J. Robert Lennon on Russell Edson's "The Neighborhood Dog"

I talk with my colleague J. Robert Lennon (Subdivision, Let Me Think, Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games) about Russell Edson's hilarious, strange poem "The Neighborhood Dog." Highlights include a recording of Edson reading the poem; laughter; the relationship between strange poetry and strange fiction; mystery and narrative expectations. Afterward, we play a game that I forgot to name.

Also mentioned:

• Edson's poem "With Sincerest Regrets," which I talked about in episode 16;
• Edson's poem "Ape"
• The Adult Swim video "Too Many Cooks"
• Theodore Roethke's "I Knew a Woman"
• Marcel Proust and William Shakespeare
• Epoch literary magazine

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
And there is the quiz at the end.

(00:01):
Oh, OK.
I haven't gotten to the end of a full long episode yet.
There's a quiz.
There's a game.
There's a poetry.
Should I just not know anything about it?
Exactly.
OK.
Yeah.
And the game is more for entertainment purposes
than anything else.
Failing at a quiz is not entertaining to me, Charlie.

(00:24):
Welcome to the Talking Poem podcast.
I'm your host, Charlie Green.
Today, I'm so stoked to have as my guest my colleague,
J. Robert Lennon, to talk about the Russell Edson poem,
The Neighborhood Dog.
I'm going to use John's official bio first from his website.
J. Robert Lennon is the author of nine novels,
including familiar Broken River and Subdivision,

(00:45):
and the story collection's Pieces for the Left Hand,
See You in Paradise, and Let Me Think.
He lives in Ithaca, New York and needs to update it with this.
He also co-edited critical hits, writers playing video games
with Carmen Maria Machado.
John, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for being here.
Thank you.
I do need to update.
I'm doing double duty here.
We're recording, and I'm giving you business reminders.

(01:07):
So before we get to the poem, and I'll
play the recording that you sent me of Russell
Edson reading the poem, I have a question for you.
So I'm going to get to the question in a roundabout way,
because I'm an academic.
So after Edson died in 2014, you wrote an essay
for the London Review of Books.
Oh, did I?
Yes, you did.
I completely forgot about that.

(01:28):
John has a young child.
And you wrote in part about the neighborhood dog.
And one of the things you wrote about
was that when you first encountered him,
it sort of opened your ways of thinking
about the kinds of things you could do in fiction,
the kinds of weirdnesses you could have in fiction.
And I was curious to hear about that,
because in terms of the class that you have taught,

(01:49):
it's weird stories or weird fictions.
Weird stories.
Yeah.
So did Russell Edson play into that in any way,
either directly or indirectly?
I would say so, yeah.
I didn't assign him in that class.
That's ostensibly a fiction class.
Listeners of the podcast might not
know that when we're able in the Literatures and English

(02:11):
Department at Cornell, we have this class called
Reading for Writers, which is like a craft-focused literature
class that both graduate students in creative writing,
both poets and fiction writers and PhD students in literature
are able to take.
It's a great class because it allows the writers
to teach in a different way and approach

(02:32):
material that might not be totally appropriate
in a workshop.
That class came from things that are peculiar that have interested
me in terms of form.
And Edson is one of the writers who
is like a hallmark of that category for me.
But also bringing in bits of genre fiction,

(02:53):
fiction that defies genre in interesting ways,
and straight up experimental writing.
I feel like Edson uses strange juxtapositions,
seemingly realistic worlds in which impossible things
suddenly happen.
The techniques that are common to straight up fiction writers

(03:15):
and he's employing as kind of a, you called him a,
you called him a comic poet in your other Russell Edson
episode.
But I kind of, maybe at some point in this discussion
we should address what the hell a prose poem is.
Because I think of him as a prose poem,
but he's almost like a writer of strange fables.
Yeah.
Well, what's weird is, so I'm not generally

(03:37):
a big fan of prose poetry, in part
because I always find myself making line breaks when
I'm reading them.
And I don't do that with him, but part of it is the layout.
So like, paragraphs are indented,
whereas in prose poetry I feel like that
doesn't happen much anymore.
That's interesting.
You're right.
Yeah, he looks like his poems look like Lydia Davis stories
on the page to me.
They totally do, yeah.
Though I think for whatever reason,

(04:00):
I mean, we can call him a comic prose poet.
We can call him whatever you want.
I don't know much about his life,
but I can imagine that he probably
reveled in his uncategorized ability.
Probably so, yeah.
But let's listen to The Neighborhood Dog.
This is called The Neighborhood Dog.

