Finnegan and Friends

Here it is: the trailer for season six of The Cosmic Library, which comes out this month. It's "Karamazov Season," which means this five-episode miniseries will go into and beyond The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Sigmund Freud called it “the most magnificent novel ever,” and it contains so much—a murder mystery, philosophical conundrums, mathematical contemplation, and transformative scenes of ecstasy. For that reason, this miniseries will also contain so much. The first episode will include a radio play adapted from Dostoyevsky's novel, in which the parts of the three central brothers will be read by people who create fiction. Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire, will read the part of Dmitri Karamazov; Andrew Martin, author of Cool for America, will read the part of Ivan Karamazov; and WFMU host Hearty White is our Alyosha Karamazov.  After the play, the conversations begin. The novelists reflect on their own writing along with Dostoyevsky's; Hearty White connects cinema with radio with literature; scholars Robin Feuer Miller and Katherine Bowers consider the life of Dostoyevsky and his novel; and the mathematician Paulina Rowińska guides us through the logical and mathematical questions prompted by this book of conflicting and converging thoughts. It's a season about frenzied doubts and discoveries, about philosophical intensity and weird dreams, about mathematical questions and literary surprise. Find it this spring at Lit Hub or wherever you go for podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The word “story” often comes after the word “bedtime,” and for good reason. Stories can frighten us, disturb and shock us, prompt us to change our thinking, but compared to most experiences, reading a story is tranquil. Podcasts, similarly conveying mediated encounters with other lives, are also used as sleep aids (there's a “sleep” category in Apple Podcasts). Story podcasts, then, can demonstrate powerfully the connections between fiction and sleep. This episode—the concluding episode of The Cosmic Library's season on the short story in the U.S.—examines those connections. Deborah Treisman says in this episode, of the observation that her own New Yorker Fiction podcast can soothe its listeners, “When people say they use my podcast to fall asleep, it feels slightly insulting. But there is something about being read to, and we all really love it. And it takes us back to childhood, and it is soothing.” Fiction's capacity for tranquil transport isn't about boredom, either. Stories vanquish boredom, taking audiences on adventures into something beyond their immediate experience. And often, stories don't even reassure us. Andrew Kahn points out here that “with the short story, in a way the whole plot can come down to irony, which leaves a situation unresolved, open, something to think about rather than all tied up.” The calming effect and the strange openness of stories can have, it turns out, everything to do with each other. With some of the most ambitious literature, as Deborah Treisman says, “you are being taken somewhere else in the way that you are in dreams, and you have no option but to sort of respond to it as you would in a dream.” Guests: Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker Becca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too Small Justin Taylor, author of Reboot Andrew Kahn, author of The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“If my college-age self, reading White Noise, had thought I would one day be discussing word placement with Don DeLillo, I would have had a heart attack,” Deborah Treisman says in this episode. Since those days, in her role as fiction editor at The New Yorker, she has indeed discussed word placement with Don DeLillo, whose stories include “Midnight in Dostoyevsky” and “The Itch.” Treisman has helped bring that kind of story to a wide audience—it's all part of her work at the center of one of the major institutions in the history of American fiction. In this episode, then, we talk about The New Yorker and other forces sustaining short stories. As unruly and unclassifiable as short stories can be, they often live in some august realms: in The New Yorker, for example, or major MFA programs. And elite organizations tend not to do well with unruliness or unclassifiability. But when it comes to short stories, the great achievements of literary institutions have come from the pursuit rather than restriction of short fiction's possibilities. Those possibilities are frequently found far from the publishing industry's hubs: Tayari Jones describes, for instance, how writers can do their best work by leaving the publishing capital of New York City for home, wherever it may be (Atlanta, in her case). Thriving U.S. institutions with a commitment to short stories all rely, in some way, on voices and tendencies beyond those institutions. The New Yorker, says the literary scholar Andrew Kahn, “for a long time has had a very, very diverse and interesting and jumbled-up catalog.” And the writer Justin Taylor says, of MFA programs, “the institutions are not the ivory towers they think they are. They're deeply reflective of the cultures that are producing them.”  Guests: Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage Becca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too Small Justin Taylor, author of Reboot Andrew Kahn, author of The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

American short stories started out weird. Consider Nathaniel Hawthorne, as we just did in episode two this season—or, consider Edgar Allan Poe. Existential strangeness and cosmic peril pervade these nineteenth-century stories, and those moods have stayed with American short stories into the twenty-first century. Brevity can be crucial for such stories' maximal, cosmic weirdness. Justin Taylor points out here how Poe can get to extremity simply in a sentence. "What Poe brings to the table," Taylor says, "is that extreme purpleness of language, that kind of humidity, that really baroque Poe sentence, where it's kind of overwrought and maybe a little silly at times, but it's also really finely controlled." And Becca Rothfeld explains in this episode how short stories themselves aren't inherently contained, minimalist projects. A story, she tells us, “can resist ending by resisting presenting a satisfying or tidy conclusion," thereby inclining the reader toward something messy, something beyond, something expansive. Brevity might also express all that we can about overwhelming sublimity, in any case. Andrew Kahn quotes an essayist, writing on the centenary of Poe's birth, who observed how Poe “understood that the