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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 mocking? 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, where we reread your 10th grade reading list. I'm John McCoy, and with me is returning co-host Glenn Fleischman. Hello. It's been a while. Why don't you introduce yourself again? Oh, gosh. Well, I am a recovering type. printer, printing historian, technology journalist who spent many years in junior high, high school and college studying the German language and reading German literature. Well, that must be very helpful for today's topic. Absolutely.
You want to plug your book? Oh, yeah, I do have a book out. It's called, well, actually, a new edition coming out by the time you hear this. It's called How Comics Are Made, and it's available for pre-order, shipping in June. It's now, it was a Kickstarter book.
And now it's actually a it's like a real boy. It's a real book. It's coming out from a major publisher that bought the rights and you can find it at worldwide at online bookstores. How comics are made about the history of comics, reproduction, production and reproduction, I should say. So this time we are doing the 1956 play.
by Friedrich Dürrenmatt called The Visit. Or can you give us the German name? Oh, sure. Let me clear my throat. It's Der Besuch der alten Dame, which is just The Visit of the Old Lady. It's not a very – it's apparently some people object. to it being the title being cut down it was like i don't know if it's a funny little little side note it's calling something the visit by itself in english seems uh I don't know, somewhat sinister. And it seems kind of quaint to read as an English speaker.
this exacting German title, but I'm sure the connotations for a German audience would be very different. So this is a play, like I said, from 1956. You want to talk a little bit about your history with this play? Well, I know that I read this at some point. I wish I could remember exactly when, because, you know, Derenmatt, Friedrich Derenmatt, or Friedrich Derenmatt, I can say it without the accent as well.
Swiss playwright, he's considered one of the great all-time playwrights in German. And a lot of his work has been translated and staged in English, both in plays. And then there are a number of films, as I recall, either they... did well in English speaking markets with subtitles or were translated and shot in English and as well as other countries. And he's...
It's hard to explain his tone. I remember reading, it's often almost like, I mean, this play in particular is almost grounded. Like there are not, there's a little bit of sort of. I mean, there's a lot of heightened reality, but some of his stuff is really like just larger than life, but he refuses to allow it to be so. So it seems bigger, but he's always casting it in terms of the the.
experiences that we have in day-to-day life, if that makes sense. And as a Swiss person, he's obviously always, you know, in this, they're never, I was going to say, they were never exactly in a comfortable position, right? He was born in 1921. and died in 1990. So across his entire life, there was always some kind of strife in, around, behind, to the right of where Switzerland was. So it's kind of an uncomfortable place. And I'm not sure the Swiss...
like their truths told. So the visit seems like one kind of accounting of sort of group responsibility to others and to morality. But yeah, I do remember reading it many years ago. It stuck with me. And when I reread it for this podcast, I was like, wow, I remember much more of the detail than I'd expect from something I read probably, again, with the theme of the show, possibly when I was a college sophomore, possibly earlier.
Well, this wasn't a book that I read in high school or college or even in the one semester of German I had one summer while I was doing my art history degree. But it is a play that I was familiar with. Back in the day, back in the 90s, I used to do from time to time posters for a local theatrical company here in Boston, this kind of loose. a confederation called Bogest, which put on some very interesting productions. And I did posters for...
them and for their main director. The main director eventually moved away from Boston and moved up to Bowdoin College. I can't remember whether this was a Bogess production or a Bowdoin College production, but he asked me to do... a poster for this and I said I didn't know the play and he described it to me in about four sentences. And I said, okay, sure. And I drew something that was sort of in the style of Edward Gorey.
because he was talking about it as being this slightly surreal, slightly sinister thing. And he said, oh, that's perfect. And he said, you know, what you need to know is there needs to be an old lady. visiting a European town. She has to have a casket next to her. And somewhere on the poster, there has to be a Black Panther. So I followed all those instructions. And I had no idea what it was that, you know, I had done.
You know, it reminds me of the old, you know, the old Ballantyne book, Lord of the Rings, that were obviously drawn by someone who had never read the books. In this case, I had never read the play, but somehow I think I got it right because I read it through now and I feel like, oh yeah, that was pretty good. Yeah, it's, I think...
