Crop Rotation - 002 - Barthelme - Selected Stories

Selected stories by Donald Barthelme: A Shower of Gold, The President, The School.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears while we are some sorrow with us. There's a song that will linger forever in our ears. Hard times come again. Hard times, hard times come again. Many days you have lingered around my cabin door. Oh hard times come again no more.

SPEAKER_02 0:47

Welcome to Crop Rotation, a literature, theology, and philosophy discussion podcast. A good farmer doesn't grow the same thing every year. For the soil to thrive, there needs to be variety. We're a group of friends who found that we missed the life of the mind that we were able to live together when we were at St. John's College in Annapolis two decades ago. This podcast is an opportunity to explore and discuss works of art and of intellect that we've each discovered in the intervening years. Before each meeting, one of us gives the group an assignment. This leader is also responsible for asking an opening question to begin the discussion. Hey guys, welcome to seminar, man. Today we're going to be talking about a really important writer named Donald Bartlemay. This is not somebody that I had heard of until I went to graduate school for book stuff, and turns out he wrote some really amazing stories, and I picked three of them for us to discuss today. So the stories are A Shower of Gold, The President, and The School. The School. And these can all be found in the collection of his called 60 Stories. A little background on Donald Bartle May. I don't think there's any point in reading the like Wikipedia for this guy. He's a really good writer. What I will do is I will show you an issue of McSweeney's that I have here. And this issue is a strange issue in that they bound it in like a Z shape so that there's two halves to the book. And this whole half of the book is just dedicated to honoring Donald Bartlemay. So if you ever have a chance, if you're interested in Donald Bartlemay, you know, the best thing in this McSweeney's issue, in my opinion, is where George Saunders gives like a five or six-page breakdown of the school and why it works the way it does. George Saunders may be the best person at doing this in the world, as far as I can tell. So I don't know, maybe I'll send a PDF of that after we're done or something. But I guess what I wanted to mention to sort of locate these stories in history is that English language fiction started off crazy. Like the first novels and stories that were written, people were just doing anything. And then for a while things like calmed down and people mainly wrote realism. So think Dickens, think you know, I don't know, Thackeray, Trollope, all the great novelists, even Hemingway, you know, completely dedicated to realism. And then something happened around about the end of World War II, where something that is called modernism in literature. It's called postmodernism in other domains, but in literature it's called modernism. And it's where you have things like fragmented, and you have given up on the idea of having a single authoritative narrator or a single authoritative story that's going on, and sort of reflecting the social and political fragmentation of the world that people were experiencing. So think S. Eliot, think James Joyce in like Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake, which I have not read. I've read Ulysses, so I know what I'm talking about there, but not Finnegan's Wake. That stuff was all for intellectuals. It was not until Donald Bartlemay started getting his fragmented, modernist, weirdo stories into the New Yorker magazine that modernist, non-realist, crazy stuff began to enter the mainstream. Uh, and nowadays, you know, the short story market is not huge, but the experimental short stories of the type pioneered by Donald Bartle May make up a large percentage of what short stories in English are now. And actually, you know, in the world, some of the best short story collections will at least dabble in modernist techniques like metafiction or the unreliable narrator or fragmentation or past or pulling in like pulling in fragments from other kinds of literature or kinds of art. Anyway, that's neither here nor there, but it's it sort of uh allows you to get a sense for where Donald Bartle May lies in the history of English literature, and I also want to note to bring it up to sort of our time, that this kind of wild modernism was accompanied also by an attitude of extreme irony and embracing the absurd in a sort of existentialist sense. And that really sort of dominated academic or intellectual literature for a long time, until about the nineties, when somebody who you may have heard of, David Foster Wallace, started to say, Hey, maybe we should be sincere instead of ironic, instead of just reflecting an exploded nonsense world. Maybe we should try to build something that's real and sincere. And the place where we're in right now in English literature, serious, what I would say serious, like English language literature, is like trying to figure out this line between using literature to explode and destroy or reflect an exploded, destroyed world, and trying to use literature to build something, make something, honor something, do something real and lasting. And Donald Bartlem would have been sort of the beginning of the popularization of that very ironic tone. And David Foster Wallace would mark the beginning of a reaction against the very ironic tone. The reason, one of the reasons that I picked the story A Shower of Gold for us to talk about is that he seems to give it's it talks about irony in a way that's intentional, um, or it talks about absurdity at least, in a way that's intentional. And it makes me feel like maybe Donald Bartle May has been maligned in my account, that he's bringing this purely explosive, destructive, modernist energy into literature. If you look at the end of a shower of gold, you know, that account that I just gave is sort of troubled. The other reason I picked these three stories, and we don't have to talk about all the stuff that I'm saying, we don't have to talk about it all. We can talk about completely different stuff. But I wanted to mention there's a thing that sometimes happens. This is just to explain why I picked these particular three stories of his. Um, there's a thing that sometimes happens with writers of short stories where in their early efforts, they it's possible to discern a structure in their early stories, and as they grow more experienced with the tools that they are developing for their craft, that structure becomes less and less obvious. So it feels to me, and I don't know if anybody else in the world would think this way about it, but it feels to me like in a shower of gold, it's you can see a structure, and that in the president you can see a little bit of that same something structural that's similar, and by the time you get to the school, the structure that is more evident in a shower of gold is completely buried, and we can barely we can't see it at all, but it's still in there somewhere, active. These are very unformed thoughts, but I must end this introduction, and maybe I've gone on too long, and if I have gone on too long, I do apologize, but I will begin with an opening question, which is in the school, what is the new gerbil?

SPEAKER_06 9:47

So, to answer what the new gerbil is, I think you have to answer what all these things are that the kids have killed. And to answer that, I would disagree with you about your judgment about the existence of a clear structure in the school that was present in the other two. I found it in my experience to be the most structured, the most purposeful polemic. Seeing it really through the linchpin of the children saying, you know, mount that teacher, you know, have graphic sexual intercourse with her in front of us. We want to and the he says, You're minors, that's a crime. Get a hold of yourselves. And she comes over to him, she draws near to him, if I recall correctly, and he gives her a kiss, and he actually pays attention to her. The language, the the speed of narration slows down, and to me, it was a very it was one of the most human moments in the whole story, perhaps the only human moment outside of the actions of these psychopathic little death angels. But that moment where suddenly the gerbil walks in, to me, the difference between that kiss and all the things leading up to it is that all of those things that the kids fail at are kind of categorized as everything between that, dot dot dot, and that. And that that and that is the kind of blurring out and vaguing out and not really having an answer for exactly what it is that they're going to teach these kids or how they're going to teach them. That that dot dot dot that is an ellipsis that encapsulates the utter lack of methodology for actually teaching the kids. Instead, what they do is they just time and time again give them something to try and fail at. And they haven't shown them anything. And then at the end of it, this guy kisses this girl, they actually see love, and the gerbil comes back in. And to me, the gerbil coming back in is some sort of going back to the first point where now you've actually got a shot at keeping this gerbil alive because you've shown them anything at all. You've given them any amount of actual teaching material and something to implement rather than just letting them try it. Now, what is that? Is that a metaphor for the modern life, for modern education and modern integration into society? Because you've got kids saying, Show us sex. And, you know, he's way ahead of his time, right? He's writing this before the age that the internet has hyper-sexualized children and youth. So that's, you know, I don't he may have been preternaturally prescient in this scene in many ways. And if I make that argument, then it, you know, the gerbil is the handing of the baton to children in general, taking up a new layer of civilization. But that's some pretty heavy narratization on my part. I'd be curious to know what other people thought the gerbil was. But it's the new gerbil. The gerbil comes back to life, though, doesn't it? It's a new gerbil. Oh, I missed that.

SPEAKER_00 13:24

The other ones were the gerbils. There were the the ones that died. It was like multiple. There's a new gerbil here.

SPEAKER_02 13:33

Then there was a knock on the door. I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered wildly.

SPEAKER_06 13:40

Yeah, and the new gerbil walked in, the children cheered.

SPEAKER_05 13:45

So I don't know if it is at all helpful because my reading of it, I realize that the way I'm taking it doesn't I don't know. The way I read it was here's this teacher, and he's recounting how the school year went, and he is clearly insane. I don't think we ever hear from the kids. I think the way the kids are talking are not the way kids talk. They're the way that you have like a tweet where the you know democratic operative is like, my kid came in and said that you know Obamacare was the best thing ever, and he's eight months old, and he told me that, you know, it's like this is not what children say. Okay, Rebecca. They're talking in crazy talk. So I d I don't know how that helps with the gerbil, but that that's just how the story struck me.

SPEAKER_02 14:42

So you think this is just the most unreliable narrator of them all.

SPEAKER_05 14:48

I mean, I think it's possible some of those things happened. I think he's really bad at keeping I think he's a biology teacher. He has this lesson plan that he's following, you know, like he says, every year the fish and they're always gonna die. You know, I think there's little bits here and there that are grounded in maybe what happened, but I don't think he is telling us what kids ever told him.

