37 avsnitt • Längd: 75 min • Månadsvis
stemcel tragics use THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP to read literary classics
The podcast Do You Even Lit? is created by cam and benny feat. rich. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
This week we finally shut up about translations and get into some juicy themes and character analysis.
Telemachus: why is he such a dweeb compared to his dad? Rich argues that he's doing the best he can growing up with an absent father. The others are less sympathetic.
Odysseus: is his paranoid murderous rampage justified? what are his singular heroic attributes? Is he portrayed more as admirable or a hubristic figure? Why won't his men obey him?
On homecoming: Why was Odysseus away for so long? Was he kinda dragging his heels on the return voyage? How much strange was he getting? What motivated him to finally come home?
The Ancient Greek marshmallow test: exploring the recurring themes of self-denial, time preference, binding mechanisms, and whether playing the long game could arguably be the central theme of the whole poem.
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WOKE classics professor DESTROYED by three random guys who've never read homer before!!!
just kidding we love it.
Wilson translation discourse: is she really importing her feminist beliefs into the text? has she stripped the grandeur out to take 'complicated' Odysseus down a peg? what are the connotations of sluts and slaves? is the fancy language of other translators really just stylistic anachronism? who would win in a fight between the yass queens and the greek statue avatars?
Odysseus the hero: what's with all the false modesty? where is the line between seeking glory and outright hubris? did he do the Cyclops dirty or did the rude savage get what was coming to him? a comparison of the Greek heroic obsession with honour and social status vs Byronic heroes and modern superheroes.
Bronze age morality: which ethical framework does it correspond to? is the hospitality stuff a useful cultural adaptation? same for the tit-for-tat honour culture? do the greek gods enforce morality, or they more like regular capricious people who happen to have super powers? what are the other big differences to judeo-christian morality?
This episode is pretty light on actual plot and character stuff but I promise we will get into it much more next week: especially the ousting of the suitors, cunning Penelope, Telemachus arc, etc.
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"For how could the nose, which had been on his face but yesterday, and able then neither to drive nor to walk independently, now be going about in uniform?"
We take a break from reading novels and take a quick nose dive into Gogol's famous 1830s short story, talking absurdity, bureaucracy, and Russian wives.
Status and bureaucracies: The most straight forward reading is a satire 19th century Russian bureaucracies and status seeking. Benny outlines outlines the table of ranks and the boys consider the pros and cons.
Inconsistencies and the absurd: Rich is frustrated with the lack of internal inconsistency and doesn't buy George Saunders defence of the story as self-aware of its limitations.
Gogol's nose: Perhaps the story can be understood via a more personal lens. Benny points out Gogol's insecurities about his own noise which may be reflected in Major Kovalyov’s obsession with his appearance.
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"He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."
Wrapping up the second half of our discussion on Cormac McCarthy's 1985 classic, in which various chickens come home to roost.
The Glanton gang's downfall: on the run from the Sonoran cavalry, mercy killings, greed and symbolism of coins, the takeover of the ferry, the Yuma strike back, the judge's apocalypse-chic fashion, the Idiot plays his part (??).
On violence and human nature: Rich makes the base case that humans don't have a 'true' nature but respond to local incentives, Benny finds some logic in the conservative tradition for avoiding a major upset to the fragile equilibrium of modern civilisation, and Cam adds game theoretic reasons for having a government or third party that can make credible threats of violence.
What makes the Kid different: Rich thinks he isn't any more moral than the rest of the gang, but we end up coming up with a pretty good explanation for why the judge singles him out for opprobrium and considers him such a disappointment.
On the sunset of the Wild West: the kid becomes the man, the cycle of violence perpetuates itself, mass slaughter of the buffalo, McCarthy's satirical skewering of manifest destiny, interpreting of the epilogue and the last dance.
Also: some general thoughts on tackling our first McCarthy, his idiosyncratic writing style, and the ambiguity around his antagonist's true identity.
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Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman's making onto a foreign land. Yell wake more than the dogs.