There's something deeply upsetting about this play, and it builds up over the—as it progresses, because it starts out, again, like, I mean, even in the very first part, it's got— It's upsetting stylized elements. You don't know exactly what's going on. And then immediately some of the townspeople are saying racist, anti-Semitic, weird stuff. And I've forgotten that part. You start off and it's just kind of...
of you're dropped into this world, this small town that everybody's – the train doesn't even really stop there very often, right? All the big trains go zooming by, and there's kind of train spotters. standing there watching them go by. But yeah, it's kind of like there's a deeply unpleasant aspect of it before you even figure out what the plot of the play is. It's one of those plays that has a very large cast, but most of the cast members only have maybe one or two lines. So there's this big...
town. And it does something that I was thinking got done a lot in plays of the time, which is it introduces this world through minor characters. The scene setting is all done through incidental characters. And it's not until, I don't know, maybe five to... eight pages in, that we finally are introduced to the actual main character of the play, this old woman, Claire.
was it Zakadazian who is, uh, this fabulously wealthy old woman, uh, who is, has come for a visit and, um, she arrives as a, you know, in just a fluster of... I don't know, Dame Maggie Smith activity of, like, she stopped the train by pulling the emergency brake. When the conductor complains, she throws money at him, you know, and she just kind of, like, ostentatiously is throwing money everywhere.
Also, when she gets off the train, she has in tow these two large men who are kind of brutish, two strange... men who seem to be blind and are talking in sort of sing-song voices, and she has a casket. This is kind of a play that is by turns larger than life and by turns realistic. When I was reading it through, it reminded me very much of Berthold Brecht. Yes. And it's that kind of attempt to put the audience at a bit of a remove.
But I don't think he goes as far as Brecht. And I do think that there's plenty of scenes that are played extremely straight and where we're supposed to... highly identify with the characters as having real emotions and real situations. Right. I mean, I'm a huge Brecht fan as well. No surprise because I was reading German. But Brecht has that kind of distancing thing, right? Like his whole thing is this almost like you're supposed to –
You know, know the play is a play and the people in the play often know the play is a play. And there's a framing mechanism. And this is like a morality play. It's almost like an old style kind of.
you know, Greek drama in some ways with little chorus elements and other standard figures you would see, right? And so these are instead of standard figures in like a Roman comedy, these are drama. These are standard figures in... you know, rural life in a small town, but we're supposed to see them almost as avatars of these different kinds of roles, the teacher, the mayor, the priest, the butcher, and so forth, including the person who's the central character in the town.
I also actually want to point something out. I don't think we've gotten to this point yet, but the version of the play that I read, which is, I think, one of its primary translations. This is it's Patrick Bowles translation from 19. What year is this? 1962 or something. And it was republished. It talks about her. So she offers, we'll get into this. She offers to give a million.
In this play, it doesn't specify the units. And I assume someone reading in English is like a million pounds, a million dollars. It's actually in the German, it's milliard, which is a billion. And the correct translation is billion. So she's talking about giving a billion, let's say, francs, which is – I think even in the 1950s was –
hundreds of millions of dollars. So she's talking about dropping this huge sum of money where a million dollars or a million pounds or whatever, a million francs is not very much at the time. So there's actually, if you, dear listener, if you read this play, let's... Keep that in mind is the sum of money is kind of 100 or 500 times higher than the English translation or I think the standard English translation indicates.
Right. Now, that's the version I'm reading, too. It's pretty widely available, the Grove Press version. I can see that there has just been an extremely recent translation by Tony Kushner. Oh, really? In 2020. Oh, that's exciting. Yeah, that would be a very interesting thing to see. Given the fact that it is this heightened reality where there's this old... woman who left the town at the beginning of the play under circumstances that are only revealed later in the play. She was
impoverished when she left town. And now she's coming back as this infabulously wealthy woman. who has serial husbands. In fact, in the course of this play, she is marrying her next husband and divorcing him. We're invited to see this all as very silly and a joke. Until you get to the end of the first act in which the major conflict of the plays introduced, which is the old woman isn't coming here out of the largesse of her.
of her heart. She's come here because she wants to enact revenge upon the town's member. What's his name? Oh, I should remember. Isn't that funny? He's the central character, and I'm blanking out on his name. It's written in this translation as I-L-L, which I assume in German is pronounced eel. Yeah, I think that's correct. It's eel, right? So it looks almost like... Well, depending on how it's typeset, it looks like three or illness.