story of horror must be short, because he knew that the illusion of sheer marvel cannot be long sustained.” Guests: Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker Andrew Kahn, author of The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction Becca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too Small Justin Taylor, author of Reboot Max Gordon Moore, actor—with Broadway credits including Indecent and The Nap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's time for a story. In this episode of our season on short stories in the United States, you'll hear Nathaniel Hawthorne's mysterious short story “Wakefield,” read by the actor Max Gordon Moore. It's a story from the 1830s, reflecting from the first sentence the early American interest in strange information found repeatedly in periodicals, and then it follows that strangeness to cosmic extremes. If you know Hawthorne mostly as the author of The Scarlet Letter, you're in for a surprise in this story about a guy who moves basically next door and hides for twenty years. Short stories are good at this kind of surprise, too. They can be vehicles for writers to explore especially unusual material, and Hawthorne pursued that exploration with something like baroque concision. The novelist Justin Taylor says, of Hawthorne the writer of short stories, “When he was good, he was so good.” Max Gordon Moore reflects on the especially active thinking that Hawthorne's story stirs up: “I find myself perplexed in a fun way,” he says. As Deborah Treisman mentions in this episode, of effective short stories in general, “If the reader has to do some work, the reader becomes implicated in the story. If you're immersed in it, you've gone somewhere, you've been part of it, and then it's going to stay with you.” Guests: Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker Becca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too Small Justin Taylor, author of Reboot Max Gordon Moore, actor—with Broadway credits including Indecent and The Nap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Cosmic Library has always followed notions, tangents, and moods prompted by books that can never be neatly summarized or simply decoded. This new season is no exception. Still, there's a difference: we're prompted now by more than one major work. In season five, we're talking about short stories in the United States. You'll hear from New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, the novelist Tayari Jones, Washington Post critic Becca Rothfeld, the writer Justin Taylor, the Oxford scholar of short stories Andrew Kahn, and the actor Max Gordon Moore. And you'll hear a reading of a Nathaniel Hawthorne story that will add an exciting new dimension to your reality. Deborah Treisman in this first episode clarifies both the challenge and the promise of our subject. She says, “The term itself, 'American short story,' is slightly problematic, just because there are so many people in the U.S. writing short stories who perhaps came from somewhere else, who have a different heritage, whatever else it is—they're not playing into this tradition of Updike and Cheever and so on." Short stories in the United States tell us something way beyond any straightforward national narrative. "What's around right now is such multiplicity," Treisman says, "that it's rare to find a story that you would think of as classically American.” Contemplating multiplicity is part of the mission here in season five. We're talking about expansive range, about the uncontainable proliferation sustained by brevity. Short fiction, it turns out, can launch you into maximal excess just as novels can—and much more swiftly. Guests: Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage Becca Rothfeld, critic at The Washington Post and author of All Things Are Too Small Justin Taylor, author of Reboot Andrew Kahn, author of The Short Story: A Very Short Introduction Max Gordon Moore, actor—with Broadway credits including Indecent and The Nap Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The trailer is here for the new season of The Cosmic Library! This five-episode season concerns a subject both smaller and vaster than any massive book, and that subject is: short stories in the United States. You'll hear how short stories exceed their own brevity and meld with a reader's mind; you'll hear about the history of the short story across continents; you'll hear how stories are edited at The New Yorker; and you'll hear a thrilling reading of the cosmically bewildering “Wakefield,” a classic story by Nathaniel Hawthorne in which this guy moves next door and hides out for twenty years. Guests include The New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, Oxford scholar Andrew Kahn, Washington Post critic Becca Rothfeld, the novelist (and writer of short stories) Justin Taylor, and the actor Max Gordon Moore. Find it at Lit Hub or wherever you go for podcasts—new episodes will be released weekly, starting April 24th. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here, in the conclusion of our five-episode season on The Hall of the Monkey King, you'll hear about Journey to the West's capacity for reinvention across centuries—about, in other words, its openness to different circumstances, something like the Monkey King's own openness, his playfulness. Julia Lovell says, “Running through Monkey's actions and personality is a love of this thing called play. He's an incredibly playful character. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the Chinese word in the title of the novel that is translated as 'journey'—you—can also be translated as 'play.'" Kaiser Kuo describes the history of openness in China with regard to cosmopolitanism. He mentions the echoes between the Ming Dynasty (when Journey to the West was written) and the Tang Dynasty (when the novel is set). Both of those dynasties, he says, have "periods of outward-facing and inward-facing.” These are times of intensified tensions that Kaiser Kuo observes here across Chinese history. Journey to the West makes much of related dynamics between outward-facing and inward-facing, especially through its playful mood. In this novel, adventuring through traditions from China and from outside China, thinking in different keys, leaping from philosophy to philosophy, and seeking transcendence all depend upon a wild amount of play, of experiment, of fun. Guests this season include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; Xiaofei Tian, scholar of Chinese literature at Harvard; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston—she's now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; and Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You can encounter Journey to the West in film, on television, in comic books—it's a sixteenth-century novel that lives comfortably in an age of cinema and video games. This episode, then, follows a tangent away from the sixteenth century and into the movies. We're talking about heroic quests and martial arts in media centuries after Journey to the West's publication. Wuxia cinema, in particular, occupies our attention here. These are films of high drama and martial arts in pre-modern, legendary Chinese settings. Karen Fang, scholar of cinema and literature at the University of Houston, notes “threads of connection” between Journey to the West and wuxia, and connections include the similar presence of a spiritual quest and martial artistry in a mythical-historical world. Still, to be clear: in this installment, we're going for a walk away from the novel and into the movies. It's just that we find a few patterns that match those of the Monkey King's adventures.  