Do You Even Lit?

A provocative listener question has us reflecting on what we're getting out of the project. should we go back to reading more nonfiction? or succumb to TikTok and brainrot? What's the point of being alive at all?

A quick inbetween ep before we get into to our next read.

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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

A man hasn't played in a year. He sits back down at the piano in front of a crowd, fumbles through the first set to polite applause, and then, with a little help from the band, wades out into the deep water without drowning.

  That's the ending of the 1957 short story we read this week. It's also roughly what happened to us. It's been a month since our last episode, the Nabokov we promised is off the table, and this was our first time back at the piano.

 Somewhere between a long argument about respectability politics, a detour through Isaiah 51, and a real investigation into whether scotch and milk is an actual drink, we found the rhythm again.

  "For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness."

Raise your glasses of milk punch you filthy heathens. 

Next up: Cam has picked something "on the easier side". It's Dickens.

Timestamps

(00:00:00) synopsis: a Harlem algebra teacher and his heroin-addicted kid brother

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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens 

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Wrapping up Saul Bellow's Herzog, where the going gets tough and the tough take baths.

First up, the failed murder. Herzog gets his dad's old revolver, works himself into a state of total conviction that killing his ex-wife Madeleine and her lover is not just justified but righteous, and then loses his nerve at the last moment while watching the guy give his daughter a bath. A brothers K rerun?

Up next, potato love: Herzog's own dismissive term for humble, unglamorous sentimentality. The stuff he's spent the whole book mocking while secretly craving it. And Rich's new favorite concept handle. 

Finally, the Nietzsche breakup. A final burst of letters, an uncalled for closing shot at semen reabsorption as the fuel of creativity, and the implication that Herzog doesn't resolve his arguments so much as simply stop needing to win them. Plus the book's real-life backstory. 

Chapters

(00:00:00) intro, and loving Herzog more the second time around

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"If I'm out of my mind, that's okay with me." 

Part 1 of our dive into Moses Herzog's breakdown. Like all the best books, Herzog follows a manic academic, freshly dumped by his second wife for his own one-legged best friend, who processes the whole disaster by firing off unsent letters to everyone from his mother to Eisenhower to Spinoza.

We get a peak into the 1964 version of the suffering olympics, which Rich obviously tries to tie back to New Zealand MPs and Nietzschean slave morality. 

Plus: how Christianity's meaning-making project curdled into Romanticism, then Hegelian historicism, then modern secular doomerism. 

Full transcripts are available at doyouevenlit.com, where you can filter and search episodes by key ideas, authors, and themes.

(00:00:00) how would a wizard signal being gay?

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"The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts."

— Middlemarch

The DYEL boys finally finished George Eliot's Middlemarch and finally answered the question of what this thing is about. At least we think we did: A 900-page long cope on being mid. 

Updated Website: We unveil the new Do You Even Lit website: doyouevenlit.com. It now has searchable tags by theme, book, and thinker and a breakdown of our most biggest obsessions: Christianity, David Foster Wallace, signalling, death, David Foster Wallace, and the sexual revolution.

Thwarted ambitions: Nobody seems to achieve what they set out to: Dorothea, Lydgate, Casaubon, even Bulstrode. We ask whether Eliot is simply describing reality or arguing against ambition.

Ordinary goodness: Related to the above, we unpack the famous final paragraph. Rich wonders if it's all just cope. And points out how it seems at odds with the real life of George Eliot, aka "Mary K", aka Mary-Ann Evans.

Full transcripts are available at doyouevenlit.com, where you can filter and search episodes by key ideas, authors, and themes.

CHAPTERS:

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Rich reflects on his truly deranged reaction to the film, after entering a manic state and staying up all night penning a 2500 word rant.

Meanwhile Cam had a nice time at the cinema and gives it a soft seven. Benny liked it too, until he thought about it, and is now hopelessly hung up on whether you can fairly judge an adaptation of something you know so well.

Just after we recorded, Emily Wilson came out swinging with a review in the London Review of Books, in which she shares many of our disappointments:

Nolan’s Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior’s glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words.