Alfred Il, but it's often translated apparently as Anton Schiel. So I guess we can't read too much into Il, which I don't think has a particular German meaning. So it's just a boring name, I guess. I think that the trouble is, since it looks so much like the English word ill, that they're trying to avoid that. You know, sort of like what they did with Mrs. Frisbee when they made the movie and changed her name to Mrs. Brisbee. Oh, right, right, right.
Because in the intervening years, I guess, the Frisbee had been introduced to the public. So she wants to enact revenge on Ile because when they were young, they were young lovers. And she became pregnant as a teenager. tried to claim paternity from Ile, who brought false witnesses to the magistrate. She was denied her paternity suit. She had to leave town and basically take up as a prostitute in another city somewhere. And over the years, because of the...
uh, machinations of fortune. She's been able to come back here and now she's sent down and she says, Hey guys, I've heard about your, your, your being in trouble. Your town has fallen upon hard times. Here, I will give you this incredible sum of money, both to the town and to be split up amongst every town member personally. as long as you just do me the favor of killing my old lover. Mm-hmm.
Which must have been – I'm trying to think how shocking it would have been in the theater. I remember hearing when Stephen Reich debuted one of his first – pieces it was during a subscription um like it was mostly subscribers are taking some music you know the musical series somewhere and um
I don't know, it wasn't Piano Phase, but it was one of his early pieces. And people literally went to the stage and were banging on the stage. They were so angry about it. And I'm thinking, when this debuted, were people expecting something that, would they have come to the theater and known? Would they have come to the theater and... thought something so horrific, 10...
plus years after the end of World War II that someone would just say, I'm going to pay you to murder this man, but you have to make the choice. I'm not going to do it. You're going to do it. And then I'm going to give you a bunch of money. Everyone will be wealthy and you can go on with your lives. That's your choice. This play, in some ways, falls into that category of post-war literature that tries to examine why people do bad things. You know, it seemed like a very...
Very at the forefront of people's minds at the time to try to explain how World War II had even happened and why Germans would have gone along with such a... horrific regime. And as such, I have to say, I find this play a little bit disconcerting to read, given our current political situation. Because it's kind of the deal some people have been offered, and you don't have to specify our country. In many countries around the world right now, people have been told by politicians, elect me.
Because what I will do is I will give you riches. I will improve the economy. There might be some cost. Some people you don't like might be thrown into the country. There might be some collateral damage. But I'm the person who's going to bring you wealth and the wealth comes through.
Potentially death and suffering, but you don't need to worry about that. It's hardly a different message. And it's kind of a it's an old message, but it's one we haven't heard, I think, quite as resoundingly. So this play does have. I think it's the sheer transactional dollar or money-based nature of it too, right? It's not, I want revenge, kill him. It's here's a bunch of money. It's a contract hit, just a very expensive one.
Right. One of the things that I find complicates this, though, is that Claire Zakanasian is written in such a appealing, funny way. She's a brilliant wit and she's got a lot of charisma. And on the other hand, she was wronged in a way that I think everyone in the audience will agree that she was treated extremely poorly. And not just by her ex-lover, but by this town. You kind of find yourself understanding.
where she comes from. And depending on what kind of a person you are and how much, how close you feel as the audience to these characters, you can almost find yourself rooting for her. But to the extent that it is a play about real people and we are confronted again and again by the terror. that Eel feels as he realizes slowly that what he thought was an absolute line that would not be crossed.
people are starting to consider that. He knows people are starting to consider that because Eel runs a shop and people are buying things on credit from him. And they are buying expensive things on credit from him, presumably with the expectation that they will never have to pay this debt back. So I feel like... As a viewer, you know, I've only read this, I have not seen this, but as an audience viewer, you're kind of...
being pulled both ways. You're both to the sort of this comic vision of this. wronged woman getting revenge. You know, in some ways, Americans love those stories. We love stories about people going off and getting revenge. But you'll... In the intervening years, has married, has kids, is a member of society.
It feels like both those things are true. It's both true that he was a horrible man when he was young. And he's never fully atoned for that. And he probably needs to atone for that. But does he need to die for this? Right. I mean, this is the fundamental dilemma is he's not given – he never chose to atone. He did a horrible act. He forgot about her. He went on with his very –
bourgeois life. He married the woman who was respectable. He had children who may care a little for him. It's not very clear, but probably not. In the middle of this decaying town, he sees himself almost as a... part of that decay. And even if you believe within the text of the play that he feels guilty about it, he still...
