erin’s book “Avail,” “The Third Man,” “Julius Caesar.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow:Twitter | Facebook | Website
Nurse Ratched likes a rigged game, according to R.P. McMurphy. And it’s true that the game he is playing—lawless and hedonistic, but also vital and free-spirited—is unwinnable on her sandlot. As their conflict develops, we seem to be asked to compare the therapeutic value of McMurphy’s introduction of the Dionysian, to Ratched’s attempt to enforce an ordered calm within the psychiatric ward over which she is absolute ruler. What happens when the Godzilla of superegos takes on a libidinal King Kong? Wes & Erin discuss the 1975 film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Upcoming Episodes: Erin’s book “Avail,” “The Third Man,” “Julius Caesar.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
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What’s the difference between collaborating with Nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative, rather than the critical, faculty? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image.”
Upcoming Episodes: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
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The short stories we cover in this episode pit the magic of art against that of scientific discovery. In one story, a woodcarver transcends his materials and his own humble talents to create a sculpture that bears an otherworldly resemblance to a real woman. In the other, a scientist uses his estimable but flawed powers to improve on Nature’s design by removing a birthmark from his wife’s otherwise-perfect face. The varying results of these efforts seem to correspond to the extent with which love, that most magical of forces, underscores them. “You cannot love what shocks you,” the scientist’s wife remarks when her husband expresses how disturbed he is by her imperfection. What’s the difference between collaborating with Nature and mining her secrets? Where is the line between imitation and interpretation? And can love only work its magic through the creative, rather than the critical, faculty? Wes & Erin discuss two short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image.”
Upcoming Episodes: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
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What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film “There Will Be Blood.”
For more analysis, check out Way Too Close on YouTube: https://youtu.be/J3usJ4fqOJU
Upcoming Episodes: Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.”
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
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The clash between Eli Sunday and Daniel Plainview, between religion and industry, steeple and oil derrick, might come down to something like the difference between a gift and a skill. Eli calls himself a son of the hills of Little Boston, an inheritor of land and legacy, a member of a family, and of a faith imagined as a family. Daniel calls himself an oil man, but only after reciting his resume as proof that he’s earned the title. He tends flocks of derricks, not people, and he leases both land and family to strategic, rather than communal, ends. Yet ultimately, each lacks what the other has. What is a gift without control or discipline, a skill without purpose or meaning? And is there a difference between a gift and luck? Wes & Erin discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film “There Will Be Blood.”
Upcoming Episodes: Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” “One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Julius Caesar.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
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In Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockmann’s is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brother’s is conservative, focused on the use of authority and ascetic self-restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism, and expressions of contempt respectively for both past and future. Wes & Erin discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us, and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the the role of education.
Upcoming Episodes: “There Will Be Blood,” “Julius Caesar,” “One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
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In Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockmann’s is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brother’s is conservative, focused on the use of authority and ascetic self-restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism, and expressions of contempt respectively for both past and future. Wes & Erin discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us, and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the the role of education.
Upcoming Episodes: “There Will Be Blood,” “Julius Caesar,” “One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides’ rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature.
Upcoming Episodes: “A New Leaf” (Elaine May), “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt), “Beetlejuice”
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides’ rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature.
Upcoming Episodes: “A New Leaf” (Elaine May), “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt), “Beetlejuice”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides’ rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature.
Upcoming Episodes: “A New Leaf” (Elaine May), “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt), “Beetlejuice”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
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Known for casting mythical heroes in human proportions, Eurpides has his hands full with Medea—homocidal sorcerous, granddaughter of the sun, and a woman who does not take betrayal lightly. Nevertheless, the poet is able to capture the agony of someone who has given up everything for love—family, home, and homeland—only to find her passion disregarded, and her sacrifices unappreciated, by a man who robotically puts practicality above all else. But can we sympathize with a woman who would kill her own children, just for spite? Wes & Erin discuss Ancient Greece’s most notorious battle of the sexes, and Euripides’ rumination on the question of whether the Athenian ideals of rationality and moderation sufficiently honor the instinctual side of human nature.
Upcoming Episodes: “A New Leaf” (Elaine May), “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt), “Beetlejuice”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
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It’s awful being alone, according to millionaire playboy Arthur Bach, and nobody should be alone. And so he forestalls this feeling by getting drunk, picking up prostitutes, and laughing at his own jokes. Yet love in its true form can be a lonely business, as his servant Hobson reminds him, because it involves growing up, getting serious, and taking care of someone other than oneself … only to lose them—in one way or another—to the inevitable advance of time. What is it about working class Linda Marolla, whom Arthur first encounters in the process of shoplifting a tie for her father’s birthday, that gets him beyond this impasse? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Steve Gordon’s 1981 romantic comedy “Arthur,” and why, if you want to learn to become independent, sometimes the best that you can do is to fall in love.
Upcoming Episodes: Medea (Euripides), A New Leaf (Elaine May), “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt)
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
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It’s awful being alone, according to millionaire playboy Arthur Bach, and nobody should be alone. And so he forestalls this feeling by getting drunk, picking up prostitutes, and laughing at his own jokes. Yet love in its true form can be a lonely business, as his servant Hobson reminds him, because it involves growing up, getting serious, and taking care of someone other than oneself … only to lose them—in one way or another—to the inevitable advance of time. What is it about working class Linda Marolla, whom Arthur first encounters in the process of shoplifting a tie for her father’s birthday, that gets him beyond this impasse? Wes & Erin discuss Steve Gordon’s 1981 romantic comedy “Arthur,” and why, if you want to learn to become independent, sometimes the best that you can do is to fall in love.
Upcoming Episodes: Medea (Euripides), A New Leaf (Elaine May), “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee From Me” (Thomas Wyatt)
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of two of Marie de France’s most famous lais—”Laustic” and “Guigemar”—and how their narratives marry the “flesh” of text, art, and symbology, to the “spirit” of the spoken word (via dialogue, oaths and covenants, and authorial commentary), in order, perhaps, to communicate something of the mysterious and dangerous union that is romantic love.
Upcoming Episodes: Arthur (1981), Medea (Euripides), A New Leaf (Elaine May).
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
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The lai, a short narrative poem from the Middle Ages that treats themes of courtly love, was originally accompanied by music and sung by minstrels. But in the 1170s, poet Marie de France translated a series of Breton lais into French and, in so doing, converted an oral tradition into text. It’s no wonder, then, that her lais’ narratives are so often preoccupied with methods of communication: both the spoken word, with its spiritual, incantatory, or even magical qualities, and the written word—physical, embodied, and analogous to the art object (particularly and, appropriately, the textile, a medium associated since antiquity with female artistry). Wes & Erin discuss two of the poet’s most famous lais—”Laustic” and “Guigemar”—and how their narratives marry the “flesh” of text, art, and symbology, to the “spirit” of the spoken word (via dialogue, oaths and covenants, and authorial commentary), in order, perhaps, to communicate something of the mysterious and dangerous union that is romantic love.
