It says I was using the Audacity speakers, but they didn't work the speakers and whatever. Why don't you just get a Mac and use GarageBand? Yeah, he's going to now just make a huge switch. Yeah, just go purchase a Mac right now. We'll wait. When I want to do something local instead of remotely through my work, I have to update everything because I haven't done it for months. Old man, Robert. I love that song.
Rob, we regale us of glory days when there used to be a Radio Shack. Thank you for agreeing once again to do my silly little show. It's a tradition now. Not all traditions are good traditions, though. But we're still bound by them. They're traditions.
Are your school days out of sight? When you took English, art, and math. What's your favorite Fahrenheit? How sour are the grapes of wrath? Do you need a challenger? Poor disgusting Salinger. Do you love the written word? What happened to the Mockingbird? bird our show is just beginning so find a place to sit these questions will be on the test it's time for sophomore
Welcome back to Sophomore Lit. This is our annual family Thanksgiving episode. And once again, I have with me my brothers, Rob. Hello. And Dan. Also, hello. In past years, I've forced my brothers to investigate some little nooks and crannies of Americana, like things like... Casey at the Bat or Burma Shave Signs, a bunch of long fellow poems. This year, for no particular reason, I'm not really feeling very...
Very proud of America at the moment. So I almost called this thing off because I thought I really did not want to be sitting around trying to make funny jokes for Thanksgiving for this. But then you realized this was the most you're going to see of your brothers at Thanksgiving. Yes. Oh, man. Way to bring everything down. No, but then I thought, you know. Why don't we do an episode, again, for no reason at all, on the things that we read that bring us comfort, say in trying times.
So I wrote my brothers into this once again. And so the rules are we're going to discuss each one work apiece of something that we've read many times in our life. And perhaps the familiarity is what keeps bringing us back to those books or I don't know, poems, whatever you've chosen. And does that sound? Does that explain the premise well enough there? Mm hmm. I think I understand. Adequately explained. OK, Rob, you're the oldest. You go first. I'm the oldest. Yes.
Well, I'm not trying to have the most to say, though, but mine's not a big surprise. I was picked works of J.R.R. Tolkien, most particularly Lord of the Rings. It is easy comfort food. It was read to John and I by our dad when we were children. I think I was more impressed by it at the time. You know, it's the definition of escapist, but it's also a link to some Christian thinking that sometimes I find problematic now, but I still find very comforting.
with Tolkien's very Catholic worldview. And you can get immersed as much as you want in an alternative history when real history sucks. history that seems to have a purpose and providence. I don't know what more to say that that's something I've returned to more and more. I'm not doing as much comfort reading as I used to do with these old eyes. And, you know, this whole, I don't know, changing habits. But it's still return.
I was there for at least one dad reading, although to my shame, like I look back at it sadly because I think I hurt his feelings by being too bored to go through all of. fellowship on on whatever rereading that was you know when when we were growing up well we there was kicking around the house uh That a copy of the original Ballantyne books, paperback edition of The Hobbit, which had those weird psychedelic covers by Barbara Remington.
And what I love about those covers is they were obviously drawn by someone who hadn't read the books. Who just kind of like, okay, here's something that looks like fantasy. And I remember we got Dad to read that to us first, and he hadn't actually read, I think at that point, The Lord of the Rings, and he got a... He borrowed a copy from a friend and our dog chewed it up. Harold and Doug literally chewed up the copy of Lord of the Rings that Dad was reading. And I don't think...
I don't think my parents had a lot of money back then. And the idea of replacing the books was kind of, I think it was kind of a shock to them. Well, I know he read The Hobbit to us first, and I remember being upset because I was told, you know, Bilbo's not going to be so big in this one. And, you know, like a kid, you want these things to be the same. You want more of the same.
So I know he had some connection with that. I know he also didn't read the appendix because he would say Celeborn instead of Celeborn or Sauron instead of Sauron. Okay, nerd. Do you consult the maps about the maps? As much as I did. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know. I'll say this about reading Lord of the Rings back in the day. This was like you were reading these. I remember you wanted all the time to play scenes from Lord of the Rings with me. And I didn't quite.
get it i tried to but you were really big into like reenacting the the battle of ministeria or something like that and um But this was in the early 70s and there were no there were no Peter Jackson films. There wasn't even the Ralph Bakshi film at that point. And so you had to actually be an accredited nerd to to actually read Tolkien in those days. I think we did see the Backstreet film with Uncle John. I may be misremembering that, but I think so. But that would have been late 70s.
I don't reread Tolkien much because I feel like I've done enough of that in my life. I did read him a lot. But the last time I reread him, I reread Lord of the Rings at least. I was delighted to find. All of these strange little things that never, ever made it to any other adaptation. Because Tolkien was a was an odd duck and and those books are weirder than people remember them. And my favorite example of this is early in.
