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This week: Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of lot 49. Meaning, postmodernism, why Pynchon is like David Lynch (and Tolkien!) and more.

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Alice Gribbin, poet and author of the wonderful Notes of an Aesthete, joins the lads to talk about Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's luxurious novel of fading Sicilian nobility, The Leopard (1958).

Find Alice's work here: https://alicegribbin.substack.com/
Alice's twitter: https://twitter.com/asgribbin

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River returns for a very long, freewheeling and suitably drunken chat about Carson McCullers' novel The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and the 2013 film version of Tracy Letts' August: Osage County.

Southern Gothic and The South in fiction, the life and work of McCullers, ethno-narcissism, loneliness as a constant in the human condition, Harper Lee as a McCullers wannabe, family tales that could be true crime podcasts, gushing about Margo Martindale, the power of the Southern matriarch, eating "the fuckin catfish!",  the need for messy writers,  why The Heart is a Lonely Hunter could only be written by someone who drank themselves to death on the deck of a cruise ship, and much much more. Be prepared for long digressions!

Subscribe to River's Substack: https://riverpage.substack.com/

River's piece on Carson McCullers for the Washington Examiner: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/empty-suit-messiahs

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We discuss three articles that did the rounds recently.

Mitch Therieau's "Vibe, Mood, Energy or, Bust-time Reenchantment": https://www.thedriftmag.com/vibe-mood-energy/

Christian Lorentzen's "Authorial Fragility and the Enemies of Poptimism": https://www.gawker.com/culture/authorial-fragility-the-enemies-of-poptimism

and Ann Manov's "Has Fuccboi Killed Literature?": https://unherd.com/2022/02/has-fuccboi-killed-literature/

Talking vibes, vibe shifts, the internet as spectral realm, technopolitan occultism, critics vs fandom, cringe accelerationism, books reviews about discourse about books, rendering terrible online language in literature and more.

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We return for 2022 with a new intro (composed by the excellent GOLDpny, artist page here:  https://open.spotify.com/artist/1BIfoNbVBu02WED6cjVj8m), and plenty of thoughts on the recently departed Joan Didion.

What better way to memorialise Didion than to read The White Album, her paean?/exorcism?/dirge? to the Sixties?

CRUCIAL questions are answered, such as: why do so many Didion fans wear turtlenecks? Why do feminists think everything is rape? And why are shopping malls so great?

We also discuss Didion's status as a chic writer (while wearing our daggiest clothes), inspired by this article: https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/55411/1/the-death-of-the-chic-writer?amp=1&fbclid=IwAR1pDhyk5gq7fS22dOGipQemUP59aedT_eLADQ6oVCPZDC7i7JmgQuHLGiY

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Bookish brawls, literary violence, bitter fights and unbecoming scraps between egotistical writers . For our season finale, we each choose one of our favourite feuds from literary history. 

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It's a Q & A episode!

Join us as our lovely, twisted, perverted, overly serious, and sincere subscribers ask us all sorts of questions, including the most important one: fuck marry kill our last three guests?!

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This week, Rio and Matt are joined by writer, Paul Dalla Rosa (https://twitter.com/pauldallarosa) to talk about Yukio Mishima's coming of age novel, Confessions of a Mask, and Paul Schrader's magisterial cinematic adaptation of Mishima's life and work, Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters.

Discussion ranges over masculinity, misogyny, homosexuality, autobiographical fiction vs autofiction, and more.

Subscribe to Paul's fantastic writer interview series on Substack here: https://pauldallarosa.substack.com/

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This episode, Reuben gets an aneurysm reading Robert E Howard's first Conan story, "The Phoenix on the Sword," and asks Crom to grant revenge on Matt for inflicting this pulp trash on him. We also watch one of Matt's favourite films, Conan the Barbarian (1982), directed by the incomparable John Milius and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in his breakout role.

Come for Matt's Arnold impression! Stay for the conversation. 

We range across sword and sorcery, libertarianism, too many adverbs, the barbarian fantasy archetype, lost worlds, the appeal of pulp fiction, camp, bathos, and more.

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This episode, we're joined by John (aka Telepathy Party on Twitter), to wax lyrical about our favourite literary fantasist, John Crowley. While we didn't have enough time to read his big, magical magnum opus, Little, Big, we chose to read one  of Crowley's novellas, In Blue, a haunting, ambivalent piece of dystopian fiction. 

We gush about Crowley's virtuosic sentences and weird obsessions, while touching on RL Stine's Goosebumps books, fantasy and science fiction, how crap Neil Gaiman is, what makes In Blue such an unnerving dystopia in comparison to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, as well as gnosticism, nihilism, and meaninglessness. 

We round off the episode with an actual Telepathy Party! John offers his knowledge of the tarot to give Rio a reading. Energies combine and vibe and Rio absorbs the mystical wisdom of the cards, learns how he might shape his destiny. 

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