Wuxia stories, like the Monkey King's, draw from dynamics between intense self-cultivation and power struggle. The result is a durable kind of kinetic drama—it's opened up cinematic possibilities for decades. Karen Fang explains the heart of it all: “The underlying idea in wuxia is this idea that somebody can reach a level of human transcendency—a transcendent power, a transcendent skill—through years of training and dedication, both to physical training, but also spiritual dedication.” Guests in this episode include Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston—she's now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast; and Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You might, for good reason, not associate restless irreverence with religious engagement. But in Journey to the West, the Monkey King's adventure through Daoist and Buddhist drama does have both elements, and the book weaves together multiple moods as result, including those of spiritual clarity and zany satirical play. Whether the novel does all this for the sake of ultimate, anarchic satire, for a livelier spirituality, or for other reasons: that all gets debated. Julia Lovell says in this episode: Literary critics have been arguing about the spiritual, religious elements of the book for centuries. Some have always maintained that the book has actually a very intricate religious design, that Monkey is an allegory for the human mind. So in this reading, Monkey stands for the instability of human genius in need of discipline, namely the trials of the pilgrimage, to realize its potential for good.  There's justification for such a reading, even if it's not the only possible interpretation of this book. Lovell says: The earliest Buddhist sutras translated into Chinese analogize the human mind as a monkey, as restless, erratic, volatile. And by the end of the first millennium C.E., the phrase “monkey of the mind” (xinyuan) had become a stock literary allusion for this restless human mind.  Following the Monkey King's successful scenes of mischief, you might interpret the book as a joyous celebration of that Monkey Mind; or, the difficulties and disciplinary experiences that change the Monkey King could make the novel seem like a spiritually exacting pilgrim's quest. There's no single answer here. You'll have to choose your own adventure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Different belief systems—and just differences in general—collide and merge in Journey to the West, the classic Chinese novel at the center of this season. “In Dungeons & Dragons terminology, you've got this lawful good monk and then you have this chaotic good monkey,” says Kaiser Kuo (co-founder of China's first heavy metal band and host of the Sinica Podcast) in this episode. And their quest succeeds: the combination of the monk Tripitaka's lawfulness and the Monkey King's chaos works out. That intertwinement of differences shapes Journey to the West, on multiple levels. It's about a quest for Buddhist texts, but Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, makes his way through Daoist self-cultivation and Confucian thinking, too. The divine realm includes Daoist deities such as the Jade Emperor, but it's also a Buddhist realm, including the Buddha and Guanyin. There's a playful engagement with everything here, and the translator Julia Lovell explains the world behind that kind of expansive interaction with various traditions: The novel sprang from a much older set of legends about a real historical character who lived around 600–664 CE as a subject of the Tang empire in China. Now the Tang is one of the great eras of Chinese imperial expansion, when the empire extends from the edge of Persia in the northwest to the frontier with modern Korea in the northeast. Taizong, the emperor on the throne in Tripitaka's time—he's the character who in the novel dispatches Tripitaka off to India to fetch the sutras—Taizong is the vigorous, ruthless ruler who pushes the frontiers of his empire out so far.  And in the decades that follow this, the Tang empire is awash with cosmopolitan products and ideas. And still today in China, the Tang is celebrated as this period of phenomenal cosmopolitan flourishing of the empire and ideas throughout China. In this episode, we think about how a wild novel gave that cosmopolitan attitude a new narrative life. Guests in this episode include Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast; Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; and Xiaofei Tian, scholar of literature at Harvard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Cosmic Library is back, with a five-episode season on Journey to the West, the classic 16th-century Chinese novel of comic mischief, spirituality, bureaucratic maneuvers, and superpowered fight scenes. It's the story of a monk's journey west for Buddhist texts, and that journey is moved along by the rambunctious Monkey King, whose interests include troublemaking and the pursuit of immortality. In film, television, comic books, videogames, and elsewhere, this book remains in pop culture; for example, its story is woven into the new Disney+ streaming series American Born Chinese (based on a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang). And it's also the right book to include on The Cosmic Library shelf alongside Finnegans Wake, 1,001 Nights, and the Hebrew Bible—it's full of transformations, dream-like scenes, and surprising complications.  