Rich is a big McCarthy head. For Benny and Cam, it's their first taste, and we're going straight to the top shelf: the 1985 epic historical novel Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West.
In this discussion we cover the first half of the book (chapters 1-12) as a meditation on violence, manifest destiny, self-mythology, and McCarthy's own cunning plot to positioning himself within the literary canon.
At the centre of it all there is the judge: a towering, hairless enigma who might be a false god, or a devil... or something even worse.
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The Odyssey - Homer (Emily Wilson translation)
A bit of festive fun looking back on the year that was.
Which books have stayed with us? Which were forgettable? What was the best reading/watching we did outside of book club? What did we learn about podcasting? Are we gonna keep posting this stuff in public?
and MORE
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Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
The Odyssey - Homer (Emily Wilson translation)
A paradox: how can an author—say, Walker Percy—get the reader to care about a protagonist—say, Binx Bolling—who is stuck in a malaise and doesn't himself particularly care about anything?
A corollary: how can a book club have an engaging discussion when they don't particularly care about said book and said protagonist?
Honestly you might as well skip the first 10 minutes or so in which we half-assedly try to talk about the actual plot elements.
Luckily Cam saves the day with an impromptu lecture on Kierkegaard and we get to yapping about the meaning of life instead:
I can't be bothered doing chapter markers for this one so just take a leap of faith you cowards
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We love listener feedback. Send us a note at [email protected] to correct our bad takes, add your own, or just say hi.
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Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
The Odyssey - Homer (Emily Wilson translation)
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul... You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
Nabokov had a lot of trouble getting anyone to publish a story about a grown man falling in love with a 12 year old. After multiple bans and scandals, Lolita caught fire in America, and is now considered perhaps his greatest work (altho you still cop some dodgy glances reading it on the train).
The great central tension is between Humbert Humbert the monster and HH the sensitive and sympathetic aesthete. How reliable is HH as a narrator? Is he deluding himself? Did he successfully hoodwink certain critics? Is he truly capable of love and redemption, or is everything staged for effect?
On the murder mystery: is HH really any better than his nemesis Clare Quilty? What's the significance of trying to kill one's shadow? Did we catch Quilty's lurking presence throughout these pages? Does he even exist at all?
What's the message of this story? On didactic vs aesthetic fiction, whether this book is meant to be moralising, Nabokov's instructions to the reader, and an overall vibe check on how we feel about his tricks after reading both Pale Fire and Lolita.
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The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
These days every bestselling author writes novels about how their dad was too strict and they got bullied for bringing stinky indian food to school etc.
But Karl Ove Knausgaard walked so millennial narcissists could run.
This week we get absorbed in part 1 of his epic six-part autobiographical novel My Struggle, published in 2009.
The big central question: what makes a book which spends five pages describing the author making a cup of coffee so good? The prose is nice but prosaic, there are few major insights, and no plot beats or narrative tension. But we (mostly) agree that it is in fact a good or even great book.
On the performance art aspect to Knausgaard's project, the barriers to being truly sincere and honest, pathological self-awareness, why early memories are so often dominated by shame, nostalgia for premature ejaculation, and MORE.
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Lolita - Nabokov
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
Yeah, it's big brain time. This week we're reading 'Understand' from Ted Chiang's 2002 collection Stories of Your Life and Others.
what is the ceiling on human intelligence? can we jooce it up? did Chiang inspire the whole AI doomer movement? would superintelligence beings have to annihilate each other instead of cooperating? Do we buy the orthogonality thesis?
Also: introducing David Deutsch's 'universal explainer' theory of intelligence, which gives radically different answers to all of the above. Is the dumbest guy you know really capable of making novel advances in quantum physics? The answer may surprise you.
On abstractions and 'chunking': how important is working memory? Should we expect our high-level explanations to converge on a theory of everything? Would super-smart people really communicate in short series of grunts? Could they hack their own autonomic nervous systems or incept a linguistic killshot?
tl;dr: gestalt gestalt gestalt gestalt gestalt gestalt. gestalt gestalt? gestalt gestalt, gestalt.
