Feliz Cinco de Mayo!  This week, we’re talking about one of our favorite nuns, the genius author, poet, and scholar Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.  Born in the mid-1600s, Sor Juana’s work has had a resurgence in the past few decades, and we want to get a little piece of the action for ourselves.  (Yes, we know Cinco de Mayo isn’t actually a big deal in Mexico.)  Rachel shakes people’s hands just to MESS with them.  Jackie reveals one of the rules of being white.  Theo recommends time travel.  Topics include: Kermit face, head nods between men, Joshua’s professional look and feel, sexual home runs, Play-Doh men, Oliphaunts, Octavio Paz, the SAT (Spaniard Aptitude Test), absorbing one’s twin in utero, and the genderqueer police.

Bump Patrol is back, baby. We revisit the book Theo calls one of the scariest of the whole Goosebump canon, and it’s an absolute blast (from the past).

Will the kids stay out of the basement as they’re told? Or will they drive the plot forward by very much NOT staying out of the basement? Is Margaret and Casey’s mom having an affair with a cactus? Is Fatso a good nickname for a preteen girl? What even is DNA anyway?

Listen to find out! The first ~15 minutes are free to all. Join our much-loved Patreon fam to hear the rest, as well as all our other bonus content, at www.patreon.com/firethecanon.

Topics include: The Room, vulture librarians, trauma queens, pissing things right out of the bladder, excessive hair tossing, secret tomatoes, ridiculously poor lab hygiene, real dads vs. plant dads, Monsieur Henri, mad scientists, and murderous composers.

Voltaire’s renowned 1759 satire of the idea that everything is for the best!  Candide, a young German fellow, goes on a series of increasingly worse (and more bizarre) adventures, and does his best to maintain his sunny disposition.  Theo reveals the last thing he wanted to do.  Rachel is so powerful, despite having clothes on.  Jackie plays an ultrasound prank.  Topics include: honchxheads, Dune 1984-style, the idea of human suffering, a bunch of little Stalins running around, nonbinary Leibniz, Will Smith vs. Christopher R. Ock, the Lollipop Guild, Theo’s neighbor Vernon, Flight of the Bumblebee, Hello by Adele, Game of Thrones, color guard, vegan stories, the teeth of the back, Fiona the hippo, girls’ trips, monkeys vs. apes, Lord of the Rings, skinny dipping stories, and The Chronicles of Narnia.
WARNING: thanks to the contents of the book, this episode contains lots of discussion of sexual assault, violence, racism, antisemitism, and brief discussion of miscarriage.
Translations by John Butt and Theo Cuffe

Gather round, audience, and we’ll tell you a tale of Voltaire, perhaps the greatest satirist in all of France.  Learn why this man kept getting sent to England (a fate worse than death)!  Find out which family member he hooked up with!  Discover what his friends did with his body after he died!  Rachel apologizes for having taken a philosophy course. Jackie comes for Young Thug.  Theo declares his intention to cremate himself out of courteousness.
Topics include: the ethics of Havana Moon by Chuck Berry, birthday episodes, Bartleby, Harry Houdini, Lil Pimp, the luxuriousness of the Bastille, making it with the penguins, Timothee Chalamet, nerd bros, Frederick the Great, mere uncle status, X the Great, anti-slavery racists, Eleanor Rigby-ing someone, mummies, and full-body condoms.

This episode is a preview of the March Patreon bonus dedicated to the lurid acts of Pope Alexander VI, with whom Jackie became intrigued after learning about him during our conversation with Ada Palmer (see episode 69 for context). Head of the notorious House of Borgia, Pope Alexander VI did a lot of weird things and was rumored to have done many more. We break down the facts vs. fiction and see what’s up. Topics include: the Ten Courts of Hell, Chestnut Parties, stableboy murder, the Tree of Knives, a huge flex, purgatory, Oprah, and the latest cat trends.

We wrap up the final 7 stories of James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’. Somehow, despite the stories only getting sadder, we were more or less beside ourselves with silliness. Sometimes the stars just align that way, and neither soaring prose nor existential dread nor the revelation that one of us had unwittingly done something extremely embarrassing during a previous recording can bring us down. But fear not, for we still manage to get you (and ourselves) suitably learnt. Theo sings a song in Latin. Jackie experiences a fall from grace and emerges as Hillary Clinton. Rachel knows what it’s about, but doesn’t like it. Topics include: Mariah Carey, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Lindberg baby, the 1900s Dublin version of The Office, demon cats, Marilyn Monroe, Madame Tussauds, backfiring pranks, ghost stories without ghosts, Nora Barnacle, meat magnets, Alanis Morissette, even more scrivening, Nickelback, the impossibility of friendship both between and among the sexes, clay that just won’t quit, and racks upon racks upon racks.

Stories covered: Counterparts, Clay, A Painful Case, Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother, Grace, The Dead

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! In this seasonally appropriate episode, we read the first 8 short stories that comprise James Joyce’s 1914 collection ‘Dubliners’. A portrait of middle-class life in the titular city at the turn of the 20th century, things undeniably get weird, and the gang has to figure out how to talk about it without throwing up from sadness. Tune in to find out if they succeed! Theo is Aladdin in more ways than one. Jackie doesn’t understand how e-books work. Rachel wants her $20 back. Topics include: screaming carrots, Apple Jacks, the inaugural Oberlin goat, petty theft, young love, Scrooge McDuck, Highlights Magazine, chewing loud enough to wake the dead, and feeling seen in a bad way. 

Stories covered: The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby, Evaline, After the Race, Two Gallants, The Boarding House, A Little Cloud

The return of our wonderful guest, author and historian Ada Palmer! (If you haven’t listened to our first episode with her, scroll back a bit and listen to Romeo & Juliet & Everything else.)  This time we talk about the Black Death, Covid-19 as a historian sees it, and helping each other make a better world.  Topics include: Titus Andronicus, Romeo & Juliet, Petrarch, tranquil souls, the gayest city in Europe, cuneiform tweet tablets, jelly baby models of the Battle of Helm’s Deep, Prometheus, the correct way to time travel, Machiavelli, Beethoven, Rosalind Franklin, John Brown, and hopepunk.

Note: we briefly talk about autoimmune disorders, and the science is of course much more complex than we were able to get into.  If you want to read up a little, here are a couple articles:

https://www.science.org/content/article/black-death-left-mark-human-genome

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6925958/

We read the last five chapters of Winnie-the-Pooh, by A.A. Milne. Which character is a badass bitch? Which character is the most like Theo?  Which character makes Theo suddenly turn against the book entirely?  Find out if this book gets to remain a classic, or if we decide to fire it out of the canon entirely.  (Or a secret third option?!) Rachel disrespects the wishes of the dead.  Jackie becomes a Luddite. Theo considers the benefits of killing Rachel.  

Topics include: plane landings, Rowlf the Dog, cell phone destruction, Borat, dragons’ hoards, Faraday cages, men of letters, Poirot, Theo’s love of water, eggo my leggos, hair vs. fur, voice acting, NC housing code, and dudes secretly living in your closet.