How did it all begin? Where is it going? What’s the point of anything, anyway?
With (post)script, get to know your quirky hosts, their existential doubts, and all the behind-the-scenes drama that’s concealed by their staid demeanors, not to mention an ample Patreon paywall. Actually, we’re giving you this debut episode of (post)script — and every fifth one thereafter — for free.
Wes talks about his experiences with alien abduction, and Erin cautions against the use of mayonnaise. Erin then recounts her former life as deep sea fisherman, and Wes reminisces about his Fleetwood Mac cover band. All this and more, except probably in fact none of this. We do, we promise, chat about something.
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Thanks to Tyler Hislop for the audio editing on this episode.
Transcript
0:00 Wes: Welcome to Postscript, the subtext after show where we talk about things related and unrelated to the week's episode.
0:05 Erin: This is Wes Alwan and this is Erin Olanik.
0:08 Wes: So this is our first after show and it's not even really an after show. Normally we're going to do these. We're going to record a show and then we're going to talk for, let's say, 15 minutes after the show. But this time we're just.
0:21 Erin: It's just real life.
0:22 Wes: It's just real life.
0:23 Erin: Just nothing. Just recording it after I had my coffee.
0:27 Wes: Which means we have nothing to talk about, unfortunately. So we're not going to just be talking about what's going on. You know, we might talk a little bit more about the episode that we've just had, but often we're just going to chat about other things. So we might talk about a little bit about personal stuff or what we've been writing, what else we've been reading. Sometimes we might even read a little bit from something else that we've been reading and talk about that a little bit.
0:53 Erin: But for now I think we want to just talk about personal stuff so that you could get to know. I mean, I suppose our listeners largely will already know Wes, but probably won't know me as well.
1:03 Wes: Yeah, so I heard you were a high school teacher.
1:07 Erin: So funny that you heard that because that is what I'm most known for. I teach high school English at. It's an all boys school actually, which I never thought that I would be doing single sex education. Especially that sex. Not that I am.
1:22 Wes: Not that you have anything against that sex, but discriminatory.
1:27 Erin: But yeah, you know, I think they think of me as being like a really odd bird because they're all super into sports and I am into sports. I'm. I'm into watching baseball and sitting quietly while doing so. But yeah, but they're like, you know, there are a lot of like jocks at that school that I teach at. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way at all. Like they're just like very active. You know, they're teenage boys active.
1:52 Wes: You were not part of the jock crowd growing up.
1:55 Erin: It's hard to believe now, especially as I'm extremely muscle bound and athletic, but so I don't know what to do with them except be what I am, which they think is very funny, which is like someone who doesn't really like to move that much. I just sit around and read and I think they think that I'm interesting I hope at least you're a bit
2:17 Wes: of a disciplinarian as well, right?
2:19 Wes: How do you keep a bunch of boys in line?
2:21 Erin: You know, corporal punishment, making a stand on their head in a corner.
2:27 Wes: That's very old school, this place.
2:28 Erin: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I don't take any crap, really. Send a lot of people to detention a lot. It's a. It's a good day when I've sent a lot of people to detention. But they're good kids for the most part. A few days of sending everyone to detention really makes everybody sit just as quietly as I do, so.
2:48 Erin: I sound like a monster in this. Oh, man.
2:52 Wes: Well, it's good that you know, for listeners to know the real you.
2:56 Erin: I think boys respect discipline. You know, they're good about that. Girls get resentful, then they write angry poetry about you, you know.
3:04 Wes: Well, speaking of which, I really. What I really wanted to start with is the fact that you're a poet. Although I didn't want to embarrass you.
3:10 Erin: Yeah. I like to say that I'm a person who happens to write poetry. The word poet has a has. I have too much respect for that word and it has too much gravitas for me.
3:18 Wes: Yes. Well, for marketing purposes at least. You are a poet and I am a philosopher, which I didn't feel great about marketing the podcast, as, you know, philosopher Wes Alwan and poet Erin O'Luanaigh. But you are a real poet in the sense that you've published. I've published some essays here and there, but I haven't really published as a philosopher. But you can be found in a variety of prestigious journals, Right? Sorry to flatter you. Let's leave the pristine variety of journals and tell listeners where they can find you.
3:52 Erin: I had a poem published in Southern Review and that was reprinted on the Academy of American Poets website, and I think that might be the first near the top that comes up if you Google me or something, so that's easily accessible. And where else have I been published? Agni, out of BU and 32 poems. New Criterion, I think New Criterion is also available online. Hopkins Review, A couple of other places that I can't think of. Not because I don't like them, but just because it's hard for me to think about it.
