Unseen Academicals: A Discworld and Terry Pratchett Podcast

Josh is back on dry land, counting down the best books he read in 2022.

Live from Josh's bathtub, it's a countdown of the worst books he read for the first time in 2022!

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Josh is back to talk some more about Hogfather (1996) and its connections to Christmas traditions, covering the history of the Tooth Fairy and Hogswatch, the relationship between Father Christmas and Father Time, and the relationship between Christmas and the modern fantasy tradition, paying particular attention to works by Charles Dickens, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, as well as films like The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947).

Dr Nadav Prawer joins Josh for the first part on 1996's Hogfather, examining Susan's character development, her contrasts to Teatime, the nature of justice, the power of belief, falling angels, rising apes, Kierkegaardian existentialism, lies to children and the possible psychological (and legal!) ramifications of believing in the tooth fairy.*

*All jingling bell sounds in the background are indicative of cats, not the encroachment of any Verruca Gnomes. I hope... 

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Part three of our exploration of Soul Music (1994), examining Susan's side of the story and her engagement with heroic palimpsests, heroes' journeys, the "Sensible Susan" archetype, orphans, inheritance, education, Romanticism, quantum literature and more!

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Josh shares some initial thoughts about Rob Wilkins' official biography, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes (2022).

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Josh ranks C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia Books from worst to least terrible.

Heavy Blog is Heavy Editor in Chief, Eden Kupermitz joins Josh to talk about 1994's Soul Music, focusing on the book's engagement with the literary tradition of "magical music" and how it is foundational to the fantasy genre (and perhaps even the universe itself!) through its depiction in the myths of Orpheus, Genesis, H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, among others, as well as music's unmediated connection with spirituality and memory.* 

*May also contain copious amounts of Whitesnake. 

Follow Eden and Josh's music writing at heavyblogisheavy.com 

Eden's other literature podcasts:

Death // Sentence

Anarchy SF  

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Wotcher' Been Readin? August, 2022

May 2022 – Review Are We

Headliners: Ibaraki, Kendrick Lamar, Cave In.

Special Guests: Evergrey, SepticFlesh, Moon Tooth, Tómarúm, Malevolence.

Supports: Def Leppard, Puppy, Katharos, Entgeist, Unprocessed, Hollow Front, Morgue Supplier.

Uncool People: Mark Tremonti and Udo Dirkschneider sing Sinatra.

Cool People: Blut Aus Nord, Ufomammut, Arcade Fire. Subscribe to Podcast: https://feeds.sounder.fm/20336/rss.xml 

Further reading: heavyblogisheavy.com

Part two on Reaper Man (1991), exploring prologues, disability studies, "vegetarian" vampires, bereavement, Alzheimer's, euthanasia/assisted dying and more!

Listener Liz's essay that inspired this episode: https://somelizthoughtsondiscworld.blogspot.com/2022/06/reaper-man-death-or-death.html

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The first of two episodes on 1991's Reaper Man, exploring further representations of Death, dances Macabre and Morris, existentialism, pastoral romanticism and animal ethics.

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We kick off our examination of the Death series with 1987's Mort, exploring evolving representations of Death, fantastical and comedic bildungsromen, Dickensian parody and subverted heroes' journeys.

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Wotcher' Been Readin? May, 2022

Another episode of our bonus pre-show Wotcher' Been Reading? wherein we discuss:

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk

The Mortal Instruments seriesby Cassandra Clare

The Northern Lights by Philip Pullman

And then an extended bonus section about all the crazy shit that happens in Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

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A quick update about the podcast schedule.

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Our long-awaited second episode on Carpe Jugulum, covering the literary development of the vampire from the early-nineteenth century through to the publication of Carpe Jugulum almost two hundred years later in 1998 and beyond! We discuss Lord Byron (a lot) and his influence on the early vampire characterisation and his influence on other nineteenth-century vampire texts, including the unjustly overlooked Varney the Vampire as well as the more influential Carmilla and Dracula. (After moving house and catching COVID,) we then turn to the twentieth-century, discussing early cinematic iterations on Dracula and the shift toward sympathetic and overly Byronic representations via TV series like Dark Shadows and books like Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, ending up in the 1990s and the wild experimentation that was going on around Pratchett when he wrote his final Witches book.

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Preview episdoe for our Patreon bonus show Wotcher' Been Reading? where Alice and I discuss the non-Discworld things we've been reading recently.

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Episode 7A of Unseen Academicals, discussing Carpe Jugulum and exploring Pratchett's subversion of the triple goddess, magpie rhymes, Gothic landscapes, modernisation, notions of progress, "quilted" signifiers and more!

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Did you know Alice does another podcast called Of the Devil's Party, where they and their friend Rowan do a deep dive into dark hero archetypes? 

It's really good. You should listen to it! ...It also might help explain what all this "Byronic" stuff we keep talking about is.

On this bonus/preview episode Alice and Rowan begin their discussion of Gothic villains by examining Byron’s 1817 closet drama Manfred and its debt to the Gothic tradition. The pair discuss Byron’s life, work,  and experimentation with dark hero archetypes, and whether there is  actually such as thing as a Byronic Hero. They consider the way Byron  experiments with Dark Heroism by combining existing heroic archetypes  and traditions such as The Wandering Jew, the Child of Nature, The Hero  of Sensibility, Prometheus, Satan, the Gothic Villain and Faustus.

Subscribe to Of the Devil's Party: https://ofthedevilsparty.sounder.fm/

Support Unseen Academicals on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/doctorprometheuspod

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A Doctor Prometheus podcast.

We discuss Maskerade, exploring the origins triple goddess, the many guises of The Phantom of the Opera,distinctions between high and low culture, the gentrification of opera, masks, physical appearances, the archetype of the Gothic Villain and its theatrical transformation into a Romantic Hero of Sensibility and more!

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Our first ever bonus episode of Unseen Academicals, covering issue 19 of Neil Gaiman's comic series The Sandman: "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1991). We compare Gaiman's treatment of Shakespeare's titular play to that of Pratchett's Lords and Ladies (1992), while examining the history of Shakespeare in comics and fairy illustration, the Faerie connections to the underworld, Faustian bargains, the history of Puck and his "reverse Pandora," Tolkien's opinions on fantasy and drama, as well as the origins of drag and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and more!

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Our second part on Lords and Ladies, exploring evolving literary and cultural representations of elves and fairies through the works of William Shakespeare, J. R. R. Tolkien, T. H. White, Lord Dunsany, Rudyard Kipling and more!

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The first of two episodes on Lords and Ladies (1992), covering quantum continuities, simulacra warrior queens, performative dressing, glamour, the ethics of borrowing, vegetarianism, pagan landmarks, horny gods and more!

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