Fellowship of the Rings there's a scene where the hobbits are leaving Hobbiton to go to you know to Bree or whatever and they're sleeping under the stars And suddenly a fox comes along. And for one paragraph, Tolkien gives us the fox's point of view. And the fox says something like, Hobbits sleeping under the stars. What a strange world this is. I just love that because you picture him like getting drunk at night and like, ha ha ha, how clever am I?
Well, Dan, do you have anything to add to our Tolkien memorances here? Only that it only sort of captured my imagination. Post Peter Jackson, I and then I did finally read all of Lord of the Rings and enjoy it. But when I was a kid, I liked The Hobbit because it, you know, had a lot more sort of. simple adventure fun in it. And that's what I wanted. And then as soon as we got to
The trilogy afterwards where people are sitting around in meetings, literal meetings, deciding what to do. I'm like, well, this is not what I want out of fantasy. But I think I came around to appreciate it later. Yeah. Should I go? Let's go ahead. Now, Ben, why don't you tell us what you what you picked? Well, the thing is, like like Robert, I don't do so much rereading these days. Like when I was.
Kid, I read, you know, so much and I reread so much and that lasted a fairly long time. And then, you know, some years back, both. Personal and things out in the world got a lot tougher and I couldn't concentrate on reading for a long time. And now that I'm back to it, I kind of focus mostly on stuff I've. never read before uh so i'm i'm gonna break your rules a little bit later on but um initially i think that the thing that i read the most over and over again
I don't know. It's possible that it's in a dead heat with annotated Alice, Princess Bride, and... Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But the thing that sprung to my mind was Harpo Speaks, Harpo Marx's purported biography. And I said to you guys, it's lost a little luster for me now that I know how much of it is just...
You know, stories that were made up and embellished over the years. And there are all these other Marx biographers who are like, well, this is nonsense. This didn't happen this way. This, you know, like. Which is a shame because it's filled with. It's a ripping yarn. It's filled with great, funny anecdotes and human detail and an interesting life. I mean, you know, the vast...
The general ideas in there are not inaccurate to the life of Harpo Marx. So maybe it's still okay to enjoy, but I would... Remember rereading that over and over again and like looking forward to getting to various favorite parts of it. But I also wanted to say that, you know, there are two sort of newer things that I was reading that struck me that.
They, you know, are the sort of things that maybe wouldn't have provided me comfort at different parts of my life, stuff that I wouldn't be as interested in when I was. But now, you know, as you say, for no particular reason, there are things that make me feel better. And one of them is I'm reading the first LBJ book, Robert Caro, multi-volume set. So I'll. you know, be done with that sometime when I'm 90. But I do enjoy reading history when I read Caro in a way that I never.
do otherwise because so much of the history books that you read, particularly in school, are only interested in giving you the broadest overview of things. And so any sort of. Human detail is lost and anything that makes the story interesting is cut. But he, you know, stretches out and does exhaustive research and is a. terrific writer to boot. And it was comforting to me to read about some times in history that seemed even bleaker perhaps than now. And then also I, you know, forgive.
I ask forgiveness of your wife, John, but I never cared for philosophy. It felt like... I mean, maybe it's just avoidance. I'm like, I don't want to think about that, especially when it's put to me in such jargony, difficult to understand terms. But I did recently think, you know, it might help. To sort of get an overview of how people have coped with the world over the years. And so I'm reading the little book of philosophy that sort of gives, you know, well-written.
Cliff's notes for various philosophers chronologically. Did you read Harko Speaks to Dan? I think that was part of the McCoy world tradition because I remember hearing about it, a lot of it. uh at home and i think you may have been reading it to him before he started reading it and i think i think yeah i think that was part of my my project to make dan into a little version of myself You almost got away with it too.
There was I had a friend in high school who was very into the Marx Brothers and I started watching them. And then I found a copy of Harpo Speaks and I thought, oh, I'll read this to Dan. And poor Dan was a recipient of so many of my. long mumbled readings of books. Yeah. You know, the thing about Harpo Speaks for me is that's where I learned what the Algonquin Club was. You know, you'd think you'd think you'd learn about that by, you know, reading.
the papers of Dorothy Parker or something like that. But no, that was where I first learned about the Al Conklin Club. Yeah, well, I mean, and now, I mean, my main association with the Algonquin Roundtable sorts is how much they like to play croquet.
Not any of their witty bon mots or anything, but that they were fiends for croquet. I don't think it's bad to... enjoy a book that is full of um you know lies lies basically i mean it's like reading darren munchausen i think you know yeah or by proxy no i i i think the book is just as wonderful as before the world feels a little less magical when you think okay well maybe not have all this happened exactly this way yeah I mean, it's either the basic conceit that you're going to...