Upcoming Episodes: Arthur (1981), Medea (Euripides), A New Leaf (Elaine May).
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 noir thriller “Le Samouraï,” and the surprising power of love to capture its fugitives, even if it means finding them in the most shadowy of underworlds.
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Jef Costello is a hit-man with airtight alibis, impeccable style, and a strict code of honor. Add to this a masterful ability to evade his pursuers, mobsters and authorities alike, and a simple but effective home alarm system in the form of a bird. But what he cannot orchestrate, control, or evade is the improvisational nature of a genuine encounter with another person, which he unexpectedly finds with the jazz musician who witnesses him leaving the scene of one of his crimes. Wes & Erin discuss Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 noir thriller “Le Samouraï,” and the surprising power of love to capture its fugitives, even if it means finding them in the most shadowy of underworlds.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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What is the cause of human self-destructiveness? Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Notes from the Underground,” and its agonized rumination on whether freedom can be reconciled with love, individuality with virtue, and action with reflection.
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What is the cause of human self-destructiveness? According to Dostoyevkys’s underground man, this “most advantageous advantage” is designed to save freedom from the constraints of rationality, and vitality from the quiescence that follows success. Yet he himself finds freedom only in spite and fantasy, while in real life he oscillates between failed and humiliating attempts to dominate or ingratiate himself with other people. Wes & Erin discuss “Notes from the Underground,” and its agonized rumination on whether freedom can be reconciled with love, individuality with virtue, and action with reflection.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion John Huston’s 1948 classic, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
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It’s considered the definitive film on greed, a demonstration of just what the lust for gold can do to a man’s heart. Fred C. Dobbs starts out as a down-on-his-luck panhandler in a poor Mexican town and comes into a fortune of over $100,000 before the film’s end. Yet, in more ways than one, Dobbs never stops panhandling, never stops being subject to the vagaries of fate, to forces that might just as soon give as take away his fortune, and to the darkness within himself that he can neither understand nor control. Perhaps the film doesn’t chart his moral corruption and gradual descent into greed-fueled madness so much as it critiques the system that turned Dobbs into a beggar in the first place—a system which, the film might argue, teaches all of us to stick out our hands (and our necks) in the pursuit of profit. Wes & Erin discuss John Huston’s 1948 classic, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, HelloFresh. Go to HelloFresh.com/subtextapps for free appetizers for life.
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, HelloFresh. Go to HelloFresh.com/subtextapps for free appetizers for life.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, HelloFresh. Go to HelloFresh.com/subtextapps for free appetizers for life.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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The ancient Mariner kills his Albatross with a carelessness that stands in stark contrast to his impulse for confession. For several days he and his shipmates feed the albatross, play with it, and treat it as if it were inhabited by a “Christian soul.” The mariner never tells the wedding guest why it is that he kills the bird, but the casual and seemingly unmotivated act is followed by a psychedelic nightmare that gives us some clues. Why do we rebel against our position within the natural world, even to the point of self-destruction? What is required to restore us? Wes & Erin discuss Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, HelloFresh. Go to HelloFresh.com/subtextsweet for free dessert for life.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of “On the Waterfront.”
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Terry Malloy and his fellow longshoremen on the New York docks are witnesses to union corruption under labor boss Johnny Friendly, but won’t testify against him because of his violent intimidation tactics, which ensure that union members remain “D and D”—that is, deaf and dumb—to any illegal activity. When Terry’s collaboration with Friendly results in the death of his friend Joey Doyle, and when Terry subsequently falls in love with Joey’s sister, Edie, he’s forced to reckon with this D and D policy, as well as his own passivity, guilt, and naivete. Wes & Erin discuss Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront, which might be said to dramatize the so-called “sin of omission” while asserting that its opposite, truth-telling, can be a radical and perhaps even a strangely physical form of heroism.
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In the medieval tradition of courtly love, the aubade inverts the serenade. Where one heralds an evening arrival, the other laments a morning departure. In John Dunne’s famous poetic contribution to the genre, he chastises the sun for waking and so separating lovers, but consoles us with the notion that the power of the sun is ultimately subordinate to the imperatives of love. More bleak, Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” seems to abandon this indictment on behalf of love for one on behalf of self-love, perhaps even on behalf of life itself. Morning awakens us to both workaday drudgery and an awareness of our own mortality. As a consequence, life is harder to live by the light of day, the consolations of philosophy and religion notwithstanding, and vitality is confined to the sorts of evening revelry that make waking all the harder. Wes & Erin discuss whether life (and love) can be reconciled with human self-consciousness and all that it entails.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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In the medieval tradition of courtly love, the aubade inverts the serenade. Where one heralds an evening arrival, the other laments a morning departure. In John Dunne’s famous poetic contribution to the genre, he chastises the sun for waking and so separating lovers, but consoles us with the notion that the power of the sun is ultimately subordinate to the imperatives of love. More bleak, Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” seems to abandon this indictment on behalf of love for one on behalf of self-love, perhaps even on behalf of life itself. Morning awakens us to both workaday drudgery and an awareness of our own mortality. As a consequence, life is harder to live by the light of day, the consolations of philosophy and religion notwithstanding, and vitality is confined to the sorts of evening revelry that make waking all the harder. Wes & Erin discuss whether life (and love) can be reconciled with human self-consciousness and all that it entails.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane.”
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It’s a film bursting with objects—the treasure troves of Xanadu, a snowglobe, jigsaw puzzles, a winner’s cup, the famous sled. Even the conceptual elements of the film’s plot are expressed tangibly. Kane’s mind-boggling wealth isn’t an abstraction, but a list of concrete holdings—gold mines, oil wells, real estate. And the news Kane controls and manipulates, when yoked to another noun, is something one can hold in one’s hands: a newspaper. Kane, too, is described as the incarnation of several abstractions. As his obituary tells us, he himself was “news,” as well as the embodiment of whole years in a swath straddling the 19th and 20th centuries. One might call him the American idea personified. But what these terms really mean and how they’re made manifest in Kane is hard to pin down. At times, he seems to be no more than a vast, empty planet around which objects swirl. What’s at his core, then? What did his life mean? One reporter searching for the secret of Kane bets that just one fact—the identity of “Rosebud”—would explain his whole life. Another suggests that it’s in the sum total of his possessions. Yet another thinks, curiously, that even Kane’s actions won’t tell us who he really was. So what, then, determines his or any identity? What’s the measure of a person? The objects they possess? The abstract ideals they claim to stand for? Their actions? Or something still deeper? Wes & Erin discuss possibly the greatest film ever made: from 1941, Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane.”