This season, we'll hear readings from the book and talk about Buddhism, Daoism, cinema, comedy, and more. There's a lot here. Journey to the West continually jolts the reader toward some joke, spiritual consideration, or satirical deflation of such considerations. Gene Luen Yang has described, in his foreword to Julia Lovell's recent translation of Journey to the West, how tales of the Monkey King worked in his childhood as bedtime stories. And in this season of The Cosmic Library, you'll hear how it's the kind of book to read into the night, into the dream-like realm where categories blur, where thoughts and moods shift continually.  Guests this season will include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston— she's now working on a biography of Disney legend Tyrus Wong; D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia; and Xiaofei Tian, scholar of literature at Harvard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights; season three, the Hebrew Bible. This spring, in a season titled "The Hall of the Monkey King," we're talking and thinking about Journey to the West, the fantastical Chinese novel full of action and comedy and spiritual adventure. Guests for season four will include Julia Lovell, whose recent translation of Journey to the West is titled Monkey King; Karen Fang, scholar of literature and cinema at the University of Houston; Xiaofei Tian, scholar of literature at Harvard; and D. Max Moerman, scholar of religion at Columbia. The five episodes will come out weekly, starting in late spring of 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's not just the contradictions in the Hebrew Bible that puzzle and provoke readers—there are, throughout, passages of intense emotional or moral provocation. See, for instance, Ecclesiastes, which in the King James translation begins: Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. Ecclesiastes challenges familiar notions of what life is about, notions of meaning or usefulness. You have to respond to something like that. You have to think of your own answer to the book that declares: "There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after." Poetry often poses such challenges that can't be easily explained or resolved, but in return, these challenges might activate the mind. The poet and critic Elisa Gabbert says, "When I'm reading or when I'm writing, I'm just thinking better than I am at any other time."  The Hebrew Bible prompts you to figure things out on your own, with particular attention to language. As Peter Cole says: "At the very heart of this text, what do you have? You've got this ultimate transparency and ultimate opacity, which is the name of God, the four-letter name of God, which is unpronounceable, and no one really knows what it means." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the book of Genesis on, the Hebrew Bible presents a struggle with language: a struggle to establish meaning, to figure out the right uses of words, to understand one's place in the world. The famous early scene of struggle in the Hebrew Bible, Jacob's wrestling match with the divine, goes as follows in the King James translation:  Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. And he said unto him, What is thy name?  As Peter Cole says, "The release from that one struggle, and the blessing, only comes with a knowledge of names." Even this physical wrestling match becomes a matter of language, then. Struggles with outright disaster generate language quests, too. Elisa Gabbert elaborates on disaster poetry in this episode, especially on the subject of W.H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts." She says: "It reminds you how much text there is in a poem. It's wild." And she describes a proliferating kind of irony that radiates possibilities in so many directions, to which poetry might grant access. Find more from Elisa Gabbert on Auden's poem here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/06/books/auden-musee-des-beaux-arts.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stuck in a lonely motel room, you have a good chance of finding a Bible, left for anyone similarly stuck in a strange interval between days. In this way, it's yet another night book. The Bible also has famous night scenes, and dream scenes, too: Jacob's dream of angels, Joseph's dream of sheaves of wheat. So this chapter of “Mosaic Mosaic” explores dream interpretation and that foundational dream-interpreter Sigmund Freud, himself a close reader of the Hebrew Bible. "Literature guides Freud's thinking all the way through," says Tom DeRose of the Freud Museum in London. And one effect of reading such a literary doctor is a literary, tragic awareness—what DeRose describes as awareness that every effort to "bring things to a better place will inherently contain its own destructiveness within it."  Other tensions between contraries exist within the dreams and dream-like passages of the Hebrew Bible. The novelist Joshua Cohen calls the dreams in the Bible "highly demonstrative and overly obvious." He says that "the dreams that are presented are so clear,” which suggests "a way of taming dream space, denying dream space its wildness." On the other hand, the poet Peter Cole finds something like that wildness in the Bible, finds "that porousness of consciousness where the boundary of self is blurred." And so, somehow encountering both blurred boundaries and demonstrative clarity, we're thinking in this episode of what interpretation can make of it all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“We regulate each other's nervous systems,” says the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett in this chapter of “Mosaic Mosaic.” “We are the caretakers of each other's nervous systems.” So feeling—and thinking—and the regulations of law join together; the idea that laws exist apart from our nervous systems, our feelings, doesn't quite work, in this sense. The poet Peter Cole here describes an emotional state associated with the language of rules and ritual in the Hebrew Bible, and in Leviticus particularly. He says, “I was just totally spellbound by the choreography of sacrifice.” And the novelist Joshua Cohen speaks of living law, a kind of vital legal system that emanates beyond the Torah, through commentary and debates ever after. Laws, rules, rituals: these, you'll hear, are all alive with feeling. “Regulation doesn't mean damping down,” Lisa Feldman Barrett says. “It just means coordinating and making something happen.” Poet and critic Elisa Gabbert describes poetry as “a vibration,” which in a way might match the nervous-system correspondence described by Lisa Feldman Barrett. In literature as in legal regulation, we learn in this chapter, language coordinates responses, and it participates in the merging of thought with emotion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This season, we're rambling through and beyond a book sacred in multiple traditions, a book that keeps generating