Podcasts about byronic

In this episode I'm joined by Caily to unpack the enduring allure of Fitzwilliam Darcy. Together, we explore The Darcy Effect—why this seemingly aloof gentleman continues to captivate readers over two centuries later. Is Mr. Darcy truly the archetype of the Romantic hero, or does he lean closer to the brooding complexities of a Byronic figure? We take a deep dive into his character. Join us for a rich discussion full of nuance and theory

Atlas Shrugged seems to be everywhere today. Randian villains are in the news. Rand remains influential on the right, from the Reagan era to the modern libertarian movement. Perhaps most significantly, entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen who are moving into government with DOGE, have been influenced by Rand, and, fascinatingly, Andreessen only read the novel four years ago. Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) and I talked about how Atlas Shrugged is in conversation with the great novels of the past, Rand's greats skills of plotting, drama, and character, and what makes Atlas Shrugged a serious novel, not just a vehicle for ideology. Love it or loathe it, Atlas Shrugged is having a moment. Everyone brings a preconception of Ayn Rand, but she has been opposed by the right and the left ever since she first published. Other than Jennifer Burns' biography, academic study has largely declined to notice Rand. But Rand deserves our serious attention, both as a novelist, and as an influence on the modern world. Here are a couple of excerpts.We talk a lot these days about, “how can I be my best self?” That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Also this.What would Ayn Rand think about the influencer economy? Oh, she'd despise it. She would despise it… all these little girls wanting to grow up to be influencers, they're caught in some algorithm, which is awful. Why would you want to spend your life influencing others? Go create something. It's a hard medicine.And.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking with Hollis Robbins, former dean of the humanities at Utah University and special advisor on the humanities and AI. We are talking about Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Hollis, hello.Hollis Robbins: Hello. I'm really glad to have this conversation with you. We've known each other for some years and follow each other's work. I was trained as a scholar of 19th-century American, Victorian, and African-American literature, mostly novels, and love having conversations with you about big, deep novels. When I suggested that we read this book, I was hoping you would be enthusiastic about it, so I'm really happy to be having this conversation. It's hard to know who's interviewing you or what conversation this is, but for you coming at this middle-aged. Not quite middle-aged, what are you?Henry: I'm middle enough. No. This is not going to be an interview as such. We are going to have a conversation about Atlas Shrugged, and we're going to, as you say, talk about it as a novel. It always gets talked about as an ideology. We are very interested in it as a novel and as two people who love the great novels of the 19th century. I've been excited to do this as well. I think that's why it's going to be good. Why don't we start with, why are we doing this?Hollis: I wanted to gesture to that. You are one of the leading public voices on the importance of reading literature and the importance of reading novels particularly, though I saw today, Matt Yglesias had a blog post about Middlemarch, which I think he just recently read. I can credit you with that, or us, or those of us who are telling people read the big novels.My life trajectory was that I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead before I read Dickens, before I read Jane Austen, before I read Harriet Beecher Stowe or Melville or the Brontës. For me, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were foundational novels as novels. I wondered what it would be like to talk to somebody whose experience was flipped.Henry: Right, I'm 38 and I'd never read this book. I was coming at it partly having read all those other books, but partly for my whole life, people have said, "Oh, that's really a bad book. That's so badly written. That book is no good." The number one thing I can say to people is this book is fun.Hollis: It's really fun. I was going to say usually what I forget to do in talking about books is give the summary. I'm going to hold up my copy, which is my dog-eared copy from high school, which is hilarious. It's got the tiniest print, which I couldn't possibly read now. No underlining, which is interesting. I read this book before I understood that you were supposed to underline when you liked passages in the book.It was interesting to me. I'd probably read it five or six times in my youth and didn't underline anything. The story is--- You can help me fill in the blanks. For readers who haven't read it, there's this young woman, Dagny Taggart, who's the heiress of the Taggart Transcontinental Railroad fortune. She's a woman. This takes place in about, I think, the '40s, '50s. Her older brother, Jim Taggart, is CEO. She's COO, so she's the operations person. It is in some ways the story of her-- It's not quite a bildungsroman. This is the way I tell the story. It's the story of her coming to the realization of how the world works. There's many ways to come at this story. She has multiple boyfriends, which is excellent. Her first boyfriend, his name is Francisco d'Anconia. He's the head of d'Anconia Copper. He too is an heir of this longstanding copper fortune. Her second is a metals magnate, Hank Rearden, who invents this great metal, Rearden metal.Really, it's also the story of the decline of America, and the ways that, in this Randian universe, these villainous group of people who run the country are always taking and extracting from producers. As she's creating and building this great railroad and doing wonderful things and using Rearden metal to do it, something is pulling all the producers out of society, and she's like, "What is going on?"It turns out there's this person, John Galt, who is saying, "I don't like the way the country is run. I don't like this extractive philosophy. I am going to take all the producers and lure them voluntarily to a--" It's a hero's lair. It's not like a James Bond villain lair. It's a hero lair in Colorado called Galt's Gulch. He is John Galt. It ends up being a battle between who is right in a wrong world. Is it the ethical person, Dagny Taggart, who continues to strive and try to be a producer and hold on to her ethics in this corrupt world, or is it somebody saying, "To hell with this. I am going on strike. You guys come with me and let the world collapse." How's that for summary?Henry: No, I think that's great. I couldn't have done a better job. One thing that we can say is that the role of reason, of being a rational person, of making reason the sole arbiter of how you make choices, be they practical, ethical, financial, whatever, that's at the heart of the book, right?Hollis: That's the philosophy. We could go there in a second. I think the plot of the book is that she demonstrates this.Henry: What she has to learn, like what is the big lesson for Dagny, is at the beginning, she hasn't fully understood that the good guys use reason and the bad guys do not, as it were.Hollis: Right. I think that's right. I like thinking about this as a bildungsroman. You said that the book is fun. Her part of the book is fun, but not really fun. The fun part of the book, and you can tell me because every time you kept texting me, "Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart. Oh my God, Jim Taggart."--Henry: These guys are so awful. [laughs]Hollis: They're so awful. The fun parts of the book, the Rand villains are the government entities and the cabals of business leaders who she calls looters and second-handers who run the country and all they do is extract value. Marc Andreessen was on a podcast recently and was all about these Rand villains and these looters. I think, again, to get back to why are we doing this and why are we doing this now, Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged is in the air with the second Trump administration.Henry: Yes. In a way, we're doing this because the question is, is this the novel of the future? Right? What we're seeing is it's very influential on the right. Rand's ideas have long been a libertarian inspiration. Elon Musk's read her. You mentioned Andreessen, Peter Thiel, all these people. It goes back to the Reagan days. People in the Republican Party have been quoting Ayn Rand. Then more broadly, we see all these worries about social collapse today. What happens in the plot of Atlas Shrugged is that society does slowly collapse.Dagny has to realize it's because of these people who are not using their reason and they're nationalizing things and taking resource away from proficient entrepreneurs and stuff. It's all about infrastructure, energy, people doing exploitation in the name of the common good, ineffective political leaders, people covering up lies and misdemeanors, people being accepting of what is obviously criminal behavior because it's in the cause of the greater good. We have free speech, all these topics, energy production. We're seeing this in the headlines. When I was reading this book, I was like, "Oh my God, how did she know?"Hollis: How did she know?Henry: How did she know.Hollis: I think the bildungsroman aspect of this as a novel. It's hard to read it as a novel. I think it's hard. By the way, I have to really I applaud you for not, until you got almost to the end of the book, texting me about this person or that person, or how it's political. I admire you for looking at the book and coming to the book as an expert in novels.What she comes to terms with, and it's a real slowly-- It's not even scales falling from her eyes. She doesn't sit and say, "Oh my God, the world is corrupt." She just is like, "That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them. That person's corrupt. I'm not going to deal with them." She just keeps going, but she doesn't ever accept with a fatalism that she's living in this world where every single person who's in charge is going to let her down.Henry: It's also interesting to me that she doesn't complain.Hollis: No.Henry: Now, that reminded me of I wrote about Margaret Thatcher in my book. She was another big one for however hard it was, however difficult it was, why would you complain? Let's just go to work. A lot of people found her difficult for that reason. When I was reading this, I was like, "Ayn Rand clearly has the same idea. You can nationalize every last inch of the economy. I'm going to get up and go to work and try and beat you. I'm not going to sit around and complain." It's a very stern attitude in a way. She's very strict with herself. I found the book to be-- I know Rand is very atheist, but a very Protestant book.Hollis: Yes, it really is.Henry: Intensely Protestant, yes.Hollis: That's a nice way to think about it. A certain kind of Protestant, a Weberian Protestant.Henry: Sure.Hollis: Not a Southern Baptist Protestant who believes in the absence of reason. I was thinking I was teaching in Mississippi years ago. I was teaching a course on Wordsworth and had to do a unit on Voltaire because you can't really understand Wordsworth unless you understand Voltaire. There was a woman in my class. She was a version of Presbyterian who doesn't believe in reason, believes that in the fall, man lost their reason.Therefore, she asked if she could be excused from class because I was talking about Voltaire and the importance of reason. She said, "This is against my religion. If you believe that man has reason, you are actually going about it wrong, so may I be excused?" Which in all the years I've had people ask for excuses to miss class, that was a memorable one.Henry: That's unique. [laughs]Hollis: It's interesting because, again, I should get back to the novel, the opposition from Rand is as strong on the religious right as it is on the left. In fact, very strong. When Atlas Shrugged came out, William F. Buckley famously had Whittaker Chambers write the review. He hated her. He despised her. He despised the fact that she put reason first.Henry: Yes. I think that's worth emphasizing that some people listening will think, "I'm Rand. These nasty ideas, she's on the right." She's been ideologically described in that way so many times. Deirdre McCloskey in the Literary Review has just in the most recent edition written an absolutely scathing article about Rand. That's libertarian opposition to Rand.McCloskey is saying Hayek is the real thing here and Rand would have hated everything that Hayek did. She got everything wrong. I think the opposition to her, as you say, it's on both sides. One thing that's interesting about this novel is that because she created her own philosophy, which people will have different views on how well that went, but there isn't anyone else like this. All the other people like this are her followers.Hollis: Exactly.Henry: She's outside of the other systems of thought in a way.Hollis: We should talk about Rand. I'm going to quote a little bit from this book on feminist interpretation of Ayn Rand. Let's talk a little bit, if we can, about Dagny as the heroine of a novel, or a hero, because one of the really interesting things about reading Rand at this moment is that she's got one pronoun, he, him, man. She is in this era where man means man and women. That there isn't men and women, he and she, and now it's he, she, and them. She is like, "There's one pronoun." Even she talks about the rights of man or man believes. She means everybody, but she only means man too. It's interesting.I was very much part of the first pronoun wars in the 1980s when women scholars were like, "He and she." Now we're thrown out the window with that binary. Again, we don't need to talk about pronouns, but it's really important to understanding Rand and reading this novel, how much she embraces men and the male pronoun, even while she is using it both ways, and even while her story is led by this woman. She's beautiful. She's beautiful in a very specific way. She's tall, she's slender, she's got great cheekbones, she's got great shoulders, she's got long legs.Her aesthetic is very classical, draped. She doesn't wear flowery patterns. She wears draped, clearly close-fitting gowns and gray tailored suits and a minimum of jewelry, though she does have this bracelet chain made of Rearden metal. You don't know when she possibly has time to go shopping, but she's perfectly dressed all the time in the fashion that we would understand as feminist. She wears trousers, she wears suits, but when she goes out, this black velvet cape. I think it's important to see her as that, even though nobody talks about that in terms of this novel, what a heroine she is. I know that when I was reading her as a teenage girl, that's it.Henry: I want to be Dagny.Hollis: I want to be Dagny. I want to have capes, right?Henry: There's a very important scene, it's not too much of a plot spoiler, where Hank Rearden has invented this new metal. It's very exciting because it's much more efficient and it's much stronger and you can build new bridges for the trains and everything. He makes a bracelet of his new metal. It's a new steel alloy, I think, and gives it to his wife. His wife basically doesn't care.She's not really interested in what it takes to earn the money, she just wants to have the money. You get the strong impression throughout the book that some of the people that Rand is most scathingly disapproving of are wives who don't work. None of those people come out well. When Dagny goes to a party at the Rearden house and she is romantically involved with Hank Rearden, she sees the bracelet.Hollis: She isn't then, right? Isn't she not then?Henry: No, but they have feelings for each otherHollis: Right. Reasonable feelings for each other.Henry: That's right, reasonable feelings, but they're not currently acting on those feelings. She sees the bracelet and she exchanges her, I think, diamonds-Hollis: Diamond bracelet.Henry: -for the Rearden metal bracelet with the wife. It's this wonderful moment where these two opposite ideals of womanhood that Rand is presenting. It's a great moment of heroism for Dagny because she is saying, "Who cares about glittering diamonds when you have a new steel alloy that can make this incredible bridge?" It sounds crazy, but this is 1957. Dagny is very much what you might call one of the new women.Hollis: Right.Henry: I think in some ways, Rand-- I don't like the phrase she's ahead of her time. I've read a lot of 1950s fiction. This is not the typical woman.Hollis: No, this is not Cheever. This is not a bored suburban housewife at a time when the way the '50s are taught, certainly in America, it's like women could work during the war, then they were suburban housewives, there was bored, there were key parties and all sorts of Cheever sorts of things. This is not that. I read this first. I was only 15 years after it was published, I think, in the '60s, early '70s reading it.This, to me, seemed perfectly normal and everything else seemed regressive and strange and whiny. There's a lot to be said for reading this novel first. I think if we can talk a little bit about these set pieces because I think for me reading it as a novel and hearing you talk about it as a novel, that novels, whether we're thinking about-- I want to see if you want to compare her to Dorothea or just to any other Victorian women novel that you can think of. That's the closest, right? Is there anybody that's closest to Dorothea from Middlemarch? Is that there are these set pieces. People think that Rand-- the idea is that she's not a great writer. She is a great writer. She started in Hollywood. Her first book, The Fountainhead, was made into a movie. She understands plotting and keeping the reader's attention. We go forward, we go backwards. There's her relationship with Francisco d'Anconia that we see her now, years after, then we have flashbacks to growing up and how they became lovers.There are big meeting set pieces where everybody's in the room, and we have all the backstories of the people in the room, what is going to happen. There are these big party scenes, as you say. For example, this big, glorious, glamorous party at the Rearden house, Francisco is there. Francisco and Hank Rearden get in a conversation, and she's like, "I want to go see what my old boyfriend is talking to the guy I like about."There are these moments where you're not supposed to come at the book that way in this serious philosophical way. Then later on when there's this wonderful scene where Francisco comes to see Dagny. This is much later. Hank and Dagny are lovers, so he has a key to her apartment. He walks in and everybody sees immediately what's going on. It's as good as any other farce moment of somebody hiding behind a curtain, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Everything is revealed all at once. She's very good at scenes like that.Henry: Yes, very good. She's very good at high drama. One of the phrases that kept coming back to me was that this book is a melodrama of ideas.Hollis: Yes.Henry: Right? It's not a novel of ideas as such, it's a melodrama of ideas. I think one thing that people who think she's a bad writer will say is it's melodrama, the characters are flat, the prose is not lyrical, all these different things. Whereas when I read it, I was like, "She's so good at melodrama." I feel like, in some ways, it does not feel like a 1950s novel because there's so much excitement about technology, so much feminism, just so many things that I do not associate--Maybe I'm being too English, but I don't read John Cheever, for example, and think, "Oh, he loves the train." Whereas this book is very, very exciting as a story about inventing a new kind of train that goes really fast," which sounds silly, but that's a really Dickensian theme, that's in Middlemarch. Actually, that's what Matt Yglesias was talking about in his excellent piece today. What does feel very 1950s is you've got the Hollywood influence. The dialogue, I think, is not always great, but it is often great.I often would read pages and think, "This would actually be really good in, not an A++ movie, but in a decent crime movie or something. This would be quite good dialogue." There's a comic book aesthetic to it in the way that the scenes play out. Just a lot of these '50s aesthetics actually are present in the book. I'm going to read one paragraph. It's from part one. I think we should read out loud a few bits to give people a sense.Hollis: Yes.Henry: This is when Dagny has built a new train line using grid and metal to make the bridge so that it can go over a valley. I think that's right. The train can do 100 miles an hour. It's this very, very exciting new development. It means that energy can be supplied to factories, and so it's a huge, big deal. This is when she's on the train going at 100 miles an hour and she just can't believe it's happening."Things streaked past a water tank, a tree, a shanty, a grain silo. They had a windshield wiper motion. They were rising, describing a curve, and dropping back. The telegraph wires ran a race with the train, rising and falling from pole to pole, in an even rhythm like the cardiograph record of a steady heartbeat written across the sky. She looked ahead at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster.""She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine. Safer here where it seemed as if should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be the first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer. It was the security of being first with full sight and full knowledge of one's own course, not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead."That's not MFA prose or whatever, but it turns the pages. I think she's very good at relating we're on the train and it's going very fast to how Dagny is thinking through the philosophical conundrum that is basically going to drive the whole plot forwards. I was reminded again and again of what Virginia Woolf said about Walter Scott, where she compared Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson. She said that Stevenson had beautiful sentences and dapper little adjectives. It was all jeweled and carefully done. You could marvel over each sentence.She said, "Whereas Scott, it's just page after page and no sentence is beautiful," but she says, "He writes at the level of the page. He's not like Stevenson. He's not writing at the level of the sentence. You have to step into the world." You can say, 'Oh, that wasn't a very good sentence,' but my goodness, the pages keep turning and you're there in the world, right?Hollis: Exactly.Henry: I think she made a really important point there and we just undervalue that so much when we say, oh, so-and-so is not a good writer. What we mean is they're not a Robert Louis Stevenson, they're a Walter Scott. It's like, sure, but Walter Scott was great at what he did. Ayn Rand is in the Walter Scott inheritance in the sense that it's a romance, it's not strictly realistic novel. You have to step into the world. You can't spend your whole time going, "Was that a great sentence? Do I really agree with what she just--" It's like, no, you have to go into this utopian sci-fi universe and you have to keep turning the pages. You get caught up and you go, "Wow, this is this is working for me."Hollis: Let me push back on that-Henry: Yes, good.Hollis: -because I think that was a beautiful passage, one of my favorite passages in this book, which is hard to say because it's a really, really big book. It's a memorable passage because here she is in a place at this moment. She is questioning herself. Isn't she questioning why? Why do I feel safe? Then it strikes her. In this moment, all interior while all this stuff is happening. This whole Rearden metal train bridge set piece is one of the highlights of at least the first half of the book. You come away, even if we've had our entire life up to her, understanding her as a philosophical this woman. How is that different from Dorothea or from Elizabeth Bennet? Yes, Elizabeth Bennet, right?Henry: Oh, no, I agree. My point was purely about prose style, which was to say if you say, "Oh, she writes like a Walter Scott, not like a Robert Louis Stevenson," you're going to deny yourself seeing what you've just said, which is that actually, yes, she has the ability to write philosophical characters.Hollis: When I first read Pride and Prejudice, I read it through the lens of Rand. Now, clearly, these heroines had fewer choices. Dorothea marries Casaubon, I don't know how you pronounce it, because she thinks he's a Randian expert, somebody who's got this grand idea. She's like, "Whoa, I want to be part of this endeavor, the key to all mythologies." Then she's so let down. In the Randian sense, you can see why she would have wanted him.Henry: That's right. I think George Eliot would have strongly disagreed with Rand philosophically. The heroines, as you say, what they're doing in the novel is having to realize that there are social conventions I have to understand and there are things I have to learn how to do, but actually, the key to working all that out is more at the moral philosophical level. This is what happens to Dagny. I think it's on the next page from what I just read. There's another passage where it says that she's in the train and she's enjoying. It's working and she's thrilled that her train is working. She was trying not to think, but she couldn't help herself.She said, "Who made the train. Is it the brute force of muscle? Who can make all the dials and the levers? How is it possible that this thing has even been put together?" Then she starts thinking to herself, "We've got a government who's saying it's wrong to do this, you're taking resources, you're not doing it for the common good." She says, "How can they regard this as evil? How can they believe that this is ignoble to have created this incredible thing?"She says she wants to be able to toss the subject out of the window and let it get shattered somewhere along the track. She wants the thoughts to go past like the telegraph poles, but obviously, she can't. She has this moment of realization that this can't be wrong. This type of human accomplishment can't be against the common good. It can't be considered to be ignoble. I think that is like the Victorian heroines.To me, it was more like Fanny Price, which is that someone turns up into a relatively closed system of ideas and keeps their own counsel for a long time, and has to admit sometimes when they haven't got it right or whatever. Basically, in the end, they are vindicated on fairly straightforward grounds. Dagny comes to realize that, "I was right. I was using my reason. I was working hard. I was being productive. Yes, I was right about that." Fanny, it's more like a Christian insight into good behavior, but I felt the pattern was the same.Hollis: Sure. I'll also bring up Jane Eyre here, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: Jane Eyre, her relationship, there's a lot to be said of both Mr. Darcy and Mr. Rochester with Hank Rearden because Hank Rearden has to come to his sense. He's married. He doesn't like his wife. He doesn't like this whole system that he's in. He wants to be with a woman that's a meeting of the mind, but he's got all this social convention he has to deal with. Rochester has to struggle, and of course, Bertha Mason has to die in that book. He ends up leaving his wife, but too late. If we're going to look at this novel as a novel, we can see that there are these moments that I think have some resonance. I know you don't seem to want to go to the Mr. Darcy part of it.Henry: No. I had also thought about Jane Eyre. My thought was that, obviously, other than being secular because Jane Eyre is very Christian, the difference is that Hank Rearden and Dagny basically agree that we can't conduct our relationship in a way that would be morally compromising to her. They go through this very difficult process of reasoning like, "How can we do this in a good way?"They're a little bit self-sacrificing about it because they don't want to upset the moral balance. Whereas Mr. Rochester, at least for the first part of the book, has an attitude that's more like, "Yes, but she's in the attic. Why does it matter if we get married?" He doesn't really see the problem of morally compromising Jane, and so Jane has to run away.Hollis: Right.Henry: One of the interesting things about Rand, what is different from like Austen and the Brontës and whatever, is that Dagny and Hank are not in opposition before they get together. They have actually this unusual thing in romance and literature, which is that they have a meeting of minds. What gets in the way is that the way their minds agree is contra mundum and the world has made this problem for them.Hollis: I think in a way, that's the central relationship in--Henry: Yes. That was how I read it, yes.Hollis: Yes. The fact as we think about what the complications are in reading this novel as a novel is that here is this great central romance and they've got obstacles. She's got an old boyfriend, he's married. They've got all these things that are classic obstacles to a love story. Rand understands that enough to build it, that that will keep a lot of readers' interest, but then it's like, "That's actually not the point of my book," which is how the second half or the last third of the novel just gets really wiggy." Again, spoiler alert, but Hank is blackmailed to be, as the society is collapsing, as things are collapsing--Henry: We should say that the government has taken over in a nationalizing program by this point.Hollis: Right, because as John Galt is pulling all the thought leaders and the industrialists and all the movers of the world into his lair, things are getting harder and harder and harder, things are getting nationalized. Some of these big meetings in Washington where these horrible people are deciding how to redistribute wealth, again, which is part of the reason somebody like Congressman Paul Ryan would give out copies of Atlas Shrugged to all of his staffers. He's like, "You've got to read this book because we can't go to Washington and be like this. The Trumpian idea is we've got to get rid of people who are covering up and not doing the right thing."They've blackmailed Hank Rearden into giving up Rearden Metal by saying, "We know you've been sleeping with Dagny Taggart." It's a very dramatic point. How is this going to go down?Henry: Right. I think that's interesting. What I loved about the way she handled that romance was that romance is clearly part of what she sees as important to a flourishing life. She has to constantly yoke it to this idea that reason is everything, so human passion has to be conducted on the basis that it's logically reasonable, but that it therefore becomes self-sacrificing. There is something really sad and a little bit tragic about Hank being blackmailed like that, right?Hollis: Yes. I have to say their first road trip together, it's like, "Let's just get out of here and go have a road trip and stay in hotels and have sex and it'll be awesome." That their road trip is like, "Let's go also see some abandoned factories and see what treasures we might find there." To turn this love road trip into also the plot twist that gets them closer to John Galt is a magnificent piece of plot.Henry: Yes. I loved that. I know you want to talk about the big John Galt speech later, but I'm going to quote one line because this all relates to what I think is one of the most central lines of the book. "The damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know yet chose to blank out reality." A lot of the time, like in Brontë or whatever, there are characters like Rochester's like that. The center of their romance is that they will never do that to each other because that's what they believe philosophically, ethically. It's how they conduct themselves at business. It's how they expect other people to conduct themselves. They will never sacrifice that for each other.That for them is a really high form of love and it's what enables huge mutual respect. Again, it's one of those things I'm amazed-- I used to work in Westminster. I knew I was a bit of a libertarian. I knew lots of Rand adjacent or just very, very Randian people. I thought they were all insane, but that's because no one would ever say this. No one would ever say she took an idea like that and turned it into a huge romance across hundreds of pages. Who else has done that in the novel? I think that's great.Hollis: It really is hard. It really is a hard book. The thing that people say about the book, as you say, and the reason you hadn't read it up until now, is it's like, "Oh, yes, I toyed with Rand as a teenager and then I put that aside." I put away my childish things, right? That's what everybody says on the left, on the right. You have to think about it's actually really hard. My theory would be that people put it away because it's really, really hard, what she tried is hard. Whether she succeeded or not is also hard. As we were just, before we jumped on, talking about Rand's appearance on Johnny Carson, a full half hour segment of him taking her very seriously, this is a woman who clearly succeeded. I recently read Jennifer Burn's biography of her, which is great. Shout out to Jennifer.What I came away with is this is a woman who made her living as a writer, which is hard to do. That is a hard thing to do, is to make your living as a writer, as a woman in the time difference between 1942, The Fountainhead, which was huge, and 57, Atlas Shrugged. She was blogging, she had newsletters, she had a media operation that's really, really impressive. This whole package doesn't really get looked at, she as a novelist. Again, let me also say it was later on when I came to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who is another extraordinary woman novelist in America who wrote this groundbreaking book, which is filled--I particularly want to shout out to George Harris, the slave inventor who carried himself like a Rand hero as a minor character and escapes. His wife is Eliza, who famously runs across the ice flows in a brave Randian heroine escape to freedom where nobody's going to tell them what to do. These women who changed literature in many ways who have a really vexed relationship or a vexed place in academia. Certainly Stowe is studied.Some 20 years ago, I was at an event with the great Elaine Showalter, who was coming out with an anthology of American women writers. I was in the audience and I raised my hand, I said, "Where's Ayn Rand?" She was like, "Ha, ha, ha." Of course, what a question is that? There is no good reason that Ayn Rand should not be studied in academia. There is no good reason. These are influential novels that actually, as we've talked about here, can be talked about in the context of other novels.Henry: I think one relevant comparison is let's say you study English 19th-century literature on a course, a state-of-the-nation novel or the novel of ideas would be included as routine, I think very few people would say, "Oh, those novels are aesthetically excellent. We read them because they're beautifully written, and they're as fun as Dickens." No one's saying that. Some of them are good, some of them are not good. They're important because of what they are and the barrier to saying why Rand is important for what she is because, I think, people believe her ideas are evil, basically.One central idea is she thinks selfishness is good, but I think we've slightly dealt with the fact that Dagny and Hank actually aren't selfish some of the time, and that they are forced by their ethical system into not being selfish. The other thing that people say is that it's all free-market billionaire stuff, basically. I'm going to read out a passage from-- It's a speech by Francisco in the second part. It's a long speech, so I'm not going to read all eight pages. I'm going to read this speech because I think this theme that I'm about to read out, it's a motif, it's again and again and again.Hollis: Is this where he's speaking to Hank or to Dagny?Henry: I think when he's speaking to Dagny and he says this."Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he want. Money will not give him a code of values if he has evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose if he has evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent."The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him with his money replacing his judgment ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered, that no man may be smaller than his money."Hollis: That's a good--Henry: Right? It's a great paragraph. I feel like she says that in dozens of ways throughout the book, and she wants you to be very clear when you leave that this book is not a creed in the name of just make money and have free market capitalism so you can be rich. That paragraph and so many others, it's almost biblical in the way she writes it. She's really hammering the rhythms, and the tones, and the parallels. She's also, I think, trying to appropriate some of the way the Bible talks about money and turn it into her own secular pseudo-Aristotelian idea, right?Hollis: Yes.Henry: We talk a lot these days about, how can I be my best self? That's what Rand is saying. She's saying, actually, it's not about earning money, it's not about being rich. It is about the perfection of the moral life. It's about the pursuit of excellence. It's about the cultivation of virtue. These are the important things. This is what Dagny is doing. When all the entrepreneurs at the end, they're in the happy valley, actually, between them, they have not that much money, right?Hollis: Right.Henry: The book does not end in a rich utopia, it's important to say.Hollis: It's interesting. A couple of things. I want to get this back since we're still in the novel. Let me say when we get to Galt's great speech, which is bizarre. He says a similar thing that I'll bring in now. He says, "The mother who buys milk for her baby instead of a hat is not sacrificing because her values are feeding the baby. The woman who sacrifices the hat to feed her baby, but really wants the hat and is only feeding the baby out of duty is sacrificing." That's bad. She's saying get your values in order. Understand what it is you want and do that thing, but don't do it because somebody says you have to. She says this over and over in many ways, or the book says this.Henry: We should say, that example of the mother is incidental. The point she's always making is you must think this through for yourself, you must not do it because you've been told to do it.Hollis: Right, exactly. To get back to the love story aspects of the book because they don't sit and say they love each other, even all the great romances. It's not like, "I love you. I love you." It's straight to sex or looks and meetings of the minds. It's interesting. We should deal with the fact that from The Fountainhead and a little bit in this book, the sex is a little rapey. It's a difficult thing to talk about. It's certainly one of the reasons that feminists, women writers don't approve of her. In the book, it's consensual. Whatever one wants to think about the ways that people have sex, it is consensual in the book. Also in The Fountainhead.I'm sure I'll get hate mail for even saying that, but in her universe, that's where it is. What's interesting, Francisco as a character is so interesting. He's conflicted, he's charming, he's her first lover. He's utterly good in every way. He ends up without her. Hank is good. Hank goes through his struggles and learning curve about women prioritizing. If you don't like your wife, don't be married to your wife. It's like he goes through his own what are my values and how do I live them.I know you think that this is bizarre, but there's a lot of writing about the relationship of Hank and Francisco because they find themselves in the same room a lot. They happen to have both been Dagny's lovers or ex-lovers, and they really, really like each other. There's a way that that bonding-- Homosexuality does not exist in her novels, whatever, but that's a relationship of two people that really are hot for one another. There is a lot of writing. There are queer readings of Rand that make a lot of that relationship.Again, this isn't my particular lens of criticism, but I do see that the energy, which is why I asked you which speech you were reading because some of Francisco's best speeches are for Hank because he's trying to woo Hank to happy valley. Toward the end when they're all hanging out together in Galt's Gulch, there's clearly a relationship there.Henry: Oh, yes. No, once you pointed out to me, I was like, "That makes sense of so many passages." That's clearly there. What I don't understand is why she did that. I feel like, and this is quite an accomplishment because it's a big novel with a lot of moving parts, everything else is resolved both in terms of the plot, but also in terms of how it fits her philosophical idea. That, I think, is pretty much the only thing where you're left wondering, "Why was that in there? She hasn't made a point about it. They haven't done anything about it." This I don't understand. That's my query.Hollis: Getting ready to have this conversation, I spent a lot of time on some Reddit threads. I ran Atlas Shrugged Reddit threads where there's some fantastic conversations.Henry: Yes, there is.Hollis: One of them is about, how come Francisco didn't end up with anybody? That's just too bad. He's such a great character and he ends up alone. I would say he doesn't end up alone, he ends up with his boyfriend Hank, whatever that looks like. Two guys that believe in the same things, they can have whatever life they want. Go on.Henry: Are you saying that now that they're in the valley, they will be more free to pursue that relationship?Hollis: There's a lot of things that she has said about men's and women's bodies. She said in other places, "I don't think there'll ever be a woman president because why would a woman want to be president? What a woman really wants is a great man, and we can't have a president who's looking for a great man. She has to be a president." She's got a lot of lunacy about women. Whatever. I don't understand. Someplace I've read that she understands male homosexuality, but not female homosexuality. Again, I am not a Rand scholar. Having read and seen some of that in the ether, I see it in the book, and I can see how her novel would invite that analysis.I do want to say, let's spend a few seconds on some of the minor characters. There are some really wonderful minor characters. One of them is Cherryl Taggart, this shop girl that evil Jim Taggart meets one night in a rainstorm, and she's like, "Oh, you're so awesome," and they get married. It's like he's got all this praise for marrying the shop girl. It's a funny Eliza Doolittle situation because she is brought into this very wealthy society, which we have been told and we have been shown is corrupt, is evil, everybody's lying all the time, it's pretentious, Dagny hates it.Here's the Cherryl Taggart who's brought into this. In the beginning, she hates Dagny because she's told by everybody, "Hate Dagny, she's horrible." Then she comes to her own mini understanding of the corruption that we understand because Dagny's shown it in the novel, has shown it to us this entire time. She comes to it and she's like, "Oh my God," and she goes to Dagny. Dagny's so wonderful to her like, "Yes. You had to come to this on your own, I wasn't going to tell you, but you were 100% right." That's the end of her.Henry: Right. When she meets Taggart, there's this really interesting speech she has where she says, "I want to make something of myself and get somewhere." He's like, "What? What do you want to do?" Red flag. "What? Where?" She says, "I don't know, but people do things in this world. I've seen pictures of New York," and she's pointing at like the skyscrapers, right? Whatever. "I know that someone's built that. They didn't sit around and whine, but like the kitchen was filthy and the roof was leaking." She gets very emotional at this point. She says to him, "We were stinking poor and we didn't give a damn. I've dragged myself here, and I'm going to do something."Her story is very sad because she then gets mired in the corruption of Taggart's. He's basically bit lazy and a bit of a thief, and he will throw anyone under the bus for his own self-advancement. He is revealed to be a really sinister guy. I was absolutely hissing about him most of the time. Then, let's just do the plot spoiler and say what happens to Cherryl, right? Because it's important. When she has this realization and Taggart turns on her and reveals himself as this snake, and he's like, "Well, what did you expect, you idiot? This is the way the world is."Hollis: Oh, it's a horrible fight. It's the worst fight.Henry: Right? This is where the melodrama is so good. She goes running out into the streets, and it's the night and there are shadows. She's in the alleyway. Rand, I don't have the page marked, but it's like a noir film. She's so good at that atmosphere. Then it gets a little bit gothic as well. She's running through the street, and she's like, "I've got to go somewhere, anywhere. I'll work. I'll pick up trash. I'll work in a shop. I'll do anything. I've just got to get out of this."Hollis: Go work at the Panda Express. Henry: Yes. She's like, "I've got to get out of this system," because she's realized how morally corrupting it is. By this time, this is very late. Society is in a-- it's like Great Depression style economic collapse by this point. There really isn't a lot that she could do. She literally runs into a social worker and the social-- Rand makes this leering dramatic moment where the social worker reaches out to grab her and Cherryl thinks, "Oh, my God, I'm going to be taken prisoner in. I'm going back into the system," so she jumps off the bridge.This was the moment when I was like, I've had this lurking feeling about how Russian this novel is. At this point, I was like, "That could be a short story by Gogol," right? The way she set that up. That is very often the trap that a Gogol character or maybe a Dostoevsky character finds themselves in, right? That you suddenly see that the world is against you. Maybe you're crazy and paranoid. Maybe you're not. Depends which story we're reading. You run around trying to get out and you realize, "Oh, my God, I'm more trapped than I thought. Actually, maybe there is no way out." Cherryl does not get a lot of pages. She is, as you say, quite a minor character, but she illustrates the whole story so, so well, so dramatically.Hollis: Oh, wow.Henry: When it happens, you just, "Oh, Cherryl, oh, my goodness."Hollis: Thank you for reading that. Yes, you could tell from the very beginning that the seeds of what could have been a really good person were there. Thank you for reading that.Henry: When she died, I went back and I was like, "Oh, my God, I knew it."Hollis: How can you say Rand is a bad writer, right? That is careful, careful plotting, because she's just a shop girl in the rain. You've got this, the gun on the wall in that act. You know she's going to end up being good. Is she going to be rewarded for it? Let me just say, as an aside, I know we don't have time to talk about it here. My field, as I said, is 19th century African American novels, primarily now.This, usually, a woman, enslaved woman, the character who's like, "I can't deal with this," and jumps off a bridge and drowns herself is a fairly common and character. That is the only thing to do. One also sees Rand heroes. Stowe's Dred, for example, is very much, "I would rather live in the woods with a knife and then, be on the plantation and be a slave." When you think about, even the sort of into the 20th century, the Malcolm X figure, that, "I'm going to throw out all of this and be on my own," is very Randian, which I will also say very Byronic, too, Rand didn't invent this figure, but she put it front and center in these novels, and so when you think about how Atlas Shrugged could be brought into a curriculum in a network of other novels, how many of we've discussed so far, she's there, she's influenced by and continues to influence. Let's talk about your favorite minor character, the Wet Nurse.Henry: This is another great death scene.Hollis: Let's say who he is, so the government sends this young man to work at the Rearden Mills to keep an eye on Hank Rearden.Henry: Once they nationalize him, he's the bureaucrat reporting back, and Rearden calls him the Wet Nurse as an insult.Hollis: Right, and his job, he's the Communist Party person that's in every factory to make sure that everything is--Henry: That's right, he's the petty bureaucrat reporting back and making sure everyone's complying.Hollis: He's a young recent college graduate that, Hank, I think, early on, if it's possible even to find the Wet Nurse early scene, you could tell in the beginning, too, he's bright and sparkly right out of college, and this is, it seems like a good job for him. He's like, "Woohoo, I get to be here, and I get to be--" Yes, go ahead.Henry: What happens to him is, similarly to Cherryl, he has a conversion, but his conversion is not away from the corruption of the system he's been in, he is converted by what he sees in the Rearden plant, the hard work, the dedication, the idealism, the deep focus on making the metal, and he starts to see that if we don't make stuff, then all the other arguments downstream of that about how to appropriate, how to redistribute, whatever, are secondary, and so he becomes, he goes native, as it were. He becomes a Reardenite, and then at the end, when there's a crowd storming the place, and this crowd has been sent by the government, it's a fake thing to sort of--Hollis: Also, a very good scene, very dramatic.Henry: She's very good at mobs, very good at mobs, and they kill, they kill the Wet Nurse, they throw him over. He has a couple of speeches in dialogue with Rearden while he's dying, and he says--Hollis: You have to say, they throw him, they leave him on this pile of slag. He crawls up to the street where Rearden happens to be driving by, and car stops, and so that finding the Wet Nurse there and carrying him in his arms, yes.Henry: That's right, it's very dramatic, and then they have this dialogue, and he says, "I'd like to live, Mr. Rearden, God, how I'd like to, not because I'm dying, but because I've just discovered tonight what it means to be alive, and it's funny, do when I discovered it? In the office, when I stuck my neck out, when I told the bastards to go to hell, there's so many things I wish I'd known sooner, but it's no use crying over spilt milk," and then Rearden, he goes, "Listen, kid, said Rearden sternly, I want you to do me a favor." "Now, Mr. Rearden?" "Yes, now." "Of course, Mr. Rearden, if I can," and Rearden says, "You were willing to die to save my mills, will you try and live for me?"I think this is one of those great moments where, okay, maybe this isn't like George Eliot style dialogue, but you could put that straight in a movie, that would work really well, that would be great, right? I can hear Humphrey Bogart saying these things. It would work, wouldn't it?She knows that, and that's why she's doing that, she's got that technique. He's another minor character, and Rand is saying, the system is eating people up. We are setting people up for a spiritual destruction that then leads to physical destruction. This point, again, about it's not just about the material world. It's about your inner life and your own mind.I find it very moving.Hollis: These minor characters are fantastic. Then let's talk a little bit about Eddie Willers, because I think a lot about Eddie Willers. Eddie Willers, the childhood three, there were three young people, we keep going back to this childhood. We have Dagny, Francisco, because their parents were friends, and then Eddie Willers, who's like a neighborhood kid, right?Henry: He's down the street.Hollis: He lives down the street. He's like the neighborhood kid. I don't know about you. We had a neighborhood kid. There's always neighborhood kids, right? You end up spending time with this-- Eddie's just sort of always there. Then when they turn 15, 16, 17, and when there's clearly something going on between Dagny and Francisco, Eddie does take a step back, and he doesn't want to see.There's the class issues, the status issues aren't really-- they're present but not discussed by Rand. Here we have these two children heirs, and they don't say like, "You're not one of us, Eddie, because you're not an heir or an heiress." He's there, and he's got a pretty good position as Dagny's right-hand man in Taggart Transcontinental. We don't know where he went to college. We don't know what he does, but we know that he's super loyal, right?Then when she goes and takes a break for a bit, he steps in to be COO. James is like, "Eddie Willers, how can Eddie Willers be a COO?" She's like, "It's really going to be me, but he's going to be fine." We're not really supposed to identify with Eddie, but Eddie's there. Eddie has, all through the novel, all through the big old novel, Eddie eats lunch in the cafeteria. There's always this one guy he's having lunch with. This is, I don't know, like a Greek chorus thing, I don't quite know, but there's Eddie's conversations with this unknown person in the cafeteria give us a sense, maybe it's a narrator voice, like, "Meanwhile, this is going on in the world." We have these conversations. This guy he's having lunch with asks a lot of questions and starts asking a lot of personal questions about Dagny. Then we have to talk to-- I know we've gone for over an hour and 15 minutes, we've got to talk about Galt's Speech, right? When John Galt, toward the end, takes over the airwaves and gives this big three-hour speech, the big three-hour podcast as I tweeted the other day, Eddie is with Dagny.Henry: He's in the radio studio.Hollis: He's in the studio along with one of John Galt's former professors. We hear this voice. Rand says, or the narrator says, three people in the room recognize that voice. I don't know about you, did you guess that it was Galt before that moment that Eddie was having lunch with in the cafeteria?Henry: No, no, no, I didn't.Hollis: Okay, so you knew at that moment.Henry: That was when I was like, "Oh, Eddie was talking, right?" It took me a minute.Hollis: Okay, were you excited? Was that like a moment? Was that a big reveal?Henry: It was a reveal, but it made me-- Eddie's whole character puzzles me because, to me, he feels like a Watson.Hollis: Yes, that's nice, that's good.Henry: He's met Galt, who's been under their noses the whole time. He's been going through an almost Socratic method with Galt, right? If only he could have paid a little bit more attention, he would have realized what was going on. He doesn't, why is this guy so interested in Dagny, like all these things. Even after Galt's big speech, I don't think Eddie quite takes the lesson. He also comes to a more ambiguous but a bad end.Hollis: Eddie's been right there, the most loyal person. The Reddit threads on Eddie Willers, if anybody's interested, are really interesting.Henry: Yes, they are, they're so good.Hollis: Clearly, Eddie recognizes greatness, and he recognizes production, and he recognizes that Dagny is better than Jim. He recognizes Galt. They've been having these conversations for 12 years in the cafeteria. Every time he goes to the cafeteria, he's like, "Where's my friend, where's my friend?" When his friend disappears, but he also tells Galt a few things about Dagny that are personal and private. When everybody in the world, all the great people in the world, this is a big spoiler, go to Galt's Gulch at the end.Henry: He's not there.Hollis: He doesn't get to go. Is it because of the compromises he made along the way? Rand had the power to reward everybody. Hank's secretary gets to go, right?Henry: Yes.Hollis: She's gone throughout the whole thing.Henry: Eddie never thinks for himself. I think that's the-- He's a very, I think, maybe one of the more tragic victims of the whole thing because-- sorry. In a way, because, Cherryl and the Wet Nurse, they try and do the right thing and they end up dying. That's like a more normal tragedy in the sense that they made a mistake. At the moment of realization, they got toppled.Eddie, in a way, is more upsetting because he never makes a mistake and he never has a moment of realization. Rand is, I think this is maybe one of the cruelest parts of the book where she's almost saying, "This guy's never going to think for himself, and he hasn't got a hope." In a novel, if this was like a realistic novel, and she was saying, "Such is the cruelty of the world, what can we do for this person?" That would be one thing. In a novel that's like ending in a utopia or in a sort of utopia, it's one of the points where she's really harsh.Hollis: She's really harsh. I'd love to go and look at her notes at some point in time when I have an idle hour, which I won't, to say like, did she sit around? It's like, "What should I do with Eddie?" To have him die, probably, in the desert with a broken down Taggart transcontinental engine, screaming in terror and crying.Henry: Even at that stage, he can't think for himself and see that the system isn't worth supporting.Hollis: Right. He's just going to be a company man to the end.Henry: It's as cruel as those fables we tell children, like the grasshopper and the ants. He will freeze to death in the winter. There's nothing you can do about it. There are times when she gets really, really tough. I think is why people hate her.Hollis: We were talking about this, about Dickens and minor characters and coming to redemption and Dickens, except Jo. Jo and Jo All Alones, there are people who have redemption and die. Again, I don't know.Henry: There's Cherryl and the Wet Nurse are like Jo. They're tragic victims of the system. She's doing it to say, "Look how bad this is. Look how bad things are." To me, Eddie is more like Mr. Micawber. He's hopeless. It's a little bit comic. It's not a bad thing. Whereas Dickens, at the end, will just say, "Oh, screw the integrity of the plot and the morals. Let's just let Mr. Micawber-- let's find a way out for him." Everyone wants this guy to do well. Rand is like, "No, I'm sticking to my principles. He's dead in the desert, man. He's going to he's going to burn to death." He's like, "Wow, that's okay."Hollis: The funny thing is poor John Galt doesn't even care about him. John Galt has been a bad guy. John Galt is a complicated figure. Let's spend a bit on him.Henry: Before we do that, I actually want to do a very short segment contextualizing her in the 50s because then what you say about Galt will be against this background of what are some of the other ideas in the 50s, right?Hollis: Got it.Henry: I think sometimes the Galt stuff is held up as what's wrong with this novel. When you abstract it and just say it, maybe that's an easier case to make. I think once you understand that this is 1957, she's been writing the book for what, 12 years, I think, or 15 years, the Galt speech takes her 3 years to write, I think. This is, I think the most important label we can give the novel is it's a Cold War novel. She's Russian. What she's doing, in some ways, is saying to America, "This is what will happen to us if we adopt the system of our Cold War enemies." It's like, "This is animal farm, but in America with real people with trains and energy plants and industry, no pigs. This is real life." We've had books like that in our own time. The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver said, that book said, "If the 2008 crash had actually gone really badly wrong and society collapsed, how would it go?" I think that's what she's reacting to. The year before it was published, there was a sociology book called The Organization Man.Hollis: Oh, yes. William Whyte.Henry: A great book. Everyone should read that book. He is worrying, the whole book is basically him saying, "I've surveyed all these people in corporate America. They're losing the Protestant work ethic. They're losing the entrepreneurial spirit. They're losing their individual drive. Instead of wanting to make a name for themselves and invent something and do great things," he says, "they've all got this managerial spirit. All the young men coming from college, they're like, 'Everything's been done. We just need to manage it now.'" He's like, "America is collapsing." Yes, he thinks it's this awful. Obviously, that problem got solved.That, I think, that gives some sense of why, at that moment, is Ayn Rand writing the Galt speech? Because this is the background. We're in the Cold War, and there's this looming sense of the cold, dead hand of bureaucracy and managerialism is. Other people are saying, "Actually, this might be a serious problem."Hollis: I think that's right. Thank you for bringing up Whyte. I think there's so much in the background. There's so much that she's in conversation with. There's so much about this speech, so that when you ask somebody on the street-- Again, let me say this, make the comparison again to Uncle Tom's Cabin, people go through life feeling like they know Uncle Tom's Cabin, Simon Legree, Eliza Crossing the Ice, without having ever read it.Not to name drop a bit, but when I did my annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, this big, huge book, and it got reviewed by John Updike in The New Yorker, and I was like, "This is freaking John Updike." He's like, "I never read it. I never read it." Henry Louis Gates and then whoever this young grad student was, Hollis Robbins, are writing this book, I guess I'll read it. It was interesting to me, when I talk about Uncle Tom's Cabin, "I've never read it," because it's a book you know about without reading. A lot of people know about Atlas Shrugged without having read it. I think Marc Andreessen said-- didn't he say on this podcast that he only recently read it?Henry: I was fascinated by this. He read it four years ago.Hollis: Right, during COVID.Henry: In the bibliography for the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, and I assumed he was one of those people, he was like you, he'd read it as a teenager, it had been informative. No, he came to it very recently. Something's happening with this book, right?Hollis: Huge things are happening, but the people who know about it, there's certain things that you know, you know it's long, you know that the sex is perhaps not what you would have wanted. You know that there's this big, really long thing called John Galt's Speech, and that it's like the whaling chapters in Moby-Dick. People read Moby-Dick, you're like, "Oh, yes, but I skipped all the chapters on cetology." That's the thing that you say, right? The thing that you say is like, "Yes, but I skipped all the John Galt's Speech." I was very interested when we were texting over the last month or so, what you would say when you got to John Galt's Speech. As on cue, one day, I get this text and it's like, "Oh, my God, this speech is really long." I'm like, "Yes, you are the perfect reader."Henry: I was like, "Hollis, this might be where I drop out of the book."Hollis: I'm like, "Yes, you and the world, okay?" This is why you're an excellent reader of this book, because it is a frigging slog. Just because I'm having eye issues these days, I had decided instead of rereading my copy, and I do have a newer copy than this tiny print thing, I decided to listen on audiobook. It was 62 hours or whatever, it was 45 hours, because I listen at 1.4. The speech is awesome listening to it. It, at 1.4, it's not quite 3 hours. It's really good. In the last few days, I was listening to it again, okay? I really wanted to understand somebody who's such a good plotter, and somebody who really understands how to keep people's interest, why are you doing this, Rand? Why are you doing this, Ms. Rand? I love the fact that she's always called Miss. Rand, because Miss., that is a term that we