He hasn't done anything. I mean, this is the B2 movement problem, too, is that how do you forgive someone who has done terrible things if they haven't even made any effort to begin the path to atonement, even if what they've done is not illegal, which is eels.
Many of the people in the Me Too movement haven't. But is there a state in which if you haven't attempted atonement, anyone should ever forgive you? And I mean, this play resoundingly says, I think, kind of, no. But it's also, I think the play neatly builds up this kind of, there's like two, there's a...
a point and a counterpoint, right? He's afraid of being killed, but he also gradually accepts that it must happen because of what he's done and what the town needs. He's responsible for the failure of the town. At one level, he's responsible for what he did to her personally, but he's more broadly responsible to the town and to society. So he sort of ultimately accepts his fate, and the townspeople accept their role, even though theirs is...
you know, mercenary and his is ostensibly a form ultimately of atonement. We talked earlier about how the play plays with... the tone and with the level of realism in the play. And one of the things that I adore in this play is there's these four They're just called man one, two, three, and four, who appear from time to time as trees. They appear and they talk about being trees. And what's so funny about this to me is here I'm going to.
do another one of my strange digressions when i i was a kid growing up in the small town that i was growing up the uh Library I was in had a really hit or miss collection. You know, it had books that were very old that had no business being on the shelf in the early 80s when I was like. looking at them. And one of the books that I came across, and for some reason I checked it out, was called Four Short Plays for Women Troops. Oh my gosh. Okay.
And or something like that. And and and it was what it was was it was a bunch of short plays that were written for if you were. If you had sort of a ladies' art society, you know, like in The Music Man, when the old women are all doing, putting on living tableaus and stuff, you know, there's this kind of... Central American, we're going to make our own culture.
They were all sort of Arthurian romances written in the most prettified language where people would suddenly stop and talk in poetry. They were terrible plays, but... It amused me, even as a teenager, just to think that this was sort of what the sort of the mainstream America was like reaching for as high. highbrow culture. And these characters coming out and talking about being trees seems to me like a perfect parody of a certain kind of symbolist theater.
That was, of course, no longer in vogue, but would be very much in people's wheelhouse in the 50s because the symbolists were doing things in the 1910s and 20s and stuff. It's very Midsummer Night's Dream also. I am the wall. This is the hole through which Thisbe and Leander speak and so forth. And they come out and proclaim all that. And then they've run out of time for the play practically. And there's just the fact, like I'm leading the stage direction for that is the.
The men, the four citizens come in and they're wearing dress suits like they're. totally in rags at the beginning they have also upgraded their outfits buying on credit and uh but so we see them in their finery and then also you know we are standing in for trees just uh it's it's i would say it's kind of There's almost an our town element to that too, right? Is that there's a literalism that doesn't make you accept it for any less than it is.
The whole play ends on an extended riff of a Greek chorus. This chorus one, chorus two, the women, the men, which... is right out of Lysistrata at that point, The Women and the Men. So there's a lot here that plays to people's understanding of the form of theater or their... their expectations of what theater is. Nonetheless, in the postscript, in this Grove edition, Durenmott says,
I have described people, not marionettes, an action and not an allegory. I have presented a world not pointed immoral. There's all kinds of interesting contradictions here. Yeah, I mean, he's trying to tell you to not... not do the thing that he's done, right? It's, oh, if you're trying to read something into this, well, I don't know that you should. I haven't presented it. There's no conclusion to this. And it is true. Like we don't like, you know, humans don't like cognitive dissonance.
is an inherent problem with this. There's no resolution. There's no happy ending and there's no villain because the villain is circular. Is Claire the villain because she wants him dead or the townspeople because they kill him? As the play progresses, I think there's this great unfolding.
First, we find out Claire has lost her leg and maybe has other ailments. Like she has to be sort of reassembled, you know, to move around because she's had a rough life. Although sometimes in the pursuit of enjoyment and sometimes because of being forced to do things. You know, we find out we think the town has fallen in hard times like a lot of rural towns. But no, she's actually brought everything up and has made things worse. She is intentionally.
put the townspeople in the position where they're in rack and ruin, right? So she's made the decision easier for them, but also... given them even a higher moral high ground where they could say, you did this to us, we are going to resist. But it seems like, I mean, this is, again, the post-World War II, especially in Germany, the prosperity issue is everyone was...
poor or desperately poor. The country's rebuilding itself. I mean, this is, I'm sorry, this sort of takes place, like this is the tricky part, right? I'm going to keep saying Germany. They're speaking in German. This is Switzerland, but the, I'm sorry, the... We don't know exactly where it happens, right? It doesn't say this is Switzerland or Germany, as I recall. We just know it's a town with a German name. So there's that.