debate and commentary and tangents. It's the Hebrew Bible, home to Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his Ark, David and Goliath, and prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel. Here, in a season we're calling "Mosaic Mosaic," it especially prompts conversations about the mysteries of thought and language. The novelist Joshua Cohen explains in this episode that the Hebrew Bible poses fundamental questions about language. As he puts it: "Why are there letters, actually? Why do the letters form words? This is the most basic question of the Bible." There, language makes things happen on a grand scale. God creates the world by language, by declarations: "let there be light"—Cohen mentions the idea that "one could create life through the combination of letters." And in the Bible, after Adam comes to life, he gives names to things and thereby begins exploration of the world by language. Here's Robert Alter's translation of that scene in Genesis:  And the LORD God fashioned from the soil each beast of the field and each fowl of the heavens and brought each to the human to see what he would call it, and whatever the human called a living creature, that was its name.  The poet, translator, and MacArthur genius Peter Cole speaks of "the burden of the Bible," which he calls a "pain in the desk chair"; yet he adds that "everything is somehow in it, but only if you use it as a tool for reflection, or a prism, so that both you and the world end up in its pages somehow, refracted by the text." The written word can align past and present, or antiquity with you, the contemporary reader, and some sort of harmony might occasionally result. (Elisa Gabbert, speaking of poetry generally, describes in this show the experience of encountering a text that "feels like how you're feeling.") At the end of our last season, on 1,001 Nights, radio host Hearty White recounted this realization: "When you're talking about Bible stories, you're not talking about Bible stories at all. It's an excuse to talk about other things. It's just a jumping off point." Along those lines: this season, we're starting with the Bible and jumping into explorations of language, the mind, emotions, and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Cosmic Library explores massive books in order to explore everything else. Here, books that can seem overwhelming—books of dreams, infinity, mysteries—turn out to be intensely accessible, offering so many different ways to read them and think with them. Season one considered Finnegans Wake; in season two, it was 1,001 Nights. Season three, titled Mosaic Mosaic and premiering on April 11, journeys through and beyond the Hebrew Bible.  Guests for season three include: Peter Cole, the poet and MacArthur genius whose new book Draw Me After will be out this fall; Elisa Gabbert, poet and poetry columnist with the New York Times–her latest book is Normal Distance; Lisa Feldman Barrett, psychologist, neuroscientist, and author of books including How Emotions Are Made; Tom DeRose, curator at the Freud Museum in London; and Joshua Cohen, the novelist whose books include Book of Numbers.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 1,001 Nights are not typically about conclusions, but about the suggestion of more stories, more information passed from person to person, language to language. In this, the last episode of this season, Mazen Naous—a scholar whose specialties include the Nights—points out the implication of the phrase “thousand and one nights”: “There's always one more story, always one more story to be told, the stories have no beginning and no end. That's partly why the Nights still inspire rewrites and reinventions and adaptations to this day.” “I think the book doesn't end,” says Yasmine Seale, translator of the Nights, here. “The force of this work, and what's so strange and uncomfortable about it, is that it's a book without an end, without resolution, without conclusion.” That openness makes the Nights a work in which you can ramble and find, maybe, anything. Hearty White, of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU, compares such reading to other sorts of study: When you're talking about Bible stories, you're not talking about Bible stories at all. It's an excuse to talk about other things. It's just a jumping off point. And so what you do is go into excruciating minutiae as a way of opening up—it's a key, and you use it to open up a tangent, and that tangent takes you to marvelous places. And then I found out you can literally do it with almost anything that's complicated . . . And you just descend, infinitely, in between the words. The Nights were compiled in a way that supports this kind of reading, this kind of thinking. They've been added to, changed, adapted in ways that obliterate any straightforward authenticity or moral simplicity. Reading the Nights, then—and talking about the Nights—means accepting something challenging: stories can exceed easy notions of an author, or a culture, or even history. Stories can, in short, let you participate in experiences far beyond them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1,001 Nights begins in horror: a king threatens to kill, and Shahrazad tells stories to keep the king from doing so. The ongoing nature of the stories, then, relies on a drive to live, manifesting the basic connection between our intuitive selves and imagination. When stories really survive, there's more to them than repetitive cliffhangers or excessively elaborated detail—something more than escapist entertainment, even if that's there, too. Hearty White says in this episode, “I don't care for the movies that are in mythical places. They're ‘world-creating'? They're world-limiting. Every time they add another character, another detail, they're shutting off possibilities, they're not creating them.” He describes, too, the films and TV shows to which he's drawn, movies “where I'm shown something and go, ‘Why isn't the camera moving? I'm getting a little uncomfortable, what am I supposed to look at? What's my role now?' Now you're very conscious of the fact that you're observing—you're not on autopilot.” So a vital possibility glows in stories that sustain your questioning, again and again and again. Katy Waldman describes how episodic stories can work by producing more of the same-but-not-the-same. We call it “now-what fiction” in this episode, a kind of story in which there's “a mix of something enduring and going on and something . . . completely new and different.” In short: these are stories in which something persists or survives, inviting your questions continually, even if those questions are simply “now what?