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My Struggle, volume 1 - Karl Ove Knausgaard
Lolita - Nabokov
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
This week we're reading three of Anton Chekhov's most beloved short stories: The Man in the Case, Gooseberries, and About Love (The Little Trilogy, 1898).
We get a minor assist from George Saunders and his fantastic book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain but have no shortage of stuff to discuss.
Talking big 5 personality traits, the degree to which people oppress themselves, why Rich fell out of love with the early retirement movement, whether it's OK to be happy in a world full of suffering, and if having to settle in romantic relationships is antithetical to true love. Also: Cam takes a controversial and brave stance against home-wreckers.
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My Struggle, volume 1 - Karl Ove Knausgaard
Hemingway's 1929 semi-autobiographical classic tackles two big timeless themes: love and war.
Two out of three of us can relate to the first one, but war feels pretty alien to us. How would the boys do if they were conscripted? What made WWI so uniquely dispiriting? What is it about this novel that so faithfully captures the experience of war?
We also talk quite a bit about Hemingway's laconic characters and terse writing style. How representative is this of his broader work? What do we think of the 'iceberg method'? Why did he go with the most depressing possible ending?
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We wanna start reading listener feedback out on the pod, so send us a note at [email protected] to correct our bad takes or share your own.
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My Struggle, volume 1 - Karl Ove Knausgaard
Not too much plot to cover in parts 5 and 6; mostly we're hashing out our final thoughts on the book and Dostoevsky's legacy.
First up is the controversial epilogue. The boys are not sure how believable Rodya's redemption is. It feels kinda cheap? Dostoevsky is not very good at character development but maybe it doesn't matter. Sonya is a perfectly implausible character who exists only as a sort of a prop for Rodya. How on earth does Dosto have a reputation for writing realistic characters? Again, it prob doesn't matter.
Svidrigailov sneaks up on us as perhaps the most interesting (or at least the most underrated) character in the book. We talk about the three incredible scenes that bring his journey to an end: kidnapping Donya, the feverish hotel dream, and the dramatic exit.
Finally quite a bit of discussion about whether Dostoevsky is actually any good as a thinker. Rich is not sold: the critique of utilitarianism is unfair, blind deference to tradition leaves no room for progress, and God has been pretty neatly replaced by secular humanism. Benny pushes back and adds some nuance to the problem Dosto was trying to describe, and Cam talks about how he still feels the tension between nihilism and common-sense morality.
Don't miss the surprise guest appearance from Cam's manager. Is this the week he gets busted? will he live to skive off another day?? Tune in now to find out.
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Candide — Voltaire
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
we're just normal men. We're just innocent men!
In parts 3 and 4 of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1866 Crime and Punishment we get a lot more meat on Raskolnikov's 'extraordinary man' thesis.
How does it overlap with the concept of the Übermensch in Nietzsche and Hegel? Are we too deeply steeped in Christian morality to become 'extraordinary' without destroying ourselves?
We reconsider Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov, and Luzhin through this lens.
Plus: cam's obligatory sibling inc*st fantasies, rich tries to give dostoyevsky writing advice, etc
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Crime and Punishment - parts 5 and 6
Candide — Voltaire
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
Cracking into the first two parts of Dostoevsky's 1866 classic Crime and Punishment.
The first surprising thing is that this is a conservative/reactionary book: it mocks the fancy new ideas of the youth, the spirit of revolution, naive utilitarianism, etc. Jordan Peterson laps this shit up. But did the moral panic over materialism hold up? Does modern society in any way compare with the turmoil of Dostoevsky's Russia, or are we at the end of history? How relevant are Dostoevsky's concerns today?
We argue quite a bit about that but we're more aligned on the brilliance of Dostoevsky as psychologist, and especially the character of Rodya 'mister schiz' Raskolnikov: what causes his mind to fracture so spectacularly? What motivates him to do the deed? why does Rich kinda relate to him?
plus a masterclass on freestyle rap. and much more
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Crime and Punishment - parts 3 and 4, then parts 5 and 6
Candide, by Voltaire
The beauty of this book is immeasurable, and its kindness is infinite.