SPEAKER_06 15:13

See, I I didn't judge him to be insane at all because I was too busy holding him to his failure, his abject failure to teach these children anything, and yet talk about it. So and to me, the other thing was there were consequences outside of the classroom too, right? There were parents, like it ramps up. You get this long and then flop, flop, whoa, you know, and it's really bad at the end, and then there's the incident, right? Yeah, it just keeps getting worse and worse. Yeah. And it's a runaway, it's a it's not a system that experiences degradation, it's a system that experiences compound brokenness and is on a runaway trajectory. It felt like the intensity scale felt like to me. Sir Robert, what did you think the new gerbil was?

SPEAKER_00 16:09

Um, I didn't have a concrete idea of the new gerbil, but I had the a set of let's say I was gonna say experiences, but I think I mean something like relationships to the narrative as I went. So just for anybody else who happens to listen someday, I have six kids. And the death part at the beginning is pretty true. They don't know how to do anything, and lots of stuff dies, and you do a lot of like buying a new one so they don't know that it died or something.

unknown 16:39

Right.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

So I related up to the point of around around the puppy. It basically up to about the puppy, it basically rang true as like yeah, a whole bunch of stuff. It's a lot, it's a lot for a year, and it there were so many things I thought, surely this must be the springtime, the school year's almost over, right? I don't know. That's just kind of the mood I had. So then you go from at the puppy, you start getting to the guy is the person narrating, I guess, is super irresponsible. So you get this one line that says, You can't tell them they can't have a puppy when the puppy's right there, right in front of them running around the floor, yap, yap, yapping. And if somebody has had at least one, maybe a few kids, that's not true. You you totally say, No, I'm not gonna murder the puppy, but you can enjoy it until I find it at home in two days.

SPEAKER_05 17:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Like that's a totally legit thing.

SPEAKER_05 17:36

So I know that he is a teacher and not a parent.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that kind of what the picture that it's building up to that point. At first, I was like, okay, realistic teacher. He doesn't seem too connected to kids. Then he gets disconnected from kids for me at the puppy line, yap, yap, yapping. You can't tell them whatever. And then there's this whole thing about something wrong with the school because of all the deaths, right? And that's right after there's a death in Korea, like little Kim, right? So there's uh spooky action at a distance happening here, right? Theoretically, it's you know, magic or a hex or some coincidence in the guy's at least in the guy's mind, spooky action at a distance. And whatever. Okay, so it goes on for a little bit.

SPEAKER_06 18:26

I want you to keep going. I'm gonna assert that that's attention driven, and I think I have an argument behind it, but keep going. I don't want to stop you.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Okay. So then as I get to that's my like second layer of mood in here happening there. And then the third and final layer, the third and final relation to the text starts at the intentionally obviously jarring line of is death that which gives meaning to life? Which itself, okay, fine, too sophisticated a thought. The actually the weirder part of it is the diction, that which gives. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 19:05

And then it's been very casual so far. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

And I will say, even actually, all the way through there, there are no quotation marks, right? There's no direct quote in the sense of a articulated literal quote with you know, with quotation marks. Okay, anyway. So what happens at the point where he says, um, isn't it the fundamental datum? That is the moment where I got Close Encounters of the Third Kind vibes. Considered as a fundamental datum. Considered as a fundamental datum. And here, I think it really looks to me. That was the moment before even any of the Helen or anything, where it seemed clear to me that it was it looked like he's in a Vonnegut style prison or experimentation zoo, some kind of thing like that. Um children's crusade, something like that. And so what's happening is the children are something children-like, something unhuman yet, something not what he is, which is like adult male or something like that. They're experimenting, but they're in control. They own this place, they are the ones in charge, and they're asking him to do things because his consent is needed for because they want to observe him do things. Right? And then finally, we get to the gerbil. Excuse me. And I don't know, I don't have a concrete thing about the gerbil, but it and I will say that this was the part that seemed on the sort of critical side. I mean that less literary criticism and more personal critical side. Elements of all three of these stories seemed foppish to me, and that's fine. Uh, I'll talk about this in a little bit later, but there's a song by Simon Agarfunkel that says it's called The Dangling Conversation, and it's a man who's drifting from his wife, and he says, We spoke of things that matter with words that must be said. Can analysis be worthwhile? Is the theater really dead? And this feels a lot like that. In universe, I think the gerbil, first of all, gerbils can't knock. So either something else knocked or the gerbil is having some kind of interesting power. But second, the children cheering wildly is the first time you get anything like that from them. The wild. It's not the cheering, it's the wild. So for me, the children are in charge. The gerbil is something they know about that he doesn't. Introduced, I think, as an experimental element by the children that is some new set of experiences he's going to have that they can observe him having as a part of the data, and that death is the fundamental datum for people for things like us. The gerbil is a next layer. That they're doing. Okay, so in conclusion, the end.

SPEAKER_02 22:03

That is a very interesting reading. I'm fascinated by Sir Robert and Dwight's readings of this story because both of you sort of created some context around it to make it realist. Like you both you were both thinking, how could this be a story that takes place in a recognizable genre? And Dwight was like, oh, this must be an unreliable narrator. It must be a crazy person. And we're getting the words of a crazy person in real life. And so Robert was like, it must be some sort of science fiction thing, and we're getting the experiences of a test subject.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

So can I say something about that?

SPEAKER_02 22:46

I didn't have I didn't do anything like that. That's interesting. Go on.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

So first, I just want to I basically agree with what you said, but I want to frame it slightly differently. I didn't think that. I wasn't thinking, you know, how can this be whatever? I don't exactly disagree with the characterization. I just want to say, yeah, as long as that's some kind of metaphor for what I was doing, yeah. And second is I've realized about myself that I do like absurdity personally, and I'm fundamentally a mechanic. I've just discovered that about myself over a few decades, and I will look for mechanics. I I look for I whether I want to or not, I look for mechanics, and I very rarely look at them from things like the author to me. I don't look at that layer. So just throwing that in there.

SPEAKER_02 23:37

So I'm actually that makes me your account of the school, Sir Robert, makes me very curious about the account that you would give of what's going on in Shower of Gold.

SPEAKER_06 23:50

What's the relationship between the school and the game show?

SPEAKER_02 23:55

No, no, no. Like, did did Sir Robert construct a what if any context similar to the experiment context of the school, did Sir Robert construct for a shower of gold? And say for the president, if you want as well. But also, we don't have to move off of the school yet. I'm just interested in I'm interested in Sir Robert right now.

SPEAKER_00 24:22

Alright, I'm happy to humor, but also anybody else jump in.

SPEAKER_05 24:26

But real quick, real quick, I just love the line. You may not be interested in absurdity, she said firmly, but absurdity is interested in you.

SPEAKER_00 24:34

Yeah, I think uh that was a really good line. That story of the three, I have not any hold on, sorry.

SPEAKER_02 24:42

Just that line.

SPEAKER_06 24:44

Which dear listeners is from Shower of Gold.

SPEAKER_02 24:47

Right, from Shower of Gold. That's like evangelicals will say, you may not be interested in God, but God is interested in you. I think Bartlemay has taken a like a Billy Graham line and he's put it in existentialism, and that's the joke there. Okay, go on, Sir Robert.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Excuse me. Of the three stories, I have not read any Bartlemay before, so this is my first exposure. Although I have read more than one short story. I would say that of the three, this one was the least foppish to me.

SPEAKER_05 25:21

Can you give a short definition of foppish?

SPEAKER_00 25:26

Sure. I mean it metaphorically, but foppish is being excessively concerned with excellent appearance. A foppish man is one who's, you know, maybe he would have been called at some courts a dandy, like uh all put together overly much. But who's that's what they have instead of substance. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 25:46

So is the author foppish? Or sorry?

SPEAKER_00 25:50

I don't think so. That's a great question. I don't think so. My my feeling isn't that it's the author, maybe a little bit, maybe, but it's really that it's the art that he's trying to make. He it felt like um intentionally trying to make it devoid of a certain kind of substance, but using what feels to me like tricks of the trade that in some cases were a little too visible to me. And so I felt like, okay, well, sure, if you want to make it empty that way, you know.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

That's interesting because I felt like where the tricks of the trade were the most visible was in shower of gold, and they become less and less visible, although the school is very obviously you know using a particular trick.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

I agreed with you about shower of gold being having it visible, and then it was less so in the president. I actually agree with that part, but I thought the school was more than the president.

SPEAKER_06 26:50

But I still don't know what you guys are seeing in these three exactly. You guys have agreed to that, and I feel like I'm out of the loop on it, but keep continue, we can come back to that.

SPEAKER_02 27:01

Okay. No, you know what? We'll come back to that and let Sir Robert answer the original question now. Sorry.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

Remind me the original questions just so I'd not saying crazy things. What's the new dream?

