Do You Even Lit?
stemcel tragics use THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP to read litfic and classics
Episodes
Some festive chit-chat and navel gazing on the year that was.
CHAPTERS:
(00:00:00) big tiddy goth gfs and rival podcast recs (00:10:09) DYEL wrapped stats analysis (00:19:39) Third best book of the year (00:23:41) Second best book of the year (00:29:01) Best book of the year (00:33:11) Biggest stinker of the year (00:40:13) Best non-book club book or blog (00:56:25) Favourite movie or TV show of the year (01:03:53) What we...
We've been making eyes at the postmodernists for a while, but up until this point have lacked the stones to go take a ride on daddy Pynchon's rocket ship.
Now that we have a little experience we thought we were ready for a mature and sophisticated lover like Gravity's Rainbow (1973): 800 pages long, and widely considered to be one of the greatest novels of all time.
...we were not ready.
It's right back to clumsy virginal fumblings...
In 1987, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami set himself a challenge: to set aside his magical realism schtick and try to write one 'straight' novel in the realist tradition.
The result was Norwegian Wood, in which the author-insert protagonist is transported back to his college days, breaking free of ennui and depression just long enough to sleep with a string of hot but crazy chicks (and giving each of them the greatest sexual expe...
This week we're reading James Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916.
Moments of adolescent significance: on heated dinner-time conversations, a child's keen sense of injustice, the fear of burning in Hellfire, contemplating eternity, sexual guilt, and teenage rebellion. Which did we relate to the most?
Theory of aesthetics: why are evo psych explanations distasteful? Do Aqu...
This week we're discussing C.P. Snow's influential 1959 lecture 'The Two Cultures', on the growing division between literary and scientific intellectuals:
"So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."
Why do literary types tend to be Luddites? Is it kinda good that hubristic tech bros ref...
Back to the novels. This week, the DYEL boys decide to try Butcher's Crossing, the first novel from John Williams, the author famous for writing the so-underrated-it-might-be-overrated-but-probably-is-now-just-correctly-rated novel Stoner. As to be expected, it's not on the same level of Stoner but we still enjoy it.
Decline of the buffalo: Rich reminds Cam that we already had this discussion in our episode of Blood Meridian but ...
The Do You Even Lit boys put down the heavy tomes and choose a short story. Well, we're not sure if it counts as a story. Maybe a thought experiment? This week we’re talking about one of our favourite authors: Jorge Luis Borges. We read The Library of Babel, Borges’s classic meditation on infinity (well, not infinity exactly — but an almost-might-as-well-be infinity). There are a lot of books.
Nonsense: Not to complain about pLoT ...
What an absolutely dogshit ending to an otherwise incredible book. We made it through 800 pages for this?? I still love you Tolstoy but seriously wtf bro.
This discussion covers parts 6, 7, and 8 of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
Anna's unhappy ending: Look how they massacred my girl. Is this a tale of a wanton harlot who got what was coming to her, or a good woman driven mad by society's strictures? What is it exactly that Tolstoy ...
Levin is a turbo nerd who runs away from social awkwardness to theorise on agrarian economics or whatever. Sound like anyone you know??
Anyway he finally touches grass and gets the girl.
Meanwhile we are falling out of love with Anna. It feels like something bad is gonna happen? The foreshadowing is very subtle, only experts in Media Literacy will be able to catch it.
On Levin's journey away from intellectualism: Is the peasant li...
Benny decided it was time for the boys to read Leo Tolstoy's 800 page whopper Anna Karenina. Today we discuss parts 1 and 2 of the novel.
Rich immediately fell in love with all the characters. He wants be Levin, be with Anna, and be... something with that majestic horse Frou Frou.
On the famous opening line: Are happy families alike? Are any of Tolstoy's families happy? Rich argues the line is actually about statistical mechanics....
Everyone loves Gabriel García Márquez' 1967 genre-defining classic One Hundred Years of Solitude.
