What do you call it when a cynical intellectual, a loyal party member, and a Moravian folklorist walk into a bar? A joke! Or rather, The Joke. Milan Kundera’s 1968 debut novel, that is. Join Nathan, David, and Nick for a lengthy — and tricky — discussion on the individual vs. the collective, the tendency of history to turn into myth, and tips for the best way to unassumingly hide a bunch of laxatives. Is this Kundera jam only a political novel, or does it use a political setting as a way to chas...
Jul 21, 2020•1 hr 12 min
Good luck summarizing this one, nerds! Listen in as we examine William H. Gass’ holy casket of hellfire and judgment, Omensetter’s Luck , a wild stream of preacher prose, suicide and/or murder mystery, and small-town cat gossip. Seemingly intelligent points are made by the B.O.S.S. gang regarding the book’s odd three-part structure, its allusions to original sin, and Gass’ iterative writing process, but in this episode it’s truly just about the words. Cathartic, unhinged, godly (godless?) passag...
Jun 13, 2020•1 hr
Obsessions! Cacophony! Typography! Listen in as we dissect William H. Gass’ post-modern cult classic, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife , a bizarre kaleidoscope of killer sentences, 1960s design, and, of course, gratuitous nudity. David argues that the book’s overtly sexual content actually maps to Gass’ love of language. Nathan provides a breakdown of the typefaces and visual strategies at play. And Nick takes a break from musing on the intellectual properties of eroticism to give a shout out to hi...
May 12, 2020•31 min
They say that reading Albert Camus’ The Plague in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic is trendy. Well, it’s not so bad being trendy. Join us this month as David, Nathan, and Nick unpack Camus’ classic work and ask all of the questions on everyone’s minds: Is it logical to do good? Are pestilences real or mere abstractions? Is the philosophical novel genre fiction? For the sake of maintaining normalcy in our now chaotic, fully virtual world, the B.O.S.S. hosts have done their best to stay true to...
Apr 23, 2020•45 min
What do you get when you create a society with no fixed gender, a whole hell of a lot of snow, a shitload of shifgrethor , and a week off every month for carnal activities? You guessed it: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness . Listen in as Nathan, Stephanie, and Nick discuss the many flavors of science fiction , Le Guin’s nuanced role as a prominent feminist writer, and how this book seems to deal with so many moving subjects but also lacks an emphatic touch. Also included are flagrant...
Mar 29, 2020•57 min
Pragmatic non-hierarchical structures! Breaking the space time continuum! The sociopolitical and philosophical dualities that exist between two planets — but also inside us all! Join David, Eric, and Nick as they dissect Ursula K. Le Guin’s often revered classic The Dispossessed. They wonder if the book is the left-wing equivalent of The Fountainhead , if the neon color scheme of the mass market paperback version was an agent of pre-bias, and if they are missing some key aspect of the book that ...
Feb 21, 2020•43 min
What’s the deal with how choppy this Nabokov book is? Is the character of Pnin actually the target of a faculty conspiracy? Or is the real conspiracy the fact that David is secretly employed as a salesman for the word-a-day industry? Join Nick, Nathan, and David for another rousing discussion on Vladimir Nabokov, this time on the (sometimes) beloved Pnin . And don’t worry, even if they may be a bit critical, many a failed attempt at reading Nabokov passages out loud proves who the real master is...
Jan 27, 2020•48 min
Drama! Comedy! Opacity! Turpitude! All are up for grabs in Vladimir Nabokov’s holiday classic, Invitation to a Beheading . Listen in as Nathan, David, and Nick try to figure out just what exactly is going on in Nabokov’s oft-overlooked gem that may or may not be about: personal exile, political exile, gnosticism, or the inability to get a good night’s sleep. Just don’t call it Kafka-esque (even though it’s definitely Kafka-esque).
Dec 22, 2019•44 min
In this edition of The Substance of Influence Nick chats with Ross Farrar, vocalist of the Northern California punk band Ceremony, about the connections between the band’s latest record In the Spirit World Now and the classic Saul Bellow novel Humboldt’s Gift . Listen in as we discuss the similarities between Bellow’s blend of rough intellectualism and the literary underpinnings of punk music, why poetry should just tell you what it is , and the psychological impact of being on a Megabus for ove...
Nov 21, 2019•51 min
In this edition of The Substance of Influence, Nick chats with University of California-Berkeley English Professor Catherine Flynn about her new book, James Joyce and the Matter of Paris . Listen in for discussion on the (un)romantic Paris of yesteryear, the sources of all those cool modernist moves, and why Joyce’s fiction is, um, a bit smelly. In other news, members of the B.O.S.S. reading group in San Francisco are now terrified about the potentially impending selection (read: assignment) of ...