4:26 Wes: So how would you characterize yourself as a poet? Or is there a way to do that?
4:30 Erin: Probably the best way. I mean, I don't subscribe to any school of poetry or anything like that, but I think probably all poets can trace themselves back to influences and other poets that they admire. So poets that I really love are Auden Bishop, James Merrill is one of my favorite poets. Marianne Moore. Amy Clampett is a poet that isn't known as well as she should be. I think she's a real top tier American poet. I guess Lowell to a certain extent. I don't know. I mean, I guess probably every American poet has been influenced by Lowell and Bishop and some of the other names I've mentioned. I like people who are dead better than people who are alive for the most part. But that's true of everything in my life. So no one should take this as like, you know, a polemic.
5:18 Wes: And how did that not just an interview you for all of this, but how did that for all of your life? What does that mean?
5:23 Erin: Maybe the listeners do know something about me because I think I talked about this at the beginning of the apartment episode.
5:29 Erin: My whole life I was really close with my grandparents. I still am very close with my grandmother. My grandfather has since passed away. You know, they're Italian, like very old school. My grandfather was a World War II veteran. Children of the Great Depression and teens of the Great Depression. And I just really loved them. I loved being around them, being at their house all the time. And so they had very old fashioned interests. My grandfather was like a big old movie buff. My grandmother is really into foreign film, especially Italian film. So Bicycle Thieves was a movie that I watched when I was really young with my grandmother. I never understood when people who were my age, like really young, thinking that things that were old were dumb or that black and white movies were boring. You know, all those like prejudices that we have when we're little or that I think that most people have, I never had. I thought that they were more interesting. So I just started really liking and becoming fascinated with people who were all dead. Very, very dead. Many of them not just freshly dead.
6:31 Erin: And my grandfather was big into history and stuff like that. So he was like super into English history. English royal history. So was my mom, actually. I don't know if probably the same thing in your family because we both were very weird children. I'd imagine. I was like really into Eleanor of Aquitaine for a while. Like really dead people.
6:50 Erin: I don't know, maybe there are a lot more people who are like me than not like me. But I never went in for fads or anything new. And I mean, even to this day I have trouble reading fiction after like 19, I don't know. I don't want to give like a specific date, but I don't know. In general, I haven't really read anything written in the past 30 years, maybe fiction wise. And I tend to prefer 19th century fiction almost exclusively. And early 20th century fiction.
7:15 Wes: Yeah, I'm in a similar boat. I'm rarely reading contemporary fiction or more recent fiction. Although maybe we should do Infinite Jest at some point because that is a often requested book. I knew you were going to have
7:29 Erin: that reaction, but yeah, no, that's going to be a 12 part episode, I guess.
7:33 Wes: Well, yeah, yeah, I tried to read it once and didn't get through it, but. So some listeners, not all will know that I'm at the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast that's been around for about 11 years now. So if you want to know more about me, you can listen to hundreds of hours of audio over there. But yeah, I had a. I have one fan. I think we've gotten the request a few times, so sometimes we'll do literature over there. But I have one fan who's an Infinite Jest fanatic. And we kind of became friends a little bit because she lived in Boston and she kept asking me, you know, when are you going to do Infinite Jest? When are you going to do Infinite Jest? And it would have been easier to comply with that request if the book weren't quite, what, a thousand pages? It's just wrapping my head around reading all of it. And the first time I tried to read it, I got 80 pages in and then I got irritated, which is not uncommon, you know, with me. It doesn't mean that it's a bad book, it just means that I'm picky. But I think doing it now, I could handle it.
8:34 Erin: I've never even attempted it, so. Which is something I should do probably at some point, so it might be good for me.
8:41 Wes: Well, what's interesting is he's a. A lot of it is set in a transitional home for the mentally ill in the Boston area. And I happened to be a director of a transitional home for the mental ill.
8:53 Erin: I had no idea, not about you, that Infinite Jest was set in Boston in a transitional home. Wow. Yeah, really interesting.
9:01 Wes: I always thought that the home was in Somerville, but someone was telling me it's in Allston. So it's piqued my interest in giving this another attempt. Not that we would attempt that anytime soon. I don't know how we're gonna handle long novels on this. I don't know if we're gonna break it up into parts, you know, we could say, all right, we're gonna read 250 pages and then discuss, and then the next 250. I don't know how we would do that. It seems like novels are something you have to discuss as a whole, but maybe. Yeah, maybe that would work.
9:29 Erin: I'm just about to start Magic Mountain.
9:32 Erin: Yeah. I was thinking that that might be a fun one to cover.