SPEAKER_02 27:12

I was asking you, because I I found it very interesting that you had created a kind of fictional context to slot the school into that made sense of it in a genre like science fiction, and whether you had done anything similar in your reading of Shower of Gold.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

I absolutely did. I and I now that you've said it, I can tell. But I certainly did build people out of the materials provided. So the main guy, what's his name? Peterson. The artist. Yeah. Um, what's that? The welder artist, the metallurgist. Peterson is not a good artist, but he has taken the whoa shots fired, but go on. Peterson's not a good artist, and it's not because he's before his time or anything like that. What he's done is he's taken on parts of the lifestyle of art people and put himself in a place where he's not appropriate, but he doesn't have the self-awareness to have imposter syndrome. That's tough for him, I guess. You see that by the way, there's a line, there's a particular line where you see it, especially, which is give me a second, I'll see if I can grab it. It's around the part with the cat.

SPEAKER_06 28:28

While you're finding that, it's interesting to me that he is an artist in such such a cartoonishly blue-collar utilitarian medium, and his art is taking chunks, uh, is taking objects that are already fully made and you know, zipping them together. So the idea that his his dealer has a valid point that chopping it in half and making two small ones is really a pretty approximately artistically valid move when all he did to get there was zot a couple of things together. So anyway. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:12

This is it's almost a self-aware. So one of the uh not really in any of these stories, but one of the things that Bartlemay himself does is pastiche, which is like he has a story about Cortez in South America where there are limousines, right? So he's stuck together things that don't belong. He's just welded a limousine into like as royal life. Yeah, so it I don't know what to make of that. Um, Sir Robert, are you thinking of the wait a minute, Peterson exclaimed, this thing is rigged.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

No, it was before that, it was the line about I can't even feed the cat, I can't even keep myself in beer. Yeah. And excuse me, I'm not saying the guy, the character as portrayed, is not serious, but is not like trying or something like that. But you know, he's either like a real idiot or just super irresponsible because those are on very different tiers of responsibility, right? And he's equating them. And it seems to me that he's generally taking that level of seriousness to what he's doing.

SPEAKER_06 30:23

That said, but it's even real quick, it's even narcissistically foolhardy because cats are famously the kinds of animals that you can throw outside and they can hunt and fend for themselves. So he's saying, I can't feed a self-feeding predator, and he's like whining and making up the need to even be responsible for it that way. I but there were a bunch of little things about cats. Like if you yank a cat by the tail, you can kill it. So I don't know if that was if there are like layers of cat death that are supposed to be present in there, but keep going.

SPEAKER_00 30:55

So I think he had a that I that makes sense to me, Josh. Um and Matt, with respect to the Billy Graham note, you know, the evangelism, I had not thought of that, but I that it does ring like that. The thing that I thought at the very end with the shower of gold, I don't understand specifically why a shower of gold, maybe there's not a specific reason, but I think what's happening in story is that he's having something close to a religious experience. I thought that before you said that other part. So I thought it was earnest and real. He's not trying to avoid one reading of that could be that it to me, that he's trying to avoid being put in the damaging situation that the first dude was about his mother. Do you love your mother? And there's this like public humiliation, and there's there's a tactic you can use for that, right? Which is to put yourself there first, and then there's nothing more they can do. And so you've created a defensive posture. I don't think that's what's happening here. You've got some contradictions, like my mother was a royal virgin. Okay, so then she's not a mother, but she is because she's a mother, but she's a virgin, you know, stuff like that. There's also possibly some Virgin Mary stuff in there, royal.

SPEAKER_02 32:04

Wait, but Sir Robert, I thought that you would recognize this before any of us. Isn't this a a reference to mythology? Isn't what a reference to mythology? Wasn't there someone whose mother was a royal virgin and his father was Zeus as a shower of gold? Oh, I didn't recognize that.

SPEAKER_06 32:24

Somebody is that true? Yeah, I I think it's Perseus or Theseus, one of those guys.

SPEAKER_00 32:29

You know what? I heard I read this, and until you just said that just now, my picture of this was a bathroom shower stall made of gold. Ah. This was the first time I heard you say I heard it as showering gold.

SPEAKER_06 32:44

It's Denay, Denai, who gets uh impregnated.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

He's the child in that story. Perseus. Oh. Okay, well, that makes that part way more coherent. I did not hear it as coherent. Actually, and this is. No, that's good. I I'm gonna make an unfair comparison. What's that refutation? I'm sorry, I missed it.

SPEAKER_05 33:12

Uh no, I'm just saying just talking. He's trying to talk, like Sir Robert was saying, to avoid being but Sir Robert said this isn't what he thinks it is. But you know, he's just trying to avoid being told that he's lying. So he's just pulling stuff up out of his brain and putting it in the room.

SPEAKER_06 33:28

He's presenting. He's finally being an artist and regurgitating other people's art as his autobiography, but keep going.

SPEAKER_00 33:35

Now I read it like that, actually. Now that I see now that there's a myth connection with a royal virgin and a shower of gold, it does look fake. I thought it was a different thing. The unfair comparison I was going to make, and it's unfair because of the 30-year difference or whatever it is, is the absurdity of this story has the same timber as King Missile songs, or that kind of dead milkman alt 90s kind of music punk stuff. And they were much, in my opinion, if this is the same style, they were much better at it. However, I like I said, it's an unfair comparison because they were much later and benefited from all the stuff, right? Standing on the necks of giants and all that. But I think that, you know, like King Missal's song Ed, right, which opens Ed was at the end of his rope, an expression he detested. There is no rope, he would shout at the laughing walls. But the rosy fingers of Dawn always insert themselves into the nose of unfulfilled promises. And that feels like the same thing as here, but with a smoother thing going on. Anyway, so I'll stop saying things I want to hear from you all.

SPEAKER_02 34:46

No, so I mean, may I offer my analysis of this final speech? Because it seems to me that it's clearly three different things welded together. But I don't know why.

SPEAKER_05 35:00

But there's sort of like the art that the president broke.

SPEAKER_02 35:03

Yeah, the three rating. But why? But the three different things are. He says he starts from yesterday in the typewriter in front of the Olivet, etc. And he says like random, stupid things that happened to him that really are absurd and have no meaning and are not even interesting at all. Right? Ending with golden earrings, there was a shootout at our house in Meat Street, and my mother shoved me in a closet to get me out of the line of fire.

SPEAKER_06 35:33

Well, he's proving how much he loves his mom by taking his air time to heroify hero, you know, heroify her, whatever.

SPEAKER_05 35:43

Yeah, but this section is sort of lie detector, so that you know that could also set off right, and these are definitely lies.

SPEAKER_02 35:52

So he's like triggering that's interesting. I didn't think that he would be deliberately triggering the lie detector here. But that's the first section. The first section is a bunch of genuinely random nonsense that didn't happen. The second section is like a very sincere plea for people to stop being absurd and start being sincere. He says, in this kind of a world, absurd if you will, possibilities nevertheless proliferate and escalate all around us, and there are opportunities for beginning again. I'm a minor artist, and my dealer won't even display my work if he can help it, but minor is as minor does, and lightning may strike even yet. That's his sincere desire. Don't be reconciled.

SPEAKER_04 36:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:38

Turn off your television sets, cash in your life insurance, indulge in mindless optimism, visit girls at dusk, play the guitar. How can you be alienated without having first been connected? Think back and remember how it was, like when you were a child, and you were very sincere. And then there's this tag with the cameras, and he gives a third section to this speech. And the third section, I've identified two quotes. First, he says, My mother was a royal virgin and my father a shower of gold. That's Theseus. Sorry. We identified the myth mythological reference of that, and then there's another sentence which I don't know the reference, but then as a young man, I was noble in reason, infinite in faculty, in form expressed and admirable in apprehension. That's from Hamlet. Yeah. I was gonna say I recognized that. He's quoting Shakespeare. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 37:30

So we've got the Greeks, Shakespeare, and what was the other I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 37:35

I don't know what the middle sentence is.

SPEAKER_06 37:37

But what I'm saying is that can you read it?

SPEAKER_05 37:40

My childhood was pastoral and energetic and rich in experiences which developed my character.

SPEAKER_02 37:46

Huh. But this is not just random nonsense. It's rant it's random nonsense, complete sincerity, and then literary reference?

SPEAKER_06 37:56

So are these the three? So what why are these three categories presented as three categories when we just have three radiator blocks that could just as well be chopped? Is there some meta narrative?

SPEAKER_05 38:15

Does the beginning of that last paragraph kind of it's what Peterson is thinking before he starts talking? I was wrong, Peterson thought. The absurdity is punishing me for not believing in it. I affirm the absurdity. On the other hand, absurdity is itself absurd. And then he starts talking.

SPEAKER_06 38:41

Absurdity is itself absurd. Minor is as minor does, feel like two sides of the same coin. This grappling with do you give in to the absurdity and change your code around it? Do you actually get good as an artist? Or do you just kind of like be minor and be mid and not have the capacity for uh imposter syndrome, as Sir Robert lamented?