(04:20):
Very hard to read.
A neighborhood dog is climbing up the side of a house.
I don't like to see that.
I don't like to see a dog like that,
said someone passing in the neighborhood.
The dog seems to be making for that second story window.

(04:45):
Maybe he wants to get his paws on the sill.
He may want to hang there and rest,
his tongue throbbing from his open mouth.
Yet in the room attached to that window,
the one just mentioned, a woman is looking at a cedar box.

(05:06):
This is, of course, where she keeps her hatchet,
in that same box, the one in this room,
the one she is looking at.
The person passing in the neighborhood says,
that dog is making for that second story window.
This is a nice neighborhood.
That dog is wrong.

(05:27):
If the dog gets his paws on the sill of the window, which
is attached to the same room where the woman is opening
her hatchet box, she may chop at his paws
with that same hatchet.
She might want to chop at something.
It is, after all, getting close to chopping time.

(05:49):
Something is dreadful.
I feel a sense of dread, says that same person passing
in the neighborhood.
It's that dog that's not right.
Not that way.
In the room attached to the window

(06:11):
that the dog has been making for,
the woman is beginning to see two white paws
on the sill of that same window, which
is attached to the same room where that same woman is
beginning to see two white paws on the sill
of that same window, which looks out over the neighborhood.

(06:34):
She says, it's wrong.
Something, the window sill, something, the window sill.
She wants her hatchet.
She thinks she's going to need it now.
The person passing in the neighborhood
says something may happen.

(06:55):
That dog, I feel a sense of dread.
The woman goes to the hatchet in its box.
She wants it.
But it's gone bad.

(07:15):
It's soft and nasty.
It smells dead.
It smells dead.
She wants to get it out of its box, that same cedar box
where she keeps it.
But it bends and runs through her fingers.

(07:39):
Now the dog is coming down, crouched low to the wall,
backwards, leaving a wet streak with its tongue
down the side of the house.
And that same person passing in the neighborhood
says, that dog is wrong.
I don't like to see a dog get like that.
That's all I have to say.

(08:09):
So I just have to add that in the print version,
the poem ends, I don't like to see a dog get like that.
The ellipsis, it's not over yet.
It's not over yet.
The ellipsis.
I feel like if he was working off the published print
version of the poem during that reading,
I wonder if he realized that that was superfluous

(08:31):
in a public context.
Because all you have to do to end
is to just not talk for a while.
And for people to kind of feel the story echoing on
after you close your mouth, right?
Yeah.
And it's one of those lines that people
say, if you say it's not over yet to a crowd,
they're going to assume it's about the poem
and they're going to get lost.

(08:53):
True, true.
I saw a reading by Philip Levine when I was in undergrad.
It was the first poetry reading I went to where
it was like a packed house.
And he talked a ton, to the point
that at times it wasn't clear when he was talking
and when he was reading a poem.
And so I feel like this is a necessary stopping
point for Edson.
So you ended up writing mostly about the poem

(09:15):
and why this poem?
What has it stuck out to you?
I think this exemplifies a thing that Edson
2014 edition of the
does that makes him Edson for me.
The Performance at Hogg Theater.
And I should add, this is from a recording called
The Performance at Hogg Theater, which
is also the name of one of the poems in the performance.
I think it was at like Wesleyan in the late 70s
that this was recorded.

(09:36):
It was on, I don't know if it's available commercially now,
And it was on the
I don't know if it's available commercially now, but I,
a friend told me about it when I was in graduate school
in the 90s.
And I had to mail away for it
because that is how you bought things in, you know, 1994

(09:56):
or whatever it was.
And it came as a cassette with a drawing on it.
And throughout this performance,
it seems like a small but really engaged crowd.
He's also smoking during the whole thing
and you know this because he refers to the cigarettes
and lighting another cigarette.

(10:17):
And he seems to be using it as a prop.
You can hear him pause to smoke it between
or even during the poems that he's reading.
And it really feels like a standup record.
And he's performing these poems in a way that,
I mean, they do come off, they're great to read.

