Campfire Classics Podcast

Welcome to Campfire Classics, a Literary Comedy Podcast!!

Have you ever thought "Gosh, I miss being young"?

This episode will singlehandedly change your mind.

The good old days were neither good, nor old, nor days.  Actually that's not true.  They were definitely days, they were older than today, and some of them may have been good, but that's not the point.

The point is that this week, your hosts have a story for you by Stephen Crane called "The Pace of Youth", and good lord young people are stupid!  Not you of course. You are both young and very clever.  But all the other young people?  Yeah, dummies.

And what do Ken and Heather talk about while reading this story?

"The Pace of Youth" was first published in The Open Boat and Other Stories in 1898.

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Now sit back, light a fire (or even a candle), grab a drink, and enjoy.

Welcome to Campfire Classics, a Literary Comedy Podcast!!

So this one gets...sexy?  If we can call grease and custard sexy

Ken has a story for Heather to read this week from a man named Victor Bridges (look him up, he barely exists), who has become our new favorite author here at Campfire Classics.

This episode gets raunchy, hysterical, sexy, funny...it's basically podcasting burlesque.

The story is called "The Man with the Chin" (no spoilers in that title), and Heather does an admirable job reading it.  That's a joke you'll get once you've listened to the episode.

Along with the story, you'll get such inspiring conversation as:

"The Man with the Chin" was first published in The Cruise of the "Scandal" and Other Stories in 1920.

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Remember to tell five friends to check out Campfire Classics.

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Now sit back, light a fire (or even a candle), grab a drink, and enjoy.

Welcome to Campfire Classics, a Literary Comedy Podcast!!

Look after your own ass.  Just good words to live by.

This week we're dipping into the tales of the Brothers Grimm!  Because somehow we seem to have missed them so far.

Ken selected this story and a returning guest host is reading it! Because no one, not even Ken, liked his solo episode from last week.  Don't worry, the people in charge of making that decision have been mercilessly ridiculed.

So!  The story this week is called "Little Table Set Thyself, Gold-Ass, and Cudgel Out of the Sack".  Hard to believe there are any words left or the rest of the story.

This weeks conversation topics include monkey syphilis, talking rose bushes, and the inevitable heat death of the universe.  Two of those are true, ten points to the first person to email us and tell us which one isn't. 

"Little Table Set Thyself, Gold-Ass, and Cudgel Out of the Sack" was first published in Gimms' Fairy Tales in 1812 under the German title "Tischlein deck dich, Goldesel und Knüppel aus dem Sack."

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Remember to tell five friends to check out Campfire Classics.

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Now sit back, light a fire (or even a candle), grab a drink, and enjoy.

Welcome to Campfire Classics, a Literary Comedy Podcast!!

Welcome to the first official installment of Tales From the Tub, where Ken and Heather can't record together, so Ken just reads you story!

A few weeks back, in the episode "Silly Old Bear" Ken read the first Winnie the Pooh story.  Today, he reads you the second.

We will soon return to your normal programming, but for now Campfire Classics hopes you enjoy this quiet little short story read with no sex jokes made about getting stuck in a hole.

Winnie-the-Pooh was first published in 1926.

Email us at [email protected].

Remember to tell five friends to check out Campfire Classics.

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Now sit back, light a fire (or even a candle), grab a drink, and enjoy.

Welcome to Campfire Classics, a Literary Comedy Podcast!!

Go become a burglar.  I think that's the moral of this week's episode.

Or possibly it's that '90s pop culture references are weird.

I really don't know. Maybe this episode, like life, has no moral, and we are all merely wandering through a meaningless nihilistic wasteland that we call "reality" because we don't know what else to do.

Agh!  This is what happens when I'm forced to listen to Ken try to be clever and philosophical while Heather butchers French words.  I get maudlin...

Anyway.

This week, Ken has selected another Arsène Lupin story for Heather to read.  This story is called "The Black Pearl".  Since Ken decided he didn't want to do fun facts this week, for info on the author you can check out season 2, episode 6 "The Drag Queen Chaperone".

During the episode, our hosts tackle hard hitting social issues like the importance of Mark-Paul Gosselar, pineapple pizza, and which way to load toilet paper. Oooo...edgy stuff.

"The Black Pearl” was first published in Je Sais Tout, No. 18, 15 July 1906, as "The Extraordinary Life of Arsene Lupin: The Black Pearl"

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Remember to tell five friends to check out Campfire Classics.

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Now sit back, light a fire (or even a candle), grab a drink, and enjoy.

Welcome to Campfire Classics, a Literary Comedy Podcast!!

This week is just unsettling, beginning to end.  Even the light hearted banter is a little weird.  But that is fitting, because our author this week is Weird Horror master H.P. Lovecraft.