You're going to hear Harpo in his voice is so charming. If you watched him be silent in all those movies, it's a charming thing. Still so surprised that you turned from Barbo to the true story of the tailoring of LBJ's inseam. I think I'm far away from the bunghole years of LBJ. He's still just a congressional aide right now. Well, I'm expecting some reports on where you are in LBJ's life as this goes along.
Okay, so now it falls onto me, and I'm going to choose for my book, The Midnight Fox by Betsy Byers, which was published in 1968, the same year I was born. And because I am a Gen Xer, I will bore you with stories of TV shows long ago forgotten. Back in the early days of public broadcasting. Every local station had their own show that they syndicated. And there was a show, a syndicated show. I think it was out of Pittsburgh. It might have been somewhere else. It was called Cover to Cover.
And it was basically a guy would read a couple of chapters from a chapter book and try to do. encourage you to go out and read this book. And I remember that on Cover to Cover, they read the sequence in The Midnight Fox where Tom, the protagonist, first... Spy is the titular Midnight Fox. And they had someone draw the scene as it was being read aloud. And I was so enchanted by that.
And so I went out and I found a copy of the book. And the strange thing about this book for me is over the years as I've... as I went into like a writing program, I've tried to write myself. I find that this book explains a lot of the... The voice that I've chosen, because it was the first book that I ever read where there was a main character who was so neurotic and so basically depressed.
but also self-effacing, funny, prone to digression. That was my introduction to that kind of writing in a children's book. When I reread it now, I'm kind of shocked by how simple a book it is. It's a very, very simple book. It's about a boy who comes to the city, goes to live on a farm under protest. For a summer, he has to spend with his uncle and aunt, and he finds a fox on the farm, and that changes his life.
It's kind of the most bare bones story you can imagine. It's sort of like all those made for TV Disney movies from the 70s where a boy. falls in love with a raccoon or a hawk or whatever, and that changes their life or whatever. But over the years, I think about Tom a lot. I think about these... these wonderful, the wonderful voice he had. And he had this way of...
You know, I'm going to read one little segment here because the end of the book ends with Tom recalling the events of the book from a long time in the future. And I just think this is so lovely. It all seemed like something that had happened to another boy instead of me. Like one time, Petey and I made a time capsule out of a large jar.
And we put into this jar all kinds of things so that in a hundred years or a thousand, someone would find this capsule, open it, and know exactly what Petey Berkus and I had been like. We put pictures of ourselves in the jar and lists of things we had done, and Petey wrote down everything he ate and drank in one day, and I wrote down all the books I had read in the past year.
We put in stories we had written about our families for English class and Petey's poem, TV Land, and pictures we had drawn, and then we buried it. A year went by, and one day Petey said, hey, let's go dig up the time capsule. So he ran and dug it up and took all the stuff out and laid it on the ground and read it. And Petey kept saying, I never wrote that. I know I never wrote that. And I was the same way about this crayon picture with my name on it.
i couldn't remember doing it at all it was as if two other boys had made up the time capsule and buried it in the ground and now that was the way i felt about the farm it was as if it had all happened to another boy not me at all And I was kind of a sad, strange child. This ending of this book spoke to me in a very poetic way. This is one, I don't know whether...
You just read it to me or you gave me a copy or both. But I remember reading it because you recommended it very highly. And I also really enjoyed it. I have specific memories of. Part of it, the part that stuck with me, unrelated to the fox, was when he like... makes this food where he bakes a bunch of things and some dough, some delicious sounding things like it's like a hard boiled egg and some meat or whatever, all in a loaf and ate it and talked about how delicious it was. And.
I don't know. I like cooking. I don't know. Yeah, I love that sequence myself. Although in the years since then, as I've actually have learned to cook myself, I'm like, that would not work. It would just be raw in the inside and burnt on the outside. You know, I like you to I do find myself now as a as a grown man rereading books less and less. But, you know, I was wondering earlier this year why that is, you know, because I.
I used to reread books a lot and I used to enjoy them a lot. And like everyone else, my brain has gotten rotted by too much internet and too much. phone and it's very easy these days to be distracted because we expect culture to come at us hard and fast so if it gets you to read i think You know, there's nothing wrong with pulling out a book you loved when you were 10 and rereading it. I definitely felt more peaceful than I had in quite some time.
after spending a long time the other day just reading a book. I think you just should read to us some more. Yeah. Bring back that family tradition. OK, well, you know, just call me up and I'll. I'll pull a book off the shelf. Just give us a couple of chapters, whatever you got in front of you. I got a lot to do. So, you know, I'll call you in the morning. Okay.
Well, anyway, happy Thanksgiving. Thanks for coming back on. Maybe we'll we'll pivot towards more of these kinds of episodes in the future. Let's see. And, you know, whatever you're thankful for, be thankful for, because it's going to be. It's going to be a time. Yep. A little raw on the outside, burnt on the inside, but we'll get through it. The Incomparable Podcast Network. Become a member and support this show today. TheIncomparable.com slash members.