(10:37):
But for me, this hour long cassette
is, was a thrill for me
because it was a new way to experience poetry.
I think like you in this Levine reading
that was revelatory for you, it was like,
oh, this is a thing you can do with literature
that it didn't occur to me that you could.
That makes a lot of sense.

(10:57):
You compare it to standup records.
In the essay?
I apologize for not even remembering
that I wrote this 10 years ago.
That was 10 years ago.
I will say that, you know, there's object permanence
that you develop as a child.
I'm in the period where you slowly
are developing object impermanence
where the past just disappears.
The past is definitely disappearing,

(11:18):
but it does mean that you can be pleasantly surprised
by things you learn about yourself.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, part of the reason,
one of the things I love about the poem is it,
and I've tried to explain George Saunders
to students in different ways.
One is that if you imagine you're looking
out at the world through a window,
except the window is not, it's not flush.

(11:39):
It's tilted to some degree.
And so you're seeing things in a really odd aspect.
And this feels like it's tilted even more that way
because there are things that are normal,
but the poem keeps insisting on its reality,
which of course keeps drawing our attention
to how abnormal it is.
Not that he needs to.
Yeah, yeah.
But what's funny to me is that people aren't always laughing

(12:02):
at things that are funny.
Yeah.
And part of it is probably-
I actually made what I was typing
when we were listening to that is
I wrote down every laugh line.
Oh.
And I actually, I'll have kind of an analysis
of some of them.
I'm really interested in when people were laughing
during that recording.
And I wonder how much of this,

(12:22):
I've experienced this at poetry readings,
that people feel hesitant to laugh
at funny things in poetry reading.
A few times I've been the one person
who blurt laughs at a poetry reading
and immediately turn red-faced and sweaty.
But the things that make me laugh,
and in addition to what people were laughing at,
which are funny, when she writes,
a woman is looking at a cedar box,
this is of course where she keeps her hatchet.

(12:43):
Of course.
And then she might want to chop at something.
It is after all getting close to chopping time.
And there's something about the way
he keeps drawing attention to just how ridiculous it is.
Well, it's like, it's all completely absurd, right?
It's very simple.
There's just a few elements.
There's this, you know, the side of the house,
there's the window and the woman,
and the hatchet and the passerby, the bystander, right?

(13:06):
And so in theory, it's very simple,
but he's going to combine these realistic elements
in peculiar and preposterous ways.
And part of the joke of the poem
is the way he pretends to need to call attention to them,
as though you're not gonna understand that it's silly.

(13:26):
Yeah.
Right, so the first laugh line in the poem is,
he may want to hang there and rest.
Which is, it's the first moment where people
in the audience really kind of grok
the particular zaniness of the poem, right?
Like if you've got a dog, he's made up this impossible,

(13:49):
ridiculous thing of the dog scaling a wall, right?
But then he throws in this little realistic detail.
It's like, well, of course,
this is probably very taxing for the dog.
So he's gonna want to stop and rest on his way up the wall.
And that sort of, the realism of the detail
calls attention to the absurdity of the event itself.

(14:13):
Well, I think about this with what I talk about
with student writers is, you want to go for specificity.
You want specific detail,
because in part you want to put the reader in the world.
And for something that is unreal,
you have to convince them of the reality of the world.
And I feel like really good standup comics do this.
Like John Mulaney, I don't know if you've seen
many of his specials.

(14:34):
I feel like the jokes are always in
where he follows the details
that would be natural to the scene,
and that the absurdity is in the situation.
So thinking about a dog needing to rest,
thinking about just things like the woman goes to her
hatchet in its box, and that kind of insistence
on that kind of detail that we need,

(14:58):
that he's establishing the reality of the world
through that kind of particularity.
I feel like the poem is an extended joke
on the idea of suspense.
I used to ponder, I really like reading mysteries
in crime novels, and my next book is a crime novel.
And I would often get through one and think,

(15:18):
that was really good, but did someone really have to die?
Like, could those beats, the callbacks,
the little details that come back later,
the pins that are little details
that you can thread together to form the sense
of a real world in the form of like a puzzle.
Could you achieve that level of excitement and suspense

(15:42):
if the story was just about,
what if the detective just lost his keys, right?
That enough, can you write a suspenseful story about that?
And I feel like Edson is sort of testing that theory here.
He's doing all the stuff you do in a suspense novel,
and he's making a joke about the suspense, right?
He's like, keeps reminding you,