Gäster: Angelina Douleur, Behrad Rouzbeh, Jack Moy, Ahmed Berhan, Rasmus Wimby, Eddie Ågren För 90SEK/mån får du 5 avsnitt i veckan: 4 Vanliga AMK MORGON + AMK FREDAG med Isak Wahlberg Se till att bli Patron via webben och inte direkt i iPhones Patreon-app för att undvika Apples extraavgifter: Öppna istället din browser och gå till www.patreon.com/amkmorgon Ge bort eller önska dig upp till ett års Patreonmedlemskap hos AMK Morgon! Man väljer fritt vilken tier och antal månader www.patreon.com/amkmorgon/gift Köp biljetter till Agnes Matsdotter på Patricia 14/12: https://billetto.se/e/patricia-live-agnes-matsdotter-supportband-moki-hugo-remi-mannent-biljetter-1077397?rr=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8%3D UPPTÄCKA Köp ett fint mikroskop för barn! Upptäcka är en fin liten produkt som låter ditt barn från 5år och uppåt, upptäcka världen. Ett lättanvänt, portabelt mikroskop med 20 till 40 gångers förstoring och en 2 megapixel kamera som kan fånga både bilder och video på den lilla skärmen. En perfekt present till ditt barn! www.upptackatoys.com/amk eller discount koden “amk” i checkout (inte cart) så får du rabatt på ditt köp Relevanta länkar: …Harambe https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ee/Harambe_with_boy.jpg …Shabani https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Western_Lowland_Gorilla2010501A.jpg/440px-Western_Lowland_Gorilla2010501A.jpg https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/monkey-history/images/6/60/Shabani.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1200?cb=20210307040400 https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/976/cpsprodpb/167A4/production/_83886029_comp.jpg https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/handsome-gorilla-shabani-5a4376424a913__700.jpg …”I can change him”-artikeln https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.15752-9/462558995_2982756128538315_5637358821888250427_n.jpg?_nc_cat=111&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=0024fc&_nc_ohc=a4dBvkzFkacQ7kNvgGcBXrz&_nc_ad=z-m&_nc_cid=0&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent.xx&oh=03_Q7cD1QEvW20SMJKUqDWfshGlr8R120nswzJUTa78OhETSFT4AA&oe=6778B9ED https://scontent.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.15752-9/462572082_881402807527814_2586863858602299683_n.jpg?_nc_cat=103&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=0024fc&_nc_ohc=ksR2411XYmcQ7kNvgExcz80&_nc_ad=z-m&_nc_cid=0&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent.xx&oh=03_Q7cD1QGJKsmuJqsj6MMwtRohq4NRDhjdZ9tc8LTgkEfBqCKmmw&oe=6778AC7B …Byronic Hero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronic_hero …TV4-profilen https://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/a/lwe917/tv4-profil-atalas-for-sexkop https://www.expressen.se/noje/tv4-profil-atalas-for-sexkop/ …Jönssonligan kommer tillbaka https://www.imdb.com/title/tt29633969/ Låtarna som spelades var: BAYRAKTAR is Life - Taras Borovko Long Walk To Get Back - Jack Moy Find Us - In the Back of the Club - The Beatnuts Alla låtar finns i AMK Morgons spellista här: https://open.spotify.com/user/amk.morgon/playlist/6V9bgWnHJMh9c4iVHncF9j?si=so0WKn7sSpyufjg3olHYmg Stötta oss gärna på Swish, varje litet bidrag uppskattas enormt! 123 646 2006