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Part 6 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John’s College. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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Part 5 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John’s College. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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Part 4 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, HelloFresh. Go to HelloFresh.com/subtextfree and use code subtextfree for free breakfast for life.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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Part 3 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John’s College. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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Part 2 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John’s College. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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When King Leontes accuses his pregnant wife of adultery, the nobleman Antigonus assumes that Leontes has been “abused and by some putter-on”—in other words, some Iago-like villain has been putting malevolent ideas into his head. In fact, Leontes is the father of his own misconceptions, just as he is the father of his wife’s children. But unlike his children, his ideas might be said to have no mother; they lack corroboration, which is to say, collaboration with a source outside himself. How, then, do we account for the seemingly spontaneous generation of his thoughts? How can false apprehensions arise out of nothing? And what price must one pay for bearing these misconceptions, these “nothings,” into the world? In this episode, the first part of a six part discussion, Wes & Erin discuss one of Shakespeare’s last plays, “The Winter’s Tale.”
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John’s College. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters.”
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Hannah supports her sisters. She’s a source of money, encouragement, and advice, and seems to ask for nothing in return. In fact, she’s so giving and self-reliant that her husband Eliott begins to believe that she has no needs. This seems to be the spark that ignites his infatuation with Hannah’s sister Lee. It also leads her sister Holly to rebel against what might be called Hannah’s regime of care, only to marry another of her dissidents, her ex-husband Mickey. Wes & Erin discuss Woody Allen’s 1986 classic, and try to figure out why those closest to Hannah need to escape her goodness to find themselves, and whether a loved one can be too perfect for our own good.
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Wes & Erin conclude their discussion of “The Odyssey,” with a focus on Odysseus and Penelope getting reacquainted with each other in Books 19 and 23. We discuss Penelope asking Odysseus-in-disguise whether she should marry a suitor, but tells him the dream of 20 geese, foretelling their ruin; the test involving the bed post tree trunk; and how we might think of the ending to this epic as a comedy of remarriage.
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Wes & Erin discuss the final 12 books of “The Odyssey.” Having learned the lessons of the murder of Agamemnon, Odysseus does not rush straight home to his wife and children, once he arrives at Ithaca. Athena is impressed–but why, exactly? Why is it that Odysseus feels the need to hide his identity, and put friends and family to the test? And after 20 years apart, how do Odysseus and Penelope reacquaint themselves with each other?
Thanks to our sponsors for this episode St. John’s College, and Füm. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext. Head to TryFum.com and use code SUBTEXT to save 10 percent off when you get the Journey pack today.
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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Wes & Erin continue their discussion of the Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson. In this episode, part 2 of our 3-part series, they look closely at the heart of the poem, books 5-12, in which Odysseus arrives in Phaeacia and provides the tale-within-the-tale of his adventures after the Trojan War. They discuss the significance of Odysseus’s fantastical encounters and asking what they might reveal both about his character and about the nature of our own progress—through times of safety, complacency, excitement, danger, and loss—as we wend our way back home.
Thanks to our sponsors for this episode, Factor, St. John’s College, and Füm. Head to factormeals.com/subtext50 and use code subtext50 to get 50 percent off. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext. Head to TryFum.com and use code SUBTEXT to save 10 percent off when you get the Journey pack today.
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He was famously a man of many ways, whether we interpret these as abilities or norms; designs or deceptions; reasons or identities. Yet despite such resources, he was also famously stuck, making a 10-year odyssey of his attempt to return home from a 10-year war. What keeps the man of master plans from homecoming and domestic bliss? In the first of a three part discussion of Homer’s classic, Wes & Erin try to figure out what Odysseus really wants, and whether the “lord of lies” can master the trick of entrusting his mind to others.
Before Henry VIII changed history for lack of a son, Henry II had too many. His eldest, Richard, a fierce soldier who controls the wealthy Aquitaine, is the favorite of his mother, Eleanor. The youngest, John, is immature and dull, but his father’s favorite. And the middle son, scheming Geoffrey, is, quite dangerously, no one’s favorite. In the end, there are no winners; competing affections and power schemes serve only to cancel each other out. Is it true then, as this story suggests, that being a favorite amounts to nothing more than a target on one’s back, as its benefits are counteracted by the destructive envy of the disfavored? What drives our own propensities for favoritism? And does occupying any position in the pecking order entail, in Eleanor’s words, learning to live with disappointment? Wes & Erin discuss the 1968 film "The Lion in Winter," starring Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn.
In Jean Anouilh’s 1959 play “Becket,” the titular character seems at first to be a Saxon collaborationist to the Norman rule of England, and a man who has sacrificed his personal honor to his friendship with King Henry II and, as he puts it, “good living.” This will change when he becomes Archbishop of Canterbury, only to realize that he is enchanted by the “honor of God,” leading him to to defend at any cost the prerogatives of the Church against those of the state. When is honor more important than friendship? Wes & Erin discuss the 1964 film version of the play, with Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton, about a 12th-century high-profile bromance-gone-bad.
Jack, a Canadian soldier recuperating in a European hospital during World War I, begins a correspondence with Louisa, the librarian in his hometown whom he has only seen and loved from afar. Their letters turn romantic. But when the war ends and he returns home, Jack never shows his face to Louisa and marries another woman, leaving Louisa to wonder if she’s been the victim of some diabolical trick. Then Jack becomes the victim of an accident at the local factory. Wes & Erin discuss Alice Munro’s short story “Carried Away” and asking how the unforgiving machinery of a factory might mimic the so-called machinery of courtship, and how being carried away, whether by love or by ideas, might prove dangerous.
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In the parking lot of the Twin Pines Mall, Doc Brown plans to use his Delorean time machine to head 25 years into the future and see, as he puts it, “the progress of mankind.” But like the license plate on the Delorean, Doc is out of time. Through his absent-mindedness—and angering some terrorists—Doc has failed to provide a future into which he or his friend Marty McFly can progress. Meanwhile, Marty’s own options and possibilities have been foreclosed by the mistakes of his parents, whose inaction and passivity have failed to secure happy lives for themselves or their children. Out of time and without a viable future, Marty’s only way forward is back. Wes & Erin discuss the 1985 film, “Back to the Future,” and how securing the provisions for one’s own future depends on two modes of confrontation: one in the present and one with the past.
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In “Holy Sonnet 14,” John Donne would like his “three person’d God” to break instead of knock, blow instead of breathe, and burn instead of shine. This vision of redemption is about remaking rather than reform. And it seems to be motivated by a sense that neither reason nor the typical rhetoric of faith are not enough to bridge the mortal and the divine—what’s needed is God’s violent intervention. Wes & Erin discuss Donne’s surprising and paradoxical use of war and rape as metaphors for salvation.