That aspect, too, where like if you think of it from the Swiss standpoint, well, the Swiss didn't. lose that much wealth they i mean they had their own troubles not like they endured world war ii without effort but they didn't have their you know their country wasn't bombed and they weren't the aggressor uh and if you look just over the border you had people who were desperately poor and starving
And many of those people, it wasn't – they didn't do that. Only a small number of people in relative terms of the Nazi party. But everyone suffered from the result regardless of how you – personally felt or your participation. I was reading Werner Herzog's autobiography recently, which is a great read. Let me tell you, it is everything you could hope from a Werner Herzog autobiography. And in it, he describes the absolute desperate conditions they were in during and after the war.
This mother like living in like unheated cabins in the mountains. She's heating pine needles to give her children some calories. Like this is the abjectness. So, you know, again, he's Swiss. Is he thinking of those people? Do you think of the people who suffered as well as the people who suffered from the indignities of the Germans committed, the atrocities of other people? Beyond that, there is a...
psychological examination of what you might call to be obsessive love. At the end of the play, there's a scene between Claire and Eel where She is describing how once he's dead, she will take him back to her estate on the Mediterranean and they will be there together. And she says, you will remain there, a dead man beside a stone idol. Your love died many years ago, but my love could not die. Neither could it live.
It grew into an evil thing like me, like the pallid mushrooms in the wood. In some ways, it's completely unhinged. But on the other hand, it is, you know, it is a play that sort of asks. How long do you hold on to things? You know, obviously, Claire was wronged and Claire never got justice. The town moved on from Claire's even existence in a way that was deeply unfair. But on the other hand, Claire has remained stuck in time.
You know, we mentioned, I mentioned before this Black Panther. Claire's old pet name for eel was Panther. And at the early in the story. Someone says, oh, her panther got loose. And then just it's mentioned from time to time, like, oh, you know, you think you have problems. police officer says, I have to go catch a panther. And we never get to see this panther. It also provides an excuse for everyone to suddenly have guns, right? Right. It's like panther, panther, both kinds.
Right. And and of course, you know, during my saying this is not a an allegory, but you can't help but see the panther as the expression of Claire's malevolence, you know, at loose in the town. It's introducing a predatory ecology to this town. The thing that reminds me of Brecht, again, of course, is...
Oh, what is it? It's in Threepenny Opera. I have to remember the song title, but I think it's one of the conclusions of one of the parts of the... play or the musical i don't know if it's technically musical but uh there's uh uh People saying, you know, you lot who preach restraint and watch your waist as well should learn, for one, the way the world is run. And it goes on to talk about, you know, first give everyone food.
Stop your preaching and give everyone food when we start cutting the great bread of plenty that should go to the poor first. And that's his – I mean that's his very didactic message because he was a communist and he was – very much attempting to be that voice for dispossessed and the poor and what have you. But it's also what we see here is we see these poor and so they've been given nothing. And so what is their...
They've been intentionally impoverished even more so than maybe would have happened in the economic situation. And they're presented with this choice. So is it... There's an argument, in part making the argument, is there a moral choice you can make when you have nothing? I think he comes out, even though he claims he doesn't, I think the play is certainly biased towards the notion that he's not supporting the notion of killing this guy.
man, but he's not really that strenuously in opposition. I mean, we've got the Luigi Mangione thing going on right now, right? It's the way that people responded to him killing a healthcare industry related executive. At some level, it's almost the inverse of... The visit, right, is that he did this on his own. He believed allegedly, maybe we can say allegedly, like some of the reports indicate he may have believed he was attempting to right the wrong of this.
of this company inflicting a sign of damage, a kind of impoverishment on the people that it serves. So it's not a new idea. It's not an old idea. I just... I don't know. I think that is part of it, is that we're invited to...
travel along this journey with the people as they discover first they could have all this, you know, first they express their moral outrage. Then they start buying on credit. Then they discover she's responsible for it. And then they just do the deed because that is the best thing for the town. as a whole and for them selfishly individually, even his family. His family, when his son buys a new car, the daughter's going to go off to school. Well, there is this...