(16:02):
that thing I just mentioned, it's coming back.
Here it is, what's gonna happen now?
We're talking about the box again.
Now we're talking about the dog again.
And then we get the observer, right?
Who's outside the scene and who keeps declaring,
this is wrong, what's going to happen next, right?
And these are also laugh lines for the audience
because as he rolls these out,

(16:25):
they become aware of the story structure,
like structural, not cliches,
but fundamental structural elements of story
that he's playing around with.
Yeah, the reminder every time, that very same person.
We get so much of that kind of repetition.
The one that I just mentioned, like four seconds ago,
that one, that's the one I'm talking about.

(16:46):
Yeah, exactly.
I like thinking of it in that way, that it does follow,
it does have the structure of that kind of plot.
We're waiting for something to happen with the dog
in the hatchet, the woman sees the paws
and she will need her hatchet.
And so there is that kind of suspense built into it.
The only thing that can possibly happen
is that the woman's gonna hit the dog with a hatchet, right?

(17:06):
But the poem pretends that that's a mystery.
And we have the passerby going,
something, the windowsill, something, the windowsill,
they can't figure out what the next big plot element's
going to be, even though we, the reader and the audience
in that recording all know it.

(17:27):
And then of course, it doesn't happen.
Right, well, the reason it doesn't happen
is its own mystery, that the hatchet has turned rotten.
And this is something that I always like about Edson's poems
is that there is always the sort of setting up
of some sort of basic expectation.
Like the parameters of a scene,
like in With Sincerest Regrets,

(17:48):
everything that is there is normal to domesticity.
It's just tilted in a slight way and we're kind of,
and to some extent, I think as readers,
we sometimes will, why, why is it doing this?
And with Edson, it's just, it doesn't matter.
Right, well, the idea that the hatchet goes bad
is you feel him inserting a new, even more ridiculous detail

(18:10):
into the already ridiculous story.
In the world of this poem, a hatchet can spoil.
There's another poem of his called,
I can't remember the name of it,
but a woman is serving her husband dinner
and she has made, it's a pair of ape hands.
Ape, it's called ape.
And the gag there is like, you, the reader,
want to react to the horror

(18:31):
of being served ape hands for dinner.
And the character does get very angry,
but then the reason he's angry is,
I'm sick of ape every night.
Yeah.
Right, it's not the shocking peculiarity
of what's happening that he's angry at.
He's angry that in fact, this is routine.
And he's sick of the routine of eating ape every night.

(18:52):
Well, he's interested in,
he has a lot of poems about domestic spaces.
And there's a way, just as you can think of them as mysteries,
you can kind of think of them.
And I have no idea if this was in his head or not,
but they kind of have the structure of sitcom episodes
that are based in a house
where there's some sort of miscommunication
or misunderstanding or the frustration of this kind of rut.

(19:12):
And the dog climbing the house is kind of that gag.
It works as a visual gag in a way that you might,
well, it's almost a sitcom,
but if a sitcom were dreamed up by Russell Edson.
Do you remember that viral video from a while back
called Too Many Cooks?
Yes, yes.
Too many cooks.
Which is just like the opening credits of a sitcom

(19:36):
that go on and on and on and on
and get stranger and stranger.
And they play upon the tropes of this very over-familiar
narrative introductory structure.
And then they begin to pull threads of narrative out of it
in a disturbing and really funny way.
Yeah, I'm gonna have to link to that in the show notes.
I love Too Many Cooks.
Too Many Cooks is good.

(19:56):
I probably watch it once a year at this point.
The thing about the domesticity that's also interesting
is that there's always a character who can't deal with it.
And to some extent, it's the woman,
although it's like, oh, well,
I'm just gonna go to my hatchet,
but that passerby doesn't know what to do with it.
And when Sincerus regrets, it's that voice
not being able to, you know,
not wanting to talk about the toilet
because it's, you know, it's from an un,

(20:19):
I forget the phrase.
I'll record myself saying the phrase and edit it in later.
No.
But there's always faced with this domestic problem
and they don't want to address it.
That there's this, I mean,
I know that you can spoil a joke by explaining it,
but I feel like his poems are always interested in that way
that at least American voices and American household,

(20:42):
you can't talk about the things that are central
to your life and this way it's,
the neighborhood should be this way.
Yeah.
Like it's this commentary on,
on different kinds of neighborhoods and the idea.
The dog is violating the social code.
Exactly, exactly.
The HOA explicitly says, no dogs climbing the houses.