Please support the podcast by taking our short listener questionnaire at surveymonkey.com/r/airwaveThe conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. Get (post)script episodes by becoming a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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A recusant Catholic turned Protestant, a rake turned priest, a scholar, lawyer, politician, soldier, secretary, sermonizer, and of course, a poet— John Donne’s biography contains so many scuttled identities and discrete lives, perhaps its no wonder that his great subjects were mortality and death. His Holy Sonnets, likely composed between 1609 and 1610, and published posthumously in 1633, are a collection of 19 poems written after the sea change in Donne’s subject matter from the secular to the sacred. They reflect his anxiety over his conversion to Anglicanism and his eventual decision to enter the priesthood, and meditate on salvation, death, and the wages of sin. Erin & Wes discuss Sonnet 10 in this series, “Death Be Not Proud,” an address of Death personified, whose power gradually diminishes beneath the force of Donne’s dazzling poetic rhetoric.
Please support the podcast by taking our short listener questionnaire at surveymonkey.com/r/airwave The conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. Get (post)script episodes by becoming a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
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Roman Polanksi’s 1974 film “Chinatown” seems to have little to do with its titular neighborhood, which is the setting for only one horrible and final scene. Chinatown functions instead to represent the traumatic moment that drives this story just because it is hidden from view—a place indecipherable even to the hard-boiled private investigator who has seen it all … the place he doesn’t go … the place that bothers him to talk about … the place where inaction and evasion are the only ways to avoid causing harm. Wes & Erin discuss what Chinatown has to do with “Chinatown,” and how the theme connects the seemingly disparate themes of police work, political corruption, water rights, and incest.
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It’s a play full of contradictions, secrets, lies, and unspoken rules. It’s a play decidedly for adults, but about a child—an imaginary one, no less. It takes place on a college campus, but it is absent of students. And it’s about “fun and games” and “playing pretend,” but its games are harsh and shocking, and playing pretend involves vengeance and even murder. Wes & Erin discuss Mike Nichols’s 1966 film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, adapted from Edward Albee’s 1962 play, and ask what it has to say about the nature of game and play itself, as well as what might be generative on the one hand or contraceptive and inhibiting on the other about our relationships with our spouses, our parents, our children, and our work.
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Wallace Stevens was an ungainly insurance executive, but his poetry is serene and secularly reverential. In particular, his poem “Sunday Morning” seems to suggest that the rhythm of the natural world—if we give it enough rapt attention—is as good as any chant or prayer. But can a return to nature worship solve the problem of nihilism, once monotheism has been eclipsed by modernity? Are memory and desire as permanent heaven, and can the poet become their high priest? “Sunday Morning” is a poetic dialogue about these questions. And whether or not we’re satisfied with its conclusion that the world is nothing more than an “old chaos of the sun,” the poem itself is an orderly and beautiful form of communion.
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The conversation continues on our after-show (post)script. Get (post)script episodes by becoming a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Food with Former New York Times food journalist and bestselling author Mark Bittman; and Movie Therapy, in which Siskel & Ebert meets Dear Abby.
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Howard Hawks’s 1940 film His Girl Friday knits together two plots from two very different genres. One is a romantic comedy that intends to reunite its main couple in something like wedded bliss. The other is a dark drama of murder and corruption, complete with a gallows lurking just outside the window and a suicide attempt that takes place on screen. Yet Earl Williams and Hildy Johnson’s fates in their respective plots are twinned. Both are, in a sense, looking for their own reprieves. And Hildy has her own production-for-use dilemma. What was she made for—the life of a newspaperman, or the life of a housewife? To what kinds of production should we devote our own lives? What are we made for—risk and adventure or security and insurance? Wes & Erin discuss.
Dr. Faustus expected more from his education. After a lifetime of study, his professional options—philosophy, medicine, law, and theology—all seem disappointingly ordinary. He is of course not the first to have this experience. At a societal level, the promise of knowledge is power, especially once it has become technology. At an individual level, what education seems to make us is an insignificant part of a formidable machine. For Faustus, the only way to make book learning great again is to extend it to the domain of black magic. And yet all this seems to earn him is an all-expenses-paid European vacation—notwithstanding the perk of having Mephistopheles as tour guide—to be followed by eternal damnation. What’s the point of selling your soul to the devil? How do we avoid subordinating our own search for meaning to the desire for power? Wes & Erin discuss Christopher Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus."
Who is to blame for Mary Tyrone’s morphine addiction? Is it Mary herself? Is it Edmund, her younger son, after whose difficult birth Mary was first prescribed the drug? Is it Jamie, her older son, who caused the death of the brother that Edmund was born to replace? Is it the doctor who prescribed morphine too readily? Or is it James, Mary’s husband, who hired a third-rate doctor because he was too cheap to pay for his wife’s proper care? James, in turn, will have his own story to tell of familial suffering and a miserliness acquired from a childhood fear of the poorhouse. To ask who is to blame for Mary’s addiction, or for the alcoholism that seems to plague every other Tyrone, is to ask who or what is responsible for our own suffering. Are our woes self-created—or at least self-perpetuated? Or is suffering something visited upon us by caregivers, the legacies of nature or nurture that we are powerless to control? If so, whom do we have the right to accuse? Wes & Erin discuss.
In the beginning, Colonel Nicholson seems to be a stickler for principle, willing to die rather than have his officers do menial labor in a Japanese prison camp. In the end, his principles seem to be a cover for personal vanity. He is willing to put his officers to work building a bridge for his enemies, as long as it leaves him with a legacy. "The Bridge on the River Kwai" is a reflection on the meaning of work, and whether the ravages of time, if not war, imply that being happy in one’s work—to use a phrase repeated several times in the film—is nothing more than futility and madness. Is work the key to freedom, or is it inevitably a form of bondage? How do we distinguish the desire to be creative from the desire for prestige? When is destroying something more creative than building it?
In 1906, presumably finished with his short story collection Dubliners, James Joyce wrote to his brother with dissatisfaction that, though he set about to create a comprehensive portrait of Ireland’s capital city, he had not managed to render its famous, unrivaled hospitality. His efforts to rectify this omission resulted in “The Dead,” the book’s final story. It takes place chiefly at a party in the home of the elderly Morkan Sisters on the Feast of the Epiphany, and fittingly its central character, the Morkans’ nephew, Gabriel Conroy, will have his own epiphanic experience by the story’s end. Gabriel preaches about Irish hospitality in his after-dinner speech but does not realize that he will grapple with a stranger of sorts later that night. How might the virtue of hospitality include the need to incorporate difficult feelings about our families, our homelands, and ourselves? And is the story’s ending, with its incorporative vision of snow falling on both the living and the dead, hopeful or hopeless? Wes & Erin discuss.