Full transcripts are available at doyouevenlit.com, where you can filter and search episodes by key ideas, authors, etc.

CHAPTERS:

(00:00:00) a normal and proportionate reaction

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O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;

Tackling Shakespeare's 1604 play Othello. It goes a lot better than last time, altho Rich gets a bit of a fright when the lead actor comes out in blackface.

Othello the outsider: Was interracial marriage an uncrossable divide for a man of Othello's station? What do we think of race-swapped casting? What exactly is a Moor anyway? A special investigation.

Iago as master manipulator: Why does he keep escalating his schemes? How did the most conniving man in Venice get the nickname 'honest Iago'? Is he too OP to be believable? We try to make sense of whether he's motivated by ambition, sexual jealousy, or is purely in it for the love of the game.

Sexual jealousy as a uniquely destabilising force: How does a general who can stare down an armed mob go to pieces over his wife's handkerchief? Benny runs through Othello's many epistemological mistakes. Cam gives us the evo psych line on why men have a deep-seated fear of being cucked. Some embarrassing personal confessions emerge.

Full transcripts are available at doyouevenlit.com, where you can filter and search episodes by key ideas, authors, etc.

CHAPTERS:

(00:00:00) when an old black ram is tupping your white ewe

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"In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate."

Let's go baby, things are getting steamy.  Rich isn't sure if he's turned on or terrified by Dorothea, Cam can't figure out whether he'd take blood money, and Ben is torn about whether marrying a psychopath is worth it if she's a hottie. 

The middle section of this 800-page whopper is a tournament of injured pride. Casaubon exits early, Will (stupidly?) can't take or give a hint, Rosamund becomes Lydgate's worst nightmare, and Fred ... somehow fumbles his way back into credibility?? 

Question of the ep: Is Mary Garth a stand in for George Eliot who, as it happens, was described by Henry James as "magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous." 

Listener mail: a non-native English speaker writes in to say Cam's sentences are hard to follow. Cam accepts the feedback with unusual grace.

Full transcript for this episode (and every episode) is available at doyouevenlit.com, where you can filter and search by key ideas, authors, etc.

(00:00:00) fiction as thought experiment (or: anti-thought experiment?)

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Next up 

- Finish Middlemarch 

- ???

For our big summer read we're cracking into Middlemarch, the 1871 doorstopper written by Mary Ann Evans under her pen name George Eliot.

This chat covers the first 30 chapters. Not a whole lot has happened so far but it's a very cosy read.

On Eliot and Tolstoy: which way does the influence go? How does this compare with our beloved Anna Karenina?

Worst honeymoon ever: did we buy Dorothea and Casaubon as a couple? how were age-gap relationships treated in ye olden days? Did they even bone? And if girls like Dorothea exist in real life, where might we find them today?

Lydgate and Rosamond: who he will vote for as chaplain at the new hospital? Tyke or Farebrother? The stakes are higher than they might first appear.

Fred and the Garths: a charming failson coasting on a rich uncle's dangled inheritance. We debate whether every heir ought to be lightly humiliated before they're allowed to inherit.

Plus, from the listener mailbag: have the boys ever read a book by a black person?

Full transcript for this episode (and every episode) is available at doyouevenlit.com, where you can filter and search by key ideas, authors, etc.

CHAPTERS:

(00:00:00) the guardian's #1 novel, aka English Anna Karenina

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- The rest of Middlemarch

Raymond Carver's Cathedral might be one of the most simple and beloved American short stories, but Benny is determined to overthink it anyway.

On meta-deception: before we dive in, Benny obsesses over “meta-deception” and feels betrayed by magicians.

On jealousy: is it OK for your wife to write intimate poetry about another man tenderly stroking her face? Also, what does it take to be a good host?

Moment of transcendence: what is the narrator transformed by drawing the cathedral, or is this just an over-interpreted moment in American fiction? We talk about sincerity, empathy, and seeing other people.

Full transcript for this episode at doyouevenlit.com enriched with links, ideas, authors, etc.

CHAPTERS:

(00:00:07) benny mad at magicians using magic

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