(21:03):
So he might ruin the sighting.
So anything else you wanted to say about this poem?
I will, I want to say one more thing
about the recording of the poem, which is Edson's voice.
He has a beautiful speaking voice, at least to my ear,
but he has this patrician mid-century,
almost like mid-continental kind of,

(21:26):
or mid-Atlantic, I guess is the term, kind of voice.
You can hear the New England in it
and some echo of, of Britain in it.
And he's sort of, he's sort of playing it for laughs.
He's, and he's also laughing at himself.
He's anticipating the jokes he's going to tell
as they come up and he's chuckling at everything he reads

(21:46):
throughout this entire performance.
So, and I really like that.
You feel the poet's delight in presenting the poems.
And, and this speaks to me powerfully as a writer
because it's, I'm not often asked why I write,
but it's a good thing because the reason is
I just like to entertain myself, basically.

(22:08):
I'm trying to crack myself up or amuse myself
or write something that I think would be fun for me to read.
And you can really sense that in Edson's delivery.
Like he's just cracking himself up.
He's probably cracking himself up at his desk
when he's writing his poems.
And so I really admire that.
And it also, to listen to it,

(22:29):
it really has a certain appeal.
His particular brand of self-confidence
is really infectious to me.
And it made me want to be that kind of writer
who did something unusual that,
even if people didn't like it,
that I would enjoy writing it
and I would enjoy presenting it.
Well, one of the things I hear in his laughter too is,

(22:50):
and I think that this is part of what also gives them
their energy as poems, is that they,
the fact that they are poems.
That it's a poetry reading.
And in his laughs, sometimes I hear this,
I can't believe I'm getting away with this.
The idea that something like this is a poem.
And granted by the 1970s, you know, there's Ginsburg,
there's been Ginsburg, there've been all kinds of poets
writing surrealist poems, absurd poems.

(23:13):
And yet there's something about him
that just twists it in that bizarre direction
that I don't think I'd seen before.
And like I said, I mentioned George Saunders.
He does remind me of George Saunders
with the sort of incessant repetition,
the sort of strangeness that we have,
most of the trappings of reality,
and then some aspect of them really turned on their head.

(23:34):
And on the way over here, we were talking about
this is kind of a good thing for you and I to discuss,
because you're a poet who also writes fiction.
I'm a fiction writer who's sort of dabbled in poetry
and prose poetry a little bit.
And I think that inter in-betweenness of Edson
is a place he really loves to live, right?
These are too silly and absurd to be conventional stories.

(23:57):
And they're not serious enough to be,
or sort of formally assertive enough to seem like,
seem like serious poems,
which means they're my favorite kind of thing.
Well, they defy genre and to an extent,
you just get to let them be what they are.
It's not whose woods these are.
I think I know the horse is rebuilding the fence though.

(24:18):
Good fences make good horses.
I did wanna bring in one other Edson poem
since we're both in a college atmosphere.
This is, and just to read it, and then we'll move on to the,
I feel strange saying we'll move on to the silliness
since we've been talking about it.
This is the academic sigh.
Some students were stretching a professor

(24:39):
on a medieval torture rack.
He had offered himself to show them
how an academic might be stretched
beyond his wildest dreams like a piece of chewing gum.
As they turned the wheel,
the professor was getting longer and longer.
Don't make me too long or I'll look kind of goofy,
sighed the professor as he grew longer and longer.

(25:01):
And I'll just note on the page,
we have a small section break here.
Suddenly something snaps.
What happened, sighed the professor from the rack.
We were just stretching an academic
when suddenly something snapped.
You may have heard it.
Yes, I was there.
Don't you remember, sighed the professor.
And then we heard an academic sigh.

(25:24):
Yes, I heard it too, sighed the professor.
It seemed to come from the rack
where I was being stretched beyond my wildest dreams.
Like a piece of chewing gum.
I love how the characters in the story
are in dialogue with the writer
and their awareness of being in a story.
Mm-hmm.