Stephen Spielberg once said that he was “still waiting to get out of [his] Peter Pan shoes and into [his] loafers.” Being a filmmaker, he said, was his way of remaining a child. Sort of. While his film “E.T.” is told from a child’s vantage point, it does not completely honor the wish to remain there. Like the alien he befriends, Eliot has been abandoned. And to this, many of us can relate. But in the end, the point of phoning home isn’t to get rescued by adults, but to avoid—even as we succumb to the responsibilities of adulthood—alienating our childhood talents for imagination and play.
William Wordsworth wrote no fewer than 523 sonnets over the course of his career. (By comparison, the second most prolific Romantic sonneteer was Keats with a paltry 67.) Two of Wordsworth’s best-loved efforts in the form are both Petrarchan sonnets with the same rhyme scheme, written in the same year, published in the same volume. Yet their messages, at least at first blush, are fundamentally opposed; one admires London’s cityscape and establishes a truce between the trappings of human innovation and the untouched features of the natural world, while the other laments a developed, industrialized, disenchanted England. How might we reconcile Wordsworth’s two minds on city life? What characterizes his so-called pagan creed? And must devotion to an ideal alienate us from the tune—however discordant—of our own age? Wes & Erin discuss Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” and “The World is Too Much With Us.”
In Part 1 of our discussion of “Tintern Abbey,” we talked about whether Wordsworth was right to suggest that our experience of nature was good not just for restoring our weary spirits, but for helping us to mature and even for making us better people. In part two, we explore his justifications for this thesis, in particular the claim that nature connects us not just to our senses and baser instincts, but to our capacity to think, experience beauty, and ultimately act ethically and autonomously. Does nature really never betray the heart that loves her, or has the poet ignored her more sinister dimensions?
After an absence of five years, the poet William Wordsworth returned to the idyllic ruins of a medieval monastery along the River Wye. The spot was perhaps not so very different from his last visit, but Wordsworth found that he had undergone a significant transformation in the intervening years. In a long blank-verse meditation, he explores the changes that the memory of this landscape has affected on his psyche and the role it played in his now-mature comportment towards nature, impulse, and desire. What can Wordsworth’s poem teach us about our own relationships to the natural world? Can Mother Nature truly exert a parental influence? Can nature even make us better people? In this Part One of a two-part episode, Wes & Erin discuss the first three stanzas of Wordsworth’s 1798 poem, “Tintern Abbey.”
Fellini called his film "La Strada" a dangerous representation of his identity, and had a nervous breakdown just before completing its shooting. Perhaps this identity, and its vulnerability, have something to do with the film’s portrayal of a disappointed hope that love might vanquish pride, if properly assisted by the forces of playfulness and creativity. The problem is that such forces are often themselves an offense to pride, and become the target of its cruelty. And so while the clown and tightrope walker Ill Matto convinces tenderhearted Gelsomina to stay with heartless Zampanò, his murder severs their tenuous, highwire connection. Wes & Erin analyze a classic.
In the late 19th century, the “New Woman” was a term coined by Henry James for a particular kind of feminist who demanded freedom of behavior, dress, education, and sexuality. Out of that paradigm came "The Awakening," a novel that scandalized critics upon its publication with its tale of New Orleans society wife Edna Pointellier, who tries to throw off the shackles of society’s expectations for women and follow her own passions. What might the novel have in common with a fairy tale? How do Edna’s artistic ambitions frustrate her role as a wife and mother? And do Edna’s efforts to cast off her so-called “fictitious self” and live honestly constitute a triumph or a tragedy? Wes & Erin discuss Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel.
Though sometimes accused of a sentimentality dubbed “Capracorn,” Frank Capra’s films are clear-eyed about the suffering of the everyman. A quintessential director of the Great Depression and World War II eras, Capra expressed better than most the desperation at the heart of a young country’s ambitions. And as a chronicler of his age’s disillusionment and alienation, he joined an American cultural landscape stretching back to Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain. How is George Bailey, a purveyor of the American dream, representative of the anonymyzing terror of 20th century society? And how might Christmas, rather than providing merely the heart-warming scaffolding for Capra’s tale, form an integral part of his message? Wes & Erin discuss the 1946 holiday classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
It’s a Christmas movie, some say, and in the end the holiday classic “Let it Snow” plays over the credits. But what counts as snow in the final scenes is a confetti of smoke, debris, and millions of dollars of bearer bonds, not to mention the Euro-villain who tried to steal them. These descend from the blasted-out upper floor of a skyscraper onto a scene of total destruction. Worse, it all happens in Los Angeles. Is "Die Hard" actually a Christmas movie? And what is a Christmas movie, anyway? Wes & Erin try to figure out if there’s anything like a yuletide miracle in this story about the violent defense of marriage and family against materialism, globalism, status, and other forces of social dissolution.
Diana Christensen is a television executive in search of an angry show—something that articulates the rage of the average viewer. In Howard Beale, failed newscaster turned mad-as-hell prophet, she seems to get exactly what she’s looking for. Yet in doing so, she reduces political and social discontent to a form of entertainment focused on generating audience excitement and television ratings. Wes & Erin discuss the 1976 film "Network," which seems to suggest that with the advent of mass media, acts of anti-establishment defiance tend to be incorporated by the systems they oppose.
His first claim to fame was the solution to a riddle that earned him a kingdom by sheer force of intellect. His second was a doomed attempt to escape the particularly gruesome fates of patricide and incest. With his first act, Oedipus saved the city of Thebes from the sphinx; with his second, he afflicted it with a plague. In his retelling of this myth, Sophocles reflects on the competing claims of three paths to knowledge: reason, revelation, and experience. Why can’t Oedipus’s brilliant mind save him from the enactment of a prophecy? Why might we be most vulnerable to the fate we’re most determined to avoid? Can we truly be free, or are our attempts to transcend the limitations of character central to its pathologies? Wes & Erin discuss Sophocles’ "Oedipus Rex."
How do you become the many you truly are? Try becoming the woman you aren’t. While Michael Dorsey can take the blame for his desperate transformation into Dorothy Michaels, it’s she who gets the credit for making him a better man. How are gender dynamics reflected in our relationships to ourselves? When are we staying true to ourselves, and when are we just acting out a role for others? Wes & Erin discuss Sydney Pollack’s 1982 film, “Tootsie."