SPEAKER_05 39:11

Yeah, I mean, it seems like he doesn't really want to be a great artist. He just wants to make some money.

SPEAKER_06 39:17

He wants to be well when the women show up, he says, I my art is substantial, or my I'm a real artist, not a I'm not selling for money here. I'm trying to be a sincere artist. Right.

SPEAKER_05 39:30

He he refuses to say he refuses to cut his piece in half just to make uh just to actually sell art, which you would think is the goal is to actually sell art, especially since you're in such a crude production art kind of thing where you just take the objects and couldn't be refusing to cut it in half because despite his dealers saying oh, that it's easier to sell, he doesn't want to then find out that even when he makes himself accessible, his art is crap anyway, and it doesn't sell. Right.

SPEAKER_06 40:06

Is that why there's three of them? You can't you have to put all three of them together and you can't cut them apart into like one and a half and one and a half, or three halves and three halves, right? That doesn't make sense. So you need all three of those categories of literature and God and whatever. Anyway, Matt, what were you saying?

SPEAKER_02 40:25

Oh because all he's doing is welding together junk, if you cut it apart, it's just junk. It's just junk. If you cut it in half, it's just an old radiator.

SPEAKER_06 40:39

So the only interesting thing about radiators is that they are the part of the car that is most like the lungs. They're the place where air and water meet and heat is exchanged, they are the great thermal regulator of the car. I don't know if that's anything, but I don't know either.

SPEAKER_00 40:58

I will point out if you cut it in half that way, the president's second and third boats smash the X Essex radiator and the Chevrolet radiator. But anyway, if you pull apart the two things welded together, you actually get useful things if they're not actually junk. What if you sold them as radiators?

SPEAKER_02 41:20

What if you just sold them as radiators, man?

SPEAKER_00 41:24

That's what you would get, right? He welds the two together and he says, Well, what about just unwelding them and then you can sell these two radiators? Or whatever.

SPEAKER_06 41:32

So, Robert, you are really giving this guy the beans.

SPEAKER_05 41:35

What does season's greetings mean anything?

SPEAKER_00 41:39

Where are you?

SPEAKER_05 41:40

It's just the title of the piece Seasons Greetings, and it's two radiators. Oh oh welded together.

SPEAKER_06 41:48

Is it supposed to, isn't it three radiators welded together? So it's supposed to be a snowman.

unknown 41:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:54

One, two, three. Uh a radiator Ford pickup and a 32 Essex.

SPEAKER_06 41:59

Alright, so they're three different sizes from a 32 Essex, that's a pretty small radiator because it's to a really small little four-cylinder.

SPEAKER_05 42:07

Okay, so it's it's just a it's a snowman. Okay, I gotcha.

SPEAKER_06 42:11

Yeah, they're three very different sizes because they're three very different size engines.

SPEAKER_00 42:15

I never would have realized it's a snowman. Um, I have two questions. One is, I would like to know, Matt, what you're doing instead of a world building a world with the story. And two is I mentioned before that I find myself effortlessly being a mechanic anytime I'm in a situation at all. Right. And that benefits me in that I usually can detect incoherence really well, at least in some frames. You know, I have to do certain kinds of frame switching to like check a lot of things. I couldn't find a meaningful frame for the whole thing with the president. It did not fit mechanically into the world, into a world I could find.

SPEAKER_02 43:03

Okay, so this is the one part of Shower of Gold that I did do some mechanical genre thinking, which is the president. Because I had this idea, which I eventually rejected, that well, actually, tell me what you guys think of this idea. About two pages from the end, in the last section, when the program begins, and they're now the announcer said, Let's play Who Am I? And here's your host, Bill Lemon. No, he doesn't look like the president, Peterson decided. Like, there's a Oh no, here. The first paragraph of the last section. The master of ceremonies, Peterson noted without pleasure, resembled the president and did not look at all friendly. So I had this idea that the people who were barging in on him and doing stuff to him in the time between when he signed up for the show. And when he actually went on the show, were people employed by the show to torment him?

SPEAKER_00 44:06

I think that too. The girls that came in, it seemed to me clearly that, and we actually see them switching context later, I think. Do we see them again? I can't remember now. But I think you're right. Well, right.

SPEAKER_02 44:18

That's the reason I don't I didn't put too much like reliance on this explanation is that the president is the only one, I think. Like his barber doesn't show up in the show. The girls don't seem to show up in the show. The dealer doesn't show up in the show. The cat piano player doesn't show up in the show. It's only the president who shows up in his apartment and then shows up in the show later. So I was like, I don't know what to do with that, but it's like hinting at maybe there's you do you remember that movie where never mind, there's a movie where they do that to somebody and they like him. The movie's called They convince him to commit suicide at the end.

SPEAKER_00 44:59

Yeah, the game. But then it's not the game. It's not yeah, the game. Yeah. Great movie, by the way. So the ladies go ahead.

SPEAKER_05 45:08

Y'all are reading this story, the narrator's telling you things that are patently absurd. What is going on in your head if it is not this guy is either nuts or like pretending to be nuts? Like he is what in here is patently absurd, Dwight? Like everything.

SPEAKER_06 45:29

We need to stop everything and have a long frank conversation about what you about how you do it, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_05 45:35

But just all the stuff, everything. The president suddenly shows up with Secret Service people. I'm like, oh, okay, I guess this is happening now. We're clearly in the mind of a deluded person.

SPEAKER_06 45:49

So dreams are mentioned in the story, and to me, anything that gets mentioned becomes part. It's like Calvin Ball. Once you say it out loud, it's a rule. It's a real rule because you said it. And so that's happening lexically, it's happening in terms of story mechanic, it's happening in terms of wisdom. Like these women, the three women in the chunky sweaters and jeans who are homely but energetic, right? They quote Pascal and they help, they try to be helpful and speak to the absurdity of the realities facing. And he gives them a yeah, I I know, I know he said that. I know Pascal said that. And then they one of them's like, kiss me, I need love. So you get this same uh sudden interjection of a really clunky but really uh earnest demand for immediate sexual activity that you get in the school and in the school, right? The kids all suddenly say, Have sex with the the lady. We want to see it. Do it right now. Take your clothes off and show us graphic violent sex now. Sex now, you know. And they don't start cheering, but they all like a bunch of them say, very direct, very sociopathic, adult, crazy stuff. Anyway, as soon as those ladies say that to him, he tele he's gone. He suddenly he's in the bar having a drink, complaining to someone. So, you know, they make a pass at him and he teleports out of there. I'm I was curious to know what role you saw those women as having, given that if they're if dreams are mentioned and we see the story loop three times, if we look through the existence of everything in the story through that sort of dream-like lens, then everything becomes valuable as its archetype in its in radius context. Like presumably, we should look at it with its value within the paragraph, but then also the story has three pretty distinct loops. We should probably look at the thing within the context of that loop that it's in. To me, that was the way that I was putting together meaning, and so I didn't need to come up with any other sort of meaning-making construct that Mr. Talamini pointed out, right?

SPEAKER_02 48:21

Yeah, I would say something like every short story, every literary or experimental short story is like a science fiction story in that it has its own rules, but unlike a science fiction story, it has no obligation to explain those rules to you.

SPEAKER_06 48:42

Isaac Asimov doesn't exist for your little subgenre, you're forging your own rules, right?

SPEAKER_02 48:48

Oftentimes in the beginning of a science fiction or a fantasy story, a character is thrown into a confusing situation, and then where the fantastical elements of the story appear to them for the first time and like confuse them, and they think, What's going on? Am I going crazy? And then later in the book, it's revealed what the rules are behind that system, and they learn how to like how to manipulate those rules and make friends with that world and it and live in that world in a rational way, and then they solve whatever problem, and then the book is over. But in a short story like this, that whole second, that whole like last two-thirds of the story is not considered necessary. So the story functions according to its own rules that it makes up, and maybe you can figure them out and maybe not.

SPEAKER_00 49:44

I think I must have, I'm hearing y'all talk about this, and I was looking through to look at Dwight's question and about these rules, Matt. And I think I have a much stronger affinity for those rules than for some other things. But I was looking through and I wasn't finding anything that was particularly absurd. But I think what I was noticing then as I was trying to figure that out while y'all were talking was I think my there's this like spectrum that goes from something like peculiar to strange to absurd to bizarre to surreal, right? Some kind of like that, I would put those on a line of some kind. And I think my threshold for what I would call surreal, I'm sorry, bizarre uh absurd is much closer towards the surreal than maybe than what y'all are saying. My sensibility is maybe kind of off-kilter from yours.

SPEAKER_05 50:46

So you're you're sitting in your room one night and suddenly a tall, foreign-looking man with a switchblade, big as a butcher knife, walks in without knocking and starts talking to you about cat pianos, and you're like, oh, this is not absurd.

SPEAKER_06 51:02

I think I now Dwight's giving you the means.

SPEAKER_00 51:06

I think I actually would not qualify that as absurd. And I'll tell you why. Okay.