(25:44):
You know?
Yeah.
And also it captures for me that idea of like,
that sometimes happens in a class for various reasons
that you feel like you have to point out the obvious in a way.
Yeah.
So, all right, before we get to the game,
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(26:04):
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(26:45):
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Also, some writers have complained
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(27:08):
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Thank you for laughing at some of that.
These are...
This pun-based marketing is always a winner.
Yes, absolutely.
So today we're gonna play a very straightforward game
that usually I come up with names for these,

(27:29):
and I'm seeing the brackets here
and realizing I didn't come up with a name.
I'm gonna say, I'm gonna call this game
What's in a Sound and Fury?
Lots of novels take their titles from the Bible
or from Shakespeare's plays or from poems,
and in this game, I'm gonna give you the title of a novel.
And you have to guess either the poem or the writer
that it comes from.

(27:50):
If you can't think of the title,
like I said, the writer's fine.
One quick note, the titles only come from poems.
Some none are biblical, none come from Shakespeare's plays.
Before we get started...
They're gonna take my tenure away, Charlie,
as soon as they see what my final score is.
No serious person listens to this.
Before we get started,
I like to note that if the situation were reversed,

(28:12):
most of my answers would be,
oh, you know the guy with the beard,
or, huh, who knows?
J. Robert Lennon, are you ready to play?
I am ready.
All right, number one, Alice Seabold's The Lovely Bones.
And I will note, it's not an exact phrase, it's not verbatim.
I mean, Shakespeare is always the go-to answer for these,
because everyone's book is a line of Shakespeare.

(28:33):
Pretty much, it is not Shakespeare.
It's Theodore Rethke, the poem, I Knew a Woman,
I Knew a Woman Lovely in Her Bones.
Really fantastic poem, lovely poem.
Number two, and I'm gonna pronounce this the British way
I once heard it, Evelyn Waugh,
or Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust.
Oh, oh, William Shakespeare.
Oh, no.
Oh, God.

(28:54):
That one's T.S. Eliot, that's from The Wasteland.
And by the way, when I found various lists of these,
and my response to, you know, 90% of them was, oh yeah.
So yeah, Genoa Achebe, Things Fall Apart.
Oh, that's Yeats, right?
That is Yeats, that's from The Second Coming.

(29:15):
Oh my God, I'm glad I got one right.
Yeah, well, only two people have gotten
every single answer right.
And most people are below 50%.
If you go back and listen to the back catalog,
you will hear me say a lot,
I'm still calibrating the difficulty level of these games.
That may be going on forever.
There's a reason Jeopardy won't hire me.

(29:35):
Well, you keep bringing in novelists to talk about poems.
You're gonna have to change the settings.
That's true, that's true.
John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.
I did not know this was from something else.
Mice and Men.
Boy though, taken out of the context
of the title of the book, it does sound familiar.
I'll give you a hint, think Scottish.

(29:59):
Okay, who the hell is Scottish?
Oh, is it from Macbeth?
Oh, William Shakespeare?
No, it's from Robert Burns.
Mouse on turning her up in her nest with the plow.
All right, this one, I kinda wanna say I need a title here.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past.
I have no idea who that is.

(30:20):
I don't know, French poets.
Or is he not using a French poem?
He's not using a French poem.
I'll give you a hint.
It's so generic though.
Isn't the more recent translation
is In Search of Lost Time?
I thought In Search of Lost,
well, yeah, that is sometimes the translation.
I'll give you a hint.
You said the writer's name.

(30:41):
I did during this podcast?
Oh yes, several times.
I said the writer's name.
What?
Russell Edson?
William Shakespeare.
Oh, all right.
It's Sonnet 30.
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
I summon up a remembrance of things past.
Interesting.
So, all right, that's interesting to me

(31:03):
because going back to that,
the Penguin translations of Proust,
which are called In Search of Lost Time,
is in fact, Proust is quoting
a version of that sonnet translated into French
and then it's being retranslated back into English

(31:23):
in a new way by,
like why did that happen is my question.
That's a great question that I don't know the answer to
and I've seen the French translation
at something something,
Les Temps Perdus.
We need Lydia Davis on speed dial.
Recherche.
Recherche.
Something like that.
I think it is Recherche.
People are screaming,
well, hopefully people aren't screaming

(31:44):
at their phones or.
Just a couple of English professors mispronouncing French.
Exactly.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Exactly.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night.
I'll give you a hint.
It's not the blur song Tender.
No, it's the,
it's a different song called Tender is the Night.
He's quoting, who is that guy?