The land is not just ancient but “antique,” and while many of its artifacts end up as the possessions of distant museums, they may yet be capable of overpowering their audiences. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is traditionally taken as an exploration of hubris, and of the obliviating effect of time on power and its pretensions. But the poem also speaks to the power of art to preserve, and how this is accomplished by a hermeneutic collaboration between artist, audience, and subject matter. If there is something alive in the passions reproduced within an artist’s inanimate medium, then our creative powers may ultimately not belong to us.
The Nostromo is a labyrinthine spaceship, a hulking ore refinery run on a sophisticated computer operating system and manned by a crew of seven. But somehow it’s not the most impressive piece of technology in Ridley Scott’s 1979 film "Alien." That distinction belongs to the title character, an organism with blood of acid and two sets of jaws, highly-evolved, adaptable to any climate. Its scientific mission, if you will, is to fulfill a basic biological imperative: to become a parent. Fitting, then, that it chooses to prey on a ship controlled by its own problematic Mother. Just what kind of existential threat does this techno-sexual organism pose to a man-made and sterile future? And how does one woman manage to defeat it? Wes & Erin discuss.
Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” is subtitled a “Story of Wall St.,” yet there is almost nothing in it of the bustle of city life, and entirely nothing in it of the hustle of the trading floor. The story’s walls block out the streets, serving on the one hand as a container for a colorful assortment of human Xerox machines, on the other as a blank projection screen for the reveries of a man who seems to quietly rebel against the very concept of imitation. Can we continue to live and work, if we strongly prefer to do nothing that is derivative? What happens to our aspirations, if we come to fully appreciate the gravity of fate? Could we continue to tell our own stories, if we were liberated from all idiosyncrasies of character? Wes & Erin analyze.
The story begins and ends with two variations on the meaning of the title. On the one hand, to give another turn of the screw is to ratchet up the horror of a good ghost story, in this case by involving children in it. On the other, it’s to treat the cause of that horror as if it were just another of life’s many obstacles, to be overcome both by screwing one’s courage to the sticking place, and by suppressing awareness of what is revoltingly unnatural in it. Whose screw turns out to be looser—the audience that enjoys such stories (and sometimes believes them), or the teller who manufactures them? Wes & Erin analyze Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.”
Gone with the Wind— adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing film in American history— has undergone several critical reappraisals in the 82 years since its production and release. Certainly the film romanticizes the Antebellum South and the Confederacy while glossing over the evils of slavery and stereotyping many of its black characters. Yet it may also provide a sharp critique or even satirization of its white characters— the ambivalent, arrogant, and deluded plantation owners who fail to acknowledge that their so-called “fairy-tale kingdoms” are built on the backs of slaves. What can we make of Rhett Butler’s characterization of the Confederate “Cause” as the “Cause of Living in the Past”? And why does even the modern, adaptable Scarlett O’Hara remain in thrall to a childhood dream that, like the “gallantry” of the Old South, was nothing more than a fantasy? Wes & Erin anazlye.
In the transition from stage to screen, "A Streetcar Named Desire" retained its long-running Broadway cast with a single exception: the role of Blanche Dubois, which passed from Jessica Tandy to Vivien Leigh. Like Blanche, Leigh was the odd woman out. A symbol of the glories of the studio system, married to the symbol of English stage acting, her classical training ran contrary to that of her Method-trained co-stars. Thus to the clash of wills between Blanche and Stanley Kowalski was added a clash of acting styles— and the struggle between the death of Old Hollywood and the birth of Brando and the New. Which principle— Blanche’s fantasy or Stanley’s realism— makes for superior art? Can the conflict between magic and truth ever be resolved? And is all realism a form of cruelty? Wes & Erin discuss Tennessee Williams’s "A Streetcar Named Desire."
The Wizard of Oz is supposed by the land’s inhabitants to be its most powerful magician. But far from having any actual power, he is not even native to the place in which real magic is in plentiful supply. Oddly, this supernatural world seems to be secretly governed by mundane sleight of hand, and growing up, for Dorothy, involves uncovering the flimsy basis of adult authority. Which magic is more potent: the childish imagination, or the symbolic power of grown-ups to educate it? Wes & Erin analyze the 1939 film, “The Wizard of Oz.”
Wes & Erin continue their analysis of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In Part 1, they covered roughly the first third of the poem. In Part 2, they begin with a discussion of Prufrock’s coffee spoons, and then continue on to: his allusions to John the Baptist, Lazarus, and Hamlet; the disjointed portrait of his probable love interest; and the twinning of aging and fantasy in the final stanzas.
It was T. S. Eliot’s first published poem. Written when he was only in his early 20s, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” rode the crest of the wave of literary Modernism, predated World War I, and presaged an age of indecision and anxiety. The poem is the dramatic interior monologue of the title character, a middle-aged man whose passivity and ambivalence are threaded with artistic allusions, epigrammatic observations, and meditations on the nature of time, the fraudulence of relationships, and the risks of eating a peach. Should Prufrock dare disturb the universe? Should we?
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of "Apocalypse Now." Wes apologizes for asking Erin to watch something so disturbing, and we further discuss dueling conceptions of the arts, one Platonic and the other Aristotelian. We agree that "Apocalypse Now," despite being challenging, is an aesthetic masterpiece. What about the narrative? Wes argues that it is very close to not having enough of an arc. What it does most successfully is to convey a kind of surreal, psychedelic mood, one that is meant to capture the insanity of the Vietnam War (and perhaps war in general), and so constitutes its critique. We end by reminiscing about watching "Notting Hill" together. But we fail to talk about an obvious hypothetical ....
Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore doesn’t flinch for enemy fire, loves the smell of napalm in the morning, and would literally kill for good surfing and a beachside barbecue. His attempts to recreate home within the theater of war render him the perfect foil to a certain upriver madman, who seems intent on making high culture serve the purposes of primitive horror. And yet Kurtz is ready to argue that it is his methods that are more sound, just because they embrace their ruthlessness more honestly, in contrast to the impotent half-measures of an imperial power that can rationalize its atrocities as collateral damage in the service of a larger humanitarian goal. Which approach should evoke more horror? Wes & Erin analyze Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film “Apocalypse Now.”
On his journey to the heart of the Congo, Marlow learns of a famed ivory trader named Kurtz— a remarkable man; a “universal genius;” a painter, poet, and musician; a man whose success in his trade has been unparalleled, but whose “unsound methods” have put him at odds with local bureaucrats. When Marlow finally meets Kurtz, he hears firsthand the trader’s essential characteristic: a deep and commanding voice which, combined with his methods, has earned him disciples and inspired local tribes to worship him as a god. But what message does Kurtz speak into the terrible silence of the African wilderness? And what deficiency, as Marlow calls it, might be hiding beneath his eloquence? Wes & Erin analyze Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella, Heart of Darkness.