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 1,001 Nights are full of patterns; the stories have formulas, and this too anticipates the world of television, comic books, video games. Yasmine Seale, translator of the Nights, says in this episode, “Formula is essential to the work. It draws it force from accumulation. It draws its meaning from pattern.” But formulaic narrative doesn't necessarily mean mind-numbing sameness. It can mean the opposite. Hearty White, the host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU, talks in this episode about watching formulaic Three Stooges episodes, which don't limit the viewer's imagination. Instead, you get the sense that an artist like Hearty White is liberated by the formulaic, finds a field in which to play and invent within clichés or patterns. He says in this episode, of formulaic story: “I think what it does is, it frees you from the involuntary compulsive predicting that you have to do when you're navigating your life. Maybe because the same thing is happening all the time you don't have to guess.” For Katy Waldman, critic at The New Yorker, stories that serially, repeatedly suggest infinity also work with the sense that “things might end . . . but something will persist. And what on earth will that look like?” She describes a dystopian version of the liberating experience Hearty White finds in ongoing, repetitious story. Still, in either case, attention is repeatedly compelled to something beyond repetitions. We are, once more, in the world of night and the dreams that surpass the night. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The House of Wisdom was a center of learning in Baghdad of the Abbasid caliphate. Established in the eighth century, it sustained a golden age of science that coincided with the collection of early versions of the 1,001 Nights. In this episode, we hear about the science of the Nights, the science of the Abbasid age, and the history, more broadly, of science fiction. A similar exchange from culture to culture, language to language, made possible the scientific advances of this time and 1,001 Nights. The very frame narrative of Shahrazad is a Persian story, and leading figures associated with Baghdad's House of Wisdom were Persian, as well. In this episode, Jim Al-Khalili, author of a book on the House of Wisdom, describes two Persian thinkers, Ibn Sina and al-Biruni: Both these guys were philosophers, scientists, polymaths—and they were having the sorts of debates about the nature of reality that would not seem out of place in modern physics . . . debating about: how does the light from the sun reach the Earth as it travels through space, are there many worlds, are there parallel universes? Stuff that you'd think, “How could they possibly be talking about that?” I just get the feeling that we didn't invent cleverness in modern times. The Nights and scientific work have more in common than speculative thinking and reliance on cross-cultural communication, too. Both depend on ceaselessly driving toward something yet to be fully grasped—either through repetitive experiments or repetitive storytelling. Maybe it was inevitable, then, that the Nights would have a major part in the history of science fiction. You'll hear in this episode how magnetism was a scientific preoccupation that became a source of adventure within the Nights—specifically, within the stories of “The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad,” which also contain a link to a later monument of science fiction: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know Shahrazad, who tells a story every night in order to survive and save lives; you also know the collection of stories that results: 1,001 Nights. At least, you've felt the influence of those stories. On TV, in books, in comics—you've experienced things informed by the episodic narratives of Shahrazad. And in this season of The Cosmic Library, you'll hear how the Nights opened paths to infinite story possibility within repetitive constraints. Even as the threat of death looms over Shahrazad in the Nights, her narrative inventions promise something that exceeds the power of a tyrant. And so, in this season (as in the last one, which was about Finnegans Wake) we're once again talking about a night book that takes you beyond the night. Along the way, we're hearing of a historical golden age, The Three Stooges, the art of literary survival, and possible worlds that emanate from even the worst situations. Such imaginative survival entails changes, some of which are well known: Shahrazad is familiar to many readers as Scheherazade, a transliteration that resulted from translation after translation, and alteration after alteration, across cultures. Yasmine Seale, translator of 1,001 Nights and guest on this season, writes to The Cosmic Library, “I like Shahrazad because it makes clear the name's Persian origins. There are different theories about its etymology. One sees it as shahr, city, and the suffix zad, born. A child of the city. Shahrazad is an urban figure—worldly, streetwise, unshockable. The stories were about merchants and for merchants.” Meanwhile, the Scheherazade spelling, Seale writes, “is a bit of a monster. The ‘Sch' smells German, the final ‘e' is French. English puts the stress on a syllable which is silent in Persian and Arabic. It's a spelling that tells us more about the various European readings and misreadings of the text, its many messy afterlives, than about the work itself.” This season thinks about classic stories that have had over-brimming afterlives through readings and misreadings, stories that have always suggested infinitely branching ideas, possibilities, and questions. Guests this season include a maker of fiction, a New Yorker critic, a theoretical physicist, a translator of the Nights, and a literary scholar. If our first volume, “Finnegan and Friends,” found creative revitalization in Finnegans Wake's evocation of night, let this second volume, “The Worlds of Scheherazade,” reveal the potential Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Cosmic Library follows tangents out of literary classics concerned with infinity. Building on Lit Hub's five-part Finnegan and Friends podcast, this series explores the most unfathomable books in conversation with an eclectic cast of guests. The upcoming season, The Worlds of Scheherazade, plunges into and out of the 1,001 Nights with guests Katy Waldman, critic at The New Yorker; Yasmine Seale, translator of the 1,001 Nights; Jim Al-Khalili, theoretical physicist; Mazen Naous, professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and Hearty White, host of Miracle Nutrition on WFMU.