(32:05):
Lawyers in Love.
That's not one.
Jackson Brown.
He's quoting Jackson Brown, of course.
Yes, because we know that in The Great Gatsby,
there is the time machine.
Yeah.
In which he tries to warn Gatsby
that someone's coming to shoot him.
Spoiler alert for a novel that's now in public domain.
It's from Keats, Ode to a Nightingale,
which I get that was one that is completely lost on me.

(32:26):
This was a total surprise to me.
E.M. Forster's A Passage to India.
I never would have guessed this.
I'll tell you, it's an American poet.
The title, A Passage to India,
comes from an American poet.
Yes.
I can't even begin to guess.
It's from Leaves of Grass by Whitman.
Really?
I was shocked to read that and then read the excerpt
and I thought, how did E.M. Forster?

(32:47):
Do you remember the context from the Whitman?
No, I have to confess that Whitman goes in and out
of my head.
I just, someone needs to introduce me to Whitman.
I feel like, there are different poets
you have to read at different ages.
Yeah.
I mean, this is true of all writers.
Like when I, for whatever reason,
read Virginia Woolf in high school and couldn't stand her.

(33:08):
And then just a few years later, I was like,
holy, oh my God, she's incredible.
You just sometimes need it.
I read every single Woolf in a book club about 15 years ago.
Wow.
And it was great.
Yeah.
It was great.
And I was that way too.
I had bounced off of her when I was younger,
just because the complexity of the prose was,
you know, was defying me.
Yeah.

(33:29):
Or, and I came around really hard
and I love all her books, especially Orlando.
Yeah.
I haven't read Orlando.
Bonus, bonus story.
I read Mrs. Dalloway in my PhD program
for my comprehensive exams and halfway through,
and I tell my students this story all the time,
halfway through, I was just, I was frustrated
and I just, I couldn't quite figure out what it was doing.

(33:52):
And about halfway through, it just, it sort of clicked.
And I loved the rest of the novel
and then reread it and loved it.
And it's, for me, she's one of those writers
that is teaching you how to read her in a way.
Yeah.
And there are, there are writers like that.
Joyce is kind of like that,
except every chapter is teaching you something else.
All right, last one.

(34:12):
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men.
Oh, geez.
I actually know this one, but I'm not gonna remember it.
Would you like a hint?
Yeah. Ireland.
Is he Yeats again?
It is Yeats.
It's from Sailing to Byzantium.
Yeah.
The only ones that I got when I, when I found this list
were Things Fall Apart and Remembrance of Things Past

(34:33):
and No Country for Old Men.
So I got three out of eight.
So I sort of got two with hints.
Yeah.
Well.
And if you, you know, I said Shakespeare so many times,
you gotta give me credit for the one where I didn't.
Well, yeah, the thing is, as with Fitzgerald,
you were seeing into the future.
You just didn't know where exactly in the future.
John, thank you so much for being here.
Is there anything you would like to say

(34:53):
or plug before we go?
No, thanks for your bio earlier.
My next book is coming out in February.
It's called Hard Girls.
It's a thriller first in the series.
And oh, and people should,
I'm now the editor of Epoch Magazine.
Our mutual friend, Michael Cook,
the long time editor of the magazine passed away

(35:17):
about a year and a half ago.
And I've taken over and I'm really proud
to be carrying on his legacy and I'm trying to preserve it.
And we opened for submissions in January, just a few weeks.
It's great magazine, has always been for 76 years now,
I think.
So people should read it and subscribe to it.

(35:38):
It's online at epochliterary.com.
I will share that in the link in the show notes.
The magazine is fantastic.
The issues you've helmed are beautiful.
Oh, thank you so much.
So thanks everybody for listening.
If you like the show, please give us a five star rating.
Us, it's me.
Give me a five star rating.
If you write a positive review,
apparently it helps get views and-

(35:59):
And advertising dollars as well.
Yes, all that fat, fat stacks from Virgil Wright's share.
So have a wonderful day.
Go pet some dogs, read some poems
and support striking workers wherever you find them.
Bye.