9:35 Wes: So is that for school?
9:36 Erin: Mm, mm. No. I've only read Death in Venice. It's my only Thomas Mann.
9:42 Erin: So I felt I needed to. Plus I'm really attracted to the subject matter. And it also seems like thing to be reading during a world that's still sort of in semi quarantine. So I'm interested in, you know, in a world that's still kind of largely under varying degrees of quarantine. I'm interested in reading about the great sanatorium novel. The experience of being alone together or something like that.
10:03 Wes: Yeah. I recently read the Plague for the Partially Examined Life. We did an episode on that. That's a great. I hadn't read it before, and it's really, really great. It's one of my favorite novels now. So spot on for what we've been going through with the pandemic. I also dabbled, looked a little bit at Daniel Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year.
10:23 Erin: Oh, yeah? Yeah.
10:24 Wes: I don't know that I'll get through all of it, but that's a really interesting account. I think he basically took his uncle's diary and turned that into. It's a fictionalized account, but it's largely based in truvents. All I've read of it is just him deliberating about whether or not to leave town. Apparently that's what people did. They went into the country. And he's extremely ambivalent about whether he should leave or stay for various reasons, one of which is just that his home and his workspace he thinks will be robbed if he leaves. I've started just dabbling in reading a bunch of different stuff at the same time. So one of them, which I just finished, is a book on humor. Because I want to write my own book on humor, the Psychology of Humor. And kind of synthesizing different accounts from philosophy and sociology and psychology. But this one is written by literary critic who also happens to be, or happened to be a psychoanalyst, Norman Holland. And he gives a really wonderful synopsis of all the different things that have been said about humor over the ages. Really, really entertaining and fascinating. And unfortunately, when he gets to his own theory at the end, I think it turned out not to be. Not to be great. Why he gets bogged down in the fact that in order to explain humor, you have to give these kind of universalizing explanat. Despite the fact that not everyone's going to laugh at the same jokes, and despite the fact that, you know, it suffers from the deficits of any explanation, which is that it has to generalize to some extent, so some of the concrete reality will always get left out. And he thinks he's going to overcome that problem by giving this theory of humor as having something to do with people recreating their own particular identity, so that even when we're laughing at the same jokes, we are doing so for different reasons in some ways. So there are some classic theories of humors involving superiority or incongruity, which he acknowledges have their place, but he thinks he can find a richer explanation when he's trying to explain why someone laughs at a particular joke by analyzing their particular identity theme as a person, the particular narrative that they have. So I think that when you talk about humor, why people laugh at jokes, you do have to do the equivalent of literary interpretation. You can't just generalize about incongruity. To really get at a joke, you have to go deep and you have to say something about the social context that's assumed. You have to say something about the subtext of the joke. There's a lot of stuff going on, which is really what excites me about hopefully writing this book. I don't think that the attempt to relativize it to a particular identity is workable.
13:15 Erin: I've heard a lot about that. The idea of, like, the comedian herself or himself has to be, like, alienated in order to be. You don't subscribe to any of that idea, like the social outcast or something.
13:28 Wes: I think comedians tend to be that way because I think comedy is always working with a tragic premise. So people who are dealing with their own tragic premise are going to tend to, you know, use comedy as a. As a defense or people for whom that's more poignant. He was thinking about not the identity of people telling jokes necessarily, but the identity of people on the receiving end of jokes and trying to explain why they laugh in terms of their identity.
13:54 Erin: Yeah, I just meant to flip it around and.
13:57 Wes: But I think it's probably true that there's a particular character type for successful comedians. Although, on the other hand, I am reading a book about how to write jokes as well, because I thought I should be able to consider myself with friends. I can, you know, make witty asides. I can make people laugh. But I'm finding out that that's entirely different than being able to actually write a joke, which is. Turns out to be quite difficult. So if I really want to understand humor, I have to at least train myself to write one joke. At least that's not terrible.
14:29 Erin: Have to watch more Dick Van Dyke show episodes.
14:32 Wes: Yeah, well, I'm going to be analyzing. I'm going to look for as much material as possible.
14:36 Erin: Sally and Buddy.
14:38 Erin: School of. Yeah.
14:40 Wes: Have we reached the end of our show?
14:42 Erin: No. That was fun. I'm going to enjoy these a heck of a lot more than the actual episodes.
14:46 Wes: Much less pressure.
14:49 Wes: All right. That was fun.
14:51 Erin: Yeah, it was fun.
14:52 Wes: Okay. Thanks for listening and thanks for being a supporter.
14:56 Erin: Yeah. Thanks so much for supporting us guys.