SPEAKER_06 51:12

Um have you seen what the foreigners are carrying these? I'm sorry, there's just a little bit of light xenophobic humor going on.

SPEAKER_00 51:19

I think that so in linguistics, there's this set of maxims that are how we do make sense of conversation. And they're called Grice's maxims, this guy Grice. And there's four of them. But I don't know if I can recall all four, but they are basically we assume that the other person says is saying something, and that one, it's relevant, two, it has meaning, like it has content in it, three, it is sufficient or something like that to answer these kinds of things, right? And so I think I lean on that. I think I naturally go there. And if there's a dude coming in and talking to me about the cat piano, I would say things, I would have a reaction that's like, hey, you don't have a right to be here. But I don't think that qualifies me for absurd yet. I think it would be more like this is a very oh, you know what? Here's an experience I had today. I went to Popeye's with a friend, Popeye's chicken place. He was like, Hey, you want to get some lunch? He whatever, and I said, sure. So I go to the Popeye's, we get there, order some food, they're making some chicken tenders or whatever. And so I go to the restroom for a second, and I walk out, and as I'm walking out of the restaurant, a man with a broom and no shirt walks in, sorry, not the restaurant, the restroom. A man holding a broom with no shirt walks in past me and he says, Hey, you have a shirt. Could you get me some coffee? This is a true story today. Yeah. And I say, No, that's a little too much for me right now. And he kind of looks around and says, Okay. And then continues on into the bathroom and I leave. Right. And I sat down and I said to my friend Ken, I said, I just had an unusual experience. I might have said strange. There's a man. Not absurd. I told him what I just told you, right? Yeah. Let's temper our language, gentlemen. He said, actually, the guy had said, You have a shirt. Can you get me some coffee? And I said, No, that's a little much too much for me right now because I was thinking about other things. And he said, Somebody took my shirt. And I said, Sorry. And then I left, right? And he went on his way. Anyway, the point is, I find that to be a peculiar exchange, but not even close to absurd.

SPEAKER_02 53:55

So, okay, let me break into this conversation about semantics with a couple of observations. First, in this story, we don't have to grapple with the question of what does what does absurdity mean? Because in the on page two, the second page, Miss Arbor says, Mr. Peterson, are you absurd? Her enormous lips were smeared with a glowing white cream for some reason. I beg your pardon. I mean, Miss Arbor said earnestly. Do you encounter your own existence as gratuitous? So that's what the show means by absurd. And absurdity is a technical term from existential philosophy, which is what a lot of the language in this story comes from. But we don't have to know any existentialist philosophy to know what absurd means, because it means that something is existentially gratuitous, which is to say it fails that first test that you're talking about, Sir Robert. It's not relevant. It's not relevant to existence.

SPEAKER_06 55:05

Yeah, it's not participating in the larger scheme of existence sincerely.

SPEAKER_00 55:09

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Second, wait, hold on, hold on. Josh, it's not participating in the larger what of existence sincerely.

SPEAKER_06 55:18

Scheme. You could you could set, you could swap out that word scheme, schema cosmos. It's not participating in the cosmos sincerely, because the cosmos is everything that was created by God, whereas something absurd is something that is quasi-existing. It's getting lexical existence through our talking about it, through the concept being constructed on the back of objects of meaning that are normally used to coherently describe the reality of the cosmos, and now they've been rearranged to represent an idea that is not part of the cosmos.

SPEAKER_00 55:57

I think that that statement. Can I say this part, Matt? Is that all right? Please. Okay. Please. I think that the statement that the woman makes, Arbor, Ms. Arbor, about absurdity, she says, or sorry, he's he says, sorry, Miss Arbor says to Peterson, Do you believe in absurdity? He says, Are you interested in absurdity? No, I don't. Do you believe in it? You may not be interested in absurdity, but absurdity is interested in you, which is, I think, probably the most reasonable thing in the story to call absurd, based on her prior definition. The idea that there is something that is existentially gratuitous, but is interested in you doesn't work.

SPEAKER_02 56:45

Yeah. No, and and I found it in this word Miss Arbor said earnestly, right?

SPEAKER_00 56:53

Yeah, tell me, tell me why you emphasized that. I didn't catch it.

SPEAKER_02 56:56

Oh, so the correct mode for absurdity is irony. Because when things are absurd and they don't connect, then what you say doesn't mean what it means. It means something else. Because language has exploded.

SPEAKER_05 57:11

No, it doesn't mean anything. Right, right, right. Irony has meaning. Irony is, you know, irony is an absurdity.

SPEAKER_06 57:20

Irony is a negative value, whereas this is an absurd, it's like the square root of negative one. It's imaginable.

SPEAKER_05 57:29

It's tangent to the whole thing.

SPEAKER_06 57:31

Let me let me say it a different way.

SPEAKER_02 57:34

Let me say it a different way. At the end, he says, How can you be alienated without first having been connected? And what I noticed when I saw that Miss Arbor said, Are you absurd earnestly? is that she is really connected to the proposition that everybody and everything is alienated. She is not alienated from the idea of absurdity. She's very connected to it and loves it and is constantly pushing it on people.

SPEAKER_05 58:10

Okay, so at the end, why are they changing the camera angle to try to throw him off? It's I I was taking that as they're like, oh no, we can't just go to dead air. We have to like cut to something else.

SPEAKER_06 58:26

Well, they're trying to make him look absurd. They have to keep the program running, and they want to make a spectacle of him, but he's making he's but he's too smart for it. Right. And so he is, I felt like that was the part where the author was looking into our eyes and trying to say, go outside, sing a song, like actually look at me. Like I'm trying to look into your eyes, reader, in the same way that my character is trying to keep the keep his eyes on the red light to actually get his message out to the audience.

SPEAKER_05 59:00

But the MC tries to cut him off in the in after the first portion of the last speech. I was taking that all as like, oh no, this has gone wrong. But if he's actually being absurd, shouldn't they be like, oh, this is gold, this is exactly what?

SPEAKER_02 59:15

No, no, because that's the thing. They're not actually after absurdity. This is it's just the show is just like Jerry Springer. They're just bringing people on and shaming them. It has nothing to do with absurdity. They're just putting this window dressing of the language of existentialism on top of it.

SPEAKER_06 59:36

We're looking for people with weird ideas who weird things have happened to, and then we're gonna shame you and get you off kilter and make you look absurd.

SPEAKER_02 59:46

I don't know. That's my reading of it. I don't understand it. It's clear that there's something intentional and structural going on with absurdity and irony and like all this stuff, but I don't understand what it is. Um I wanted to show Sir Robert one section in the president. Okay, here we go.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:11

So is this the story of the president or the section of shower?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:15

Sorry, no, this isn't the section of shower of gold that is about the president. So he's welding, he walks out of the refrigerator and he eats a sandwich. And then the door to the loft burst open, and the president ran in, trailing a 16-pound sledge. His first blow cracked the principal weld in season's greetings, the two halves parting like lovers, clinging for a moment and then rushing off in opposite directions. Twelve Secret Service men held Peterson in a paralyzing combination of secret grips. And this next sentence is absurd because Peterson's reaction is alienated from the situation. He has a reaction here which is completely superfluous to the requirements of the scene. I did catch this sentence when I was going through the story. He's looking good, Peterson thought. Very good, healthy, mature, fit, trustworthy. I like his suit. So that's I think that is a genuine moment of real absurdity reaching out to Peterson.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:30

So I I saw that as a very structured moment. Go on, Sir Robert.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:34

I was in a car accident once. Nobody seriously hurt or anything, but I was driving in my minivan, it got totaled, and there was a pack of wild teenagers in the other car. And what happened was we were going through green light, they did not have a left-hand turn, and we were just going past each other intersection, and they turned left, and I was going like 35 or 40, and they were probably going, you know, something around there, but turning. And we're passing each other and they start turning. And if you actually do the math, you're looking at like a a second, a half second, right? And in that time, I thought a number of things, this is about 12 years ago, 10 years ago. But I thought, I really didn't expect this. As the car's, you know, doing its deal. I really didn't expect this. But it is a really nice night. I'm looking around, right, at the thing. I wonder if we're gonna be late to the movie. Adam and I were going to a movie. Wonder if we're gonna be late to the movie. I should tighten up a little bit because they're about to hit us. Right. And I don't know why, but I was pulled out of the moment into what felt way too long. Like there's too much content in it. Um, I read this and I did read it as absurd, but I didn't read it as unrealistic.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:59

A secret service man bit him in the back of the neck.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:03

Yeah, that was pretty absurd.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:05

Then the president lifted the sledge high in the air, turned toward Peterson, and said, Your liver is diseased? That's a good sign. Suddenly the president is talking like Miss Arbor. That's a good sign. You're making progress. You're thinking. And then you just dis you're just on to the next scene. We're at the barber. But I don't want to I don't want to say that Sir Robert's experience of this story is in any way illegitimate. Just my experience of it as having moments of genuine absurdity in it is founded upon sentences like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:42

I still Sorry for the dog bark. I still I definitely feel it is disjointed. There are parts of it that certainly feel there are some parts that I can say, like, yeah, okay, I think that he's going. This is part of the foppishness, by the way. There are a lot of parts where I thought he's going for absurdity. I was pulled out of the story and into the author and was like, okay, sure, fine. Right? I don't find that absurd. Okay. I find that You lost suspension of dis of disbelief. I did. And that does away with my feeling of absurdity, like my classification of it, because it puts a mechanic to what's happening. I do, by the way, I really like absurdity. It's my favorite kind of humor. I very much think that. Doesn't he want that?