At first we were charmed. But after trying to track a complex web of births and deaths and affairs and inc*stuous unions all taking place in the first 100 pages we found ourselves mired deep in the swamp.
When we reached the halfway mark we recorded an episode so hopelessly confused that we had to junk it. As we trudged through the sec...
we have very premium episode for you this week. welcoming special guest Nicole (@elocinationn), one of the great up-and-coming poasters of our time.
We revisit one of her younger self's favourite books, Jonathan Safran Foer's ambitious 2002 novel Everything is Illuminated.
On being disconnected from history: can you be traumatised by losing connection with your past? how reliable is our conception of history anyway? can the stories...
This week we tackle another short story by Ted Chiang: From his 2019 Exhalation collection Truth of Fact, Truth of Feeling.
Luddism and cognitive tool breakthroughs: we go through the pros and cons. Rich wants to go to the moon. We're not sure how much of a luddite, or dare we say relativist, we should make Chiang out to be.
Fallible memories: just how bad are our memories? Benny and Rich have opposing intuitions,
Special guest epi...
This week we wrap up our discussion of Ursula LeGuin's 1974 classic The Dispossessed.
Simultaneity physics: just a mcguffin, or deeper thematic significance? How is it different to a block universe? Does this count as hard sci-fi?
on the [redacted] scene: why would LeGuin include this? how are we supposed to feel about our hero Shevek? why would capitalism make me do this??
Final thoughts on the book: was Shevek's arc satisfying? w...
A brilliant physicist grows disenchanted with the stifling anarchist society of his home planet, defecting to a capitalist world in the hopes of finding true freedom...but what he finds only horrifies him.
Cam says Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 award-winning piece of sociological fiction is a leftist pamphlet. Benny and Rich call bs.
who's right? let us examine the textual evidence.
On incentives: Are social sanctions powerful enough to...
“All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.”
After a break, the boys jump into the 1980s po-mo White Noise by Don DeLillo. We talk about the denial of death, toxic airborne events, and Baudrillardian copies of copies of copies (of copies...)
Simulacra: The boys shake off their reddit I Love Science teenage years and start to embrace all things post-modernism. Namely, Baudrilliard's idea of the Simulacra where so...
This week we finally shut up about translations and get into some juicy themes and character analysis.
Telemachus: why is he such a dweeb compared to his dad? Rich argues that he's doing the best he can growing up with an absent father. The others are less sympathetic.
Odysseus: is his paranoid murderous rampage justified? what are his singular heroic attributes? Is he portrayed more as admirable or a hubristic figure? Why won't hi...
WOKE classics professor DESTROYED by three random guys who've never read homer before!!!
just kidding we love it.
Wilson translation discourse: is she really importing her feminist beliefs into the text? has she stripped the grandeur out to take 'complicated' Odysseus down a peg? what are the connotations of sluts and slaves? is the fancy language of other translators really just stylistic anachronism? who would win in a fight betw...
"For how could the nose, which had been on his face but yesterday, and able then neither to drive nor to walk independently, now be going about in uniform?" We take a break from reading novels and take a quick nose dive into Gogol's famous 1830s short story, talking absurdity, bureaucracy, and Russian wives. Status and bureaucracies: The most straight forward reading is a satire 19th century Russian bureaucracies and status seeki...
"He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."
Wrapping up the second half of our discussion on Cormac McCarthy's 1985 classic, in which various chickens come home to roost. The Glanton gang's downfall: on the run from the Sonoran cavalry, mercy killings, greed and symbolism of coins, the takeover of the ferry, the Yuma strike back, the judge's apocalypse-chic fashion, the Idiot plays his par...
