Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.

The grapes return for another episode of 'Stories for Kate.' This time we do a deep dive into Martha Coolidge's 1983 indie classic Valley Girl, starring a young Deborah Foreman and Nicholas Cage. We talked about aspects of the film that we still love (eileen: still the way NC kisses, swoon; Jen: the storytelling; Yaz: the character of Julie), and aspects that make us cringe now; and, a surprising revelation from Eily. Plus the music! the music! Still one of my all-time favorite soundtracks, from The Plimsouls to Modern English to Josie Cotton to Psychedelic Furs.

Listen to the end for some bonus Kate love life content!

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#ReadingTheStone Season 3: We have ventured a bit far afield from Story of the Stone and 18th century Chinese mansions for now, as Season 3 will be stories for (and about) Kate - in which we talk about her favorite books and films and men - and eagerly await her emendations and rebuttals.
Episode 1 Our Foundational College-era Romances, from Room with A View to Valley Girl to Pride and Prejudice to Dirty Dancing

Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.

[Originally recorded on March 25, 2023]

"The Fellowship of the Stone" (thank you to one of the episode guests for our new sobriquet!) reconvened for a post #ReadingTheStone wrap-up episode. We welcomed a panoply of new-to-the-group friends - all Hongloumeng scholars and teachers - Paola Zamperini, Canaan Morse, I-Hsien Wu, Carlos Rojas, Emily Wu, Steve Durrant, Scott Gregory who dropped in to discuss their own origin stories and current research interests in Story of The Stone. We heard from several members of our group, too - and their experiences reading The Stone together this past year.  Ann, Waiyee, and Eileen concluded by discussing future thematic episodes that we'll be hosting in the coming months, now that we have come to a conclusion of reading the story proper. 

Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.

[Originally recorded on 3-11-2023]
 
We recorded our first #ReadingTheStone Saturday chat on April 2, 2022, and now nearly 12 months later, we say farewell to Story of the Stone, as we reach Chapter 120 together. In this episode we explore the various 'happy endings' presented at the end of the fiction, and wonder how and if they responded to the questions posed by the text at the very beginning.

But we're not quite done with #ReadingTheStone! - next Saturday we will livestream from Boston, and we'll also be continuing with occasional future episodes on thematic topics - check back in with us, and we'll also keep you posted!

Thank you to all who have joined us in this adventure - Waiyee, Ann, and Eileen are deeply grateful.

Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.

[Originally recorded on 3-4-23]

“Before one disaster is over, here’s another!” Pretty much sums up all the chapters lately. - Dani
Our heroic trio Waiyee, Ann, and Eileen are reunited (thank you Shelly!) for the penultimate episode discussing Chapters 110-115, alongside the rest of our #ReadingTheStone community. A wide-ranging conversation today from Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness to Everything, Everywhere All At Once - but also a deeper dive into the notion of qing 情 as we encounter it in this story and in Chinese philosophical discourse, thanks to Wei and Waiyee.  Several character deaths explored - Faithful, Xifeng, Grandmother Jia, and  Adamantina - as we head to the end.

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[Originally recorded on 2-25-2023]

Waiyee and Eileen had other commitments this week, but Ann led the #ReadingTheStone group in a rich discussion of Chapters 105-109, on the dual plot strands of Baoyu's marriage and also of the Fall of the House of Jia, and whether, even for those with power and money and connections like the Jia family, there might be an limit-point to their ability to evade the justice system of their time. 
Many fascinating and overlapping strands this week on the exorbitant price of sea otter pelts in the early 18 century (thank you Kate!), the family's list of corruptions and Xifeng's culpability, personal messiness and public prominence (Stephanie's early work experience with Ted Kennedy informed her thoughts here!), whether Baoyu's trajectory might make for an anti-bildungsroman (thank you Shelly), and why it seems impossible to contemplate harmonious polygamy as an outcome for Baoyu Baochai and Daiyu in this fictional world, despite its acceptance in the 'real world' and in other instances in this story (Steve and Ann and Elena all weigh in here).  

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[Originally recorded on 2-18-23]

As #ReadingTheStone enters its final dozen chapters, we find ourselves ruminating over the postlapsarian state of things: the scattering and banishment of most everyone from Grand Prospect Garden, Xifeng's decline and Baochai seemingly being groomed to be the next Xifeng, the ethics of appeasement in a large social structure, and the desultory state of the Jias after Daiyu's death and Baoyu and Baochai's coerced union. We also finally give the paterfamilias Jia Zheng 賈政 his due - and the group has a lively discussion about all things Jia Zheng, and ponder the story from his point of view.

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[Originally recorded on 2-11-2023]

The theme of this morning's #ReadingTheStone live chat began earlier, with Kate's Twitter poll on where readers fell on The Baoyu-Daiyu-Baochai ship, and whether Daiyu's quiet off-stage demise in the midst of a wedding was unbefitting the exit of a central character. Some other forked paths of conversation centered around Chapters 96-100 of Hongloumeng: Daiyu's final utterance, the business of Baoyu's lost jade, idealized polygamy, destroying traces of oneself as gesture of moral purity or willful self-destruction, bowderlizing sad endings to please one's audience, and of course, muzak. 

Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.

[Originally recorded on July 2, 2022]

After a lovely first #ReadingTheStone (virtual) face-to-face meetup as part of the Duke APSI Book Club in late June, we returned to our Twitter Spaces live chats in early July, and also dove back into reading the text proper. Eileen revisited one of her favorite moments of multimodal reading at the end of Chapter 23 - Daiyu's encounters with snippets of famous stories of love. The group also had a lively conversation about where Cao's narration of youthful emotion might be placed on the spectrum from Proustian nostalgia to Goethe's depiction of Young Werther's in-the-moment fervid passions. Other threads begun on that week's Twitter threads and continued in the live chat include: Bao Chai's cattiness, how Hawkes' decision to not begin the English translation with the authorial preface changes our perception of the text, magical hexes and our understanding of them, and Xue Pan fanfic potential?? Early summer was a time for readerly fancifulness, it seems!

Thanks for listening! Find us at readingthestone.com or @ReadingTheStone on Twitter.