SPEAKER_06 1:04:31

Doesn't he want you to come out of suspension of disbelief, Sir Robert, Dwight, Matt? Wait, you mean the author's brain? Yeah, doesn't the author want you to experience the art artificially? Doesn't he want you to like meta narrativize, metacognate about, and not just experience the story?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:53

I think in Shower of Gold, he definitely wants you to think this is a story that I'm reading. Right. Is this story absurdist?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:03

Okay. I don't want to be harsh on Bartle Me. How do you say it? How do you say his name? Bartle May. But it seems that seems to me, I think you might be right. And that seems to me to be sort of hackish or not as artful as other kinds of absurdity that I've encountered and I've enjoyed. I do think that the idea of going, wow, the absurdity of that is great. I've said this before, Dwight, you'll remember, but what we were having some like cocktail type of things with LT and Dwight and a couple, somebody else, and uh LT sipped something and said, ooh, it has kind of an oaky afterbirth.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:42

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:42

Which maybe he got the I don't know. But so the great part about that is right, like you stay in it, you're pull you have the whole set of experiences, but it's it was artfully done in a way that keeps you there. And then after Fact you can experience its kind of absurd afterbirth.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:03

No, I agree with you. I think that art that is about the kind of art that it itself is a lower form of art than art which is about something like real in the world.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:16

Yeah. Movies about movie making and all of that. I call that masturbatorial cinema. So it there's a what about Go ahead.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:25

There's a thing that Douglas Adams likes to do where he says almost entirely but not quite almost but not quite entirely unlike something. Because you can't say something that is actually entirely unlike. You've moved into what is I think the like existentially defined absurdity. Right? And it's it so what I think Douglas Adams was doing when he said he he used it quite a few times in his stories. I think what he was trying to do is something like what Bartle May is trying to do is like I'm painting these little pictures for you, and they're real close to being absurd, but they're not they still are pictures. Like if you actually said something absurd, grammar would fall apart.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:18

Right.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:19

To me, all of Go ahead, Matt.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:21

To be able to put it into a story at all means that it has not reached 100% absurdity.

SPEAKER_06 1:07:28

To me, all of these, this whole genre of self-aware, absurd, looped narrativization seems like you're just dealing with the angst of being a gestalt, conscious being who struggles with everything getting sucked into solipsistic meaning. Like because your brain is always making meaning out of everything, you're always going to be up against the question: did I just make this meaning up because I'm the one making meaning? Right. And that's the whole engine of exploration and angst and truth at the heart of this modern absurd storytelling thing, you know, dealing with that anxiety.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:17

So in In A Shower of Gold, the story has absurd elements. And one of the most absurd ones is where the president comes in, and the story is explicitly about absurdity because there are characters in the story talking about absurdity, and then the story itself has absurd things happen. In The President, it seems like I sort of conceptualized the story The President, which was the other one that we read, as like just taking that one section from Shower of Gold with the President and sort of expanding it, expanding it to full story length. Right. But another interesting thing about it is that it has a moment at the end, which I think is very much like the end of the school. We cheered until the ushers tore up our tickets. It's the word cheer in there.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:17

And it also kind of ends at a yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:21

Is there a new gerbil in this?

SPEAKER_00 1:09:23

What's going on? The closest candidate to that for me is the mother of the president.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:29

Yeah, isn't the president a Christ image, right? I think that one the one Secret Service guy biting him on the neck is supposed to be a Malchus reference. It's a inappropriate violence on the part of a member of his inner circle. It lends to the theory that this is a religious experience because he's seeing the president as this neurological swap-in for Jesus. You know, he's looking well, he's looking powerful, he's looking healthy. I don't know. It felt there are 12 Secret Service agents. Right. And and he's but he's the one being apprehended, right? He's the Christ figure. So that's the falseness of it. That's why Jesus is the president here, right? The absurdity still holds up, right? Because he's not really Jesus. He's the president. He's this guy who's the exact opposite of Jesus. He's this very obvious lambast of uh his suit is blue. I felt like we were supposed to hear Pascal's reference to everybody being in awe of the Grand Turk because of his 10,000 Janissaries and his silk and his high gold throne. It's just the perception of power and authority because we've all agreed to it. He's literally the picked person. He doesn't have anything about him other than what we picked, and yet he's ascribing all these traits to this guy. They're just, they're obviously not there, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:00

I I don't know any with any level of certainty about the following, but so the if there is some kind of symbolism of Jesus and disciples, apostles, whatever, they do an odd thing by the serviceman, the secret serviceman taking communion by eating the body of There you go.

SPEAKER_06 1:11:20

What's his head? Unless you eat my flesh.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:24

I don't know if that's real or not.

SPEAKER_06 1:11:25

I'm just Oh Peterson, he's Peter, he's the rock on which Christ will found the son of Peter, he's the rock on which Christ will found the church.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:33

Do you think it might be a retelling of the Grand Inquisitor? Where the main character is the Pope and is encountering I mean, maybe.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:42

I don't know enough to be a little bit more. It's hard for me to not I don't want to do this, but I'm just telling you this is what's happening in my head, is like, oh well Mr. Bartlemay obviously has heard of the account of Christ's arrest, and he's just pulling stuff out to put into his absurd picture.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:02

No, I think that's completely I think that that's what most people think Bartlemay is doing most of the time, and they like it.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:09

Yeah, for me, it I'm I'm denigrating the action by by putting it that way.

SPEAKER_06 1:12:16

Yeah. Yeah, you said he's just putting stuff in. Yeah, that's I'm accusing you of accusing him of purposelessly incorporating stuff, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:12:28

He's like the artist, he's just welding some stuff together, whereas a artful short story writer will make references in this way and will have them actually tie to things.

SPEAKER_06 1:12:45

It feels like he's kicking a football into some uprights. Off to this side, we have over-structured literature that's like Dickens. Here is where he wants to be, and then out this way would be like, you know, super hyper crazy, absurd, and or past the rails. So he wants to split the uprights of what Sir Robert was describing. You like this goalpost, I think, would define good, not good being suspension of disbelief being broken. Whereas this is noticing that you're having to like put together some rules to keep making sense of the story that you're hearing, and he's somewhere in here. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:32

I think so. The absurdity that I'm more familiar with. I as I said, I do particularly enjoy absurdity as I understand it, which I did not catch the definition that Miss Arbor gave, Matt. So thank you for pointing that out. Absurdity as I have encountered it is significantly more absurd and is cohesive via grammar mostly, not ideas, as much as making things that are something like grammatically valid and conceptually invalid. And I can I I could give examples if that's helpful or anything, but it doesn't matter. But this was so much more, I think the word might be concrete, uh conceptually, like mentally concrete compared to the kinds of things that I have experienced a lot more of and appreciated in certain ways that I didn't actually recognize it as absurd in the same way.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:34

Yeah, and there's there are the art of the short story has gotten significantly less coherent, or there are practitioners who are very nearly completely incoherent at book length. Like, I mean, you mentioned you know Finnegan's wake. But um I wanted to go back to something Dwight said, because I think Dwight that you almost asserted the same thing that I was trying to grapple towards in my opening remarks, which is that there's something about a shower of gold which is less artful, it's like more obvious in what it's doing, and then by the time we get to the school, it's more artful and it's like more hidden the thing that he's doing. Anyway. Got it.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:25

Is part of that simply because with the school it's more narratively coherent? Like the things that happen, the plot is more absurd, but narratively it's more coherent. That may be. It may be that I would assert that.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:42

Like what maybe the thing that he discovered is that you can do your play with absurdity once you have married the story to a really predictable form, like the escalation form. Like maybe what he figured out was like, okay, we build a structure that ever that everybody will just get without having to be told, like, we're gonna escalate over and over and over again, and then once I've set that up, I can do my real stuff under the surface.

SPEAKER_06 1:16:16

But the escalation curve is part of what's happening. It's not just a it's not a uh arithmetic slope, and it's not even a geometric slope, it's like logarithmic, it just goes flying off into the stratosphere at the end.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:34

Yeah, I think in Shower of Gold would happen for me, I mean, I listened to this like three or four times. It wasn't just like once over. And you're Matt, you like mentioning the definition of absurdity. There's a lot of things I miss because I'm just like, oh, okay, I guess we're doing this now. And by the time I've you know, accepted this new weird scene that's happening, I've missed stuff that's happened, you know, because it took me a second to be like, oh, we're no longer at the barber, or we're no longer captured by 12 secret servicemen, we're just at the barber, or you know, it's just we've jumped to this other thing. Whereas in in the school, yeah, there's this one thing after another, but it's not right.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:27

I mean, until you get to the there's only one real transition.