Popular Podcasts
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Burden is a documentary series that takes listeners into the hidden places where justice is done (and undone). It dives deep into the lives of heroes and villains. And it focuses a spotlight on those who triumph even when the odds are against them. Season 5 - The Burden: Death & Deceit in Alliance On April Fools Day 1999, 26-year-old Yvonne Layne was found murdered in her Alliance, Ohio home. David Thorne, her ex-boyfriend and father of one of her children, was instantly a suspect. Another young man admitted to the murder, and David breathed a sigh of relief, until the confessed murderer fingered David; “He paid me to do it.” David was sentenced to life without parole. Two decades later, Pulitzer winner and podcast host, Maggie Freleng (Bone Valley Season 3: Graves County, Wrongful Conviction, Suave) launched a “live” investigation into David's conviction alongside Jason Baldwin (himself wrongfully convicted as a member of the West Memphis Three). Maggie had come to believe that the entire investigation of David was botched by the tiny local police department, or worse, covered up the real killer. Was Maggie correct? Was David’s claim of innocence credible? In Death and Deceit in Alliance, Maggie recounts the case that launched her career, and ultimately, “broke” her.” The results will shock the listener and reduce Maggie to tears and self-doubt. This is not your typical wrongful conviction story. In fact, it turns the genre on its head. It asks the question: What if our champions are foolish? Season 4 - The Burden: Get the Money and Run “Trying to murder my father, this was the thing that put me on the path.” That’s Joe Loya and that path was bank robbery. Bank, bank, bank, bank, bank. In season 4 of The Burden: Get the Money and Run, we hear from Joe who was once the most prolific bank robber in Southern California, and beyond. He used disguises, body doubles, proxies. He leaped over counters, grabbed the money and ran. Even as the FBI was closing in. It was a showdown between a daring bank robber, and a patient FBI agent. Joe was no ordinary bank robber. He was bright, articulate, charismatic, and driven by a dark rage that he summoned up at will. In seven episodes, Joe tells all: the what, the how… and the why. Including why he tried to murder his father. Season 3 - The Burden: Avenger Miriam Lewin is one of Argentina’s leading journalists today. At 19 years old, she was kidnapped off the streets of Buenos Aires for her political activism and thrown into a concentration camp. Thousands of her fellow inmates were executed, tossed alive from a cargo plane into the ocean. Miriam, along with a handful of others, will survive the camp. Then as a journalist, she will wage a decades long campaign to bring her tormentors to justice. Avenger is about one woman’s triumphant battle against unbelievable odds to survive torture, claim justice for the crimes done against her and others like her, and change the future of her country. Season 2 - The Burden: Empire on Blood Empire on Blood is set in the Bronx, NY, in the early 90s, when two young drug dealers ruled an intersection known as “The Corner on Blood.” The boss, Calvin Buari, lived large. He and a protege swore they would build an empire on blood. Then the relationship frayed and the protege accused Calvin of a double homicide which he claimed he didn’t do. But did he? Award-winning journalist Steve Fishman spent seven years to answer that question. This is the story of one man’s last chance to overturn his life sentence. He may prevail, but someone’s gotta pay. The Burden: Empire on Blood is the director’s cut of the true crime classic which reached #1 on the charts when it was first released half a dozen years ago. Season 1 - The Burden In the 1990s, Detective Louis N. Scarcella was legendary. In a city overrun by violent crime, he cracked the toughest cases and put away the worst criminals. “The Hulk” was his nickname. Then the story changed. Scarcella ran into a group of convicted murderers who all say they are innocent. They turned themselves into jailhouse-lawyers and in prison founded a lway firm. When they realized Scarcella helped put many of them away, they set their sights on taking him down. And with the help of a NY Times reporter they have a chance. For years, Scarcella insisted he did nothing wrong. But that’s all he’d say. Until we tracked Scarcella to a sauna in a Russian bathhouse, where he started to talk..and talk and talk. “The guilty have gone free,” he whispered. And then agreed to take us into the belly of the beast. Welcome to The Burden.
"SmartLess" with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, & Will Arnett is a podcast that connects and unites people from all walks of life to learn about shared experiences through thoughtful dialogue and organic hilarity. A nice surprise: in each episode of SmartLess, one of the hosts reveals his mystery guest to the other two. What ensues is a genuinely improvised and authentic conversation filled with laughter and newfound knowledge to feed the SmartLess mind. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of SmartLess ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!