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some of Finnegans Wake’s canniest readers, like guest Olwen Fouéré, don’t read the whole thing. That makes sense, too, considering that the book is itself incomplete: the last line doesn’t end, has no period. You’re left with a book that cannot conclude itself, that avoids coherence. So what are all these words doing, if not communicating? In part, they’re making music. They’re an experiment with language’s sounds. Joyce obsessed over such sounds, including the sound linkages that connect meanings in ways impossible to track consistently. The scholar Joseph Nugent says in this episode, “Joyce does things very frequently for the fun of it, or because of some coincidence that was inside his own head that the rest of us have no access to whatsoever. We give up after a while imagining that we’re going to make entire sense of this book.” Some of the sound connections are easier to make than others, especially when we think of the book’s music. The book alludes often to the song “Finnegan’s Wake,” but it also echoes the song about poor old Michael Finnegan, which has lyrics—“poor old Michael Finnegan, begin again”—about restarting. When you read the book with songs in mind, you can end up noticing glorious constellations that scholars have catalogued for decades. Consider the closing lines, with their patterns of iambs and rhyme and alliteration, their music that carries you along with the rising and falling of waves: "We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the" You, reader or listener, have to figure out where you go from here. But the Wake gives you rhythms and sensations to encourage those next steps. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Think of your most obscure, private, family chatter—some combination of baby-talk and nicknames and reiterations of the same concerns or jokes. It wouldn’t make sense to outsiders, but it makes a special kind of sense to you. It’s language that communicates in a highly local way, and not at all in other ways. And yet: everyone sort of knows how this language works. In Finnegans Wake, that private language converges, even, with broadly recognizable mythic language. We’re reading about a family—the patriarch HCE, the mother ALP, the sons Shem and Shaun, and daughter Issy—but they’re all associated with mythic figures: Aesop’s characters (the ant and grasshopper turn into the Shaun-like responsible Ondt and the Shem-like irresponsible Gracehoper), the HCE-like Humpty Dumpty, and, most Irishly, Finn MacCool. The Wake shows us how the super-local is also mythical, shared. Wittgenstein framed the idea of private language as follows: “The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know—to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.” But in the Wake, the most inscrutably private language echoes beyond privacy. The cryptic HCE’s name at one point stands for Here Comes Everybody; characters flow into one another, mix together in their most private moments. Washerwomen gossiping about the private lives of ALP’s family are overcome by the river that is itself tied to ALP, swept up into the mystery rather than ejected from it. The document that supposedly might reveal ALP’s family truth is the “mamafesta,” a manifesto of the mama. Joyce mocks usual methods of interpretation, Freudian and Marxist, of this document. Efforts to interpret that private language create epic resonances, of Greek language and grandiosity, useful in a story about the epic dimensions of everyday characters. You can see some of that here: "that (probably local or personal) variant maggers for the more generally accepted majesty which is but a trifle and yet may quietly amuse: those superciliouslooking crisscrossed Greek ees awkwardlike perched there and here out of date like sick owls hawked back to Athens" The most majestic connection to HCE would be the mythic Finn MacCool, the Irish hero linked to the fallen Finnegan in lines like, “Macool, Macool, orra whyi deed ye diie?” In this episode, the scholar Katherine O’Callaghan describes how HCE’s fall and rise recall the fall of the ancient Irish hero, the fall of “a sort of Finn” and “the old myths of the Fionna, a warrior tribe in Ireland in the first and second centuries, with Finn the leader.” O’Callaghan tells us that in the Wake, we find “the fallen Finn, but the idea of course in Finnegans Wake is that Finn himself might be woken in some way and come back out of his burial site and rise again.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The “wake” in Finnegans Wake means both a joyous funereal gathering (here Joyce invented the word “funferal”) and a rising from sleep. But it also suggests the wake that follows movement through water. The book’s language, while dreamy and ceremonial, is also material, and often watery. This is appropriate, because like dreams, water brings us into an ongoing process of expansive life. Cosmically expansive, even. Alok Jha says in this episode that while we’re mostly water-beings on a planet covered in water, “all of those molecules of water came not from the Earth; the Earth’s water comes from space,” from the bombardment of meteorites that carried water to us. And in Finnegans Wake, water links characters to new forms, via the river that runs through the book’s first word (“riverrun”) and to the final unfinished sentence from Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP), the wife of the central figure, HCE. Joyce relates ALP to the River Liffey, the river that flows through Dublin. He plays with sonic affinities between Livia/livvy/Liffey, and writes, of ALP, “haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run” (recalling, with this running rill, that rivverrun of the book’s first line). Along the River Liffey, in one passage, washerwomen gossip about ALP, until they’re turned into a stone and a tree, overwhelmed by the mystery of ALP’s family and by the river itself: "Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughter-sons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Tellmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!" Shem and Shaun, the two sons of HCE and ALP, might be sons or daughters here. A fluidity of identity allows them to shift forms throughout the book, too, into other pairings (like the Ondt and the Gracehoper, who represent responsibility and play much as Shem and Shaun do—Shem the mischievous penman, Shaun the responsible postman). And it’s not just a metaphorical fluidity. Real wateriness, the riverrun, overcomes the washerwomen, who, like us, want to know more but are riverrun by the Wake’s liffeying waters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Finnegans Wake—a book of rebirth and reawakening—finds its engine for rejuvenation in