We all love Susanna Clarke's 2012 metaphysical thriller, which feels like a mashup of Borges/C.S. Lewis/Gone Girl.
Venture deeper into the labyrinth with us:
Piranesi as amateur scientist: On indigenous knowledge, the dangers of naïve empiricism, achieving dominion over nature, and whether the Other kind of had a point.
Metaphysics of the House: Are abstractions real, revisiting Plato's world of perfect forms, and whether the world is fundamentally Good.
Identity and mental illness: The illusion of stable personhood over time, repressed memories as trauma response, and how a person with dementia or psychosis can maintain a consistent internal worldview.
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We wanna start reading listener feedback out on the pod, so send us a note at [email protected] to correct our bad takes or share your own.
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Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky (reading in three parts over six weeks)
holy shit this was hard. Our first attempt at shakespeare and it was a doozy!
Rich struggled through the original text and only had the vaguest idea what was going on. Cam watched every single movie adaptation and studied for two weeks but still got casually mogged by his girlfriend.
By the time we got done with the discussion we were all actually hyped to read more shakespeare so something must have gone right.
Covering such topics as:
The impenetrability of Shakespearean english, whether it's better to read modern translations or the original text, our favourite lines and soliloquies, shitting on the Freudian reading, connections to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and Hamlet as the archetypal annoying theatre kid.
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THE ADDRESS I SAID IN THE RECORDING IS WRONG! it has since been changed to [email protected]
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Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky
This one starts slow but it ends up being one of my favourite book clubs ever.
Camus' last finished novel was The Fall (1956). It has a lot of personal resonance for Rich and the other boys loved it too.
Loss of innocence: how much of our behaviour comes down to signalling? Is there such a thing as genuine altruism? Is it dangerous to learn about this stuff? Was David Foster Wallace's 'new sincerity' idea doomed from the outset?
Escaping the double bind: Choosing which status games to play, finding solace in sports and other explicit games, why hedonism doesn't work, moving awareness away from the self and towards others, dissolving the problem of a meaningless universe.
Performative castigation: Is Jean-Baptiste's judge-penitent stance actually coherent? The pitfalls of woke ideology, recursive traps of judging people, and why virtue signalling is good, actually.
Religious interpretations: The biblical fall, Jean-Baptiste as antichrist, the death of God, and organised religion as laundering scheme.
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Hamlet - Shakespeare
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
Crime and Punishment - Dostoyevsky
Philip K. Dick is a sci-fi legend, but the boys have only ever seen the film adaptations of his work (Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly).
Dick's 1969 classic Ubik has us divided. Benny is mad that major premises are introduced and then abandoned, internal logic is sloppy, and the twist ending is lazy writing. Rich and Cam are charmed by the imperfections and think it heightens the sense of (un)reality.
Is Ubik a metaphor for God? What are the parallels to Gnosticism, and who is the demiurge behind the false reality of half-life? Do people who experience psychotic breaks even know that it's happening? What does Plato have to do with all of this?
“He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.”
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The Fall - Camus
Hamlet - Shakespeare
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.”
(who amongst us, etc)
This week we're talking Kafka's 1915 novella The Metamorphosis.
Rich swoons over Gregor and is deeply moved by his plight. Cam wonders whether the giant freaky bug might bear some responsibility for events. Benny starts out sorta lukewarm on the whole thing but comes around in the end.
Is this story meant to be a depiction of depression? An autobiographical work about an artist becoming alienated from his philistine family? A Marxist commentary on capitalism? A subconscious Freudian incest thriller?
We fearlessly explore all of these interpretations... and if you can believe it, even more
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Ubik - Philip K Dick
The Fall - Camus
Hamlet - Shakespeare
Wrapping up Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which we all loved.