Oct 20, 2019•28 min
In this installment of the Books of Some Substance podcast, Nick is joined by University of California-Berkeley English Professor Catherine Flynn to dissect the endless permutations of Samuel Beckett’s oft-overlooked Watt . Is there meaning behind Sam’s lists upon lists upon lists? Is this a reality more real than realism itself? And will there be an opportunity for Nick to —most predictably — use the term “post-post-post modern”? To language, we raise our glass, and descend into the Schopenhaue...
Sep 29, 2019•45 min
You may be thinking: If I had a dollar for every time I felt like I was just sitting in the waiting room of life—except that the room was an open field with a single tree in it and my best bud just wouldn’t keep his boots on—I’d be rich! Or in a hit Samuel Beckett play. Whether it is about morality or acceptance or the morality of acceptance, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot resonates indefinitely. Listen in as David, Nick, and the recently returned Nathan talk it through, possibly existentially nave...
Aug 25, 2019•40 min
[Update (8/12/19): After recording and releasing this podcast, it has come to our attention that Sarvis has been barred from teaching in Florida public schools following allegations he engaged in inappropriate communications with students on social media. We in no way condone this alleged behavior. This episode will remain available and those that choose to listen may do so at their discretion.] In this edition of The Substance of Influence, David and Nick speak with Caleb Michael Sarvis, managi...
Jul 18, 2019•30 min
Have you heard the bad news? God is dead. But in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, you can't keep a good god down—even when you murder a consumptive flim-flam man, seduce a fifteen-year-old, and blind yourself with quicklime. So put glass shards in your shoes, turn up your headphones, and drink every time we say "nihilism." (This episode’s summary was written by our guest, Kathleen Founds . Before she found herself dreaming up nihilism-themed drinking games on a classic literature podcast, Founds ...
Jun 24, 2019•50 min
In this latest installment of the Books of Some Substance podcast San Francisco State University English Professor Sarita Cannon returns to talk about the violent grace (or graceful violence?) of Flannery O’Connor’s short story A Good Man Is Hard to Find . Listen in as Nick and Sarita talk about the curious relationship between Catholicism and the grotesque, how O’Connor can keep a live audience laughing right up until a story plunges into mass murder, and the intriguing, dark-prophet nature of ...
May 07, 2019•31 min
On this, our first episode of The Substance of Influence episodes, David speaks with fiction writer and poet Chaya Bhuvaneswar, winner of the 2017 Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize for her first book White Dancing Elephants . They discuss authorial voice, being a reader and a writer, influence in general, direct influence in particular with Chaya's selection of the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and, of course, her wonderful collections of short stories. You can find Chaya and he...
Apr 16, 2019•33 min
In this latest installment of the Books of Some Substance podcast David, Nick, and Eric go for a disorienting ride through the comedic darkness of László Krasznahorkai’s Satantango. This paragraph-shunning tome from the “Hungarian Master of the Apocalypse” is perfect for the reader seeking that good ole bleak, rain-soaked, mud-packed, worm-eatin’, dust-filled vibe. Listen in for a rousing discussion in which we unlock all of the secrets: why Satantango can feel like an amalgamation of influences...
Mar 23, 2019•44 min•Ep. 37
In this episode of the Books of Some Substance podcast, Stanford English Professor Roanne Kantor stops by to chat with Nick about Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes . While providing a fertile ground to discuss what exactly Global Anglophone literature is , the 2008 novel also packs many a nod to Latin America greats García Márquez and Vargas Llosa and pairs well with that other stellar work about General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and 1980s Pakistan, Salman Rushdie’s Shame . A Case of Explod...
Feb 16, 2019•57 min•Ep. 36
If by chance—and what else really controls it all other than chance?—you are into examining the futility of it all, or, of course, the scorn of it all, then the latest B.O.S.S. podcast on László Krasznahorkai’s The Last Wolf in which David, Stephanie, and Nick examine the tale of how a washed up German author tells the tale of traveling to the barren plains of Spain to encounter a warden telling a tale of how the area’s final wolf perished—yes, perished—all told to the Hungarian barman who doesn...
Jan 26, 2019•30 min•Ep. 35
Did you just stop at digging up her body? How crippling is your love? In this episode, San Francisco State University Literature Professor Summer Star joins Nick and David for a rousingly dark conversation on Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Is this story within a story within a story meant to be identifiable to anyone? Are those really ghosts? Is Heathcliff a critique of mid-19th century British class structure, a rotten bastard, or simply one who loves and revenges harder than any made for TV...