SPEAKER_06 1:17:31

Yeah. Yeah. The president seemed to be the one where I felt like he was making fun of people, us, society, the most because there was but part of that was just because we were focusing on the president, and the purpose to me of the president in these stories is to poke fun at our belief that we have made a person with these qualities by picking them.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:04

Made a person with which qualities?

SPEAKER_06 1:18:07

Uh he just he gushes about the president.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:11

He gushes about him in terms of how are you talking about the story of the president or the portion of Shower of Gold?

SPEAKER_06 1:18:23

Uh both, right? Because in the in when he pops in, he comes in with power, he smashes apart the thing. He's got like John Henry. The only American mythos that I can think of that involves a hammer and stuff is John Henry. So to me, it felt like this weird little Jesus pastiche with a John Henry homage in it. That's where my mind went. But so he's powerful, he shows up like a superhero, he smashes the thing, he looks great in his blue suit, right? And then you go over to the president, and like in the love song of Jay Alfred Proofrock, you got all these people talking to each other, and there's criticism, and there's all this anxiety about what other people think and whatnot. I felt some of that same kind of energy whenever people were talking about the president. It seemed sycophantic, it seemed uh cultish, that there was this cult of personality around him in the way that they ascribed things to him. And then you see that he's just this, you know, shriveled little anxious man who's got a bad look on his face as soon as he's done reading his lines and whatnot. And so it seemed to be very mocking, like it felt like the author was laying into people who are sincere about their estimation of figures of authority. Like he seems to be generally tearing down authority figures because he does it in this big general cartoonish, you know, swipe at this figure of the president. Did you guys come away with any sense of what he was trying to accomplish with this story?

SPEAKER_02 1:20:10

I thought he might have seen the future.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:14

I was thinking that this whole time. I didn't want to be gauche and mention it for the same reason we're not supposed to talk about Hitler. I figured we weren't allowed to talk about DT. But yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:23

Well, also, I mean, he might be talking about Hitler. Hitler was not a very tall man.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:29

Oh, what was up with the four heights? I've I know what the Toledotes are in the Old Testament, but I couldn't figure out.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:36

Yeah, the mother. What's up with the four?

SPEAKER_06 1:20:39

Was there any math there?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:41

I don't know, but one thing that is little is known about her. She presents herself in various guises. Right? Baba Yaga. He presents her, or whatever. She's doing this in various guises. All of them seemed not normal, but okay, a little lady, 5'2 with a cane, sure, fine. A big lady, 7'1, okay. Like that's a big, big woman, yeah, right. With a dog, okay, fine. I mean, you know, whatever. A wonderful old lady, 4.3, you're getting some kind of like old world thing, with an indomitable spirit. All right, so she's really old. Anoxious old sack, six foot eight, excodate, because of an opera operation. Now, I don't know what's exactly intended here, but the excadate line there is super interesting. That's not having a tail, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:21:40

Oh, I thought it was not having a liver. Well, let me look it up. What does it mean?

SPEAKER_06 1:21:46

Uh oh, interesting. In Venoveritas, your liver is damaged.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:51

Okay. Here's what I read from that. She has no tail. Now, that's super, super interesting. By itself, okay, whatever. It's a little weird. But he in the beginning refers to the president as 48 inches high at the shoulder.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:08

Right. Right. You don't measure the horse at the shoulder, you measure horses that way. Or dogs or whatever, right?

SPEAKER_06 1:22:18

Quadrupeds, yeah. You measure quadrupeds at the shoulder, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:21

So and that's her mother, that's his mother, I mean. Interesting. Without a tail, and without a tail, because of an operation, right? So with a tail, but missing it. And the boy or the president, the young man, old man, whatever he is, is being measured like an animal, too. She presents herself in guises, and that's it. For me at least, as somebody who is being a mechanic and making a coherent world, uh, this gives me the impression here of some kind of what's the word? I I almost have a word for it. White W-I-G-H-T. Um, I get this like spirit thing, and the mom I mean, and has this strange creature who is able to who's able to fit into this world in part because of its strangeness, right? But is the strangeness alone enough? The strangeness is like a compelling factor that they've elected this person, not the other way around. But like it's too insistent.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:37

Isn't it isn't it too insistent that the president is strange? They keep the the narrator keeps saying, Oh, he's strange, he's strange, he's strange, he's strange. Like, is he really strange?

SPEAKER_06 1:23:53

Well, uh, isn't that supposed to point to the fact that the president is the kind of figure who is always a off-center or deeper meaning kind of like don't ever bother looking at the president for being the president. He's not the president, he's something else. He's strange. I don't mean the president when I say the president.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:17

He's not like other presidents we've had. So there's yeah, that he's not like other presidents we've had, and a list of them, right? But listen, interest. This narrator is not a third-person omniscient, right? This is a first-person narrator, right? And so we're not getting the world insisting on the strangeness, right? We're not getting quote-unquote reality insisting on the strangeness. This is this guy insisting on the strangeness, which is a whole other ballgame.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:46

And this guy also is very oddly insistent that about his own eyes, his warm, kind eyes. Where are you horse? In the first paragraph, I regarded her with my warm, kind eyes, and then at least one other time at the on the last page, on the last section, first paragraph, I regarded her with my warm, kind eyes.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:16

I think the other thing that happens a whole bunch, and I I don't know the relationship, Matt, but you're causing me to what you're saying rhymes with something I noticed, which is that occupation with the idea of whether he's right for the time. How does he say that? Our period is perhaps not so choice as a previous period, still. Let's see. Uh oh, is he right for the period? That comes up several times. And like, are we in sorry, let me say this too. This story I found more and more on the in the realm of the foppish as an aside, just throwing that in there. I think that's what you might be picking up on too, Matt. But he's asking something like the narrator, I mean, is asking something like, he is strange, but is he strange enough? Is he right for the period? That's a question. Asserting asking if he's strange enough is an assertion about the period that we're in, right? Is he strange enough for what? And then he's preoccupied with his idea of that. What does that have to do with his eyes? I don't know, but you're right that he's like the man himself is a product of the period, or perhaps a constituent of it, is regarding this one who may be strange enough for our period. Right.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:33

There's a parallel in this story with the school of the fainting, is a little bit like all of the deaths.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:42

And it just happens. And then, Matt, you might have noticed this, but I didn't quite notice it when you brought it up. But right at the end, the president steps through a curtain, kind of like the gerbil appearing, and then they all start clapping. Like the kids started tickets.

SPEAKER_06 1:27:02

At the end of the curtain, like you tear up tickets for things where there are curtains.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:08

Generally, like presidents step out, sure there's applause, but then they also talk, and then you know, ushers tear up tickets or whatever. Like here, all we have is clapping.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:22

The curtain is roaring. I don't understand that. I thought it might be a curtain of people. Uh yeah. I don't have no idea.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:30

No, I think it's just a clever bit of creative writing. When you're on the other side of the thick curtain, it sounds quiet, and then you push past the curtain and you hear the roar. And it's like it can feel like it's coming from the curtain. Okay.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:48

Um, but he's not talking. There's there's a singing. I I was missing the performance, but I was wrong about that.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:57

Well, let me make an assertion which may or may not be true. The president doesn't even do anything. Everybody's constantly asserting things about the president, and all he does is smile. One, he smiles, two, he waves, three, he moves his head back and forth. He steps through a curtain. At one point, I think he talks, but nobody can repeat what he has said. Yeah. The only person who does anything, uh, the only person connected with the president who does anything is his mother. Like, it's like. Oh, you guys, I think there's so there's a moment. I'm gonna say something else. This is even less connected and even less useful for you guys, unless you've studied Ulysses. But James Joyce's Ulysses, the Great Modernist masterpiece, it is stuck inside of the stream of consciousness of these two particular men who are fairly self-obsessed and nerdy. And the book is a dense hodgepodge of references that have to be decoded, and it's really annoying and painful to get through it, but also deeply beautiful and moving, but also annoying and painful. And you go through this massive book, it's just so dense and difficult, and then you get to the final chapter, and at last there's a third point of view character who is Molly Bloom's wife, and we're in her head, and she has she's simple, she's emotional, she's not self-obsessed, she's remembering things, and it's like a relief. Like the final chapter of Ulysses is like being let out of prison into a sunlit field.

SPEAKER_06 1:29:57

Like the prison of these self-obsessed men into the heart of this, like the prison of the minds, the prison of the prison consciousness of the minds of the consciousness of these men.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:10

Their consciousness is obsessed with their minds, and we get her perspective, and she is feeling things instead of like thinking about everything all the time. And I sensed a little bit like he's copying that a little bit with the president's mother. Like the president, when he says, I could tell you about his mother's summer journey in 1919. Have we had any other dates, specific dates in this whole story?