Because we've covered Lovecraft before, so you can hear fun facts about him by listening to Season 1, Episode 11 "Don't Go in the Moist Hole" or in Season 2's "Coming for Boston".

Instead, Heather has covered a haunted acoustic guitar, and a disturbingly skeletal electric guitar from haunted eBay.

Then Ken reads this week's haunted ditty, and along the way our hosts discuss:

"The Music of Erich Zann” was first published in National Amateur in March 1922.

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Now sit back, light a fire (or even a candle), grab a drink, and enjoy.

Welcome to Campfire Classics, a Literary Comedy Podcast!!

If you've ever found yourself think "This episode of Campfire Classics is too linear and the story they're reading makes a lot more sense than I want it to," then this is the episode for you.  Good lord, your hosts are pulling out all the stops, hopping from non-sequitur to non-sequitur, and reading a story that feels almost like it was written by someone challenged to avoid any semblance of plot.

Now you're intrigued, aren't you?

Ken has chosen a short story by Virginia Woolf (the extra "o" proves you're supposed to howl her name) for Heather to read.  It's called "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street". And while Heather does a fabulous job of reading, the story is just...confusing.

During moments of lucidity, your hosts ask:

"Ms. Dalloway in Bond Street” was published by The Dial in 1923.

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Remember to tell five friends to check out Campfire Classics.

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Now sit back, light a fire (or even a candle), grab a drink, and enjoy.

Welcome to Campfire Classics, a Literary Comedy Podcast!!

YES!  The knight errant and lord protector of the realm, Sir Johnny Bangs has returned again, to keep us safe from boredom and bad puns.  And he succeeds on one of those two fronts.

Long time fans will be delighted to learn that Heather has chosen a story by John Kendrick Bangs for Ken to read this week.  But our long time fans have proven that they are easily entertained, so maybe that's not saying much!

After a quick series recap on how our hosts are incapable of following a through line without severe tangential nonsense.  But that seems to be part of their charm!  Either that or we all have some sort of auditory Stockholm Syndrome.

Ken reads the story with his usual array of voices ranging from grizzled to old to old and grizzled.  Along the way your hosts discuss how many balls are too many, the invention of the contact lens, and your favorite joke.

"The Speck on the Lens” was published in the collection The Water Ghost & Others in 1894.

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Remember to tell five friends to check out Campfire Classics.

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Now sit back, light a fire (or even a candle), grab a drink, and enjoy.

Welcome to Campfire Classics, a Literary Comedy Podcast!!

Come down!  Come down!  And let’s see who you be!

If that didn’t make sense to you, you haven’t listened to this week’s episode yet.  And why the heck not!?!?  Huh?  What’s keeping you?

It is a pretty good one.  Ken has chosen a story for Heather by author Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom fame.  But like, it’s funny, and spooky, and there’s a lot of stuff about poo and penises.  So, you know…a Campfire Classics episode.

Heather gives a masterful read despite the story being largely written in dialect (something regular listeners will know our hosts fear more than death by a thousand mosquitoes), and along the way you’ll be treated to some classic ‘90s movie references from Heather, Ken fundamentally misunderstanding what is happening in the story, and a surprisingly long conversation about the virtues of a wooden prosthetic foreskin.

"The Ghost in the Mill” was published in the collection Oldtown Fireside Stories in 1872.

Email us at [email protected].

Remember to tell five friends to check out Campfire Classics.

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Now sit back, light a fire (or even a candle), grab a drink, and enjoy.

Welcome to Campfire Classics, a Literary Comedy Podcast!!

This one gets weird right off the bat, with Heather deciding that being literary and funny isn't enough, this show also needs to be a paranormal political travelogue. It's a pretty wild opening that includes advice on finding some really horrifying stuff on the internet.  Ken does not approve.

Once we get to the story, chosen by Heather this week, we're back in familiar if unsettling territory as Ken reads a ghost story from M.R. James entitled "The Haunted Dolls House."

It's exactly the kind of beautifully written creep fest we've come to expect from Mr. James.  As the episode progresses Heather tries to sell you things I promise you don't want, Ken basically just whines about being uncomfortable a lot, and one of your hosts misses a really obvious "Elizabethan erection" joke.

"The Haunted Dolls House" was published in Empire Review in 1923. It was republished 2 years later in the anthology A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories.

Some of the haunted objects Heather talks about can be found here.

Info on M.R James can be found by listening to Episode 6 of this podcast!

Email us at [email protected].

Remember to tell five friends to check out Campfire Classics.

Like, subscribe, leave a review.

Now sit back, light a fire (or even a candle), grab a drink, and enjoy.