Andy Barr would be Byronic if Byron weren't an absolute nightmare and wore more interesting shirts. The tragic clown, a master of turns of phrase and void-staring. I wish I could describe him better but the fact is I'm not as good at describing Andy Barr as Andy Barr would be because he's amazing. Alongside a superb set, Andy talks to host and MC James Ross about mental health, the 3 Act Structure of sets and just checking in on whether he's ok. CW: Alcoholism, Depression If you'd like to have more of Andy in your ears and eyes, you can find his website HERE, or listen to his (and other wonderful comedian Alexander Bennet's) superb podcast Born Yesterday HERE. Do you want to see Andy's incredible shirt? Then consider joining our Patreon where you can get early access to podcast episodes and watch full videos of Quantum Leopard comedy shows, from the high-energy openers to the loveliest of headliners, including the set from this very episode! Quantum Leopard is a lovely comedy night for lovely people and you can find more links to info about us here: https://linktr.ee/quantumleopard   Edited by Rhys Lawton Original show recording by Aniruddh Ojha Music is by ROOKES production services (https://www.iamrookes.com/)

可以搜索公号【璐璐的英文小酒馆】或者添加【luluxjg2】咨询课程or加入社群，查看文稿和其他精彩内容哦~· The Romantic Poets were among the first celebrities in history.o Famous for their talent and their scandalous lives.· William Blakeo Born in London on November 28, 1757, Blake was not only a poet but also a painter and printmaker. § His prints and artworks are known just as much as his poems.o Blake's work often explores themes of spirituality, imagination, and the nature of reality. § He often had visions as a child, including angels in a tree and God looking at him through a window.§ Also, known for being a pioneer in the free love movement. o In poems like "The Tyger" and "The Lamb," he explores the dualities of existence—good and evil, innocence and experience. § His most famous poem is Jerusalem which is now considered to the unofficial anthem for England. o Influenced many poets, writers and is considered the inspiration for comic literature.· Lord Byrono Born George Gordon Byron on January 22, 1788, in London, Byron was both a poet and a nobleman. o His life was marked by scandal, adventure, and a fierce dedication to personal freedom. § “Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know”§ He was disabled and bulimic who suffered with body image issues.§ Byron used to drink out of a skull he found and made flower pots out of the rest. § He had numerous affairs with both men and women as well as his own half-sister.o Byron's most famous works include Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. § In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron introduced the "Byronic hero," a brooding, rebellious, and charismatic figure that became a staple of Romantic literature. § Don Juan, on the other hand, is a satirical epic that parodies the traditional hero by presenting its protagonist as a flawed yet sympathetic character. § He was one of the first writers whose works were pirated!o Byron fought for Greek independence and died in Greece in 1816· Percy Shelleyo Born on August 4, 1792, in Sussex, England. § Also, he was famous vegetarian. o He was expelled from Oxford for writing an essay promoting atheism.o Married a 16-year-old girl Harriet Westbrook.§ Shelley was cut off by his father and lost a huge fortune.§ Harriet eventually drowned herself when Shelley abandoned her.§ Married Mary Shelley, the writer of Frankenstein, three weeks later.· Also was having a relationship with Mary's step-sister!o Shelley's poetry is known for its lyrical beauty, philosophical depth, and revolutionary spirit. o He was a passionate advocate for political and social reform, and his works often express a longing for a more just and free world. o Shelley's life was cut short when he drowned in a boating accident at the age of 29. Hi, everyone and welcome back to Britain Under the Microscope. 欢迎回来【闲话英伦】. Hi, 安澜. Hi lulu, hi everyone. So 安澜, you know that we have been developing this new course, this new 四合一literature classics course. Yeah, that's when we've been going through pretty much the whole of English literature very very carefully.Yeah, and when we say English literature, we don't just mean England, we mean like English speaking.English speaking literature.Yeah, so I thought let's do a literature episode. Sounds great. But like English literature is huge, which area do you want to focus on?I would like to do the romantic poets.Woo, yes.就是浪漫主义诗人. When you hear this title, you probably think "oh, it's just going to be very romantic and sentimental lyrics or like verses.No.No, we're gonna talk about their 狗血 life. Yes, the romantic poets were pretty scandalous. And in some cases, pretty horrible as well.Yeah. Well, unlike the name suggests.

“The Greatest In Goth Pop Culture” is admittedly a weird topic to be talking about today but with the new Crow movie bombing it made us think about how truly ubiquitous goth culture was in the 80's and 90's.  What happened? Why did this brand of melancholic existentialism / nihilism fall out of fashion after being basically the aesthetic of 90's action movies and many of the teens going to see them.  The discussion of greatest works in goth movies and literature is truly inspired and one of our proudest moments.  So lay on a grave, turn your walkman on and listen to this episode with a sense of ennui and Byronic yearning.    Follow us! Here's everybody's Twitter: https://twitter.com/NerdGoatPodcast (Our Twitter account) https://twitter.com/EdGreerDestroys https://twitter.com/dorkyswallow Please leave a 5 star review on your podcast app, it really helps! Subscribe and like our videos on YouTube and Please share our stuff.   Support our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/TheGreatestPod to get exclusive pods on subjects we can't tackle here and also physical art prints. Watch REBOOT IT, our YouTube Show where we update your favorite franchises alongside Fandom Producer Billy Business here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/REBOOTITSHOW https://www.youtube.com/@ronswallow   Buy Ron's album here: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=on+the+wing+of+a+dragon+ron+swallow&i=digital-music&crid=19V9JSITSY4QX&fbclid=IwAR1pNRvTsJXRfyPj0hu4MFINx6bUXy9KTdy7_3_UJZNB9Zr8j7fe8FUIiVA&sprefix=%2Cdigital-music%2C187&ref=nb_sb_ss_recent_1_0_recent https://music.apple.com/us/album/on-the-wings-of-a-dragon/1687418796

Sailor Noob is the podcast where a Sailor Moon superfan and a total noob go episode by episode through the original Sailor Moon series!Luna is in trouble this week when she falls for the enigmatic Yaten! But can she pull her head out of the clouds in time to save herself and her Byronic boyfriend from Sailor Mademoiselle?In this episode, we discuss the history of cosmetics in Japan. We also talk about having an open face, Eclair de Luna, Shakespeare Moon, Old School Sailor V, shojo nosebleeds, sex farce stuff, Hangin' with Mr. Higashi, going seinen, "almost like girlfriend", #freeJuliana, sorry ladies, Sailor Fredericks of Hollywood, a moaning after, and Love Benedryl!#RIP Donald SutherlandWe're on iTunes and your listening platform of choice! Please subscribe and give us a rating and a review! Arigato gozaimasu!https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sailor-noob/id1486204787Answer this week's show question on Spotify!Listen to our new podcast, Mona Lisa Overpod!https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/mona-lisa-overpod--6195851Become a patron of the show and get access to our live-action PGSM, Animedification, Utena, Ghibli, and Evangelion podcasts!http://www.patreon.com/sailornoobPut Sailor Noob merch on your body!http://justenoughtrope.threadless.comSailor Noob is a part of the Just Enough Trope podcast network. Check out our other shows about your favorite pop culture topics and join our Discord!http://www.twitter.com/noob_sailorhttp://www.justenoughtrope.comhttp://www.instagram.com/noob_sailorhttps://discord.gg/49bzqdpBpxBuy us a coffee on Ko-Fi!https://ko-fi.com/justenoughtrope

Emily Princess is a tragic, Byronic heroine in this one and also SO Pretty! Join James and Bee as they talk about Emily's wet dog energy and her need for hot soup. This one is 3 hours long, so strap in! We're talking Season 4 Episode 17 - DEMONOLOGY --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wheelsuppod/message

This is Episode 244 of Celebrate Poe - Darkness - the second of three episodes about Lord ByronWhere we left off, it is said that Lord Byron awoke one morning and found himself famous. The first run of his latest book of 500 copies sold out in three days.  Pretty impressive for the time!This episode also takes a deep dive into Byron's apocalyptic poem - Darkness, as well as a look at the concept of the Byronic hero.

OK Annabel is still OOO, so Emilie has roped in a friend of the pod, the marvellous Esther Coren to help. Esther has her own podcast, Giles Coren Has No Idea and a Substack called The Spike and she also gives excellent book recommendations. Given we're all feeling mad, bad and dangerous to know (not in a swashbuckling-Byronic-way but in a teetering on The-Brink-kind-of-way) perhaps books can soothe us tiny bit: little umbrellas for the mind. We talk about The Paleo Life by Clare Foges (out June 6), Quint by Robert Lautner, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (May 14), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Egg & I by Betty MacDonald (out of print, but will be on World of Books, which, incidentally, is the preloved Amazon), Hugo Rifkind's Rabbits (also June 6), and In Memoriam by Alice Winn. Plus there's a cameo from Esther's cat Iris.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He brought forth the eponymous Byronic hero, inspired musicians from Liszt to Leonard Cohen, and despite a roguish reputation, he is still regarded today as one of the great poets.

Tune in to this episode of The Lit Pickers where Deepanjana and Supriya set out to explore the allure of the literary bad boy, a.k.a Byronic heroes. From Bronte's brooding Heathcliff to the hero of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera, they navigate the treacherous terrain of men from literature who challenge convention and also uphold them in often dark and mysterious ways. Beware of anti-heroes, unflattering husbands, and the evolving definition of virtue as they explore how this trope has evolved over time and spilled even into Byronic heroines. Grab your books and a strong cup of coffee for this literary soiree where the only dish up for grabs is sass.   You can find Supriya Nair at @supriyanair and Deepanjana Pal at @dpanjana on Instagram.    If you have any books, reading or literature-related questions, please email us at contact@maed.in.    For a list of all the books mentioned in the season so far, check out: https://thelitpickers.fanlink.to/books   This is a Maed In India Production; check us out at www.maedinindia.in.  Creative Director: Mae Mariyam Thomas Project Manager: Shaun Fanthome Head of Audio: Kartik Kulkarni Producer: Meghna Gulati  Sound Editor: Lakshman Parsuram Artwork: Alika Gupta Theme Music: Easy Wanderlings - Here's to You

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Byronic Hero Always Loses, published by Cole Wyeth on February 23, 2024 on LessWrong. Why do we root for the antiheroes? Walter White, Light Yagami, Lucifer Morningstar, Doctor Frankenstein... It seems to be natural to root for the bad guys, and perhaps even more natural for rationalists. "I must confess I have always had some sympathy with villains. Heroism makes fine entertainment but sooner or later someone has to get things done." - Bayaz, Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy. I think this is the reason, at least for me. Villains (particularly the most beloved villains) are agentic. They know what they want and they attempt to obtain it through their own actions. Sometimes those actions are even reasonable. This is notable because it's usually untrue of heroes. Heroes tend to be called to adventure, accepting a goal thrust upon them by circumstances or a bearded stranger or both. Then they pursue it, but often alongside a handful of other eclectic goals which cause internal conflict when they can't all be satisfied (getting distracted rescuing some civilians when the fate of the world is at stake). There's also something fairly un-agentic about following an absolute "honor" code, which is much more common among heroes than villains. Finally, heroes have teams of friends instead of minions, and are often forced to go out of their way to help their friends. A hero's friendships might even change his terminal values! So, why do we often find villains so fascinating? I think it's the same reason that rationalists don't run the world. Being highly agentic just isn't easy in real life, because it's inherently individualistic. Individuals tend to be outcompeted by large organizations. Large organizations are approximately agentic, but the people making up a large organization don't necessarily have to be. In fact, it might be better if they aren't! The military seems to optimize much more strongly for loyalty and discipline than agency - in fact, an army of agents with diverse goals seems tricky to control, since most will instrumentally value their own survival (though an army of agents with one cohesive goal may be even more formidable). In industry, principles of comparative advantage can imply that it is best for each employee to become highly specialized, which seems opposed to developing their agency. A more capable agent might generalize (building the type of skill set that a startup found might need, including "executive nature" as in Competent Elites). Though agentic employees can create a lot of value, I think it is typically more cost effective to create additional cogs in the machine than it is to increase agency. I think this is also why politicians are not very clever (epistemic status: I don't know any politicians). The things we value in a leader include costly trustworthiness signals (see https://www.elephantinthebrain.com/). In fact, the risk of an actively corrupt leader may be great enough that some would prefer a candidate with actively irrational beliefs (say, expecting moral judgement in the afterlife). I would almost go so far as to say that the idea of becoming a Machiavellian scheming mastermind and changing the world (for better or worse) through sheer cleverness is a childish fantasy. Maybe that's not a bad thing; children might be naive, but at least they aren't bitter. Perhaps it's just my American upbringing, but I think I want to live in a world where agents can get what they want, even with the world set against them, if only they are clever and persistent enough. So when I read about another despicable villain sacrificing it all and throwing the natural order out of balance in the name of cursed immortality or to avenge their family or to grasp untold riches, I can't help but root for them a little. In a way, Milton's Lucifer is the ...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Byronic Hero Always Loses, published by Cole Wyeth on February 23, 2024 on LessWrong. Why do we root for the antiheroes? Walter White, Light Yagami, Lucifer Morningstar, Doctor Frankenstein... It seems to be natural to root for the bad guys, and perhaps even more natural for rationalists. "I must confess I have always had some sympathy with villains. Heroism makes fine entertainment but sooner or later someone has to get things done." - Bayaz, Joe Abercrombie's First Law Trilogy. I think this is the reason, at least for me. Villains (particularly the most beloved villains) are agentic. They know what they want and they attempt to obtain it through their own actions. Sometimes those actions are even reasonable. This is notable because it's usually untrue of heroes. Heroes tend to be called to adventure, accepting a goal thrust upon them by circumstances or a bearded stranger or both. Then they pursue it, but often alongside a handful of other eclectic goals which cause internal conflict when they can't all be satisfied (getting distracted rescuing some civilians when the fate of the world is at stake). There's also something fairly un-agentic about following an absolute "honor" code, which is much more common among heroes than villains. Finally, heroes have teams of friends instead of minions, and are often forced to go out of their way to help their friends. A hero's friendships might even change his terminal values! So, why do we often find villains so fascinating? I think it's the same reason that rationalists don't run the world. Being highly agentic just isn't easy in real life, because it's inherently individualistic. Individuals tend to be outcompeted by large organizations. Large organizations are approximately agentic, but the people making up a large organization don't necessarily have to be. In fact, it might be better if they aren't! The military seems to optimize much more strongly for loyalty and discipline than agency - in fact, an army of agents with diverse goals seems tricky to control, since most will instrumentally value their own survival (though an army of agents with one cohesive goal may be even more formidable). In industry, principles of comparative advantage can imply that it is best for each employee to become highly specialized, which seems opposed to developing their agency. A more capable agent might generalize (building the type of skill set that a startup found might need, including "executive nature" as in Competent Elites). Though agentic employees can create a lot of value, I think it is typically more cost effective to create additional cogs in the machine than it is to increase agency. I think this is also why politicians are not very clever (epistemic status: I don't know any politicians). The things we value in a leader include costly trustworthiness signals (see https://www.elephantinthebrain.com/). In fact, the risk of an actively corrupt leader may be great enough that some would prefer a candidate with actively irrational beliefs (say, expecting moral judgement in the afterlife). I would almost go so far as to say that the idea of becoming a Machiavellian scheming mastermind and changing the world (for better or worse) through sheer cleverness is a childish fantasy. Maybe that's not a bad thing; children might be naive, but at least they aren't bitter. Perhaps it's just my American upbringing, but I think I want to live in a world where agents can get what they want, even with the world set against them, if only they are clever and persistent enough. So when I read about another despicable villain sacrificing it all and throwing the natural order out of balance in the name of cursed immortality or to avenge their family or to grasp untold riches, I can't help but root for them a little. In a way, Milton's Lucifer is the ...

Byron's early poems – his so-called 'dark tales' – have been dismissed by critics as the tawdry, slapdash products of an uninteresting mind, and readers ever since have found it difficult not to see them in light of the poet's dramatic and public later life. In a recent piece for the LRB, Clare Bucknell looked past the famous biography to observe the youthful Byron's mind at work in poems such as The Giaour (1813), The Corsair (1814) and Lara (1814), where early versions of the Byronic hero were often characterised by passivity, rumination and choicelessness.Clare discusses the piece with Tom, and talks about her new Close Readings series, On Satire, with Colin Burrow, which features Don Juan alongside works by Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne, John Donne, Muriel Spark and others.Read Clare's piece on Byron: https://lrb.me/byronpodJoin Clare and Colin Burrow for their series on satire next year, and receive all the books under discussion, access to online seminars and the rest of the Close Readings audio, with Close Readings Plus: https://lrb.me/plusytTo subscribe to the audio only, and access all our other Close Readings series:Sign up directly in Apple here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPqIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/byronsc Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What do you do when you find out your lover intends to destroy the world? Listen now as the girls discuss Byronic heroes, hubris and shame, and falling in love so hard it's frightening. We were joined at the end by best friend of the pod and fellow Solasmancer, Cloudy Atlas! We tangent as usual, we like to shoot the shit here. Please like, subscribe, and leave a review! Watch live on Fridays at 10:30pm ET: https://www.twitch.tv/twogirlsoneship Follow us on all the socials https://linktr.ee/twogirlsoneship Advertise with us & business inquiries: twogirlsoneship@gmail.com Theme song: TGOS Theme from Pipeman Studios Find all the other Robots Radio Network shows at https://www.robotsradio.net/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The beautiful tone and pure British diction of Nicholas Boulton are put to fine use in this history of the mutiny on HMS BOUNTY. Host Jo Reed and AudioFile's Alan Minskoff discuss how this history differs from previous explorations of the BOUNTY mutiny. Golden Voice Boulton has a masterful ability to let this fascinating re-creation of events unfold for listeners. His performance highlights how this often romanticized story made Captain Bligh into a monster and Fletcher Christian a Byronic hero, interpretations that the record doesn't reveal or corroborate. This is a long but satisfying listen. Read the full review of the audiobook on AudioFile's website. Published by Penguin Audio. Find more audiobook recommendations at audiofilemagazine.com Support for this podcast comes from #1 New York Times bestselling author Harlan Coben's explosively fast thriller Shelter is now an Amazon Prime Original Series. Listen to the series that started it all at Audible.com/Shelter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the spirit of excess and self-indulgence, the rakes inspect our own characters. What is a historical romance rake, and can they be categorized by type? Join us as we discuss Byronic rakes, malevolent seducers, charming rakes, loquacious weirdos, and so much more. This is a fun one with lots of recommendations, so ignore your gambling debts and hop in your curricle, we're on our way to the Hellfire Club! For further reading, check out A Taxonomy of Rakes on Chels' Subastack. Support us on our PATREONFollow us on social media: Twitter: @reformedrakesInstagram: @reformedrakesBeth's TikTokChels' TikTokEmma's TikTokChels' SubstackEmma's Substack Visit our website for transcripts and show notes: reformedrakes.comThank you for listening!

Nancy, who needs enrichment in her habitat, is persuaded (ridiculously easily) to follow up on the faintest clue in the three year old disappearance of a hot rock star (John Stamos). Bess persuades veejay Luke from General Hospital to sponsor Nancy's improv murder-mystery destination vacation at his MTV-lite station. L Ron also appears as the channel president with mutton chop sideburns, and Tawny Kitaen has a fun cameo. Lots about “just because we can, should we?” and “how much do we owe Byronic heroes?”

Notes:The Verbivore mentions a book that she read on how we create that talks about Picasso and his creative inspirations and influences. That book is The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt.Here are a few articles and videos we referenced for this conversation:- New York Public Library Article “A Brief History of Gothic Romance”- The Hub YALSA Article “Genre Guide: Paranormal Romances for Teens”- YouTube Video “Vampires: Folklore, fantasy and fact - Michael Molina - TedED”- YouTube Video “How did Dracula become the world's most famous vampire? - Stanley Stepanic” - YouTube Video “Lessons from a terrified horror researcher | Mathias Clasen | TEDxAarhus”- YouTube Video “What horror films teach us about ourselves and being human | Dr. Steven Schlozman | TEDxNashville”- YouTube Video “Crimson Peak 2015 Extras - A Primer on Gothic Romance” - YouTube Video “Tom Hiddleston Explains Gothic Romance (Oct. 20, 2015) | Charlie Rose”- YouTube Video “The Byronic Hero: Isn't it Byronic? (Feat. Princess Weekes) | It's Lit” - YouTube Video “Jane Eyre: Why We Keep Reading It (Feat. Princess Weekes) | It's Lit”- YouTube Video “Literary References in Reylo: Jane Eyre”- GreekMythology.com Article “The Myth Of Hades And Persephone”- BuzzFeed Article “22 Books With The Grumpy/Sunshine Trope That You'll Absolutely Love” We touch on several of our previous podcast episodes. They are as follows:- Episode 161: Monster In The House Stories- Episode 162: Setting as a MonsterBooks and Films Mentioned: - Twilight (The Twilight Saga, Book 1) by Stephenie Meyer- Crave (Crave Book 1) by Tracy Wolff - Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë - The Invitation – Directed by Jessica Thompson - The Beautiful (The Beautiful Quartet Book 1) by Renée Ahdieh - Dracula by Bram Stoker - An American Werewolf in London – Directed by John Landis - An American Werewolf in Paris – Directed by Anthony Waller - Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix - The Silver Kiss by Annette Curtis Klause - Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice - The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt - Underworld (Film Series) – Directed Len Wiseman - Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV Series) - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K Rowling - The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black - The Beauty and the Beast by Marie Le Prince de Beaumont - Beauty and the Beast – Directed by Bill Condon - Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge - The Rise of Skywalker – Directed by J. J. Abrams - The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazlewood Music from: https://filmmusic.io ‘Friendly day' by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Notes:The Verbivore reads some of the introductory description to the house High Place from Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic. Here are those words:- “Francis took out a key and opened the heavy door. Noemí walked into the entrance hall, which gave them an immediate view of a grand staircase of mahogany and oak with a round, stained-glass window on the second landing. The window threw shades of reds and blues and yellows upon a faded green carpet, and two carvings of nymphs—one at the bottom of the stairs by the newel post, another by the window—stood as silent guardians of the house. By the entrance there had been a painting or a mirror on a wall, and its oval outline was visible against the wallpaper, like a lonesome fingerprint at the scene of a crime.”Here are a few articles and videos we referenced for this conversation:- The Strand Magazine “The Necessity of an Antagonistic Setting”- MasterClass Article “How to Create Atmosphere and Mood in Writing”- MasterClass Article “How to Describe Setting in Literature”- MasterClass Article “What Is Setting in Writing? Plus Dan Brown's 5 Tips on Writing Setting” - Storyboard That “Character vs. Nature / Man vs. Nature” - New York Public Library Article “A Brief History of Gothic Romance”- BL.UK Article “The Gothic in Great Expectations” - YouTube Video “Crimson Peak 2015 Extras - A Primer on Gothic Romance” - YouTube Video “Tom Hiddleston Explains Gothic Romance (Oct. 20, 2015) | Charlie Rose”- YouTube Video “The Byronic Hero: Isn't it Byronic? (Feat. Princess Weekes) | It's Lit” - YouTube Video “Jane Eyre: Why We Keep Reading It (Feat. Princess Weekes) | It's Lit”We touch on several of our previous podcast episodes. They are as follows:- Episode 58: Let's talk about Mexican Gothic- Episode 131: Jurassic Park Books Mentioned: - Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë - Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen - Masterpiece Theater: Northanger Abbey - Directed by Jon Jones - The House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig - Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë - Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier - Rebecca – Directed by Alfred Hitchcock - Twilight by Stephenie Meyer - Great Expectations by Charles Dickens - Crimson Peak – Directed by Guillermo del Toro - The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King - Uprooted by Naomi Novik - Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton - Crooked Hearts by Melissa Albert Music from: https://filmmusic.io ‘Friendly day' by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

What makes certain types of crime cool and are there any rules? Why is it that the arts and media glorify different forms of criminality over others? In this week's podcast, we delve into the world of cool criminals. We discuss the difference between pirates and privateers, the Byronic hero, the mafia, Baader Meinhof and Narco ballads. Nick presents his theory on how to make crimes cool and we speculate on the origins of coolness itself. Finally, we share some of our favourite crimes and criminals. A few things we mentioned in this podcast: - Lance Gooden wants to make privateering great again https://texassignal.com/lance-gooden-wants-to-make-privateering-great-again/ - Too Great a Cruelty: ARCHAEOLOGY's Top Ten Vicious Pirate Actshttps://archive.archaeology.org/online/reviews/pirates/poll.html - Baader-Meinhof: The glamorous and beguiling face of militant violencehttps://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/long-reads/baader-meinhof-germany-terrorists-b829163.html For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com

What is beastliness? Little Red Riding Hood stories used to be tales of warning for young women to manage their sexuality in the face of the dangerous beasts of court, who were smooth on the outside, but hairy on the inside. In the 21st century, paranormal teen romances use enchantment to transform the beasts into objects of desire. Dr. Nicola Welsh-Burke, a scholar of fairy tales and romance, is here to discuss hot wolf boys, brooding Byronic figures, pseudomarriage and pseudovirginity, hot villain discourse, and why young women need beastly men to unlock their sexuality.Shelf Love:Join the Conversation on Discord: https://www.patreon.com/ShelfLoveSign up for the email newsletter list | Website | Patreon | Twitter | Instagram | YouTubeEmail: Andrea@shelflovepodcast.comGuest: Dr. Nicola Welsh-BurkeTwitterDr. Welsh-Burke is an academic and lecturer at Western Sydney University in Sydney, Australia. She's an early-stage researcher in folklore and fairy tales and the romance genre, and her PhD was on contemporary YA supernatural romance, retellings of little red riding hood from the 21st century.fDiscussed:Nicola's Texts:Wolves of Mercy Falls Series by Maggie StiefvaterSister's Red by Jackson PierceLow Red Moon by Ivy DevlinRed Riding Hood, the novelization of the 2011 filmThe Toast: A Day In The Life Of A Brooding Romantic HeroAarne-Thompson-Uther indexLittle Red Riding Hood is: ATU 425Famous Folklorists & scholars:Angela Carter: “hairy on the inside”Charles Perrault: “smooth-faced wolves”Countess d'Aulnoy: coined the term “fairytale”Cristina Bacchilega: “the fairy tale web”Dr. Jodi McAllister: The Consummate VirginDr. Christina Seifert: pseudovirginityThe complex fantasy (Diamond, 2011): to have the bad boy, to never come to harm, to have his wildness for one's self.

In the last episode of this podcast, we took apart Ulysses' speech to discover its poetics and uncover some of its historical roots. Now it's time to turn to the interpretation of his words. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I build a case against Ulysses. Yes, he's in hell. But that's not enough for us readers to condemn him, given his rousing rhetoric and gorgeous poetics. What can we learn from his speech that will help us put him far down in hell, as Dante does? Here are the segments of this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE: [01:46] Once again, my English translation of the passage: INFERNO, Canto XXVI, lines 85 - 141. If you'd like to read along or drop a comment on this episode, go to my website, markscarbrough.com. [05:09] The eight pieces of our case against Ulysses: 1. Why even make a case against him if he's already in hell? Because he's been turned into a Byronic hero over the years. [06:33] 2. Ulysses is a Greek, enough in itself for Dante to condemn him. [07:46] 3. Ulysses is not forthright about his motivations. [11:04] 4. Ulysses rouses his companions with a speech that begins by quoting one by Julius Caesar in Lucan's PHARSALIA. [13:48] 5. What then are Ulysses' motivations? Perhaps to find immortality without death. [15:32] 6. Ulysses is a tempter toward destruction, like the snake in Eden. [18:20] 7. Ulysses repeatedly uses a word--"picciola"--that minimizes his guilt and the humanity of the men who die with him. [20:42] 8. Ulysses' entire speech is a masterpiece of false counsel toward Virgil, Dante the pilgrim, and, well, us, as we come to sympathize with him.

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.

Julia Golding and Kate Macfarlane take a light-hearted look at the questions of what kind of man you should aspire to be! Reviewing the models available in Jane Austen's era, from the 1770s fop to the Byronic heroes of the 1810, they discuss what qualities were expected of men. They then turn to Austen's works and see what she admired - and disliked - in men of her era. Why is there very little description of what people look like in her works? What would she make of our Romance Novel front cover model of bronzed chest and rippling hair? Which character would put in for plastic surgery? Finally, Julia and Kate turn to her for wisdom on today's issues of gender and sex, as well as the cancel culture. Is it time for a duel?

A rainy Sunday night in ---. Two broadcasters, a man and a woman recently arrived from Central Park, convene in the cramped kitchen of the man's lodging with Malbec and Port Salut. There is much to speak of - the Kinks, a mangled papaya dog, an invective against tweets by Wallace Shawn (Swan?) - but as their trivial chatter progresses, a mystery emerges (as it ought in all literature): who is the third figure in the kitchen? The man and the woman keep making reference to a Byronic figure they call Mason, a brooding spectre whom they claim supplies them steadily with tea, glasses, bound volumes. This 'Mason,' who may or may not resemble D.H. Lawrence, who may or may not exist, lies at the heart of the story. The extent to which he will reveal himself (or be revealed by our protagonists) is the most thrilling part of the narrative, an adventure of epic sprawl playing out entirely within the confines of a tiny New York kitchen. -J. Wood --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ourstrugglepod/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ourstrugglepod/support

Julian Bernick has written across a wide variety of mediums, so Oliver discusses with him getting burnt out on novels, the Appendix N Reading List, writing for role-playing games, Jack Vance's Dying Earth series, writing lyrics as the lead singer of several bands, and more - but the focus of this interview is poetry, gothic horror, and how Julian combined the two in his most excellent book Castle Bash: A Record of the Most Unfortunate Doings at Castle Bash - As Told by an Unnamed Poet who was Never Seen Again! A narrative poem in the Romantic tradition, Castle Bash is Byronic in character, Gothic in atmosphere, Romantic in outlook and Lovecraftian in scope. When a bastard poet is given safe haven and patronage at the tenebrous Castle Bash, mystery, passion, and the forces of hell converge upon its benighted inhabitants. Spellburn Podcast / iTunes / Twitter Whistling Shade Magazine, where Julian serves as an editor of poetry. Julian's RPGeek page Some of Julian's earliest storytelling can be found in this Dungeons of Yesteryear feature. If you'd like to hear Julian talk more about his game design career... and Here's three contemporary poets Julian recommends: Chelsea Minnis Freddie Seidel Michael Robbins www.soimwritinganovel.com PATREON: www.patreon.com/soimwritinganovel BUY OLIVER'S BOOKS: https://www.oliverbrackenbury.com/store SO I'M WRITING A NOVEL... TWITTER: https://twitter.com/so_writing OLIVER'S TWITTER: https://twitter.com/obrackenbury Oliver's Link Tree (For everything else): https://linktr.ee/obrackenbury

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 Contact: unseenacademicalspod@gmail.com A Doctor Prometheus podcast.

Dark and Shallow Lies By Ginny Myers Sain | Book Review Podcast Website: https://gobookmart.com Buy Now: https://amzn.to/3G2iZDp * “Dreamy prose conjures a mythical Southern Gothic atmosphere, mixing violence with a Byronic characterization of Elora's stepbrother Hart. Taut pacing builds sustained terror on the page with each successive suspect in this formidable debut.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “Murky waters, hidden gators, and nasty cottonmouths match the setting to its darkly unsettling story….Fans of Brenna Yovanoff's Fiendish or Natalie C. Parker's Beware the Wild will find this atmospheric thriller deeply satisfying.” –BCCB "A darkly atmospheric mystery set in the bayous of Louisiana."— School Library Journal “Haunting and arresting, this is one stunning debut. Ginny Myers Sain has written a totally engrossing small-town mystery about what happens when you finally dig up long-buried secrets.” —Jessica Goodman, New York Times bestselling author of They'll Never Catch Us “Don't even try to resist—Ginny Myers Sain will lure you into the spellbinding world of the deep Louisiana bayou with this riveting missing girl mystery populated by a bewitching cast of characters; spun to life in lush, atmospheric prose; and teeming with a dark mythology that is part folklore, part psychic mysticism, and entirely compelling.” —Kit Frick, author of I Killed Zoe Spanos “Enchanting and chilling at once, you'll instantly get sucked into this atmospheric tale of kindred spirits brimming with secrets that could tear them apart. Ginny Myers Sain's haunting, lush, lyrical prose will keep you captivated till the end.” —Diana Urban, author of All Your Twisted Secrets --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/gobookmart-review/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/gobookmart-review/support

Turn off the lights and light a candle as we become one with "Sub Rosa"!Author Catherynne M. Valente returns to the show this week to discuss an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that will challenge everything you know about amorous ghosts on Scottish planets. After the death of her grandmother, Beverly Crusher discovers that her nana had a mysterious younger paramour named Ronin. As she begins to investigate their connection, she discovers a malevolent force that has stalked her ancestors for centuries . . . and she's the next target!On its face, Sub Rosa seems irredeemable as an hour of Star Trek, but if you look past the Celtic sex ghost candle, you'll find an episode that is positive about female sexuality, that provides rare glimpses into the back story of an underdeveloped main character, and one that pushes plain old Trek into cosmic gothic romance. *If* you can look past the Celtic sex ghost candle, that is. On this episode, we discuss the flexibility of Trek's setting, if and when Trek succeeds with horror storytelling, what pop culture is like in the 24th century, the English Lit tropes endemic to Trek stories, how the tech of Trek is updated, how longform Trek storytelling has lead to actual relationships being depicted on-screen, Byronic characters in Star Trek, and not actually going far *enough* with your sex candle story.We also discuss Bean Dad and insurrections, this year's Eurovision winner, the surprising number of bite-hiders in society, "hopepunk" and finding beauty in a crapsack world, the "warm milk bath" of TNG, how TV lighting kills horror, The Ballad of Jeanna F. Gallo, Irottish appropriation, no Internet = old people hobbies, a masturbation-based narrative, casting Dracula as "Dracula", sex cringe on TNG, eating grapes for cancer, leaving your job for ghost love, a Golden Girls ep in space, Blazin' Bev, and Space Fabio the Hereditary Sex Ghost!Lights! Camera! Writhe!Follow Catherynne on Twitter and join her Patreon!https://twitter.com/catvalentehttps://patreon.com/catvalenteBuy Cat's new book, The Past is Red, and preorder her upcoming book, Comfort Me With Apples!The Past is Red - OUT NOW!https://amzn.to/2W62tQiComfort Me With Appleshttps://amzn.to/3kJ63KuLearn the story behind your favorite Trek episodes with BackTrekking!http://www.twitter.com/backtrekkingLuxuriate with us on Facebook and Twitter and the Just Enough Trope Discord!http://www.facebook.com/eistpodhttp://www.twitter.com/eistpodhttps://discord.gg/ATMBeUDBuy us matches on Patreon and Ko-Fi!http://www.patreon.com/eistpodhttps://ko-fi.com/E1E01M2UASubscribe to the show on iTunes!https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/enterprising-individuals/id1113165661?mt=2

This month we discuss The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by, perhaps the lesser known sister, Anne Brontë. We delve into representations of masculinity, the Byronic hero, romanticism versus realism, the marriage plot and a whole lot more.

 • Learn about Lord Byron’s many sexual scandals• Experience one of the darkest poems ever written• Learn why Lord Byron is often considered the first superstar01:28 Ghost of Lord Byron enters02:19 She Walks in Beauty3:38 Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know (Life in England)09:40 Darkness19:35 Villa Diodati intro20:39 The Dream22:38 Life in Italy and Greece24:46 On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixty Year26:50 Death and Memory28:15 Further reflections and scandals32:30 Fame and Byronic hero35:05 Sources and Outro

Francesca has been a subject of fierce debate in literary history. By the mid-nineteenth century, she's been turned into an almost Byronic hero. Maybe the truth of the matter is that she's bigger than her sin. Not in a "Romantic heroine" sort of way. Maybe she escapes the poet who gives her a voice. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore Francesca's speech in Canto V of Dante's INFERNO. Maybe Francesca does the ultimate that a character can do: she pulls the curtain back to reveal her creator, standing there in all his ambivalence and unfulfilled desire. In this episode, I'll build a case for Francesca and explain how perhaps she does truly escape her damnation as she escapes the very text that imprisons her. Here are the segments of this episode: [01:00] The reasons why there should be a case for and against her. [02:24] My English translation of the passage from INFERNO: Canto V, lines 88 - 142. If you want to see this translation, it's on my website: markscarbrough.com. [05:17] An admission: the case for Francesca is really the case against Dante-the-pot. [06:33] Is she really a flatterer? Or is she more of a poet? [10:41] Her hymn to love. Yes, it slips the definitions between lust and love. But she's only doing what Virgil and Dante have already done. [15:18] Francesca calls the poet on his game. Her speech is so difficult, so overwhelming, that she reveals that he still turns to classical literature, not theological literature, for the answers to the questions of human motivation and purpose. [19:07] Francesca is a reader! Surely this must actually be a mark in her favor. She's the very thing the poet wants. [20:20] Paolo kissed her "trembling all over." It's a clue. It's an echo from Dante's reaction to Beatrice in the VITA NUOVA. [24:27] The final problem: Francesca does with Paolo what Dante-the-poet never did with Beatrice. The passage ends with desire fulfilled. And the pilgrim faints--and maybe the poet, too. [25:50] The incredible scope of Canto V: from the sure judge Minos to Francesca's long passage of (perhaps) ambiguity and (perhaps) deep irony. Support this podcast

It seems likely that most of our listeners have at least heard of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Many also know that Charlotte and Emily had two other talented siblings who grew to adulthood: Anne, author of the novel Agnes Grey, and the only male heir, Branwell—whose early promise evaporated in a haze of alcohol and opiates. Still, it seems likely that Branwell’s affair with his employer—Lydia Robinson, a wealthy, married woman eighteen years older than he—has received far less attention. This affair, the exact parameters of which have not been determined, is the subject of Finola Austin’s lovely debut novel, Brontë’s Mistress (Atria Books, 2020). Although advantaged in many ways, Lydia has many reasons for complaint when we meet her. Her mother has just died, and her father suffers from senility. At forty-three, she fears the effects of approaching middle age on her beauty and her ability to bear children, the things that have defined and given value to her life. She worries about her daughters’ futures while fending off the encroachments of her mother-in-law. She still mourns the unexpected death of her fifth child, two years before the novel begins. And the loss of that youngest daughter has irreparably damaged Lydia’s long and once-satisfying relationship with her husband, Edmund, who neither offers comfort to nor accepts overtures from her. So when the Robinsons’ governess, Anne Brontë, recommends her brother, Branwell, for the position of tutor to Lydia’s only son, it is perhaps not surprising that Lydia’s initial attempts to keep a proper distance soon evaporate in the face of the attraction she feels for this Byronic young man who pays her compliments, shares his poetry and his art, and listens to her woes. As Finola Austin notes in our interview, Branwell “sees” Lydia, and the consequences of that instinctive emotional connection drive the action of this psychologically sophisticated and always engrossing novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It seems likely that most of our listeners have at least heard of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Many also know that Charlotte and Emily had two other talented siblings who grew to adulthood: Anne, author of the novel Agnes Grey, and the only male heir, Branwell—whose early promise evaporated in a haze of alcohol and opiates. Still, it seems likely that Branwell’s affair with his employer—Lydia Robinson, a wealthy, married woman eighteen years older than he—has received far less attention. This affair, the exact parameters of which have not been determined, is the subject of Finola Austin’s lovely debut novel, Brontë’s Mistress (Atria Books, 2020). Although advantaged in many ways, Lydia has many reasons for complaint when we meet her. Her mother has just died, and her father suffers from senility. At forty-three, she fears the effects of approaching middle age on her beauty and her ability to bear children, the things that have defined and given value to her life. She worries about her daughters’ futures while fending off the encroachments of her mother-in-law. She still mourns the unexpected death of her fifth child, two years before the novel begins. And the loss of that youngest daughter has irreparably damaged Lydia’s long and once-satisfying relationship with her husband, Edmund, who neither offers comfort to nor accepts overtures from her. So when the Robinsons’ governess, Anne Brontë, recommends her brother, Branwell, for the position of tutor to Lydia’s only son, it is perhaps not surprising that Lydia’s initial attempts to keep a proper distance soon evaporate in the face of the attraction she feels for this Byronic young man who pays her compliments, shares his poetry and his art, and listens to her woes. As Finola Austin notes in our interview, Branwell “sees” Lydia, and the consequences of that instinctive emotional connection drive the action of this psychologically sophisticated and always engrossing novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It seems likely that most of our listeners have at least heard of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Many also know that Charlotte and Emily had two other talented siblings who grew to adulthood: Anne, author of the novel Agnes Grey, and the only male heir, Branwell—whose early promise evaporated in a haze of alcohol and opiates. Still, it seems likely that Branwell’s affair with his employer—Lydia Robinson, a wealthy, married woman eighteen years older than he—has received far less attention. This affair, the exact parameters of which have not been determined, is the subject of Finola Austin’s lovely debut novel, Brontë’s Mistress (Atria Books, 2020). Although advantaged in many ways, Lydia has many reasons for complaint when we meet her. Her mother has just died, and her father suffers from senility. At forty-three, she fears the effects of approaching middle age on her beauty and her ability to bear children, the things that have defined and given value to her life. She worries about her daughters’ futures while fending off the encroachments of her mother-in-law. She still mourns the unexpected death of her fifth child, two years before the novel begins. And the loss of that youngest daughter has irreparably damaged Lydia’s long and once-satisfying relationship with her husband, Edmund, who neither offers comfort to nor accepts overtures from her. So when the Robinsons’ governess, Anne Brontë, recommends her brother, Branwell, for the position of tutor to Lydia’s only son, it is perhaps not surprising that Lydia’s initial attempts to keep a proper distance soon evaporate in the face of the attraction she feels for this Byronic young man who pays her compliments, shares his poetry and his art, and listens to her woes. As Finola Austin notes in our interview, Branwell “sees” Lydia, and the consequences of that instinctive emotional connection drive the action of this psychologically sophisticated and always engrossing novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Andy and Stephanie discuss music videos, vampires, and Bowie as they review The Hunger. Andy compares the movie to Lost Boys, Stephanie brings up Keats and Byronic heroes, and they both have a new least favorite hell. Reading Recommendations: VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE, by Karen Russell

In this episode, Andy and Stephanie discuss music videos, vampires, and Bowie as they review The Hunger. Andy compares the movie to Lost Boys, Stephanie brings up Keats and Byronic heroes, and they both have a new least favorite hell. Reading Recommendations: VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE, by Karen Russell

"Lucy isn't shallow. She isn't just an extention of other characters and their development. She really does come across as having her own identity. She is that mix of emotional optimism and reasoned out introspection we see in her chapters, and to be honest, I think that her presence brings into focus the darker elements of this gothic text. Because, with her loss, the darkness comes creeping in..." ---- Part 2 of our final look at Secret Rooms. Here, we dive deep into the gothic analysis, going a bit down the rabbit hole to explore the various kinds of gothic genre and subgenre as established both in Europe and the Americas. We talk about the subverted tropes, the plethora of added female energy to the story, if Krieger is like Dracula, Abigail as a Byronic hero, the modern trope of the Lancer, and an exploration of what Lovecraftian elements this story does use as components. And next week.... Cats. EDIT: After the official news of today, I modified the episode. There were only a few downloads, but if you listened to the original already, you can download the new one, and the changes start at timestamp 58:41.   If you want to understand the joke above: https://youtu.be/tKjZuykKY1I Trope Talk - The Lancer: https://youtu.be/fgmT_Q2R2ww Trope Talk - Five Man Band: https://youtu.be/lmmNuic_4tQ   The New Century Multiverse books and audio dramas can be found on: https://www.newcenturymultiverse.com   Intro is "The Talons of Adventure, The Antlers of Romance" by Doctor Turtle Midroll Music - Instrumental version of "Vincent" by Don McLean. Outro - "Kajiit Like To Sneak" by Miracle of Sound

Happy Halloween, listeners! This year, BFFC are delighted to discuss CRIMSON PEAK, Guillermo del Toro's most recent film. They'll discuss its classic gothic themes, fabulous costumes, set design, and gothic / Byronic heroes.

This episode delves into comparing notes on the OG graphic novel and the first film adaptation of The Crow. What worked? What changed? Why is it so dang good? Get ready for ramblings on Byronic heroes, video games, perfect revenge, and Top Dollar's wig.

Emma is joined by podcasting extraordinaire Chad Ellis to discuss the first film in the most recent of Star Wars trilogies, The Force Awakens. We share our love for this movie, and our stories of first seeing it (Chad's is way cooler). Plus: characters and world-building, Kylo & wine bros, Byronic heroes, sacred texts, appreciation of Adam Driver, the superiority of practical effects, shipping Poe and Finn, and Droids for millennials.  Follow Chad on Twitter @ChadManic, and make sure to check out their podcast Station Blue (@StationBluePod), as well as Hit The Bricks (@HitTheBricksPod) and Arden (@ArdenPod). Find Us Online: If you enjoy Pairing, follow us on social media and tell your friends! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, & Tumblr @PairingPodcast. Also check out our website, www.thepairingpodcast.com Please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts, as that's one of the best ways to get more people listening in! Support Us: Become a Pairing Patron on Patreon to get access to exclusive content, personalized pairings, bonus episodes, and more! And do't forget to check out our Merch store! About Pairing: Pairing was created, hosted, and produced by Emma Sherr-Ziarko, with music and audio recording by Winston Shaw, and artwork by Darcy Zimmerman and Katie Huey. This episode was edited by Emma Sherr-Ziarko.

In this episode, Rachael and Kirsty discuss the following: - Russian Doll creator working on a new Star Wars series - Doctor Aphra audio drama in the works - New casting announced for Cassian Andor live-action series. We then segue into an in-depth discussion of Reylo across the sequel trilogy, with a particular emphasis on Deborah Lutz’s excellent book ‘The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative’. We explore how the dynamic between Rey and Kylo Ren/Ben Solo evolved across The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, in particular emphasising how the character of Ben Solo fulfils the tragic destiny of a certain type of Byronic hero. Many thanks to Christy Carew for the Scavenger's Hoard theme, and Nemling for our artwork. If you have any questions for Rachael and Kirsty, please email them to scavengershoard@gmail.com

Byronic is an adjective that means moody and melodramatic. 19th century poet Lord Byron provides the origin of our word of the day. He was a romantic English poet known for poetry that was full of melancholy and intense drama. Byronic may be used to describe poetry of this kind, or can be used more broadly to describe anything, like as a person’s behavior, that fits such a description. For example: Catherine’s been acting more Byronic lately. She’s been in a moody frame of mind all week.

If you are determined to read this book as a love story we are so about to kill that vibe. Cris and Brynn rant about who is the most Byronic hero, discuss whether this book is racist (Spoiler: yes), and cringe over the shit Brynn underlined in her high school copy. This episode is brought to you by trips to the Continent, sleeping on moors, and that mysterious sound coming from the attic. (CW: racism, sexual assault, rape, abuse) --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ph-drunk/support

TARDIS time! We’re hopping in the big blue box with our favorite time-traveling superhero and her fam. A new season of Doctor Who has just wrapped on the BBC, and we have tons to say about it. In this episode, we’ll analyze one episode in particular of Series 12, and that’s Episode 8: The Haunting of Villa Diodati. The Doctor and her companions visit Lake Geneva in 1816 to witness one of the most famous gatherings in literary history—that dark and stormy night when Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Doctor William John Polidori, Claire Clairmont, and Lord Byron were shut indoors and decided to tell ghost stories. It’s the eve that Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein, and that also helped birth the literary vampire genre. Did we mention there was a Cyberman present? We’ll discuss the historical context of the Year Without a Summer, the psychology of horror, and the larger-than-life personalities of Lord Byron and the Shelley’s. Is the Doctor a Byronic hero? Why are the Romantics so obsessed with the titan Prometheus of Greek mythology? And how do time travel and sci-fi mix with the horror genre? All that and more in this week’s discussion. We’re doing a Lord of the Rings GIVEAWAY! Follow us on Twitter and check out our pinned tweet to enter for your chance to win two LotR Funko POPs and a set of LotR Trivial Pursuit. Support us at www.patreon.com/midnightmyth Check out our merch store for Midnight Myth, Boomerangerang, and Wheel of Ka tees and totes! Learn more, view sources and inspiration, and sign up for e-mail updates at www.midnightmyth.com Twitter Facebook Instagram If you enjoy the podcast, please consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/midnightmyth/support

Now that we’re halfway through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the CenterForLit crew paused to discuss what we’ve read thus far. Topics include the influence of Romanticism in the story, Byronic heroes, the problem of first person narratives, and the age old question: who is the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein or his creature?

The boys sit down to deliver some of their major takeaways on season 1 as well as discuss comments from listeners. Stephen Hero discusses Code Geass in the context of Romantic literature and especially the Count of Monte Cristo, pmc breaks down the data on why Suzaku is the central villain of the season, and Ignis engages in a gambit where he discusses Lelouch as compared with Xanatos from Gargoyles. Start of Discussion Timecode- 36:30 --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/mechinations/support

Set your Roombas to kill mode, because this week the boys finish off The Tommyknockers! We're also pioneering a new segment: The Conspiracy Web (red twine not included). Phoenix gets Byronic. Stephen spins out. Special thanks to our guest Call from Beyond, Ella Crockett, who makes a triumphant return one year later - the prophesy has been fulfilled! 

We’re back for more Cadillacs, more dinosaurs, and more of Mickey’s nasty bat friends (Gargoyles). Special guest Alison “Bog Sommelier” Lührs joins us at our Victorian swoon party for Byronic howling hunks. Quahoon!This week on Saturday Morning Tuesdays:Cowboys are ancient warlocks • Running Quahoon Count: 6 • Apparently cartoons in the 90s could just say whatever • Wait until Bezos mounts a castle on his downtown balls • Tune in for a special Salute to our GoonsToday’s Episode Sponsor: Hot Chips™THIS WEEK'S EPISODESCadillacs and Dinosaurs - Episode 2, "Dino Drive"Gargoyles - Episode 2, “Awakening, Part 2"The Boys: Andrew Eric Davison (Seattle), Austin Bridges (Portland), Rory Voie (San Diego)Fabulous Guest: Alison Lührs (Seattle)Audio Production: Andrew Eric Davison (Seattle)

IN A CASTLE, UPON A HILL, BESTREWN WITH COBWEBS...JOIN US ON A JOURNEY INTO SELF-DISCOVERY… Welcome to the crossroads of spooky and romantic as Gabe and his significant other, Kristine Fisher, talk about some Gothic Romance movies. This time, your Byronic heroes are covering three films in particular – Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre (1943), Joseph L. Mankiewicz’ Dragonwyck (1946), and Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body (Italian: La frusta e il corpo, 1963). This will be the first of (hopefully) a couple discussions on the subject, so we stuck to an earlier era. We don’t have a specific plan on when to record a second part, so stay tuned! 00:00 – Intro 16:53 – Jane Eyre 42:21 – Dragonwyck 1:10:32 – The Whip and the Body  1:28:28 – Other movies and farewells For the record, we’re basing our definition of Gothic Romance partially on a description found on the Toledo Lucas County Public Library website (credited to Claire F.): https://www.toledolibrary.org/blog/a-glimpse-of-genre-the-gothic-romance And here’s a relatively complete Letterboxd list of pertinent movies, including some we may be covering next time: https://letterboxd.com/gabepowers/list/gothic-romance/

Speaker – Sandra Mayer Oscar Wilde once described Benjamin Disraeli’s life as ‘the most brilliant of paradoxes’. It served as a model for someone who, as an Irishman and aspiring literary celebrity, shared Disraeli’s outsider status, his Byronic dandyism, his mastery of the quotable epigram, and his quest for fame in the British establishment. This […]

He’s the anti-hero. The Byronic hero. Listen in to hear what I can gather about what it means to be Joker.

Alex, Tom S and Chris discuss Blizzard and then say nice things about Apex Legends, Resident Evil 2, and Devil May Cry 5. Plus: The Fraudulent Rustling of the Horse Boy II: Redeem This, the adventures of Gordon Fremen, middleware war among the stars, and our winter survival tips and tricks. Here’s Jason Schreier’s writeup [...]

Join Siobhain (@siobhainma), Gemma (@gemmaflynn) and Stu (@stuartmcp) for episode 3 where they consider the logistics of an erotic IKEA experience and their Byronic hero Joe’s connection with the colour red.

On today's episode, Jason, Gwendy and David discuss the latest news in the world of Star Wars, including the new trailer for Star Wars: Resistance. Then, Gwendy leads a discussion on byronic heroes and what they can tell us about Kylo Ren. Enjoy! Follow us on Twitter: @FOTFPodcastLike us on Facebook: Followers of the Force PodcastGo to our store on TeePubluc: teepublic.com/user/fotfpodcasfRate, review and share the show on Apple Podcasts!

On today's episode, Jason, Gwendy and David discuss the latest news in the world of Star Wars, including the new trailer for Star Wars: Resistance. Then, Gwendy leads a discussion on byronic heroes and what they can tell us about Kylo Ren. Enjoy! Follow us on Twitter: @FOTFPodcastLike us on Facebook: Followers of the Force PodcastGo to our store on TeePubluc: teepublic.com/user/fotfpodcasfRate, review and share the show on Apple Podcasts!

Charlotte and Caitlin go back to basics with a discussion on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, Maureen Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey, villains, antiheroes, Byronic heroes, Reylo, Anakin Skywalker, and more. In part one, they talk definitions and history. In part two, they dive into what the creators have said about our heroes and villains: quotes from George Lucas, Rian Johnson, and JJ Abrams. In part three, they answer the question: Do these archetypes even matter? All this and more on this episode of Skytalkers.   Rolling Stones article: https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/george-lucas-and-the-cult-of-darth-vader-247142/   http://www.twitter.com/skytalkerspod http://www.twitter.com/crerrity http://www.twitter.com/caitlinplesher http://skytalkers.com

For lovers of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, Eugene Onegin takes us back to Imperial Russia, where young Tatyana Larina falls for her brooding, Byronic neighbor. More than a romance, Alexander Pushkin's epic poem is a classic of Russian literature and history, as well as a glimpse into the 19th-century dueling culture which proved to be so fatal for him.

This week on the King Mobcast: Vive la Revolution! Bad French accents! Byronic backdowns! And the introduction of everyone's favorite irredeemable degenerate, the Marquis de Sade! It's The Invisibles #6, "Mysteries of the Guillotine!"

LnR Around the World in Eighty Days 1 by Jules Verne ((1826-1905) Written in 1872 Chapter I Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814. He was one of the most noticeable members of the Reform Club, though he seemed always to avoid attracting attention; an enigmatical personage, about whom little was known, except that he was a polished man of the world. People said that he resembled Byron—at least that his head was Byronic; but he was a bearded, tranquil Byron, who might live on a thousand years without growing old. Certainly an Englishman, it was more doubtful whether Phileas Fogg was a Londoner. He was never seen on 'Change, nor at the Bank, nor in the counting-rooms of the "City"; no ships ever came into London docks of which he was the owner; he had no public employment; he had never been entered at any of the Inns of Court, either at the Temple, or Lincoln's Inn, or Gray's Inn; nor had his voice ever resounded in the Court of Chancery, or in the Exchequer, or the Queen's Bench, or the Ecclesiastical Courts.

This week on The King Mobcast: English Romanticism! Byronic heroes! Pastoral impressionism! And the underlying philosophy of self-determination vs. structured society. Sound intriguing? No? Well, stick around, we'll *eventually* get back to the punk sex-splosions and whatnot.

Cape Cod Pantoum Maria Nazos Tonight you’re loaning Billy your car, a brand-new seal-gray Volkswagen Passat with four doors, though last week at 3 a.m., he stole your canoe, and sank it in the autumn sea, then swam ashore. Tonight you’re lending Billy your car—it’s brand-new— and he’s a well-meaning, blue-eyed Byronic drinking man who last week, at 3 a.m., stole your beached canoe, and when it sank he blamed it on a dolphin. A well-meaning, blue-eyed, Byronic, hard-drinking man whose phone calls you take, no matter the hour, who sank your canoe and blamed it on a dolphin, and the young man with him, whom the sea sadly devoured, so you’ll always take Billy’s call, no matter the hour. Because, you sigh, his mother’s dying, too, and he’s drinking again. He’s no longer a young man (he’s sad and he’s drowning), and neither are you, and all friends sometimes sin. Besides, you sigh, his mother’s dying, too, that’s why he’s drinking. She wasn’t a beauty—she came on to you long ago. And he’s not a young man; he’s drunk and he’s drowning. So you press the phone to your cheek, stare out the dark window. Who hasn’t come on to you? (Who wasn’t lovely long ago?) (Even Billy did; his tragic need, his blank blue eyes.) You press the phone to cheek, stare out the dark window, and listen to him make a mess of our peaceful lives. Now back in bed, we return to our disrupted romance. Although last week, at 3 a.m., he stole your canoe, you set a sinking man adrift in the sea of second chance: tonight you’ve loaned Billy your car again, brand-new.

It's Emily's turn in the hot seat as we sit down for another edition of What Are We Reading? Stuck in an endless cycle of reading Wuthering Heights due to her own procrastination, Emily shares thoughts on Bronte's vision of love, and everyone chimes in to consider how today's world considers this story as compared to Bronte's original intentions. Oh, and along the way we remember our own melodramatic teenage years.  We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

It's beautiful to look at. It's populated with rich characters. Adam Driver is filmed as a Byronic hero, desperately romantic and at his sexiest. Matt Moore joins us for this discussion and points to how the film focuses on female characters and interestingly alters the focus of the series. We discuss how the film represents a shift from an aristocratic focus on blood and destiny to a more democratic purview on social change everyone, of whatever race or ethnicity, can engage in. Mike came out of the film gleefully playing with a lightsaber only to sit down and slash through what he saw as the film's weaker points, though he points out how Rian Johnson is the right director for the film and how, in spite of its faults, it truly does feel like a Star Wars film. Recorded on 17th December 2017.

Learn about the original Byronic hero, Lord Byron; then learn about the original fulminologic hero, lightning.

It’s like raaaa-eee-aaaiiin on your wedding day! …Or like finding out your fiance is already married and has been keeping his wife locked in the attic of his house, on your wedding day. It’s time for Jane Eyre! Megan and RJ make horrible mouth noises, sing entirely too much and ponder the question, “Where exactly SHOULD you keep your secret wife?”

The taxi to Bel Aire keeps rolling along, and this time we visit the Prince in the latter part of his career with a look at the con-man romance, Focus. The movie is nothing like the synopsis on IMDb or HBO Go would have you believe. In fact, it's really a film made of two stories, and the first one is mucher better than the second. But, we do what we always do as we take Will Smith's Focus to the analysis table. Before the analysis can begin however, we sit around the table to talk about some of our favorite plot twists in film. So, beware, there may be spoilers for movies you haven't seen. It's a fun conversation as Caleb tries to upset Dustin with mentions of Rosebud. This week, Dalton, Caleb, Alex, and Dustin discuss several key issues and ideas based around the production of Focus. Dalton and Alex wind up tag teaming the film as they discuss age discrepancies and feminism. The idea of the recent Twitter hit Ross Putnam and FemScriptIntros comes up as they discuss the sexism that is rampant in Hollywood filmmaking as well as Hollywood's lolita complex. Caleb then discusses Hollywood and American Culture's interest in Byronic characters; mentioning that this film further enforces the idea of the byronic hero as someone we should back and support. Dustin then wraps things up with a look at how the film can be viewed as a neo-noir. He goes into great detail about the formal aspects and the stylistic flourishes which allow this film to stand out before highlighting it as a modern take on a studio era, factory made film. Alright dear listener, that's what we have in store for you this week. Remember, the hand is quicker than the eye; did you know you already hit the play button? Didn't see that one coming, did you? Remember, it's all about the focus. Focus Time Stamps00:45 - Intros and Welcome03:11 - Synopsis and Reviews09:28 - The Game: Favorite Plot Twists - SPOILER ALERT16:20 - Analysis34:24 - Shelf or Trash: Else or Instead39:04 - Social Media, Wrap Up, and Next Week's Film

We're talking modern gothic novels, religious nonfiction, books for escapism, and more. Enjoy! This episode is sponsored by Tryaudiobooks.com and Book Riot Live.

Get ready as we throw so much shade on Lord Byron even a vampire would curse the night as we touch on the last of our “big three”: The Vampyre by John William Polidori. A short episode for a short story, we’ll discuss syphilis, the pains of being Lord Byron’s doctor, that night in Geneva in the year without a ... Read More

We've said this before, but holy crap: Talk about Tangentpiece Theatre. While talking about Keanu Reeves and the serious ass kickings he doles out in JOHN WICK, Michael Keaton's return in BIRDMAN as a leading man, and the very French THE BLUE ROOM, we take left turns into why trailers suck, the French as a people, the Byronic hero, and lots of other stuff. Plus, Dave sings "Two Heads Are Better Than One" for a half-chorus (it's Evan's fault), and Kris explains how John Wick (the character) comes to violence (short version: The bad guys came at him on the WRONG day).

An introduction to the life and poetry of Lord Byron and the Byronic Hero character type.

Movie Meltdown - Episode 260 This episode we continue our discussion of graphic novels turned into movies that we began in episode 259. But this time we branch out with questions like, ‘Do we always NEED an origin story’? And some of us come clean about just when we decided to stop hiding that comic geek inside of us. Which makes us wonder if it’s easier being geeky in school today vs. years ago? So many dorky topics… and yet we address them all! Plus along the way we also discuss… killing off villains, The Raid: Redemption, Underoos, Zack Snyder, Battle Royale, Sleepy Hollow, Byronic vampires, North Korea, Guardians of the Galaxy, Loki, 30 Days of Night, Nerdcore music, Persepolis, Cat Sh*t One, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Let the Right One In, Oldboy, 300, The Rocketeer, the mutant/human struggle,The Crow, Tokyopop, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Hellboy, Akira, The Craft, horror manga, Grave of the Fireflies, Evangelion, Dredd vs. Judge Dredd, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Vietnam, Gilgamesh... with ninjas, Sylvester Stallone, revisiting origin stories, Pyongyang, From Hell, Y: The Last Man, The Dark Knight, and I feel like… it ruined my childhood - less? Spoiler Alert: Spoilers for seasons 2 and 4 of “The Walking Dead”. You have been warned! “So here’s what we do… we start every superhero movie now, with an old cranky man coming out: ‘You damned kids should know this by now!’”  For more on "The Destination", like their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/destinationcomics

Dry Bob Southey; funniness of Don Juan; hudibrastic rhymes; brief discussion of the ottava rima stanza form; mercurial range of tone; Julia's struggle not to consent with herself, not with Juan; his Byronic passiveness.

The Byronic hero; what others can say about him; what he can say about himself.  The coherence of writing poetry when your lacerated breast is no longer capable of feeling pleasure or pain, hope or fear.  Who should narrate the Byronic hero?  Milton's narrator? Julian?Lockwood?  The importance of seeing Byron's range, as given by Shelley in Julian and Maddalo (that unutterably wonderful poem), and by Byron in his own letters -- all this as the beginning of an introduction to Don Juan.  The perfection of the change of tone in the canceled stanza on the MS of Canto I: "I would to heaven I were so much clay," &c.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.In 1812 the 24-year-old Lord Byron published the first part of a long narrative poem. It caused an instant sensation. "I awoke one morning and found myself famous", wrote Byron in his memorandum book, and the first edition sold out in three days. The poem narrates the life of an aristocrat on a grand tour of Europe. Its central character is the first Byronic hero, a flawed but charismatic young man modelled on the poet.As well as offering a self-portrait of Byron as a young man, Childe Harold is a fascinating snapshot of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a place ravaged by revolution and war; the poem also gives us an insight into the political and intellectual concerns of its author.With:Jonathan BateProfessor of English Literature at the University of WarwickJane StablerReader in Romanticism at the University of St AndrewsEmily Bernhard JacksonAssistant Professor in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Arkansas.Producer: Thomas Morris.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Byron's poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.In 1812 the 24-year-old Lord Byron published the first part of a long narrative poem. It caused an instant sensation. "I awoke one morning and found myself famous", wrote Byron in his memorandum book, and the first edition sold out in three days. The poem narrates the life of an aristocrat on a grand tour of Europe. Its central character is the first Byronic hero, a flawed but charismatic young man modelled on the poet.As well as offering a self-portrait of Byron as a young man, Childe Harold is a fascinating snapshot of Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a place ravaged by revolution and war; the poem also gives us an insight into the political and intellectual concerns of its author.With:Jonathan BateProfessor of English Literature at the University of WarwickJane StablerReader in Romanticism at the University of St AndrewsEmily Bernhard JacksonAssistant Professor in Nineteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Arkansas.Producer: Thomas Morris.