SPEAKER_05 1:30:39

He had the list of presidents, but that's about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:42

To Western Tibet. Have there been any other specific named locations? I don't think so. Oh no, city center, never mind, and the college. But the dandeman and the red bear, and how she told off the path and headman, instructing him furiously to rub up his English or get out of her service. Like suddenly it's telling an actual story for like a sentence, and we're like, oh Hugh, a story. And then he was like, Well, but what manner of knowledge is this?

SPEAKER_06 1:31:12

It felt very it felt like a Catholic, it felt like he was taking a big dig at Catholics who see this relationship between Mary and Jesus, and he's like hyper extending the metaphor to its even more absurd conclusion with you know, Jesus being this president who's really just a thing that you look at that has a series of appearance factors, but is of nothing substance and exists much more substantially in the criticism around him, whereas his mom is, you know, somehow real, somehow preternaturally real, like a Baba Yaga or something. She's some white or other super I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:55

We shouted until the ushers set off flares enforcing silence. What theater do they set off flares in?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:04

A war theater. Sylvia, I guess, is singing her part while the orchestra tunes itself.

SPEAKER_06 1:32:12

So why is Sylvia and Miss Arbor? Why do we have two tree names? Are they is this a garden knowledge of good and evil garden kind of thing? Is this tree of life?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:25

I will tell you that that's a great. I don't know, Josh. That's interesting. That reminds me of it might connect to, I'm not sure. When we hear about the president giving speeches, ah, here it is. The camera credits fade over an image of the president standing stiffly, his arms rigid at his sides, looking to the right and left, as if awaiting instructions. On the other hand, the handsome meliorist who ran against him, all zest and programs, was defeated by a fantastic margin. Yeah. A meliorist is right, melior is better in Latin. A meliorist is somebody who believes that we can make things better and brighter. We can we can do it. You know, let's let's get there. And he's all zest and programs. And he's running in contrast to this candidate, this president, devoid of content, as far as I can tell, right? And was defeated by a fantastic margin. I I don't know what that means for this, but if it's knowledge of tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life, possibly there's a parallel to these two candidates here.

SPEAKER_06 1:33:40

Yeah, interesting. And I don't want to take away from that at all. I think that that is happening here at a deeper root level, and then the more superficial instance is it's a criticism of a society where a guy with the message we can make this better, is crushed by a guy who got put out there by someone who has had her tail removed. I mean, that feels like is that a Lilith thing? Did Lilith have a tail? Who's is that a dog image? Is she is it a I don't understand the tail.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:24

The description of the two presidents talking that Sir Robert mentioned make makes me think of Nixon versus Kennedy's uh thing, except Nixon lost that. It wasn't until the next time he ran that he won. But the you know, appearing nervous and unhappy and all that stuff. So Goldwater.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:53

Isn't it strange if the opponent was defeated because of being a meleeist, a little bit later he says, What is going to happen? What is the president planning? No one knows, but everyone is convinced that he will bring it off. Our exhausted age wishes above everything to plunge into the heart of the problem, to be able to say, here is the difficulty. And the new president, that tiny, strange, and brilliant man, seems cankered and difficult enough to take us there.

SPEAKER_06 1:35:25

Golly, it really he really did look into a crystal freaking ball. He really did, man. I would 46-47.

SPEAKER_05 1:35:34

I don't think he did so much. I think it's always how it is. I think all ages think of themselves as, you know, people don't really know what's going on.

SPEAKER_06 1:35:46

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:35:48

There's a person, and half the country is gonna think, you know, this about the president, and the other half's gonna think half of the country is like, I don't know what he's doing, but I'll bet he's gonna get to the very center of the problem and fix everything.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:04

And the other half of the country is just fainting dead away.

SPEAKER_06 1:36:09

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. She says at the beginning of the show, we don't get into complicated stuff, we only deal with simplicities. Do you remember what that was? She said, We don't deal with stuff like this. We only do, and I can't remember if it was like complex, simple, or what, but it was I saw that in this latching on to the president with simplicity, right? She she goes through such the author goes through such trouble to make herself confess that simplicity architecturally right there at the beginning. Interesting, Dwight. I think I agree with you, yeah, about it's always thus.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:52

I think what you're thinking of, Josh, is where at the beginning of Shower of Gold, she says nothingness everywhere, dread, estrangement, finitude. Who am I? approaches these problems in a root, radical way. On television?

unknown 1:37:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:11

You're interested in basics, Mr. Peterson. Yeah, we don't play around. I see, Peterson said, wondering about the amount of the fee.

SPEAKER_06 1:37:19

I noticed that that was a motif that basics we don't play around. That that came up a couple more times. Like a lot of these ideas showed up three times in the story. It felt like there were at least three major loops that happened. Did you guys notice any kind of structure to the story? Did it did you feel that loop in there?

SPEAKER_02 1:37:42

Well, there's a I mean, it's a very simple structure. It's a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is where he signs up to be on the TV show, and then there's a series of sections in the middle where he encounters various other characters, and then in the end, he actually goes on the show. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:38:03

But he we hear the same, like a lot of these motifs show up in act one and act two and act three, and because of that, it feels like we're experiencing a loop, which begs the question Am I just gestalting the feeling of a loop because of the way that he incorporated elements?

SPEAKER_02 1:38:23

No, he repeats himself a bunch to make you I don't know why, but like to make you think, ah, is that a clue as to what's really going on? That both of these people mentioned Pascal.

SPEAKER_06 1:38:37

Right. And in the first play, Pascal shows up and it gets reacted to differently. Like he rolls his eyes at the second time that it comes up, and he's like, I know, yeah, I know, I know. Um, so there's a different way that he receives it. There's a different, like it's you know where's the first mention?

SPEAKER_05 1:38:57

Where was the first mention of the I remember the one of the three girls mentions it?

SPEAKER_06 1:39:03

Is that yeah, I think it's the barber. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:09

Yep, yep, yep. The razor move like a top across the back of Peterson's neck. Like Pascal said, the natural misfortune of our mortal and feeble condition is so wretched that we when we consider it close closely, nothing can console us.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:23

Yeah, so he came up with it there. So when he you know makes connections to wise old works, it's good. But when the uh when the girl does it, it's like, yeah, whatever.

unknown 1:39:35

Right.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:35

You don't know what you're doing.

SPEAKER_06 1:39:36

I felt like that was a meaning. Really? Yeah. Well, either way, there's a there's meaning there because he there's a difference of receptivity. Like the razor is flying around his ear. I was trying to figure out what was going on with his like that felt so intentional, right? That's such a vivid image of a razor blade roaring around, ripping around, flying around the ear. Like, so this barber is what's happening there? Is that what is the purpose of that metaphor? Where is what's the state of his receptivity to the truth vis-a-vis the ear?

SPEAKER_00 1:40:18

Quick side note, it's 9 30 and I should go soon.

SPEAKER_06 1:40:21

Yeah. Well, I guess we're ending on a mystery.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:24

Sweet. Yeah, great discussion. Sir Robert, unless anybody else has any cool. Sir Robert, what is our next reading?

SPEAKER_00 1:40:33

Yeah. We are reading a short story, again, by Tolkien. It's called Leaf by Nigel. I don't know if y'all have heard of it. I will send you a text. Yes, I've heard of it.

SPEAKER_06 1:40:52

I have not. I'm excited.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:54

I just sent you a text with a PDF of it and a good dramatized reading of it. Probably have now. I have heard of it. Or something, I'm guessing. Cool. I'll read you one quick note about it. This doesn't poison it, it's not about the story, but I thought this was neat and worth noting. So this is my favorite thing of Tolkien's, just as an aside, at least currently. Tolkien, in a letter that after he died, you know, people going through his stuff, right? In a letter to somebody, he write he wrote about the story. That story was the only thing I have ever done which cost me absolutely no pains at all. Usually I compose only with great difficulty and endless rewriting. I woke up one day, more than two years ago, with that odd thing virtually complete in my head. It took only a few hours to get down and then copy out. So it's a short story, leaf by niggle, and I hope y'all like it as much as I do.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:55

Nice.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:56

Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:57

I'm looking forward to it.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:59

I have read it, but I do not remember it.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:02

Cool. Cool. So that's all. Thanks, y'all. I really appreciate it. Yeah, this is fun. Good night.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:12

Thank you for joining us for this discussion. You are dismissed with the following valediction from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now the hungry lion roars, and the wolf behowls the moon, whilst the heavy ploughman snores, all with weary task foredone. Now the wasted brands do glow, whilst the screech owl screeching loud, puts the wretch that lies in woe in remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night that the graves all gaping wide, every one lets forth his sprite in the churchway paths to glide, and we fairies that do run by the triple heckett's team, From the presence of the sun, following darkness like a dream. Now our frolic, not a mouse, shall disturb this hallowed house. I am sent with broom before, to sweep the dust behind the door.