Two women—one a straight-laced waitress, the other a naive housewife—leave town for a quiet weekend getaway. But after a deadly encounter with a rapist, the two become unlikely...and then increasingly confident...outlaws. Though a kindly police officer tries to convince the women to turn themselves in, their refusal to surrender to a future scripted by forces more powerful than themselves drives them to a shocking and iconic ending. Is their fate triumphant or tragic? Wes & Erin analyze Ridley Scott’s 1991 film, Thelma & Louise.
In Chekhov’s stories, beautiful natural surroundings are often a setting for unnatural lives and ugly social conditions. This sets the stage for a reflection on the relationship between physical and spiritual needs. His story “The Student” suggests that material deprivation--whether it is the exhaustion of the apostle Peter or the poverty of the Russian peasant--can undermine the capacity for fidelity and cultivation. In “A Medical Case,” a young heiress is made physically ill by her guilty awareness of oppressive conditions in her family’s factories. Can art, science, and faith truly redeem the individual human spirit without first transforming its social environment?
In this story, there are two sisters: one introverted, frail, and bookish; the other dominant, opinionated, and politically active. In meeting them, an accomplished artist seems to be confronted with a dilemma. Should art subordinate itself to the project of creating a just society? Or should it focus on serving more spiritual needs? These questions make Chekhov’s “The House with the Mezzanine” an interesting meditation on the relationship between politics and the arts, and whether the windows of our proverbial dwellings are best used to illuminate a new path forward, or to articulate the beauty of the world as it is.
Dmitri Gurov does not take love seriously. His wife annoys him, long-term relationships scare him, and his love life consists of brief affairs with women he meets at vacation resorts. In Anna, he finds someone who appears to be the usual victim—traveling alone, tired of her husband, and unlikely to make any effective demands for intimacy, something that seems to be revealed in the diminutive portability of her traveling companion. This time, however, he has met a match too powerful for his predatory ambitions. When is love’s bite bigger than its bark? Wes & Erin discuss Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with a Little Dog.”
Out of the darkness of the opening frames comes a supplicant— Buonasera the undertaker. He pleads for the justice that the American legal system denied him. As the camera draws back, we see the outline of a face, a hand... Don Corleone holds court at the confluence of loyalty and duress, generosity and calculation, power and fragility. It is not money, but friendship that he asks of Buonasera. Within and without the world of the film, can one consider Don Corleone a great man? Or does his moral code, like his favor, always hide a transaction? Wes & Erin give their analysis of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film, “The Godfather.”
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of Annie Hall; Wes pines to revisit his many unwritten essays, including the one about love and nostalgia in Woody Allen films. We discuss whether Mike Nichols used crack, and the way Google's algorithms mercilessly hunt Wes down to forcibly dose him with information about the director, all because of a few searches. Wes couldn't get through Clue, but that may be due to the variability of his many movie moods, and in any case Erin's Madeline Kahn impression captures a redeeming attitude. We discuss My Favorite Wife (my favorite life?). >> More
Alvy Singer is not, he tells us, a depressive character. It’s just that as a child he always worried that the expanding universe would one day break apart; and as an adult that romantic relationships must always fall apart. With Annie Hall, he thought he had finally found something that would last, in part because she could -- like the audiences of Woody Allen -- endure and make sense of his fragmented neuroticism: by finding it, on occasion, funny, or endearing, or even informative. While Annie’s patient, quirky fatalism does not prevent her from outgrowing Alvy and leaving him behind, the nostalgic and wistful frame of Allen’s film does have something to say about what helps keep love alive, and people connected.
On the moors of medieval Scotland, three witches hail the nobleman Macbeth as the future king—despite the fact that King Duncan is very much alive, and Macbeth is not in line to the throne. At the suggestion of power, Macbeth’s mind leaps to murder. Later, he fancies he sees a floating dagger leading him to Duncan, and after more bloodshed, believes he is haunted by the ghost of a friend. Is Macbeth merely a victim of divination, goaded by suggestion and his own imagination? To what extent is every ambition an imaginative act—and perhaps a form of prophecy? Wes & Erin discuss the Scottish Play: Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy, "Macbeth.”
W. H. Auden hated this poem. He called it the most dishonest he had ever written, and eventually had it excluded from collections of his poetry. And yet it quickly became one of his most popular poems. And after the attacks of September 11, it was published in several national newspapers and widely discussed. This might seem to be a strange result, given that the poem is not a call-to-arms, but an invitation to self-critique. What explains the enduring appeal of Auden’s September 1, 1939? Was he right to repudiate it? Wes & Erin discuss.
As war loomed in Europe, the poet W.H. Auden left Britain for the United States. One of the poems he wrote just before leaving is about the nature of human suffering—or as Auden puts it, the “human position” of suffering: for the most part, it happens invisibly, and the procession of ordinary life leaves it unacknowledged. Yet, the representation and transcendence of suffering are tasks important both to religion and the arts. Is suffering’s “human position” something that can be redeemed? Wes and Erin discuss Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts.
It’s a romance that begins with a divorce. Lucy and Jerry Warriner suspect each other of affairs, so they file suit, battle for custody of their dog, see other people, and generally go wild. Despite the spectre of infidelities— real or imagined— Lucy and Jerry learn a surprising truth: that the only person they enjoy “fooling around with” is their spouse. How are all relationships a kind of performance? And how might finding a mate mean finding not just a co-star, but one’s best audience? Wes and Erin discuss the 1937 classic comedy of remarriage, “The Awful Truth.”
Hedda Gabler is not a fan of specialization: not in the professor she has married, and his esoteric scholarly interests; not in domesticity, and the specialized affections required by marriage and motherhood; not in any lover’s infatuated specialization in her; and perhaps not in the form of specialization arguably required by life itself, with its finite and confining possibilities. Is there any way, short of suicide, to transcend such limits? Wes & Erin discuss Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.
Bill Budd is a beautiful man. Not just good looking, but exquisitely good natured, something that costs him no effort and has required no instruction. And yet it is ultimately his beautiful soul and good nature that get Billy killed. Wes & Erin discuss Herman Melville’s final and unfinished work of fiction, and whether a good heart and good intentions are more important than obedience to authority and adherence to civilized norms.
Wes & Erin continue their discussion of "The Great Gatsby"; the ongoing development of our approach to the discussions; Arnold Rothstein and the fixing of the 1919 World Series; Fitzgerald's neighbors on Long Island, including Ring Lardner and Ed Wynn; the contemporary feel of the novel; the NYC movie-making scene in the early 20th century; Marilynne Robinson; and possibilities for the next episode, where because of a weird time warp we talk as if "A Woman Under the Influence" will follow "The Great Gatsby" when it has always already preceded it.