Nature vs nurture: the monster as proto-incel, to what extent do we feel sympathy for him, should Victor have made him a bride, self-loathing and recrimination, and whether hot people are actually more virtuous than ugly people.
Also: why rousseau was a giant piece of shit, the monster as Byronic hero, importance of pariahs and moral entrepreneurs, pitbull discourse, etc
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COMING UP
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Ubik - Philip K Dick
The Fall - Camus
Discussing chapters 1-10 of Mary Shelley's 1818 genre mash-up Frankenstein.
On Mary Shelley's stacked genetics, the 'scenius' with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, questions over authorship including a suspiciously accurate depiction of post-nut clarity.
Forbidden knowledge: are infohazards real, taking accountability for new technology, guilt and the disgust instinct, strong parallels with AGI, arguments for and against creating new species. Can we defend a parochial concern for our own family/friends/species?
Is the monster innately evil? Or a product of his environment?
We love this book. hyped to hear the monster's side of the story in part 2.
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COMING UP
The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Ubik - Philip K Dick
The Fall - Camus
Wandering through Samuel Beckett's 1953 absurdist play Waiting for Godot.
Did Beckett actually have an interpretation in mind, or did he deliberately write a maximally vague story that everyone could map their own interests onto?
How well does the humour hold up over time? Where does Beckett rank in the canon of absurdist and existentialist writers? What proportion of reported suicides are actually autoerotic asphyxiation accidents? etc
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Our final session with W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge (chapters 5-7).
Elliot Templeton as the last relic of a dying age. Was he really happy? We consider his self-worship and clout-chasing Catholicism as a counterpoint to Larry's spirituality. Rest in power queen.
Sophie MacDonald attempts to climb off the wheel of suffering via more prosaic means. Did she get what she wanted? An argument over whether Isabel is a total psycho or only a minor-league bitch.
Larry's spiritual journey as a synthesis of the best parts of the Eastern tradition. Was this whole book just a delivery mechanism for Vedic philosophy? On the transmigration of souls, God as a deadbeat dad, and whether it's bad for society to encourage serenity-maxxing.
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Discussing chapters 4 and 5 of W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge.
Larry becomes aloof and reserved. Is he really bringing anything to the table besides his sexy forearms? Has he gone full woo-woo granola cruncher? Why can Kosti only talk about spirituality when he's drunk? Why aren't muses a thing these days?
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Cracking into the first three chapters of Maugham's 1944 spiritual odyssey.
Why do we love Larry so much? Rich talks about his own years of loafing around. Is Larry's decision to take a step off the beaten path less admirable given his 'trifling' $54,000 inflation-adjusted stipend?
Talking about the spergy drive to collect All the Knowledge, and how to think about which problems to work on. Is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake a noble activity, or should we actually be building stuff in the world?
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Starts with light and breezy over-sharing of our masturbatory habits, ends with a downer discussion about how we should re-contextualise Wallace's work thru the lens of the abuse allegations against him.
The main stories we talk about:
Brief Interview #59: Logically coherent masturbation fantasies (00:01:34) is this a universal experience, why are adolescent boys so creepy, the rare 'gooner to godhood' pathway.
Brief Interview #28 (00:10:20) Does feminism create a double bind for modern women, was the sexual revolution a mistake, what's with the neo-trad movement, why everyone should have the freedom to make mistakes and explore their preferences.
On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand... (00:30:02) a paean to r/childfree? do parents sometimes secretly hate their children, why small kids are sociopaths, was the father an unreliable narrator, 'radical honesty' is a terrible idea, are lies of omission morally permissible, rich's experience of fatherhood.
Church Not Made With Hands (00:52:42) dreamlike disorientation, modernist subjectivism redux, what does the title mean, ego and pride as an obstacle to healing.
The Mary Karr abuse allegations (01:10:38) what are the allegations against DFW, can mental health ever absolve people of responsibility, a framework for separating art from artist, should we reanalyse DFW’s work in light of what we know about his life, to what extent is he telling on himself in this book.