There's a speech by the schoolmaster discussing this with Eel about what's happening because Eel is feeling that the town is turning on him. He doesn't understand how they can do that. And the schoolmaster... provides what you might call a naturalistic response. People are powerless to change their own outcomes because they are driven by... appetites that are beyond them. He says...
He says, they will kill you. I've known it from the beginning and you've known it too for a long time, even if no one else in Gullion wants to admit it. The temptation is too great and our poverty is too wretched. But I know something else. That's all very well and good, I guess, on the one hand. What do the townspeople actually do with the wealth that they are amassing? They start to become...
bourgeois themselves. They start to dress well. They develop a taste for luxury items. It's not like, okay, now we have this money and we will be forever... sorry for what we had to do, but now I can give my kids bread and we will take the rest of the money and put it away so we never have to do this again. You know, they immediately like become, start putting on these airs.
Yeah, let's see. There's an argument about like generational memory of the acquisition of wealth, right? Is how much are people responsible for what their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents? How far back do you go where you say? The acquisition of this wealth is unjust, and they kind of want to wash it. I think a little bit of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away From...
which is a classic story, of course, very relevant in our time again about, I don't know, can I spoil the story? I want people to read it, but I don't know if it's a spoiler 40, 50 years after it was written. You know, I read The Dispossessed for this, and we made mention of...
The other Hamish novel, so go ahead and talk about it. All right, so it's a very, I think the ones who walk away from Omelas is very short story is my recollection, but it's basically at a certain age in this town of Omelas. are brought to see like in the basement and there's this filthy child who's like living in his own excrement and isn't
She's in a cage and suffering and just always just in pain. And their people are told when they come of age, they're told the reason our town is so wonderful and perfect and everything is great is because we all. See this. person child suffering eternally never aging ostensibly and uh that forces us to do the right things in our lives and some people go all right and they internalize it and they think it's terrible but it they go on to remain and others say this is ridiculous and they walk away
You can see my bias there. And there is that kind of here, right, is that everybody in the town, no one walks away from Guerlain, the town. I think it means horse manure or something like that or liquid manure is roughly how it would translate or it sounds a little bit like that. German word. So the people of Guerlain are just, you know, none of them.
Whatever they say, whatever they said originally, like I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt, and the schoolmaster does not, that they always plan to kill him. None of them walk away. The draw of the money is too high. We also just tell the old Winston Churchill joke, right, as he said – I can't remember what's that. It's a thing like about Madam –
Or was it he who said it? I can't remember. The old thing is like, you know, we're just we're just negotiating the price business. And that's what it feels like a little bit here, too, is like the townspeople being coy about committing a murder. But really, they will do it. It's just they've already been told a price that is so far beyond.
They're imagining that they've overridden their sense of morality. The schoolmaster is the only one who really, and only when he's drunk, it seems like, kind of comes out of that haze and only briefly because he knows, as you say, he will do it. I do want to say before we leave this behind, this is a very funny play. It's very well. There are things in it that are out and out silly. So, you know, if you...
ever want to read it or you want to see a production, don't think it's just this dour reflection on humans and inhumanity towards fellow humans. It is a funny play. a silly play. It has charm and wit. So yeah, go ahead and try it if you want.
Yeah, that's funny. We've talked about it in such serious ways, and I realize it is hilarious. I mean, it's kind of like Brecht. Brecht is ridiculous, and you laugh. Like, Three Penny Opera is just full of silly things, and it's hilarious and pompous, and he's poking fun at people.
Same thing here is it's some really dark elements, but it's also just there's some really absurdist things and hilarious things. I laughed out loud reading it a number of times. So it is kind of a hoot. There's I remember I can't even what there's another. play that I thought I remembered better. Now I can't remember the plot at all. It's called The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi. And I don't even remember.
what it's about anymore. I remember thinking it was very, very funny, but apparently I don't think as well remembered as this one is my suspicion. Thanks again to guest host Glenn Fleischman. If you have an idea for a book, a story, a poem, or anything else you'd like to see me cover on a future episode, or if you have a suggestion for another guest host, or if you just want to say hi, you can write me at sophomore.literature at gmail.com. The Sophomore Lit theme song is by Malcolm Nygaard.
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