Dec 03, 2018•54 min•Ep. 34
That day they discoursed in a cool and oft solitudinous basement. Eric and Nick and Dean Rader of the University of San Francisco examined Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West and inquired what Cormac McCarthy had in mind. Sulphurous and detached and surgically endeavored as that mind may be. They passed through the beauty and bleakness of the prose and the ruinous afterimage of the bloodstained vacancies of emotions firestoked and withheld. They glanced upon the ragged edges of rep...
Nov 12, 2018•58 min
A man sits down at a cafe. Pauses. Thinks. Writes a sentence. Pauses. Thinks. Writes another sentence. Pauses. Thinks. Will that next sentence be about solving an age-old puzzle of a pirate’s submerged treasure? Or perhaps it will be about cloning Carlos Fuentes? Or maybe it will just be about an attack of giant, shimmering silk worms. Only César Aira knows, but he ain’t looking back and neither should you. On this episode of the podcast, join David, Nick, and Frida as they embrace the constant ...
Oct 16, 2018•24 min
Is there anything beneath the iceberg of Ernest Hemingway's status than the Hemingway Lifestyle Brand™, with its hyper-masculinity, pared-down prose, and a shirtless, boozy, gun-toting Papa? On this episode of the podcast, join Nick, Eric, and Stephanie as they find the answer to that question by analyzing the second best piece of war-time art after Top Gun: Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms As always you can find us here: On Instagram & Twitter: @booksosubstance On the ole interwebs: ww...
Sep 19, 2018•49 min
You know the feeling. Or, perhaps, the lack thereof. It can happen to even the strongest human, the greatest writer, the toughest leopard capable of climbing the highest heights. But is it stagnation? Boredom? Regret? Or just your average case of gangrene? Only time (or one's continued sense of consciousness before the ultimate blackout) will tell. Bust out your hiking boots and climb to Ngaje Nga, you life-wasting fools! It's the conclusion of Hemingway Short Story Month! Join Nick and Stephani...
Aug 24, 2018•18 min
On this episode, the third in our Hemingway Short Story Month, David and Nick are joined by Stephanie to discuss the oft-anthologized "Hills Like White Elephants," an anis-soaked, dialogue-heavy, purgatorial little number in which two characters talk around the possibility of an abortion and a doomed relationship. Find the story, and give us a listen. Follows us on Instagram & Twitter: @booksosubstance Check out our homepage: www.booksofsomesubstance.com...
Aug 17, 2018•14 min
Hola Nada! On this episode, our second in the Hemingway Short Story Month, join David and Nick as they discuss the story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place." Ernest Hemingway was born in nothing in Oak Park, nothing . As a young man he worked as a nothing for The Nothing City Star until nothing, when he volunteered as a nothing on the nothing front. He was severely wounded and decorated for nothing . In nothing , he joined the nothing nothing nothing in nothing. With the encouragement of such fellow n...
Aug 08, 2018•12 min
Howdy bright boys and girls! Roll over in bed, face the wall, and forget the wrong people you double-crossed in Chicago with a new episode of the Books of Some Substance podcast. This month we are reading four of Papa Hemingway's short stories. First up: The Killers, an elevated piece of noir with all the Hemingway trimmings. Follows us on Instagram & Twitter: @booksosubstance Check out our homepage: www.booksofsomesubstance.com...
Aug 02, 2018•10 min
Ah yes, Sabbath’s Theater . Perhaps you remember that one uncle of yours reading it at family Thanksgiving ’96. Or maybe you noticed a dash of judgment in the eye of your local librarian upon recently checking out a quality hardcover edition. (Don’t worry, everyone’s just pumped that you still go to the library.) Maybe you, a literary-minded baseball fan, picked it up after reading The Great American Novel and encountered a different kind of curve ball. Is Philip Roth’s filthiest tome anything m...
Jul 25, 2018•53 min
For Books of Some Substance’s 25th episode, Nick is joined by San Francisco State American Literature Professor Sarita Cannon to discuss Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Listen in for insight into 1970s politics, writing books like songs, the importance of myths and ancestry, and Morrison’s knack for asking all of the right questions while not giving any of the answers. And, oh yeah, that whole flying thing.
Jun 27, 2018•57 min•Ep. 25
In preparation for next month's reading of Song of Solomon, Nick is joined by bookclub mainstays Frida and Eric to discuss Toni Morisson's key work of literary criticism Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination . Listen along as they discuss otherness, reading race, the inherently political, and their own confrontation with ways in which we read.
May 30, 2018•26 min