Brief Interview #20 and #46: The Granola Cruncher and the Viktor Frankl guy (01:27:25) are harm and traumatic events 'good' if they lead to more meaningful lives, could you weaponise this argument to justify anything, epic levels of cope never before conceived of.
This week's discussion is loosely based around the story Octet, but really we just drill down on what David Foster Wallace is trying to achieve in this collection.
How much metafiction is too much metafiction, does DFW stray into self-indulgence, the leap of faith he asks from his readers, is it possible to tactically and deliberately try to be sincere (or is this another double bind), and whether Brief Interviews is really about toxic masculinity.
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Wallace's 1999 collection of short stories takes us to some uncomfortable places (and as always, is eerily prescient).
In this week's discussion we talk about his 'juvenilia' coming-of-age story Forever Overhead, his famous piece The Depressed Person, and a smattering of the titular brief interviews.
We kinda fucked up the format on this by trying to talk about everything. But salvaged some bits about nostalgia, the blurred lines between narcissism and depression, therapy culture, and why metafiction is played out.
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An anticlimactic final discussion to an anticlimactic book. We are confused and afraid. Cam is on the brink of quitting reading altogether.
This discussion covers Parts 2 and 3 of To The Lighthouse. Actual book-related content starts at 11 minutes.
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Rich waxes lyrical about the dinner party scene. Do men have impaired theory of mind, or are they just assholes? On the invisible mastery of social reality, and capturing subjective experience in literature. It goes well enough that the boys decide to actually read the rest of the book.
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A fragmented jumble of multiple shifting perspectives, punctuated by abrupt jumps between topics and timelines, infused with the frustration of trying to express intensely-felt experiences within the bounds of mere words.
(oh and we also talked about a Virginia Woolf book)
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These days the 'multiverse' idea is standard marvel slop. But if we read this story in 1941 it would have blown our tiny little minds.
how tf did Borges sit at the cutting edge of philosophy and physics without doing the classic info-dump spergy thing?
We read one of our favourite stories in search of Clues
(actual plot-related analysis starts around the 1 hour mark)
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(00:00:00) synopsis and throat clearing
(00:06:43) Borges the troll (death of the author redux)
(00:16:23) How this mf had so many original ideas
(00:22:12) Cho Chang discourse
(00:30:30) Conceptual analysis of being cool
(00:42:20) History of the multiverse
(00:52:23) ambiguity of the Liddell Hart intro
(01:01:22) Fatalism and free will
(01:18:53) What motivates Yu Tsun?
(01:25:05) maze strategy chat
(01:31:20) When we first encountered the multiverse
(01:34:00) Does multiverse imply all possible things happen?
(01:49:25) Real hypertext has never been tried
Our critical consensus on John William's sleeper bestseller Stoner:
could it be...a perfect novel?
we try figure out why we relate so hard to Mr William Stoner, the great shining exemplar of principled mediocrity.
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closing out the last section of the book with death, entropy, and thwarted ambitions:
Not sure why the audio cuts off abruptly at the end but it does feel appropriate
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This section is light on plot but we do get a coherent theme: the perversions that emerge from consumer capitalism's relentless optimisation process.
will our hero Jed maintain his artistic integrity and stop feeding the beast? does Houellebecq think of himself as a kind of ethnographer? Does the g-spot actually exist? etc
benny's audio still sucks. actual book content starts at 00:06:19
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(00:00:00) what if we kissed under the mistletoe
(00:06:19) is art just expensive furniture
(00:17:48) refining Houllebecq's actual beef with consumer capitalism
(00:21:51) how true creativity can be corrupted by profit motive
(00:27:42) b*stiality bodycount digression
(00:29:53) Houllebecq as neutral ethnographer
(00:36:34) hot people are smarter too. its not fair
(00:42:18) height discourse
(00:48:14) William Morris
(00:52:47) trying and failing to talk about death
(00:55:28) how many holes are down there anyway??
Some good stuff coming up already in part 1 of The Map and The Territory:
benny's audio is completely cooked on this. I lost the files so I can't fix it sorry
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En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.