dreaminess. This matches what neuroscientists tell us: sleeping and dreaming are regenerative, intellectually and physiologically. Dr. Jade Wu, a sleep specialist at Duke University, tells us in this episode, “Sleeping is actually a very very active state of the brain, and there’s a lot of life-affirming things happening. For example, the growth hormones are being released . . . your brain is literally refreshing itself when you sleep. So in a way you’re not so much dying as getting maybe a little younger in a way, or getting a little healthier.” She says that “sleeping is almost like a tiny bit of reversal of death.” In other words, sleep gives us something close to the plot of Finnegans Wake. We can’t say for certain that Joyce’s whole book is set within a dreamer’s mind, but James Joyce himself maintained it was his book of dreams and “nocturnal life.” And John Bishop’s classic study, Joyce’s Book of the Dark, charts the dream logic of the novel, and it makes a lot of sense. Still, whether or not the whole book is a dream, it’s often dream-like: illogical, obsessive, anxious. Joshua Cohen in this episode relates the dreaminess to the drunkenness of a wake, the drunkenness at the pub run by main-character HCE. Almost halfway through the book, we find HCE in his pub, drinking whatever’s left over in empty bottles. And at that moment, Cohen observes, one might consider the Wake “a kind of drunken dream-book.” Here’s the scene: "he finalised by lowering his woolly throat with the wonderful midnight thirst was on him, as keen as mustard, he could not tell what he did ale, that bothered he was from head to tail, and, wishawishawish, leave it, what the Irish, boys, can do, if he did’nt go, sliggymaglooral reemyround and suck up, sure enough, like a Trojan, in some particular cases with the assistance of his venerated tongue, whatever surplus rotgut, sorra much, was left by the lazy lousers of maltknights and beerchurls in the different bottoms of the various different replenquished drinking utensils left there behind them on the premisses by that whole hogsheaded firkin family, the departed honourable homegoers and other sly-grogging suburbanites" Is the groggy slygrogging mood one of drunkenness or of sleep? Or is it both at once, a mood of dreaming and wakefulness? (The “multiple things at once” approach will often carry you through Finnegans Wake; never rule it out.) Consider “replenquished” in the passage above, too. It’s an unreal word, describing the empty bottles. It must mean the fullness of replenishment (there’s still something in those bottles for HCE to drink) but it also tells us of a vanquished (emptied, defeated, “quished”) state. A fallen thing, an empty bottle, becomes a source for replenquishment, for bizarre fullness. Joyce’s word has the dreary desperation of our waking days (wherein we find emptiness and defeat and vanquishing and deserted pubs) along with the hope of our dreams (wherein we find compensatory fullness in that emptiness). Emptiness/fullness, or falling/rising: these opposites merge throughout Joyce’s book. Joshua Cohen says in this episode that the Wake, a book about an old man, is also “a book of second youth, maybe.” An old man falling asleep or drunkenly stumbling about drifts into the youthful play of dreams, or at least dreamy language, from which come novelty and rebirth. “Maybe that’s what night is,” Cohen says, “second youth.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake doesn’t work like other novels. It has lines like: “What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods!” In some ways, this makes the book almost impossible to read. H.G. Wells told Joyce, “You have turned your back on common men — on their elementary needs … What is the result? Vast riddles.” The Wake doesn’t have to be difficult, though; you don’t have to read it as a collection of unsolvable riddles. In Finnegan and Friends, we don’t regard the Wake as something to decode completely. Instead, we find in the book a well of inspiration for endless exploration. When you accept that you can’t perfectly decipher this thing, you set yourself free to notice rather than solve, and you’ll start to notice a lot. You’ll notice, for one thing, that Finnegans Wake deals with basic, shared, elemental experiences—of dreams, of water, of private chitchat. And it does all this in its own dreamy, fluid language. As Samuel Beckett wrote, of Joyce and the Wake: “His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.” Finnegans Wake also consoles. It’s the book of death giving way to life, of a fall that generates rebirth. The story, as much as it has one, draws connections between figures associated with a fall: the central, disgraced character HCE; Humpty Dumpty; and Finnegan (from the Irish song “Finnegan’s Wake,” about a guy who falls, is presumed dead, then turns out to be fine). There’s nothing total about such falling in this book, no complete catastrophe. The fall leads us into something much weirder. Here’s a sample from the Wake itself: The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy. In collapse and decline we find hints of rebirth to some ancient glory—the return of the ancient Irish heroism of Finn MacCool. (“Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain!”) So we’re reading a book of sadness that leads to joy, of hazy connections that exist beyond gloom, beyond logic, and sometimes just at the level of sound (between Finnegan and Finn, again), all of which intimates the promise of life that never never makes perfect sense. Notice, too, that the title of the Wake lacks an apostrophe. You can read the title as an encouraging command, urging all Finnegans, all of us fallen and struggling people, to wake up into free-floating consciousness within our routine, elemental experiences. Episodes of Finnegan and Friends will trace this waking through one elemental experience at a time—of water, of dreams, of language—and each will be accompanied by notes like this one, on Joyce’s novel and on a related, Joycean life adventure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Prepare for our five-part series about the most mystifying book ever written: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. With a range of guests—including a novelist, an actor, a sleep specialist, a philosopher, and several Joyce scholars—Finnegan and Friends follows tangents inspired by Joyce’s novel of dreamy strangeness. We discover, along the way, that the Wake’s infinite complexity comes from attention to our most simple, elemental experiences (of dreams, of water, of local and familiar language). This show celebrates the wonders of the basic stuff of life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices