Podcast appearances and mentions of Leslie Fiedler

Who else in literature today could be more interesting to interview than Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans, as well as the author of popular reviews and the sweater weather Substack? We talked about so much, including: Chopin and who plays him best; why there isn't more tennis in fiction; writing fiction on a lab bench; being a scientific critic; what he has learned working as a publisher; negative reviews; boring novels; Jane Austen. You'll also get Brandon's quick takes on Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Franzen, Lionel Trilling, György Lukács, and a few others; the modern critics he likes reading; and the dead critics he likes reading.Brandon also talked about how his new novel is going to be different from his previous novels. He told me:I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. I want my books to feel like books. I don't want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation.I have enjoyed Brandon's fiction (several people I recommend him to have loved Real Life) and I think he's one of the best critics working today. I was delighted to interview him.Oh, and he's a Dickens fan!Transcript (AI produced, lightly formatted by me)Henry: Today I am talking to Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans. Brandon is also a notable book reviewer and of course he writes a sub stack called Sweater Weather. Brandon, welcome.Brandon: Yeah, thanks for having me.Henry: What did you think of the newly discovered Chopin waltz?Brandon: Um, I thought, I mean, I remember very vividly waking up that day and there being a new waltz, but it was played by Lang Lang, which I did not. I don't know that, like, he's my go-to Chopin interpreter. But I don't know, I was, I was excited by it. Um, I don't know, it was in a world sort of dominated by this ethos of like nothing new under the sun. It felt wonderfully novel. I don't know that it's like one of Chopin's like major, I don't know that it's like major. Um, it's sort of definitively like middle of the road, middle tier Chopin, I think. But I enjoyed it. I played it like 20 times in a row.Henry: I like those moments because I like, I like it when people get surprised into realizing that like, it's not fixed what we know about the world and you can even actually get new Chopin, right?Brandon: I mean, it felt a little bit like when Beyonce did her first big surprise drop. It was like new Chopin just dropped. Oh my God. All my sort of classical music nerd group texts were buzzing. It felt like a real moment, actually.Henry: And I think it gives people a sense of what art was like in the past. You can go, oh my God, new Chopin. Like, yes, those feelings are not just about modern culture, right? That used to happen with like, oh my God, a new Jane Austen book is here.Brandon: Oh, I know. Well, I mean, I was like reading a lot of Emile Zola up until I guess late last year. And at some point I discovered that he was like an avid amateur photographer. And in like the French Ministry of Culture is like digitized a lot of his glass plate negatives. And one of them is like a picture that Zola has taken of Manet's portrait of him. And it's just like on a floor somewhere. Like he's like sort of taken this like very rickety early camera machinery to this place where this portrait is and like taken a picture of it. It's like, wow. Like you can imagine that like Manet's like, here's this painting I did of you. And Zola's like, ah, yes, I'm going to take a picture to commemorate it. And so I sort of love that.Henry: What other of his photos do you like?Brandon: Well, there's one of him on a bike riding toward the camera. That's really delightful to me because it like that impulse is so recognizable to me. There are all these photos that he took of his mistress that were also just like, you can like, there are also photographs of his children and of his family. And again, those feel so like recognizable to me. He's not even like a very good photographer. It's just that he was taking pictures of his like daily life, except for his kind of stunt photos where he's riding the bike. And it's like, ah, yes, Zola, he would have been great with an iPhone camera.Henry: Which pianists do you like for Chopin?Brandon: Which pianists do I love for Chopin? I like Pollini a lot. Pollini is amazing. Pollini the elder, not Pollini the younger. The younger is not my favorite. And he died recently, Maurizio Pollini. He died very recently. Maybe he's my favorite. I love, I love Horowitz. Horowitz is wonderful at Chopin. But it's obviously it's like not his, you know, you don't sort of go to Horowitz for Chopin, I guess. But I love his Chopin. And sometimes Trifonov. Trifonov has a couple Chopin recordings that I really, really like. I tend not to love Trifonov as much.Henry: Really?Brandon: I know it's controversial. It's very controversial. I know. Tell me why. I, I don't know. He's just a bit of a banger to me. Like, like he's sort of, I don't know, his playing is so flashy. And he feels a bit like a, like a, like a keyboard basher to me sometimes.Henry: But like, do you like his Bach?Brandon: You know, I haven't done a deep dive. Maybe I should do a sort of more rigorous engagement with Trifonov. But yeah, I don't, he's just not, he doesn't make my heart sing. I think he's very good at Bach.Henry: What about a Martha Argerich?Brandon: Oh, I mean, she's incredible. She's incredible. I bought that sort of big orange box out of like all of her, her sort of like masterwork recordings. And she's incredible. She has such feel for Chopin. But she doesn't, I think sometimes people can make Chopin feel a little like, like treacly, like, like a little too sweet. And she has this perfect understanding of his like rhythm and his like inner nuances and like the crispness in his compositions. Like she really pulls all of that out. And I love her. She has such, obviously great dexterity, but like a real sort of exquisite sensitivity to the rhythmic structures of Chopin.Henry: You listen on CD?Brandon: No, I listen on vinyl and I listen on streaming, but mostly vinyl. Mostly vinyl? Yeah, mostly vinyl. I know it's very annoying. No, no, no, no, no.Henry: Which, what are the good speakers?Brandon: I forget where I bought these speakers from, but I sort of did some Googling during the pandemic of like best speakers to use. I have a U-Turn Audio, U-Turn Orbital record player. And so I was just looking for good speakers that were compatible and like wouldn't take up a ton of space in my apartment because I was moving to New York and had a very tiny, tiny apartment. So they're just from sort of standard, I forget the brand, but they've served me well these past few years.Henry: And do you like Ólafsson? He's done some Chopin.Brandon: Who?Henry: Víkingur Ólafsson. He did the Goldbergs this year, but he's done some Chopin before. I think he's quite good.Brandon: Oh, that Icelandic guy?Henry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the glasses? That's right. And the very neat hair.Brandon: Yes. Oh, he's so chic. He's so chic. I don't know his Chopin. I know his, there's another series that he did somewhat recently that I'm more familiar with. But he is really good. He has good Beethoven, Víkingur.Henry: Yeah.Brandon: And normally I don't love Beethoven, but like—Henry: Really? Why? Why? What's wrong with Beethoven? All these controversial opinions about music.Brandon: I'm not trying to have controversial opinions. I think I'm, well, I'm such a, I'm such, I mean, I'm just like a dumb person. And so like, I don't, I don't have a really, I feel like I don't have the robust understanding to like fully appreciate Beethoven and all of his sort of like majesty. And so maybe I've just not heard good Beethoven and I need to sort of go back and sort of get a real understanding of it. But I just tend not to like it. It feels like, I don't know, like grandma's living room music to me sometimes.Henry: What other composers do you enjoy?Brandon: Oh, of course.Henry: Or other music generally, right?Brandon: Rachmaninoff is so amazing to me. There was, of course, Bach. Brahms. Oh, I love Brahms, but like specifically the intermezzi. I love the intermezzi. I recently fell in love with, oh, his name is escaping me now, but he, I went to a concert and they sort of did a Brahms intermezzi. And they also played this, I think he was an Austrian composer. And his music was like, it wasn't experimental, but it was like quite, I had a lot of dissonance in it. And I found it like really interesting and like really moving actually. And so I did a sort of listening to that constantly. Oh, I forget his name. But Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, love Rachmaninoff. I have a friend who says that Rachmaninoff writes Negro spirituals. And I love that theory that Rachmaninoff's music is like the music of the slaves. It just, I don't know. I really, that really resonates with me spiritually. Which pieces, which Rachmaninoff symphonies, concertos? Yeah, the concertos. But like specifically, like I have a friend who said that Rach II sounded to her like the sort of spiritual cry of like the slaves. And we were at like a hangout with like mostly Black people. And she like stopped playing like Juvenile, like the rapper. And she put on Rach II. And we just like sat there and listened. And it did feel like something powerful had entered the room. Yeah, but he's my guy. I secretly really, really love him. I like Liszt, but like it really depends on the day and the time for him. He makes good folk music, Liszt. I love his folky, his folk era.Henry: What is it that you enjoy about tennis?Brandon: What do I enjoy about tennis? I love the, I love not thinking. I love being able to hit the ball for hours on end and like not think. And like, it's the one part of my life. It's the one time in my life where my experience is like totally unstructured. And so like this morning, I went to a 7am drill and play class where you do drills for an hour. Then you play doubles for an hour. And during that first hour of drills, I was just like hitting the ball. I was at the mercy of the guy feeding us the ball. And I didn't have a single thought about books or literature or like the status of my soul or like the nature of American democracy. It was just like, did I hit that ball? Well, did I hit it kind of off center? Were there tingles in my wrist? Yes or no. Like it was just very, very grounding in the moment. And I think that is what I love about it. Do you like to watch tennis? Oh, yeah, constantly. Sometimes when I'm in a work meeting, the Zoom is here and the tennis is like playing in the background. Love tennis, love to watch, love to play, love to think about, to ponder. Who are the best players for you? Oh, well, the best players, my favorite players are Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Stanislas Wawrinka, love Wawrinka. And I was a really big Davydenko head back in the day. Nikolai Davydenko was this Russian player who had, he was like a metronome. He just like would not miss. Yeah, those are my favorites. Right now, the guy I'm sort of rooting for who's still active is Kasper Rud, who's this Norwegian guy. And I love him because he just looks like some guy. Like he just looks like he should be in a seminary somewhere. I love it. I love, I love his normalness. He just looks like an NPC. And I'm drawn to that in a tennis player.Henry: It's hard to think of tennis in novels. Why is that?Brandon: Well, I think a lot of people don't, well, I think part of it is a lot of novelists. Part of it is a lot of novelists don't play sports. I think that they, at least Americans, I can't speak for other parts of the world, but in America, a lot of novelists are not doing sports. So that's one. And I think two, like, you know, like with anything, I think that tennis has not been subjected to the same schemes of narrativization that like other things are. And so like it's, a lot of novelists just like don't see a sort of readily dramatizable thing in tennis. Even though if you like watch tennis and like listen to tennis commentary, they are always erecting narratives. They're like, oh yeah, she's been on a 19 match losing streak. Is this where she turns it around? And to me, tennis is like a very literary sport because tennis is one of those sports where it's all about the matchup. It's like your forehand to my backhand, like no matter how well I play against everyone else, like it's you and me locked in the struggle. And like that to me feels incredibly literary. And it is so tied to your individual psychology as well. Like, I don't know, I endlessly am fascinated by it. And indeed, I got an idea for a tennis novel the other day that I'm hopefully going to write in three to five years. We'll see.Henry: Very good. How did working in a lab influence your writing?Brandon: Well, somewhat directly and materially in the case of my first book, because I wrote it while I was working in the lab and it gave me weirdly like time and structure to do that work where I would be pipetting. And then while I was waiting for an assay or a experiment to run or finish, I would have 30 minutes to sit down and write.Henry: So you were writing like at the lab bench?Brandon: Oh, yeah, absolutely. One thousand percent. I would like put on Philip Glass's score for the hours and then just like type while my while the centrifuge was running or whatever. And and so like there's that impression sort of baked into the first couple books. And then I think more, I guess, like spiritually or broadly, it influenced my work because it taught me how to think and how to organize time and how to organize thoughts and how to sort of pursue long term, open ended projects whose results may or may not, you know, fail because of something that you did or maybe you didn't do. And that's just the nature of things. Who knows? But yeah, I think also just like discipline, the discipline to sort of clock in every day. And to sort of go to the coalface and do the work. And that's not a thing that is, you know. That you just get by working in a lab, but it's certainly something that I acquired working in a lab.Henry: Do you think it's affected your interest in criticism? Because there's there are certain types of critic who seem to come from a scientific background like Helen Vendler. And there's something something about the sort of the precision and, you know, that certain critics will refuse to use critical waffle, like the human condition. And they won't make these big, vague gestures to like how this can change the way we view society. They're like, give me real details. Give me real like empirical criticism. Do you think this is — are you one of these people?Brandon: Yeah, yeah, I think I'm, you know, I'm all about what's on the page. I'm all about the I'm not gonna go rooting in your biography for not gonna go. I'm not I'm not doing that. It's like what you brought to me on the page is what you've brought to me. And that is what I will be sort of coming over. I mean, I think so. I mean, very often when critics write about my work, or when people respond to my work, they sort of describe it as being put under a microscope. And I do think like, that is how I approach literature. It's how I approach life. If there's ever a problem or a question put to me, I just sort of dissect it and try to get down to its core bits and its core parts. And and so yeah, I mean, if that is a scientific way of doing things, that's certainly how I but also I don't know any other way to think like that's sort of that's sort of how I was trained to think about stuff. You've been to London. I have. What did you think of it? The first time I didn't love it. The second and third times I had a good time, but I felt like London didn't love me back. London is the only place on earth I've ever been where people have had a hard time understanding me like I like it's the only place where I've like attempted to order food or a drink or something in a store or a cafe or a restaurant. And the waiters like turned to my like British hosts and asked them to translate. And that is an entirely foreign experience for me. And so London and I have like a very contentious relationship, I would say.Henry: Now, you've just published four classic novels.Brandon: Yes.Henry: George Gissing, Edith Wharton, Victor Hugo and Sarah Orne Jewett. Why did you choose those four writers, those four titles?Brandon: Oh, well, once we decided that we were going to do a classics imprint, you know, then it's like, well, what are we going to do? And I'm a big Edith Wharton fan. And there are all of these Edith Wharton novels that Americans don't really know about. They know Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. And if they are an English major, they maybe know her for The House of Mirth. Or like maybe they know her for The Custom of the Country if they're like really into reading. But then they sort of think of her as a novelist of the 19th century. And she's writing all of these books set in the 1920s and about the 1920s. And so it felt important to show people like, oh, this is a writer who died a lot later than you think that she did. And whose creative output was, you know, pretty, who was like a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald in a lot of ways. Like, these books are being published around the same time as The Great Gatsby. And to sort of, you know, bring attention to a part of her over that, like, people don't know about. And like, that's really exciting to me. And Sarah Orne Jewett, I mean, I just really love The Country of the Pointed Furs. I love that book. And I found it in like in a 10 cents bin at a flea market one time. And it's a book that people have tried to bring back. And there have been editions of it. But it just felt like if we could get two people who are really cool to talk about why they love that book, we could sort of have like a real moment. And Sarah Orne Jewett was like a pretty big American writer. Like she was a pretty significant writer. And she was like really plugged in and she's not really read or thought about now. And so that felt like a cool opportunity as well to sort of create a very handsome edition of this book and to sort of talk about a bit why she matters. And the guessing of it all is we were going to do New Grub Street. And then my co-editor thought, well, The Odd Women, I think, is perhaps more relevant to our current moment than New Grub Street necessarily. And it would sort of differentiate us from the people, from the presses that are doing reissues of New Grub Street, because there's just been a new edition of that book. And nobody in America really knows The Odd Women. And it's a really wonderful novel. It's both funny and also like really biting in its satire and commentary. So we thought, oh, it'll be fun to bring this writer to Americans who they've never heard of in a way that will speak to them in a lot of ways. And the Victor Hugo, I mean, you know, there are Hugos that people know all about. And then there are Hugos that no one knows about. And Toilers of the Sea was a passion project for my co-editor. She'd read it in Guernsey. That's where she first discovered that book. And it really meant a lot to her. And I read it and really loved it. I mean, it was like Hugo at his most Hugo. Like, it's a very, it's a very, like, it's a very abundant book. And it's so wild and strange and changeful. And so I was like, oh, that seems cool. Let's do it. Let's put out Toilers of the Sea. So that's a bit of why we picked each one.Henry: And what have you learned from being on the other side of things now that you're the publisher?Brandon: So much. I've learned so much. And indeed, I just, I was just asked by my editor to do the author questionnaire for the novel that I have coming out next. And I thought, yes, I will do this. And I will do it immediately. Because now I know, I know how important these are. And I know how early and how far in advance these things need to be locked in to make everyone's life easier. I think I've learned a bit about the sometimes panicked scramble that happens to get a book published. I've learned about how hard it is to wrangle blurbs. And so I think I'm a little more forgiving of my publishers. But they've always been really great to me. But now I'm like, oh, my gosh, what can I do for you? How can I help you make this publication more of a success?Henry: Do you think that among literary people generally, there's a lack of appreciation of what business really involves in some of the senses you're talking about? I feel like I see a lot of either indifferent or hostile attitudes towards business or commerce or capitalism, late stage capitalism or whatever. And I sometimes look at it and I'm like, I don't think you guys really know what it takes to just like get stuff done. You know what I mean? Like, it's a lot of grind. I don't think it's a big nasty thing. It's just a lot of hard work, right?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, 1000%. Or if it's not a sort of misunderstanding, but a sort of like disinterest in like, right, like a sort of high minded, like, oh, that's just the sort of petty grimy commerce of it all. I care about the beauty and the art. And it's just like, friend, we need booksellers to like, sell this. I mean, to me, the part of it that is most to me, like the most illustrative example of this in my own life is that when I first heard how my editor was going to be describing my book, I was like, that's disgusting. That's horrible. Why are you talking about my race? Why are you talking about like my sexuality? Like, this is horrible. Why can't you just like talk about the plot of the book? Like, what is the matter with you? And then I had, you know, I acquired and edited this book called Henry Henry, which is a queer contemporary retelling of the Henry ad. And it's a wonderful novel. It's so delightful. And I had to go into our sales conference where we are talking to the people whose job it is to sell that book into bookstores to get bookstores to take that book up. And I had to write this incredibly craven description of this novel. And as I was writing it, I was like, I hope Alan, the author, I hope Alan never sees this. He never needs to hear how I'm talking about this book. And as I was doing it, I was like, I will never hold it against my editor again for writing this like, cheesy, cringy copy. Because it's like you, like, you so believe in the art of that book, so much that you want it to give it every fighting chance in the marketplace. And you need to arm your sales team with every weapon of commerce they need to get that book to succeed so that when readers pick it up, they can appreciate all of the beautiful and glorious art of it. And I do think that people, you know, like, people don't really kind of, people don't really understand that. And I do think that part of that is publishing's fault, because they are, they've been rather quick to elide the distinctions between art and commerce. And so like publishing has done a not great job of sort of giving people a lot of faith in its understanding that there's a difference between art and commerce. But yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of misapprehension out there about like, what goes into getting bookstores to acquire that book.Henry: What are the virtues of negative book reviews?Brandon: I was just on a panel about this. I mean, I mean, hopefully a negative book review, like a positive review, or like any review, will allow a reader or the audience to understand the book in a new way, or to create a desire in the reader to pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree or that they, that they have something to argue with or push against as they're reading. You know, when I'm writing a negative review, when I'm writing a review that I feel is trending toward negative, I should say, I always try to like, I don't know, I try to always remember that like, this is just me presenting my experience of the book and my take of the book. And hopefully that will be productive or useful for whoever reads the review. And hopefully that my review won't be the only thing that they read and that they will in fact, go pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree. It's hopefully it creates interesting and potentially divergent dialogues or discourses around the text. And fundamentally, I think not every critic feels this way. Not every piece of criticism is like this. But the criticism I write, I'm trying to create the conditions that will refer the reader always back to the text, be it through quotation, be it through, they're so incensed by my argument that they're going to go read the book themselves and then like, yell at me. Like, I think that that's wonderful, but like, always keeping the book at the center. But I think a negative review can, you know, it can start a conversation. It can get people talking about books, which in this culture, this phase of history feels like a win. And hopefully it can sort of be a corrective sometimes to less genuine or perceived less genuine discourses that are existing around the book.Henry: I think even whether or not it's a question of genuine, it's for me, it's just a question of if you tell people this book is good and they give up their time and money and they discover that it's trash, you've done a really bad thing to that person. And like, there might be dozens of them compared to this one author who you've been impolite to or whatever. And it's just a question of don't lie in book, right?Brandon: Well, yeah. I mean, hopefully people are honest, but I do feel sometimes that there is, there's like a lack of honesty. And look, I think that being like, well, I mean, maybe you'll love this. I don't love it, you know, but at least present your opinion in that way. At least be like, you know, there are many interpretations of this thing. Here's my interpretation. Maybe you'll feel differently or something like that. But I do think that people feel that there have been a great number of dishonest book reviews. Maybe there have been, maybe there have not been. I certainly have read some reviews I felt were dishonest about books that I have read. And I think that the negative book review does feel a bit like a corrective in a lot of ways, both, you know, justified or unjustified. People are like, finally, someone's being honest about this thing. But yeah, I think it's interesting. I think it's all really, I think it's all fascinating. I do think that there are some reviews though, that are negative and that are trying to be about the book, but are really about the author. There are some reviews that I have read that have been ostensibly about reviewing a text, but which have really been about, you don't like that person and you have decided to sort of like take an axe to them. And that to me feels not super productive. I wouldn't do it, but other people find it useful.Henry: As in, you can tell that from the review or you know that from background information?Brandon: I mean, this is all projection, of course, but like there have been some reviews where I've read, like, for example, some of the Lauren Oyler reviews, I think some of the Lauren Oyler reviews were negative and were exclusively about the text. And they sort of took the text apart and sort of dissected it and came to conclusions, some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't agree with, but they were fundamentally about the text. And like all the criticisms referred back to the text. And then there were some that were like projecting attitudes onto the author that were more about creating this sort of vaporous shape of Lauren Oyler and then sort of poking holes in her literary celebrity or her stature as a critic or what have you. And that to me felt less productive as like a book review.Henry: Yes. Who are your favorite reviewers?Brandon: Ooh, my favorite reviewers. I really love Christian Lawrence. And he does my, of the critics who try to do the sort of like mini historiography of like a thing. He's my favorite because he teaches me a lot. He sort of is so good at summing up an era or summing up a phase of literary production without being like so cringe or so socialist about it. I really love, I love it when he sort of distills and dissects an era. I really like Hermione Hobie. I think she's really interesting. And she writes about books with a lot of feeling and a lot of energy. And I really love her mind. And of course, like Patricia Lockwood, of course, everyone, perhaps not everyone, but I enjoy Patricia Lockwood's criticism. You don't?Henry: Not really.Brandon: Oh, is it because it's too chatty? Is it too, is it too selfie?Henry: A little bit. I think, I think that kind of criticism can work really well. But I think, I think it's too much. I think basically she's very, she's a very stylized writer and a lot of her judgments get, it gets to the point where it's like, this is the logical conclusion of what you're trying to do stylistically. And there are some zingers in here and some great lines and whatever, but we're no longer, this is no longer really a book review.Brandon: Yeah.Henry: Like by the, by the end of the paragraph, this, like, we didn't want to let the style go. We didn't want to lose the opportunity to cap that off. And it leads her into, I think, glibness a lot of the time.Brandon: Yeah. I could see that. I mean, I mean, I enjoy reading her pieces, but do I understand like what's important to her at a sort of literary level? I don't know. I don't, and in that sense, like, are they, is it criticism or is it closer to like personal essay, humorous essay? I don't know. Maybe that's true. I enjoy reading them, but I get why people are like, this is a very, very strong flavor for sure.Henry: Now you've been reading a lot of literary criticism.Brandon: Oh yeah.Henry: Not of the LRB variety, but of the, the old books in libraries variety. Yes. How did that start? How did, how did you come to this?Brandon: Somewhat like ham-fistedly. I, in 2021, I had a really bad case of writer's block and I thought maybe part of the reason I had writer's block was that I didn't know anything about writing or I didn't know anything about like literature or like writing. I'd been writing, I'd published a novel. I was working on another novel. I'd published a book of stories, but like, I just like truly didn't know anything about literature really. And I thought I need some big boy ideas. I need, I need to find out what adults think about literature. And so I went to my buddy, Christian Lorenzen, and I was like, you write criticism. What is it? And what should I read? And he gave me a sort of starter list of criticism. And it was like the liberal imagination by Lionel Trilling and Guy Davenport and Alfred Kazin who wrote On Native Grounds, which is this great book on the American literary tradition and Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. And I, and then Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle. And I read all of those. And then as each one would sort of refer to a different text or person, I sort of like followed the footnotes down into this rabbit hole of like literary criticism. And now it's been a sort of ongoing project of the last few years of like reading. I always try to have a book of criticism on the go. And then earlier this year, I read Jameson's The Antimonies of Realism. And he kept talking about this Georg Lukács guy. And I was like, I guess I should go read Lukács. And so then I started reading Lukács so that I could get back to Jameson. And I've been reading Lukács ever since. I am like deep down the Lukács rabbit hole. But I'm not reading any of the socialism stuff. I told myself that I wouldn't read any of the socialism stuff and I would only read the literary criticism stuff, which makes me very different from a lot of the socialist literary critics I really enjoy because they're like Lukács, don't read in that literary criticism stuff, just read his socialism stuff. So I'm reading all the wrong stuff from Lukács, but I really, I really love it. But yeah, it sort of started because I thought I needed grown up ideas about literature. And it's been, I don't know, I've really enjoyed it. I really, really enjoy it. It's given me perhaps terrible ideas about what novels should be or do. But, you know, that's one of the side effects to reading.Henry: Has it made, like, what specific ways has it changed how you've written since you've acquired a set of critical principles or ideas?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is, part of it has to do with Lukács' idea of the totality. And, you know, I think that the sort of most direct way that it shows up in a sort of really practical way in my novel writing is that I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. Like, I don't want, I want my books to feel like books. I don't want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation and stuff like that. And so like that, that's sort of, that's sort of abstract, but like in a concrete way, like what I'm kind of trying to resolve in my novel writing these days.Henry: You mentioned Dickens.Brandon: Oh, yes.Henry: Which Dickens novels do you like?Brandon: Now I'm afraid I'm going to say something else controversial. We love controversial. Which Dickens? I love Bleak House. I love Bleak House. I love Tale of Two Cities. It is one of the best openings ever, ever, ever, ever in the sweep of that book at once personal and universal anyway. Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities. And I also, I read Great Expectations as like a high school student and didn't like it, hated it. It was so boring. But now coming back to it, I think it, honestly, it might be the novel of our time. I think it might accidentally be a novel. I mean, it's a novel of scammers, a novel of like, interpersonal beef taken to the level of like, spiritual conflict, like it's about thieves and class, like it just feels like like that novel could have been written today about people today, like that book just feels so alive to today's concerns, which perhaps, I don't know, says something really evil about this cultural stagnation under capitalism, perhaps, but I don't know, love, love Great Expectations now.Henry: Why are so many modern novels boring?Brandon: Well, depends on what you mean by boring, Henry, what do you mean? Why?Henry: I mean, you said this.Brandon: Oh.Henry: I mean, I happen to agree, but this is, I'm quoting you.Brandon: Oh, yes. I remember that. I remember that review.Henry: I mean, I can tell you why I think they're boring.Brandon: Oh, yes, please.Henry: So I think, I think what you said before is true. They all read like movies. And I think I very often I go in, I pick up six or seven books on the new book table. And I'm like, these openings are all just the same. You're all thinking you can all see Netflix in your head. This is not really a novel. And so the dialogue is really boring, because you kind of you can hear some actor or actress saying it. But I can't hear that because I'm the idiot stuck in the bookshop reading your Netflix script. Whereas, you know, I think you're right that a lot of those traditional forms of storytelling, they like pull you in to the to the novel. And they and they like by the end of the first few pages, you sort of feel like I'm in this funny place now. And to do in media res, like, someone needs to get shot, or something, something weird needs to be said, like, you can't just do another, another standard opening. So I think that's a big, that's a big point.Brandon: Well, as Lukasz tells us, bourgeois realism has a, an unholy fondness for the, the average, the merely average, as opposed to the typical. And I think, yeah, a lot of it, a lot of why I think it's boring echoes you, I think that for me, what I find boring, and a lot of them is that it feels like novelists have abandoned any desire to, to have their characters or the novels themselves integrate the sort of disparate experiences within the novel into any kind of meaningful hole. And so there isn't this like sense of like things advancing toward a grander understanding. And I think a lot of it is because they've, they are writing under the assumption that like the question of why can never be answered. There can never be like a why, there can never be a sort of significance to anything. And so everything is sort of like evacuated of significance or meaning. And so you have what I've taken to calling like reality TV fiction, where the characters are just like going places and doing things, and there are no thoughts, there are no thoughts about their lives, or no thoughts about the things that they are doing, there are no thoughts about their experiences. And it's just a lot of like, like lowercase e events in their lives, but like no attempt to organize those events into any sort of meaningful hole. And I think also just like, what leads to a lot of dead writing is writers who are deeply aware that they're writing about themes, they're writing about themes instead of people. And they're working from generalities instead of particularities and specificities. And they have no understanding of the relationship between the universal and the particular. And so like, everything is just like, like beans in a can that they're shaking around. And I think that that's really boring. I think it's really tedious. Like, like, sure, we can we can find something really profound in the mundane, but like, you have to be really smart to do that. So like the average novelist is like better off like, starting with a gunshot or something like do something big.Henry: If you're not Virginia Woolf, it is in fact just mundane.Brandon: Indeed. Yeah.Henry: Is there too much emphasis on craft? In the way, in the way, in like what's valued among writers, in the way writers are taught, I feel like everything I see is about craft. And I'm like, craft is good, but that can just be like how you make a table rather than like how you make a house. Craft is not the guarantor of anything. And I see a lot of books where I think this person knows some craft. But as you say, they don't really have an application for it. And they don't. No one actually said to them, all style has a moral purpose, whether you're aware of it or not. And so they default to this like pointless use of the craft. And someone should say to them, like, you need to know history. You need to know tennis. You need to know business. You need to know like whatever, you know. And I feel like the novels I don't like are reflections of the discourse bubble that the novelist lives in. And I feel like it's often the continuation of Twitter by other means. So in the Rachel Kong novel that I think it came out this year, there's a character, a billionaire character who comes in near the end. And everything that he says or that is said about him is literally just meme. It's online billionaire meme because billionaires are bad because of all the things we all know from being on Twitter. And I was like, so you just we literally have him a character as meme. And this is the most representative thing to me, because that's maybe there's craft in that. Right. But what you've chosen to craft is like 28 tweets. That's pointless.Brandon: 28 tweets be a great title for a book, though, you have to admit, I would buy that book off the new book table. 28 tweets. I would. I would buy that. Yeah, I do think. Well, I think it goes both ways. I think it goes both ways. I somewhat famously said this about Sally Rooney that like she her books have no craft. The craft is bad. And I do think like there are writers who only have craft, who are able to sort of create these wonderfully structured books and to sort of deploy these beautiful techniques. And those books are absolutely dead. There's just like nothing in them because they have nothing to say. There's just like nothing to be said about any of that. And on the other hand, you have these books that are full of feelings that like would be better had someone taught that person about structure or form or had they sort of had like a rigorous thing. And I would say that like both of those are probably bad, like depending on who you are, you find one more like, like easier to deal with than the other. I do think that like part of why there's such an emphasis on craft is because not to sort of bring capitalism back in but you can monetize craft, you know what I mean? Like, craft is one of those things that is like readily monetizable. Like, if I'm a writer, and I would like to make money, and I can't sell a novel, I can tell people like, oh, how to craft a perfect opening, how to create a novel opening that will make agents pick it up and that will make editors say yes, but like what the sort of promise of craft is that you can finish a thing, but not that it is good, as you say, there's no guarantor. Whereas you know, like it's harder to monetize someone's soul, or like, it's harder to monetize like the sort of random happenstance of just like a writer's voice sort of emerging from from whatever, like you can't turn that into profit. But you can turn into profit, let me help you craft your voice. So it's very grind set, I think craft has a tendency to sort of skew toward the grind set and toward people trying to make money from, from writing when they can't sell a book, you know. Henry: Let's play a game. Brandon: Oh dear.Henry: I say the name of a writer. You give us like the 30 second Brandon Taylor opinion of that writer.Brandon: Okay. Yeah.Henry: Jonathan Franzen.Brandon: Thomas Mann, but like, slightly more boring, I think.Henry: Iris Murdoch.Brandon: A friend of mine calls her a modern calls her the sort of pre Sally Rooney, Sally Rooney. And I agree with that.Henry: When I'm at parties, I try and sell her to people where I say she's post-war Sally Rooney.Brandon: Yes, yes. And like, and like all that that entails, and so many delightful, I read all these like incredible sort of mid century reviews of her novels, and like the men, the male critics, like the Bernard Breganzis of the world being like, why is there so much sex in this book? It's amazing. Please go look up those like mid-century reviews of Iris Murdoch. They were losing their minds. Henry: Chekhov.Brandon: Perfect, iconic, baby girl, angel, legend. Can't get enough. 10 out of 10.Henry: Evelyn Waugh.Brandon: So Catholic, real Catholic vibes. But like, scabrously funny. And like, perhaps the last writer to write about life as though it had meaning. Hot take, but I'll, I stand by it.Henry: Yeah, well, him and Murdoch. But yeah, no, I think I think there's a lot in that. C.V. Wedgwood.Brandon: Oh, my gosh. The best, a titan, a master of history. Like, oh, my God. I would not be the same without Wedgwood.Henry: Tell us which one we should read.Brandon: Oh, the 30 Years War. What are you talking about?Henry: Well, I think her books on the English Civil War… I'm a parochial Brit.Brandon: Oh, see, I don't, not that I don't, I will go read those. But her book on the 30 Years War is so incredible. It's, it's amazing. It's second to like, Froissart's Chronicles for like, sort of history, history books for me.Henry: Northrop Frye.Brandon: My father. I, Northrop Frye taught me so much about how to see and how to think. Just amazing, a true thinker in a mind. Henry: Which book? Brandon: Oh, Anatomy of Criticism is fantastic. But Fearful Symmetry is just, it will blow your head off. Just amazing. But if you're looking for like, to have your, your mind gently remapped, then Anatomy of Criticism.Henry: Emma Cline.Brandon: A throwback. I think she's, I think she's Anne Beattie meets John Cheever for a new era. And I think she's amazing. She's perfect. Don't love her first novel. I think her stories are better. She's a short story writer. And she should stay that way.Henry: Okay, now I want you to rank Jane Austen's novels.Brandon: Wait, okay. So like, by my preference, or by like, what I think is the best?Henry: You can do both.Brandon: Okay. So in terms, my favorite, Persuasion. Then Mansfield Park. Sense and Sensibility. Pride and Prejudice. And then Emma, then Northanger Abbey. Okay.Henry: Now, how about for which ones are the best?Brandon: Persuasion. Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park. Emma,.Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey.Henry: Why do people not like Fanny Price? And what is wrong with them?Brandon: Fanny Price is perfect. Fanny Price, I was just talking to someone about this last night at dinner. Fanny Price, she's perfect. First of all, she is, I don't know why people don't like her. She's like a chronically ill girl who's hot for her cousin and like, has deep thoughts. It seems like she would be the icon of literary Twitter for like a certain kind of person, you know? And I don't know why they don't like her. I think I'm, I am becoming the loudest Mansfield Park apologist on the internet. I think that people don't like Fanny because she's less vivacious than Mary Crawford. And I think that people are afraid to see themselves in Fanny because she seems like she's unfun or whatever. But what they don't realize is that like Fanny Price, Fanny Price has like a moral intelligence and like a moral consciousness. And like Fanny Price is one of the few Austen characters who actually argues directly and literally about the way the world is. Like with multiple people, like the whole, the whole novel is her sort of arguing about, well, cities are this and the country is this. And like, we need Parsons as much as we need party boys. Like, like she's arguing not just about, not just about these things like through the lens of like marriage or like the sort of marriage economy, but like in literal terms, I mean, she is so, she's like a moral philosopher. I love Fanny Price and she's so smart and so sensitive and so, and I guess like maybe it's just that people don't like a character who's kind of at the mercy of others and they view her as passive. When in fact, like a young woman arguing about the way the world should be, like Mary Crawford's, Mary Crawford's like kind of doing the above, not really, not like Fanny. But yeah, I love her. She's amazing. I love Fanny Price. And I also think that people love Margaret Hale from North and South. And I think that when people are saying they hate Fanny Price, what they're picturing is actually how Margaret Hale is. Margaret Hale is one of the worst heroines of a novel. She's so insufferable. She's so rude. She's so condescending. And like, she does get her comeuppance and like Gaskell does sort of bring about a transformation where she's actually able to sort of like see poor people as people first and not like subjects of sympathy. But Margaret is what people imagine Fanny is, I think. And we should, we should start a Fanny Price, like booster club. Henry, should we? Let's do it. It begins here. I just feel so strongly about her. I feel, I love, I love Fanny.Henry: She's my favorite of Austen's characters. And I think she is the most representative Austen character. She's the most Austen of all of them, right?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, that makes great deal of sense to me. She's just so wonderful. Like she's so funny and so observant. And she's like this quiet little girl who's like kind of sickly and people don't really like her. And she's kind of maybe I'm just like, maybe I just like see myself in her. And I don't mind being a sort of annoying little person who's going around the world.Henry: What are some good principles for naming literary characters?Brandon: Ooh, I have a lot of strong feelings about this. I think that names should be memorable. They should have like, like an aura of sort of literariness about them. I don't mean, I mean, taken to like hilarious extremes. It's like Henry James. Catherine Goodwood, Isabelle Archer, Ralph Touchett, like, you know, Henry had a stack pole. So like, not like that. But I mean, that could be fun in a modern way. But I think there's like an aura of like, it's a name that you might hear in real life, but it sort of add or remove, it's sort of charged and elevated, sort of like with dialogue. And that it's like a memorable thing that sort of like, you know, it's like, you know, memorable thing that sort of sticks in the reader's mind. It is both a name, a literary, a good literary name is both a part of this world and not of this world, I think. And, yeah, and I love that. I think like, don't give your character a name like you hear all the time. Like, Tyler is a terrible literary name. Like, no novel has ever, no good novel has ever had a really important character named Tyler in it. It just hasn't. Ryan? What makes a good sentence? Well, my sort of like, live and let live answer is that a good sentence is a sentence that is perfectly suited to the purpose it has. But I don't know, I like a clear sentence, regardless of length or lyric intensity, but just like a clear sentence that articulates something. I like a sentence with motion, a sense of rhythm, a sense of feel without any bad words in it. And I don't mean like curse words, I mean like words that shouldn't be in literature. Like, there's some words that just like don't belong in novels.Henry: Like what?Brandon: Squelch. Like, I don't think the word squelch should be in a novel. That's a gross word and it doesn't sound literary to me. I don't want to see it.Henry: I wouldn't be surprised if it was in Ulysses.Brandon: Well, yes.Henry: I have no idea, but I'm sure, I'm sure.Brandon: But so few of us are James Joyce. And that novel is like a thousand bodily functions per page. But don't love it. Don't love it.Henry: You don't love Ulysses?Brandon: No, I don't… Listen, I don't have a strong opinion, but you're not going to get me cancelled about Ulysses. I'm not Virginia Woolf.Henry: We're happy to have opinions of that nature here. That's fine.Brandon: You know, I don't have a strong feeling about it, actually. Some parts of it that I've read are really wonderful. And some parts of it that I have read are really dense and confusing to me. I haven't sort of given it the time it needs or deserves. What did you learn from reading Toni Morris? What did I learn? I think I learned a lot about the moral force of melodrama. I think that she shows us a lot about the uses of melodrama and how it isn't just like a lesion of realism, that it isn't just a sort of malfunctioning realism, but that there are certain experiences and certain lives and certain things that require and necessitate melodrama. And when deployed, it's not tacky or distasteful that it actually is like deeply necessary. And also just like the joy of access and language, like the sort of... Her language is so towering. I don't know, whenever I'm being really shy about a sentence being too vivid or too much, I'm like, well, Toni Morrison would just go for it. And I am not Toni Morrison, but she has given me the courage to try.Henry: What did you like about the Annette Benning film of The Seagull?Brandon: The moment when Annette Benning sings Dark Eyes is so good. It's so good. I think about it all the time. And indeed, I stole that moment for a short story that I wrote. And I liked that part of it. I liked the set design. I think also Saoirse Ronan, when she gives that speech as Nina, where she's like, you know, where the guy's like, what do you want from, you know, what do you want? Why do you want to be an actress? And she's like, I want fame. You know, like, I want to be totally adored. And I'm just like, yeah, that's so real. That's so, that is so real. Like Chekhov has understood something so deep, so deep about the nature of commerce and art there. And I think Saoirse is really wonderful in that movie. It's a not, it's not a good movie. It's maybe not even a good adaptation of The Seagull. But I really enjoyed it. I saw it like five times in a theater in Iowa City.Henry: I don't know if it's a bad adaptation of The Seagull, because it's one of the, it's one of the Chekhov's I've seen that actually understands that, like, the tragic and the and the comic are not meant to be easily distinguishable in his work. And it does have all this lightheartedness. And it is quite funny. And I was like, well, at least someone's doing that because I'm so sick of, like, gloomy Chekhov. You know what I mean? Like, oh, the clouds and the misery. Like, no, he wants you, he wants you to laugh and then be like, I shouldn't laugh because it's kind of tragic, but it's also just funny.Brandon: Yeah. Yes, I mean, all the moments were like, like Annette Bening's characters, like endless stories, like she's just like constantly unfurling a story and a story and a story and a story. Every scene kind of was like, she's in the middle of telling another interminable anecdote. And of course, the sort of big tragic turn at the end is like, where like, Kostya kills himself. And she's like, in the middle of like, another really long anecdote while they're in the other room playing cards. Like, it's so, it's so good. So I love that. I enjoy watching that movie. I still think it's maybe not. It's a little wooden, like as a movie, like it's a little, it's a little rickety.Henry: Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. But for someone looking to like, get a handle on Chekhov, it's actually a good place to go. What is the best make of Fountain Pen?Brandon: That's a really good, that's a really, really, really good question. Like, what's your Desert Island Fountain Pen? My Desert Island Fountain Pen. Right now, it's an Esterbrook Estee with a needlepoint nib. It's like, so, I can use that pen for hours and hours and hours and hours. I think my favorite Fountain Pen, though, is probably the Pilot Custom 743. It's a really good pen, not too big, not too small. It can hold a ton of ink, really wonderful. I use, I think, like a Soft Fine nib, incredible nib, so smooth. Like, I, you could cap it and then uncap it a month later, and it just like starts immediately. It's amazing. And it's not too expensive.Henry: Brandon Taylor, thank you very much.Brandon: Thanks for having me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

John and Merrilee reminisce about being different. John brings forward his time as an undergraduate student studying under Leslie Fiedler, how he was identified as being unusually compatible to outside force fields. This might be a landmark admission. Then Merrilee connects the dots between the two of them. Unusually hypersensitive people find each other in the cosmos. A remarkable hour by any measure. Merrilee is on final approach – literally. And she admits that it's John who understands what that means. For background, and to buy their books, see highinthecanopy.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-lacasse/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/john-lacasse/support

Today's guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is his first book. In 2022, Ramzi published Queer Forms, for which he was interviewed by Lilly Goren for the New Books in Political Science channel. He is also the co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies, with Deborah Whaley and Shelley Streeby, both with NYU Press. Ramzi's recently published articles include “Legions of Superheroes: Diversity, Multiplicity, and Collective Action Against Genocide in the Superhero Comic Book,” in Social Text; and wrote the introduction to “Queer About Comics,” a special issue of American Literature, with Darieck Scott. A bit about the book:  n 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as "new mutants," social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and "freaks" soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America's most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes. In The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women's and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies--including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants--alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Today's guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is his first book. In 2022, Ramzi published Queer Forms, for which he was interviewed by Lilly Goren for the New Books in Political Science channel. He is also the co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies, with Deborah Whaley and Shelley Streeby, both with NYU Press. Ramzi's recently published articles include “Legions of Superheroes: Diversity, Multiplicity, and Collective Action Against Genocide in the Superhero Comic Book,” in Social Text; and wrote the introduction to “Queer About Comics,” a special issue of American Literature, with Darieck Scott. A bit about the book:  n 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as "new mutants," social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and "freaks" soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America's most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes. In The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women's and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies--including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants--alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Today's guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is his first book. In 2022, Ramzi published Queer Forms, for which he was interviewed by Lilly Goren for the New Books in Political Science channel. He is also the co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies, with Deborah Whaley and Shelley Streeby, both with NYU Press. Ramzi's recently published articles include “Legions of Superheroes: Diversity, Multiplicity, and Collective Action Against Genocide in the Superhero Comic Book,” in Social Text; and wrote the introduction to “Queer About Comics,” a special issue of American Literature, with Darieck Scott. A bit about the book:  n 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as "new mutants," social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and "freaks" soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America's most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes. In The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women's and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies--including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants--alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today's guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is his first book. In 2022, Ramzi published Queer Forms, for which he was interviewed by Lilly Goren for the New Books in Political Science channel. He is also the co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies, with Deborah Whaley and Shelley Streeby, both with NYU Press. Ramzi's recently published articles include “Legions of Superheroes: Diversity, Multiplicity, and Collective Action Against Genocide in the Superhero Comic Book,” in Social Text; and wrote the introduction to “Queer About Comics,” a special issue of American Literature, with Darieck Scott. A bit about the book:  n 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as "new mutants," social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and "freaks" soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America's most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes. In The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women's and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies--including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants--alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

Today's guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is his first book. In 2022, Ramzi published Queer Forms, for which he was interviewed by Lilly Goren for the New Books in Political Science channel. He is also the co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies, with Deborah Whaley and Shelley Streeby, both with NYU Press. Ramzi's recently published articles include “Legions of Superheroes: Diversity, Multiplicity, and Collective Action Against Genocide in the Superhero Comic Book,” in Social Text; and wrote the introduction to “Queer About Comics,” a special issue of American Literature, with Darieck Scott. A bit about the book:  n 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as "new mutants," social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and "freaks" soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America's most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes. In The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women's and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies--including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants--alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Today's guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is his first book. In 2022, Ramzi published Queer Forms, for which he was interviewed by Lilly Goren for the New Books in Political Science channel. He is also the co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies, with Deborah Whaley and Shelley Streeby, both with NYU Press. Ramzi's recently published articles include “Legions of Superheroes: Diversity, Multiplicity, and Collective Action Against Genocide in the Superhero Comic Book,” in Social Text; and wrote the introduction to “Queer About Comics,” a special issue of American Literature, with Darieck Scott. A bit about the book:  n 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as "new mutants," social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and "freaks" soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America's most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes. In The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women's and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies--including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants--alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Today's guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is his first book. In 2022, Ramzi published Queer Forms, for which he was interviewed by Lilly Goren for the New Books in Political Science channel. He is also the co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies, with Deborah Whaley and Shelley Streeby, both with NYU Press. Ramzi's recently published articles include “Legions of Superheroes: Diversity, Multiplicity, and Collective Action Against Genocide in the Superhero Comic Book,” in Social Text; and wrote the introduction to “Queer About Comics,” a special issue of American Literature, with Darieck Scott. A bit about the book:  n 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as "new mutants," social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and "freaks" soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America's most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes. In The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women's and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies--including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants--alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Today's guest is Ramzi Fawaz, the Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Published by NYU Press in 2016, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics is his first book. In 2022, Ramzi published Queer Forms, for which he was interviewed by Lilly Goren for the New Books in Political Science channel. He is also the co-editor of Keywords for Comics Studies, with Deborah Whaley and Shelley Streeby, both with NYU Press. Ramzi's recently published articles include “Legions of Superheroes: Diversity, Multiplicity, and Collective Action Against Genocide in the Superhero Comic Book,” in Social Text; and wrote the introduction to “Queer About Comics,” a special issue of American Literature, with Darieck Scott. A bit about the book:  n 1964, noted literary critic Leslie Fiedler described American youth as "new mutants," social rebels severing their attachments to American culture to remake themselves in their own image. 1960s comic book creators, anticipating Fiedler, began to morph American superheroes from icons of nationalism and white masculinity into actual mutant outcasts, defined by their genetic difference from ordinary humanity. These powerful misfits and "freaks" soon came to embody the social and political aspirations of America's most marginalized groups, including women, racial and sexual minorities, and the working classes. In The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016), Ramzi Fawaz draws upon queer theory to tell the story of these monstrous fantasy figures and how they grapple with radical politics from Civil Rights and The New Left to Women's and Gay Liberation Movements. Through a series of comic book case studies--including The Justice League of America, The Fantastic Four, The X-Men, and The New Mutants--alongside late 20th century fan writing, cultural criticism, and political documents, Fawaz reveals how the American superhero modeled new forms of social belonging that counterculture youth would embrace in the 1960s and after. The New Mutants provides the first full-length study to consider the relationship between comic book fantasy and radical politics in the modern United States. John Yargo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Boston College. He earned a PhD in English literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in the environmental humanities and early modern culture. In 2023, his dissertation won the J. Leeds Barroll Prize, given by the Shakespeare Association of America. His peer-reviewed articles have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal for Early Modern Culture Studies, Early Theatre, Studies in Philology, and Shakespeare Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

It will be in vain for the rest of us, speaking simply as men, to say, "but this punishment is hideously unjust, hideously disproportionate to the criminal's deserts". The experts with perfect logic will reply, "but nobody was talking about deserts. No one was talking about punishment in your archaic vindictive sense of the word. Here are the statistics proving that this treatment deters. Here are the statistics proving that this other treatment cures. What is your trouble?" --CS Lewis, 1954 The terrible thing about a false accusation is that, even when we believe the innocence of the accused, we're never quite as sure of that innocence as we were prior to the accusation. It raises a faint, durable doubt. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct. -Leslie Fiedler, pre-1980

With death close at hand, Castaneda races against the clock to finish what will be his very last book. But in order to complete it, he will need to author the final chapter of his own life.  After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/38bJ9YcOne Extra Thing: bit.ly/3P5a8oODiscussion Thread: bit.ly/3MRWBPIwww.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval Shapira We wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter

Intimating the end, Castaneda decides it is time for him to anoint his successor, the next nagual. His selection is Tony Karam—a student not only of his but also the Dalia Lama. Castaneda informs Tony that has a year to decide whether or not to take the position of the nagual. After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/3vA6Ge4One Extra Thing: bit.ly/3y3clv7Discussion Thread: bit.ly/3MY1cjdwww.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval Shapira We wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter 

With the start of the ‘80s, Carlos Castaneda has now become the darling of the New Age movement.  But while New Agers are busy championing his past work, Castaneda has begun turning his sights to something new—a secretive project unlike anything he's done before. To secure the help needed, Castaneda opens up admission to his circle of followers. Hollywood producer Janet Yang soon becomes one of his most prized recruits.  After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/3vecjyMOne Extra Thing: bit.ly/3vdhZcjDiscussion Thread: bit.ly/3xSWMG5www.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval Shapira We wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter   Trickster Podcast, LLC. All rights reserved.

Alger Hiss is taken to prison   Alger Hiss's conviction — technically for perjury, but effectively for treason — was a major event.  It was a disaster for The Establishment, especially liberal Democrats, and vindication for Republicans and populist Democrats.  The 18 month labyrinth of HUAC hearings, depositions in Hiss's libel suit, grand jury proceedings, and two criminal trials were the long, long overture to the so-called McCarthy Era.  Senator McCarthy, in fact, gave his famous “I have a list . . .” speech just weeks after Hiss's conviction.  This Podcast gives an overview of the many and complex reactions to the guilty verdict.  Everyone, it seems, accepted the factual correctness of the verdict.  But many liberals could not help making up excuses for Hiss, or damning Chambers for being fat and melodramatic.  And many conservatives and populists could not help painting all liberals and Harvard graduates with the black pitch of Hiss's treason.  Most interesting and encouraging to me, a significant number of liberals and Democrats were sufficiently mature and morally alive to engage in genuine introspection and self-criticism, to admit they had ‘blown it big time' when it came to Soviet traitors in our midst, and to resolve to fashion a liberal anti-communism that was just as vigorous as what Republican conservatives had been offering for decades.     FURTHER RESEARCH    The McCarthy Era, although sparked by this Case, is an oceanic subject beyond the scope of these Podcasts.  If you want to read about it, among the best conservative books are George H. Nash's “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945” (Basic Books 1976), esp. 84-130; and Richard Gid Powers' “Not Without Honor:  The History of American Anticommunism” (Free Press 1995), esp. 191-272.See also Professor Harvey Klehr's essay “Setting the Record Straight on Joe McCarthy,” https://archives.frontpagemag.com/fpm/setting-record-joe-mccarthy-straight-harvey-klehr/.   Among the far more numerous, totally anti-McCarthy books are David Caute's “The Great Fear:The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower” (Touchstone 1979), esp. 56-62; Fred J. Cook's “The Nightmare Decade:The Life and Times of Senator Joe McCarthy” (Random House 1971); Victor Navasky's “Naming Names” (Viking 1980) (especially the early pages); I.F. Stone's “The Truman Era: 1945-52” (Little Brown 1953) (Stone was himself a secret agent of the Soviet Union); and James A Weschler's “The Age of Suspicion” (Random House 1953).  I must note that it was a stroke of genius for the minimizers of Communist treason to name the era after anti-Communism's most irresponsible big name.  This is as if racists had succeeded in labeling the civil rights movement The Al Sharpton Movement.     Concerning the impact of the Hiss verdict in particular, Dean Acheson, in his autobiography “Present at the Creation:  My Years at the State Department” (Norton 1987), titles his pertinent chapter (at 354) “The Attack of the Primitives Begins.”  Alistair Cooke (at 340) also saw nothing good coming from Hiss's conviction.  A more mature view, at page 267 of Walter Goodman's “The Committee:The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1968), is that the Hiss-Chambers Case “whip[ped] up a storm which did not last long but left ruins in its wake.”  Other more realistic analyses of the Case's impact on America are in Weinstein at 529-47 (chapter titled “Cold War Iconography I:  Alger Hiss as Myth and Symbol”); the best single essay on this Case in my opinion, Leslie Fiedler's “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence” at 3-24 of his “An End to Innocence:  Essays on Culture and Politics” (Beacon Press 1955) and Diana Trilling's essay “A Memorandum on the Hiss Case,” first published in The Partisan Review of May-June 1950 and re-published at 27-48 of Patrick J. Swan's anthology of essays on this Case, “Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul” (ISI Books 2003).  The latter two essays I highly recommend.   Questions:  If you had been adult when Hiss was convicted, what would have been your reaction to his conviction?  ‘Justice at long last,' ‘a miscarriage of justice,' ‘guilty but a fair trial was impossible,' ‘technically guilty but with an excuse,' or something else?  Would your reaction have been purely emotional/political/tribal, or would you have cited one or more facts to support your reaction?  Would you have been totally certain that your reaction was the right one, or would you have harbored some doubts?

In search of a creative elixir to bring new life to his flailing film career, the great Italian director, Federico Fellini, pursues his long-cherished dream of adapting Castaneda's books into films. But on his trip to Los Angeles, in 1984, to meet Castaneda, his dream soon turns into a nightmare. After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/3a5adFLOne Extra Thing: bit.ly/3A1ykQoDiscussion Thread: bit.ly/3ivJGGy www.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval Shapira We wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter

The story of what put Patricia Partin on the path to Death Valley is a story that ultimately goes back to her childhood. It's a story of how a devastating family tragedy can alter the whole course of a person's life. After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/3i6WcvWOne Extra Thing: bit.ly/3CNEPrJDiscussion Thread: bit.ly/2XsR0Le www.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval Shapira We wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter Trickster Podcast, LLC. All rights reserved.

Richard de Mille—son of the famed Hollywood director—makes it his mission to prove that Castaneda has perpetuated the greatest literary hoax of the 20th century. But spurring his investigation to uncover Castaneda's secrets are secrets of his own. After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/3lDVU0uOne Extra Thing: bit.ly/2XIeUD1Discussion Thread: bit.ly/39oUnWq www.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval ShapiraWe wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter Trickster Podcast, LLC. All rights reserved.

Republican members of the House un-American  Activities Committee (HUAC). (Library of Congress)  Sandwiched between the drama of the Commodore Hotel (last week's Podcast) and the equally sensational televised confrontation of Hiss and Chambers (next week's), this Podcast #12 is a backgrounder on the political climate of 1948, the setting which was shaken to its foundations by this scandal.  There were four views of the world.  Old-style conservatives wanted to return to isolationism and viewed domestic Communists as minor nuisances.  Ultra-left intellectuals saw The Century of the Common Man dawning and thought, incredibly in retrospect, that the Soviet Union under Stalin was some kind of human progress.  American capitalists thought that capitalism, tempered by some kind of safety net and led by the USA, was the wonderful and unopposed future of the human race.  The capitalists, like the isolationists, dismissed domestic Communists as a minor problem.  Fourth and last, fearful conservatives (including ex-Communists like Chambers) saw domestic subversion — traitors in our midst — as an unsolved crisis for the country; and they saw Communism on the march as a disaster-in-the-making for the whole world. This Case vindicated this last group, educated the old isolationists and the triumphant capitalists, and disgraced the ultra-left intellectuals. Further Research:  Episode 12:  Two works are cited by name in this Podcast.  Harold Laski's book — ‘Faith, Reason, and Civilization:  An essay in historical analysis' — was published by Viking in 1944.  Vintage copies are available on Amazon (thank you, Mr. Bezos).  Henry Luce's famous essay, ‘The American Century,' is available on the Internet at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mlassite/discussions261/luce.pdf (not secure).   Also on the Internet, the essay is debated to this day.  For more on the political climate of 1948, I recommend reading roughly the pages cited above in the above-cited works of Alistair Cooke, Leslie Fiedler, Walter Goodman, and  Murray Kempton.  Most books about the politics of this era, sad to say, fall into two extreme camps.  One says there were secret Commies everywhere (FDR and Truman may have been in on it).  The other says there were no Commies; but if there were, they never did any harm; but if they did harm, their hearts were in the right place; and if their hearts were black, they were all victims of political persecution.  The single best broad view of the political climate of 1948 is James F. Nagle's '1948:  The Crossroads Year,' most recently published in 2007 by BookSurge. Questions:  Was there factual evidence supporting each of the four groups identified in this Podcast?  Which group, in your opinion, got the most right and the least wrong?  Which one got the least right and the most wrong?  Does the fluid climate of 1948 remind you of America's decade-long ‘holiday from history' after the fall of Communism and before 9/11?  Do you remember “The End of History”?  Had you heard of Usama Bin Laden before 9/11?    

Carlos Castaneda didn't just write about a Don Juan—he was one. Over the course of his life, his magnetic personality pulled innumerable women into his orbit. Most stayed briefly. Only a few lasted long enough to see all the different facets that lay underneath the surface of his charismatic personality. One of them was Gloria Garvin. And this is her story. After listening, be sure to check out:Episode Slide Show: bit.ly/3tF7dZJOne Extra Thing: bit.ly/3EeJqEPDiscussion Thread: bit.ly/3E3MTGe www.tricksterpodcast.com Trickster: The Many Lives of Carlos Castaneda is a guppy production:Creator and Executive Producer: Frank HortonProducers: Ville Haimala, James Orestes, Yuval ShapiraCo-Producers: Kevin Barth, Steve Barilotti, Colin Stewart, Ybrahim Luna, Ana Djordjijevic, Dan Girmus, Celeste Cuevas, Collins Harris IV, Robert(a) Marshall, author of an upcoming biography of Carlos Castaneda, American Trickster, Katie Kidwell, Justin AierSenior Producer: Pablo VacaComposer: Ville HaimalaSound Designer and Mixer: Randy WardEditors: Frank Horton, with additional editing by Randy Ward, Paul Calo and Yuval ShapiraWe wish to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to the research of scholars, journalists and authors who have contributed tiles to the mosaic that is our project. Trickster is based, in part, on the following books and articles:Ultimas Noticias Sobre Carlos Castaneda by Arturo Granda, Conversations with a Young Nahual by Byron de Ford, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde, Ascent and Descent of the Sacred Mountain by Claudio Naranjo, Tezcatlipoca: Trickster and Supreme Deity edited by Elizabeth Baquedano, Fractured Times by Eric Hobsbawm, All Things are Possible Selected Essays by Lev Shestov, La increíble hisotoria de Carlos Castaneda by Ybrahim Luna, Castaneda's Journey and the Don Juan Papers by Richard De Mille, Peyote Hunt: The Sacred Journey of the Huichol Indians by Barbara Myerhoff, Theory in anthropology since the sixties by Sherry Ortner, Viscerality, faith, and skepticism: Another theory of magic by Michael Taussig, Introduction to the Teachings of Don Juan by Octavio Paz, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze & Guattari, A Hushed Death for Mystic Author by J.R. Moehringer, Missing Amalia by Matt Ward, Sonoran Fantasy or Coming of Age? by Ralph Beals, Tula: The Toltec Capital of Ancient Mexico by Richard A. Diehl, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition by M.H. Abrams, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, The Mirror of Magic: A History of Magic in the Western World by Kurt Seligmann, Filming Castaneda: The Hunt for Magic and Reason by Gaby Geuter, America by Jean Baudrillard, Carlos Castaneda: American Trickster by Robert(a) Marshall, Endeavors in Psychology by Henry A. Murray, Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology by Michael Rogin, Yucatan by Andrea De Carlo, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies by James A. Clifton, Fear of Freedom by Carlo Levi, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico by Octavio Paz, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent by Lionel Trilling, Freedom & Its Discontents: Reflections of Four Decades of American Moral Experience by Peter Marin, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, Feet of Clay Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr, The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin, Life of Dreams: Field Notes On Psi, Synchronicity, And Shamanism by Douglass Price-Williams, Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrere ,High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World by Christopher Partridge, The Metamorphoses of Don Juan by Leo Weinstein, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, Playing Indian by Philip J. Deloria, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing by Michael Taussig, Shamans of the 20th Century by Ruth-Inge Heinze, Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge edited by Jeremy Narby and Francis Huxley, The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World by Walter Goldschmidt, In Sorcery's Shadow by Paul Stoller, The Diabolic Root by Vincenzo Petrullo, Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians by John A. Price, The World of Time Inc by Curtis Prendergast, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography by Arnold Krupat, Another Life by Michael Korda, The Contemporary Culture of the Cahita Indians by Ralph L. Beals, The American Adam by R.W. Lewis, A Magical Journey with Carlos Castaneda by Margaret Runyan, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and Americans Identities by Laura Browder, The Theatre of Don Juan by Oscar Mandel, Impostors: Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher Miller, The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode, Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fiedler, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam, Melville's Quarrel With God by Lawrance Thompson, Shamanism Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, Extrasensory Ecology: Parapsychology and Anthropology by Joseph K. Long, On Phenomenology and Social Relations by Alfred Schutz, Seeing Castaneda by Daniel Noel, Prophetic Charisma by Len Oakes, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Death Valley and the Amargosa by Richard E. Lingenfelter Trickster Podcast, LLC. All rights reserved.

Alger Hiss, like Chambers, gives secret testimony to Nixon's HUAC Subcommittee.  He is outraged that they are thinking of trusting Chambers, whom Hiss labels a Communist and a traitor (Hiss pre-channeling Senator McCarthy).  When confronted with Chambers' detailed knowledge of his domestic life 10-15 years ago, Hiss drops his claim that he never knew Chambers.  Oh, now it's all coming back to me, . . .  There was a man whom I knew back then, a self-styled freelance journalist who went by the name George Crosley.  He was disheveled, had shockingly bad teeth, and seemed sometimes to live in a fantasy world of dramatic escapades.  He became our subtenant, living under the same roof with us for a while, and stiffed us for the rent.  Maybe Chambers and Crosley are the same man.  Does this new story, which Hiss stuck to till the day he died, sound believable to you?  Or is he just coming up with a more complicated lie to defeat Chambers and the truth? Further Research Episode 9:  Hiss's secret testimony starts at HUAC at 935; the George Crosley recollection starts at 948-49, gets into depth at 955, and continues off and on until 970.  (Congressional hearings frequently hop from one topic to another as individual Representatives arrive, chime in, think of new lines of questioning, and leave the room to attend to other business.)  Hiss's recollections of his secret testimony, and of Crosley in general, are in his memoir “In the Court of Public Opinion” at 15-32 and in his late-in-life autobiography, “Recollections of a Life” (1988) at 207-08.  Chambers' analysis of Hiss's secret testimony is at “Witness” at 580-81 and 593.  See also Weinstein's Perjury at 39-44.  Nixon's recollections are in “Six Crises” at 23-29 and “RN” at 58-60.  There is a wonderful essay on this Case by the professor and literary critic Leslie Fiedler, “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence,” in his book “An End to Innocence” (1952).  In it, at 9, Fiedler describes Hiss here as “uncertainly feeling his way into the situation, cautiously finding out at each point how much he will have to admit to escape entrapment.” Questions:   How does Hiss's new “George Crosley” story sound to you?  Obviously a fabrication, or plausible but we need to learn more, or has ‘the ring of truth'; to it?  How would you learn more?  Ask members of the Nye Committee staff if they remembered a man named George Crosley (evidently poor and with memorably bad teeth) hanging around the Committee's offices?  Ask the Hisses' household servants and social friends if they remembered a shabby looking man with bad teeth named George Crosley socializing with the Hisses back then?  Did Hiss ever mention to a deadbeat pest he'd finally gotten out of his life?  Look for magazine articles published by “George Crosley” in the mid-1930s?  Find pictures of Chambers in those years, show them to all the above-mentioned people, and ask them if the remember this man?    

durée : 02:49:59 - Les Nuits de France Culture - par : Philippe Garbit, Albane Penaranda, Mathilde Wagman - Par René Farabet, Robert Georgin et Jean-François Vallée - Avec Nicolas Ruwet, Pierre Smith, Dan Sperber, Claude Levi-Strauss, Gilles Archambault et Jacques Larue-Langlois - Textes de Michel Butor, William Eastlake, Leslie Fiedler, Claude Lévi-Strauss et Maurice Roche - Lectures Maurice Roche - Réalisation Janine Antoine, Janine Groléas et Viviane Van Den Broeck - réalisation : Virginie Mourthé

To celebrate the conclusion of the first season of Mirror and a Flashlight, community members and the podcast team gathered for a virtual event reflecting on the surprises, inspirations, and challenges of making this podcast and sharing the stories of Chicago Women's Health Center. This bonus episode brings listeners a recording of the panel discussion featuring our producer Ariel Mejia, Collective member and podcast collaborator Terri Kapsalis, and Staff members Leslie Fiedler and Scout Bratt, as well as the Q & A from that event. Learn more about Chicago Women's Health Center and this podcast on our website at chicagowomenshealthcenter.orgFollow Us:InstagramFacebookThanks to our event moderator, Scout Bratt, and our panelists, Ariel Mejia, Leslie Fiedler, and Terri Kapsalis. Special thanks to Catherine Plonka for generously sharing her wisdom and insight with us all, and to Ari's mom, Kathy, for her participation. We want to hear from you, our listeners, about your thoughts on this season - and if you want to hear more from us! Share your ideas and feedback using our Listener Survey here. This podcast was produced by Ariel Mejia - learn more about her work here. This episode was edited by A.J. Barks, Sarah Rebecca Gaglio, and Terri Kapsalis, with additional editorial support from Lisa Schergen.Mirror and a Flashlight is made possible by our community of support. Our special thanks to Corbett Vs Dempsey, Women Unite!, Early to Bed, Women & Children First Bookstore, Laura McAlpine Consulting for Growth, and Mats Gustafsson and Catalytic Sound. Make our work possible with a donation here.Visit our online Corner Store to find podcast merch and more.

Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He attended the State University of New York in Buffalo where his PhD director was Leslie Fiedler. He is professor of American literature and popular culture at Queens College of the City University of New York. Schechter is married to poet Kimiko Hahn. He has two daughters from a previous marriage: the writer Lauren Oliver and professor of philosophy Elizabeth Schechter. Dr. Harold Schechter's Website:  https://haroldschechter.com/   PLEASE - FOLLOW, LIKE, FAVORITE, SUBSCRIBE wherever you listen to podcasts. If this is important to you, you are important to me and it is so easy to ! This is your show! The website www.myalienlifepodcast.com The other website www.insidethegueststudio.com Find me on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100034090429371 My Alien Life Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/694842757635535 Inside The Guest Studio Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/169917644449645/?multi_permalinks=309315773843164 Follow me on Instagram   Thank you so much to an incredible producer, writer and musician… Thank you Eleon, for putting together the amazing music heard on this podcast.  I am forever grateful to you.  Your talent is a gift to me, my listeners and the universe. https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCoXlEprZfLhtpqPZha5v_Lw/videos https://www.heartdancerecords.com/michaellrogers

What does integrative health mean, and how is it part of feminist care? What are the barriers to accessing - and providing - a wider range of frameworks and resources for healing? In this episode of Mirror and a Flashlight, we talk with Clinical Services Director, Leslie Fiedler, about CWHC's Integrative Health Program (IHP). Learn about how this program is advancing CWHC's model of care by ensuring the clients have access to a range of healing options, including acupuncture, Pelvic Floor Therapy, and an Intuitive Eating framework of nutrition.Learn more about Chicago Women's Health Center and this podcast on our website at www.chicagowomenshealthcenter.org. Special thanks to Leslie Fiedler for sharing her wisdom with us for this episode.Follow Us:InstagramFacebookWe're having an event! Join us on March 24th from 7-8:15pm CST for a live, virtual event reflecting on the making of Mirror and a Flashlight! We'll be listening to compelling moments from our podcast's first season, and talking through the questions it has sparked for listeners and creators alike.Tickets are $10 and you can get yours here today! The event will feature a Q+A and we want to hear from you! Submit questions about the podcast and/or CWHC using this form, or by sending a voice memo to us at podcast@chicagowomenshealthcenter.org.Mirror and a Flashlight is made possible by our community of support. Our special thanks to Corbett Vs Dempsey, Women Unite!, Early to Bed, Women & Children First Bookstore, Laura McAlpine Consulting for Growth, and Mats Gustafsson and Catalytic Sound. This podcast was produced by Ariel Mejia and edited by A.J. Barks, Sarah Rebecca Gaglio, and Terri Kapsalis, with additional editorial support from Lisa Schergen and Leslie Fiedler.Make our work possible with a donation here.For more information on some of the topics discussed in this episode, we recommend the following resources:Pacific College of Health and ScienceHealth At Every Size: Resource PageNational University of Natural MedicineBastyr UniversityBoucher Institute of Naturopathic MedicineCanadian College of Naturopathic MedicineCWHC's Collaborating ProvidersMartha Burla, MPH, CHES is a certified health education specialist and intuitive eating counselor. Martha works from a fat positive, Health at Every Size, trans inclusive perspective.Ariel Wynne PT, DPT is a physical therapist specializing in the pelvic floor.Learn more about CWHC's Integrative Health Program and services:Acupuncture and BodyworkNutrition Counseling and Intuitive EatingPelvic Floor Therapy

Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He attended the State University of New York in Buffalo where his PhD director was Leslie Fiedler. He’s a retired professor of American literature and popular culture at Queens College of the City University of New York. Schechter is married to poet Kimiko Hahn. He has two daughters from a previous marriage: the writer Lauren Oliver and professor of philosophy Elizabeth Schechter. His latest book is Ripped from the Headlines. Join the Thorne & Cross newsletter for updates, book deals, specials, exclusives, and upcoming guests on Thorne & Cross: Haunted Nights LIVE! by visiting Tamara and Alistair at their websites: alistaircross.com and tamarathorne.com This is a copyrighted, trademarked podcast owned solely by the Authors on the Air Global Radio, LLC.

Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He attended the State University of New York in Buffalo where his PhD director was Leslie Fiedler. He is professor of American literature and popular culture at Queens College of the City University of New York. Schechter is married to poet Kimiko Hahn. He has two daughters from a previous marriage: the writer Lauren Oliver and professor of philosophy Elizabeth Schechter. Join the Thorne & Cross newsletter for updates, book deals, specials, exclusives, and upcoming guests on Thorne & Cross: Haunted Nights LIVE! by visiting Tamara and Alistair at their websites: alistaircross.com and tamarathorne.com This is a copyrighted, trademarked podcast owned solely by the Authors on the Air Global Radio, LLC.  

Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He attended the State University of New York in Buffalo where his PhD director was Leslie Fiedler. He is professor of American literature and popular culture at Queens College of the City University of New York. Schechter is married to poet Kimiko Hahn. He has two daughters from a previous marriage: the writer Lauren Oliver and professor of philosophy Elizabeth Schechter. Join the Thorne & Cross newsletter for updates, book deals, specials, exclusives, and upcoming guests on Thorne & Cross: Haunted Nights LIVE! by visiting Tamara and Alistair at their websites: alistaircross.com and tamarathorne.com This is a copyrighted, trademarked podcast owned solely by the Authors on the Air Global Radio, LLC.

durée : 02:49:59 - Les Nuits de France Culture - par : Philippe Garbit, Albane Penaranda, Mathilde Wagman - Par René Farabet, Robert Georgin et Jean-François Vallée - Avec Nicolas Ruwet, Pierre Smith, Dan Sperber, Claude Levi-Strauss, Gilles Archambault et Jacques Larue-Langlois - Textes de Michel Butor, William Eastlake, Leslie Fiedler, Claude Lévi-Strauss et Maurice Roche - Lectures Maurice Roche - Réalisation Janine Antoine, Janine Groléas et Viviane Van Den Broeck - réalisation : Virginie Mourthé

Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He attended the State University of New York in Buffalo where his PhD director was Leslie Fiedler. He is professor of American literature and popular culture at Queens College of the City University of New York. Schechter is married to poet Kimiko Hahn. He has two daughters from a previous marriage: the writer Lauren Oliver and professor of philosophy Elizabeth Schechter. Join the Thorne & Cross newsletter for updates, book deals, specials, exclusives, and upcoming guests on Thorne & Cross: Haunted Nights LIVE! by visiting Tamara and Alistair at their websites: alistaircross.com and tamarathorne.com This is a copyrighted, trademarked podcast owned solely by the Authors on the Air Global Radio.

Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He attended the State University of New York in Buffalo where his PhD director was Leslie Fiedler. He is professor of American literature and popular culture at Queens College of the City University of New York. Schechter is married to poet Kimiko Hahn. He has two daughters from a previous marriage: the writer Lauren Oliver and professor of philosophy Elizabeth Schechter. Join the Thorne & Cross newsletter for updates, book deals, specials, exclusives, and upcoming guests on Thorne & Cross: Haunted Nights LIVE! by visiting Tamara and Alistair at their websites: alistaircross.com and tamarathorne.com This is a copyrighted, trademarked podcast owned solely by the Authors on the Air Global Radio, LLC.

Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He attended the State University of New York in Buffalo where his PhD director was Leslie Fiedler. He is professor of American literature and popular culture at Queens College of the City University of New York. Schechter is married to poet Kimiko Hahn. He has two daughters from a previous marriage: the writer Lauren Oliver and professor of philosophy Elizabeth Schechter. Visit Tamara and Alistair at their websites. Thorne & Cross’ latest novel, The Witches of Ravencrest,is available now! Order Alistair’s murder mystery, Sleep, Savannah, Sleep! This is a copyrighted, trademarked podcast owned solely by the Authors on the Air Global Radio  

Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He attended the State University of New York in Buffalo where his PhD director was Leslie Fiedler. He is professor of American literature and popular culture at Queens College of the City University of New York. He chose the perfect title for […]

[ngg_images source="galleries" container_ids="7" display_type="photocrati-nextgen_basic_slideshow" gallery_width="600" gallery_height="400" cycle_effect="fade" cycle_interval="3" show_thumbnail_link="1" thumbnail_link_text="Click for larger view" order_by="sortorder" order_direction="ASC" returns="included" maximum_entity_count="500"]   Our fascination with the serial killer plays upon latent anxieties concerning our own willingness to commit foul play. Best-selling serial killer biographer, Professor Harold Schechter, discusses accounts of history's most notorious human predators. Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He attended the State University of New York in Buffalo where his PhD director was Leslie Fiedler. He is professor of American literature and popular culture at Queens College of the City University of New York.   Links to our guest, Dr. Harold Schecter ~ Hell's Princess -- New book by Harold Schecter about Belle Gunness - "Butcher of Men" Harold Schecter Website -- bio, books, contact info and news ... 

In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen (Dartmouth, 2017) emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,” a view that enlarges and complicates the color-based dimensions of American racial discourse. This strikingly original work will interest a wide spectrum of scholars in American Studies and the humanities. The author examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. He also explores the links between African American literature and the Mediterranean tradition of Italian immigrants, and then examines both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism in the West. This previously unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable of producing democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy. Sameule F. S. Pardini is the coordinator of the American Studies Program and Faculty-in-Residence of the Honors Pavilion at Elon University. He holds a Laurea degree in Letters and Philosophy from the Universita’ degli Studi di Pisa, Italy, and an M.A. and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Dr. Pardini’s teaching and research interests focus on 20th century Italian studies, Italian American studies, American studies, cinema and literary criticism. Prior to this work, Pardini edited and translated into Italian two collections of writings of the famed critic Leslie Fiedler titled Vacanze Romane: Un critico americano a spasso nell’Italia letteraria and Arrivederci alle armi. He also edited The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. Pardini is currently pursuing a new book-length research project called Modernity on Wheels: Speed and Automobile Culture from Futurism to Fascism and the New Deal, which examines the theme of speed in automobile culture of the first half of the 20th century in Italy and the United States. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen (Dartmouth, 2017) emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,” a view that enlarges and complicates the color-based dimensions of American racial discourse. This strikingly original work will interest a wide spectrum of scholars in American Studies and the humanities. The author examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. He also explores the links between African American literature and the Mediterranean tradition of Italian immigrants, and then examines both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism in the West. This previously unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable of producing democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy. Sameule F. S. Pardini is the coordinator of the American Studies Program and Faculty-in-Residence of the Honors Pavilion at Elon University. He holds a Laurea degree in Letters and Philosophy from the Universita' degli Studi di Pisa, Italy, and an M.A. and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Dr. Pardini's teaching and research interests focus on 20th century Italian studies, Italian American studies, American studies, cinema and literary criticism. Prior to this work, Pardini edited and translated into Italian two collections of writings of the famed critic Leslie Fiedler titled Vacanze Romane: Un critico americano a spasso nell'Italia letteraria and Arrivederci alle armi. He also edited The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. Pardini is currently pursuing a new book-length research project called Modernity on Wheels: Speed and Automobile Culture from Futurism to Fascism and the New Deal, which examines the theme of speed in automobile culture of the first half of the 20th century in Italy and the United States. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/african-american-studies

In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen (Dartmouth, 2017) emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,” a view that enlarges and complicates the color-based dimensions of American racial discourse. This strikingly original work will interest a wide spectrum of scholars in American Studies and the humanities. The author examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. He also explores the links between African American literature and the Mediterranean tradition of Italian immigrants, and then examines both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism in the West. This previously unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable of producing democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy. Sameule F. S. Pardini is the coordinator of the American Studies Program and Faculty-in-Residence of the Honors Pavilion at Elon University. He holds a Laurea degree in Letters and Philosophy from the Universita’ degli Studi di Pisa, Italy, and an M.A. and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Dr. Pardini’s teaching and research interests focus on 20th century Italian studies, Italian American studies, American studies, cinema and literary criticism. Prior to this work, Pardini edited and translated into Italian two collections of writings of the famed critic Leslie Fiedler titled Vacanze Romane: Un critico americano a spasso nell’Italia letteraria and Arrivederci alle armi. He also edited The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. Pardini is currently pursuing a new book-length research project called Modernity on Wheels: Speed and Automobile Culture from Futurism to Fascism and the New Deal, which examines the theme of speed in automobile culture of the first half of the 20th century in Italy and the United States. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen (Dartmouth, 2017) emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,” a view that enlarges and complicates the color-based dimensions of American racial discourse. This strikingly original work will interest a wide spectrum of scholars in American Studies and the humanities. The author examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. He also explores the links between African American literature and the Mediterranean tradition of Italian immigrants, and then examines both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism in the West. This previously unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable of producing democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy. Sameule F. S. Pardini is the coordinator of the American Studies Program and Faculty-in-Residence of the Honors Pavilion at Elon University. He holds a Laurea degree in Letters and Philosophy from the Universita’ degli Studi di Pisa, Italy, and an M.A. and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Dr. Pardini’s teaching and research interests focus on 20th century Italian studies, Italian American studies, American studies, cinema and literary criticism. Prior to this work, Pardini edited and translated into Italian two collections of writings of the famed critic Leslie Fiedler titled Vacanze Romane: Un critico americano a spasso nell’Italia letteraria and Arrivederci alle armi. He also edited The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. Pardini is currently pursuing a new book-length research project called Modernity on Wheels: Speed and Automobile Culture from Futurism to Fascism and the New Deal, which examines the theme of speed in automobile culture of the first half of the 20th century in Italy and the United States.   James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen (Dartmouth, 2017) emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,” a view that enlarges and complicates the color-based dimensions of American racial discourse. This strikingly original work will interest a wide spectrum of scholars in American Studies and the humanities. The author examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. He also explores the links between African American literature and the Mediterranean tradition of Italian immigrants, and then examines both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism in the West. This previously unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable of producing democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy. Sameule F. S. Pardini is the coordinator of the American Studies Program and Faculty-in-Residence of the Honors Pavilion at Elon University. He holds a Laurea degree in Letters and Philosophy from the Universita’ degli Studi di Pisa, Italy, and an M.A. and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Dr. Pardini’s teaching and research interests focus on 20th century Italian studies, Italian American studies, American studies, cinema and literary criticism. Prior to this work, Pardini edited and translated into Italian two collections of writings of the famed critic Leslie Fiedler titled Vacanze Romane: Un critico americano a spasso nell’Italia letteraria and Arrivederci alle armi. He also edited The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. Pardini is currently pursuing a new book-length research project called Modernity on Wheels: Speed and Automobile Culture from Futurism to Fascism and the New Deal, which examines the theme of speed in automobile culture of the first half of the 20th century in Italy and the United States. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen (Dartmouth, 2017) emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,” a view that enlarges and complicates the color-based dimensions of American racial discourse. This strikingly original work will interest a wide spectrum of scholars in American Studies and the humanities. The author examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. He also explores the links between African American literature and the Mediterranean tradition of Italian immigrants, and then examines both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism in the West. This previously unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable of producing democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy. Sameule F. S. Pardini is the coordinator of the American Studies Program and Faculty-in-Residence of the Honors Pavilion at Elon University. He holds a Laurea degree in Letters and Philosophy from the Universita’ degli Studi di Pisa, Italy, and an M.A. and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Dr. Pardini’s teaching and research interests focus on 20th century Italian studies, Italian American studies, American studies, cinema and literary criticism. Prior to this work, Pardini edited and translated into Italian two collections of writings of the famed critic Leslie Fiedler titled Vacanze Romane: Un critico americano a spasso nell’Italia letteraria and Arrivederci alle armi. He also edited The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. Pardini is currently pursuing a new book-length research project called Modernity on Wheels: Speed and Automobile Culture from Futurism to Fascism and the New Deal, which examines the theme of speed in automobile culture of the first half of the 20th century in Italy and the United States. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen (Dartmouth, 2017) emphasizes the racial “in-betweenness” of Italian Americans rearticulated as “invisible blackness,” a view that enlarges and complicates the color-based dimensions of American racial discourse. This strikingly original work will interest a wide spectrum of scholars in American Studies and the humanities. The author examines the cultural relationship between African American intellectuals and Italian American writers and artists, and how it relates to American blackness in the twentieth century. He also explores the links between African American literature and the Mediterranean tradition of Italian immigrants, and then examines both against the white intellectual discourse that defines modernism in the West. This previously unexamined encounter offers a hybrid, transnational model of modernity capable of producing democratic forms of aesthetics, social consciousness, and political economy. Sameule F. S. Pardini is the coordinator of the American Studies Program and Faculty-in-Residence of the Honors Pavilion at Elon University. He holds a Laurea degree in Letters and Philosophy from the Universita’ degli Studi di Pisa, Italy, and an M.A. and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Dr. Pardini’s teaching and research interests focus on 20th century Italian studies, Italian American studies, American studies, cinema and literary criticism. Prior to this work, Pardini edited and translated into Italian two collections of writings of the famed critic Leslie Fiedler titled Vacanze Romane: Un critico americano a spasso nell’Italia letteraria and Arrivederci alle armi. He also edited The Devil Gets His Due: The Uncollected Essays of Leslie Fiedler. Pardini is currently pursuing a new book-length research project called Modernity on Wheels: Speed and Automobile Culture from Futurism to Fascism and the New Deal, which examines the theme of speed in automobile culture of the first half of the 20th century in Italy and the United States. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this blast form the past Joel & Jenn talk with true crime author and serial killer expert Harold Schechter. "Harold Schechter is an American true crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He attended the State University of New York in Buffalo where his PhD director was Leslie Fiedler. He is professor of American literature and popular culture at Queens College of the City University of New York. Schechter is married to poet Kimiko Hahn. He has two daughters from a previous marriage: the writer Lauren Oliver and professor of philosophy Elizabeth Schechter."

Mark Twain The Oxford Mark Twain (Oxford University Press) In honor of the publication of a twenty-nine volume set of Twain, Leslie Fiedler, Charles Johnson and the set's editor, Shelley Fisher Fishkin join in a roundtable celebration of the American Shakespeare.