We all know this story, in part because it captures a period that will always have a special place in the American imagination. Prosperous and boozy, the Jazz Age seemed like one great party, held to celebrate the end of a terrible world war; the liberating promise of newly ubiquitous technologies, including electricity, the telephone, and the automobile; and a certain image of success as carefree, inexhaustibly gratifying, and available to all who try. And yet perhaps this fantasy is rooted in disillusionment, and a denial of inescapable social realities, including the impossibility of genuine social mobility. What do we mean when we talk about the American Dream? Is it realistic? Wes & Erin discuss F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
John Cassavetes is known today as the father of American independent film, a pioneering writer, director, editor, actor who managed to make movies on his own terms, and has since inspired two generations of filmmakers. In his own day, however, he couldn’t catch a break--unappreciated and unseen by most of the public, lambasted by critics. But what contemporaries didn’t understand about Cassavetes’s movies may actually be his message. What can he teach us about authenticity and the ways in which we confront and avoid our own emotions? Wes & Erin discuss Cassavetes’s best-known film, 1974’s “A Woman Under the Influence.”
Benjamin Braddock is a little worried about his future. He’s a recent college graduate who moves back in with his upper-middle-class parents and feels smothered by their vapid, materialistic lifestyle. But he begins an affair with a woman from his parents’ circle… And then he falls in love with her daughter. Like Benjamin, we wonder what the future can and should hold for us. Can it be free of the negative trappings of our society and culture, of our parents’ influence, of the past? Wes and Erin discuss Mike Nichols’ 1967 film “The Graduate.”
Wes and Erin continue their discussion of W.B. Yeats’ "The Second Coming." In Part 1, they analyzed the first stanza of the poem, in particular Yeats' use of "gyre"; the meaning of the phrases "things fall apart" and "the center cannot hold"; and the conflict between aristocratic and revolutionary values. In Part 2, they discuss -- with a little help from Nietzsche -- the anti-redemption of the second stanza, and the meaning of Yeats' vision of a "rough beast" slouching towards Bethlehem.
In 1919, the world seemed to have descended into anarchy. World War I had killed millions and profoundly altered the international order. Four empires, along with their aristocracies, had disintegrated. Russia was in a state of civil war, and Ireland was on the verge of its own. It’s these events that helped inspire William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” which famously tells us that “things fall apart,” that “the center cannot hold,” and that a new historical epoch is upon us. Just what rough beast is it that slouches, as Yeats has it, toward Bethlehem?
Do we owe parents our gratitude for our upbringing? What if they haven’t done such a great job? And anyway, perhaps we inevitably resent all the forces that have shaped the characters that confine and limit us. If so, the quest for filial gratitude is ultimately hopeless. It could even be a kind of madness: a foolish attempt to transcend the same formative forces that we resent in our parents, to be “unaccommodated,” free of the “plague of custom.” Wes and Erin discuss William Shakespeare’s "King Lear."
L.B. Jefferies has the perfect girlfriend—beautiful, intelligent, wealthy—but too perfect, he insists, for marriage. And so he spends his time spying on the love lives of his neighbors, and ropes his girlfriend into this project as well. Which, strangely enough, turns out to be a really effective form of couples’ therapy. What’s the connection between voyeurism and what Jefferies calls “the intelligent way to approach marriage”? Wes and Erin discuss Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film "Rear Window."
In this third and final installment of our series on Keats’s odes, we’re looking at "To Autumn," the poet’s last major work before his death at the age of 25. Keats’s elegiac meditation on the season also serves as a metaphor for his favorite subject matter, artistic creation itself. What parallels does Keats find between art-making and the bounty, harvest, and barrenness of autumn? And what can the poem teach us about loss and our own mortality? Wes and Erin discuss these questions and more.
Second in our series on the odes of John Keats is "Ode to a Nightingale," in which Keats imagines a journey into the realm of negative capability, a concept introduced in our previous episode on "Ode to a Grecian Urn." Keats hears a nightingale’s song and it inspires him to ponder such questions as, what makes an ideal artist? How might we access the world of artistic creation? How does art unite humanity across the ages? Wes and Erin discuss whether artists, however inspired, can escape the anxieties of a potential audience.
The poet John Keats is famous for the concept of "negative capability," his description of the ability to tolerate the world’s uncertainty without resorting to easy answers. Literary minds in particular should be more attuned to beauty than facts and reason. In fact, truth in the highest sense is the same thing as beauty, he tells us at the end of his poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn." What does that mean? Is it true? Wes and Erin discuss these questions, and how aesthetic judgments might communicate a kind of truth that is not strictly factual.
When egotistical weatherman Phil Connors gets trapped in a time loop in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, he gets drunk, steals money, manipulates women, binges on breakfast food, plays God… and finally grows up. The story charts Phil’s development over the course of thousands of repeated February 2nds. Along the way, it raises questions about our own capacity for growth. How do we go about improving ourselves? How can we escape boredom? Achieve fulfillment? Wes and Erin discuss the 1993 film "Groundhog Day."
At the center of every courting ritual, there’s a great unknown. How do we know when we’ve met someone we can love? How do we know the other person is actually who they seem to be? In the beginning, all we have to go on is surface appearances, which amount to a kind of hearsay. The question is how to get beyond them. Wes and Erin discuss Shakespeare’s "Much Ado About Nothing," which seems to suggest that witty banter is more than just good fun, and has an important role to play in getting to know others.
With (post)script, get to know your quirky hosts, their existential doubts, and all the behind-the-scenes drama that's concealed by their staid demeanors, not to mention an ample Patreon paywall. Wes talks about his experiences with alien abduction, and Erin cautions against the use of mayonnaise. Erin then recounts her former life as deep sea fisherman, and Wes reminisces about his Fleetwood Mac cover band. All this and more, except probably in fact none of this. We do, we promise, chat about something.
You know, it’s that old story of boy meets girl … girl is dating boy’s married boss … girl tries to commit suicide … boy saves girl’s life …. Okay, that sounds pretty dark. But somehow it’s the basis for a classic romantic comedy, Billy Wilder’s 1960 film, "The Apartment." The film raises the question of how we distinguish authentic relationships from relationships of utility and convenience. What cultivates human intimacy? What compromises it? When are we just using people? Wes and Erin discuss.
An advantageous marriage is Elizabeth Bennet’s only potential escape from a foolish mother, a disinterested father, three very silly sisters, and a house that’s entailed away to her idiotic cousin Mr. Collins. But she turns down fabulously wealthy Mr. Darcy because he’s prideful—and maybe a little prejudiced. But then, so is she. How do we know if two people are well-suited to each other? What makes a successful match? Is Mr. Collins actually the perfect man? Wes and Erin discuss Jane Austen’s "Pride and Prejudice."