Casual yet stimulating talks about books and media.
Send us a text Gian from Twinkrev (RIP) joins Rio and Matt to talk about two Vegas movies: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam 1998) and Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995). Support the show
Send us a text This week: Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of lot 49. Meaning, postmodernism, why Pynchon is like David Lynch (and Tolkien!) and more. Support the show
Send us a text 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 Support the show...
Send us a text 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,...
Send us a text 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...
Send us a text 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...
Send us a text 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. Support the show
Send us a text 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?! Support the show
Send us a text 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://paul...
Send us a text 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 a...
Send us a text 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 Gai...
Send us a text This week, we're much more tiddly than usual, so what better time to talk about anonymous authorship and literary theory? First we go through our favourite pieces of literature penned by anonymous or pseudonymous authors, including some very old medieval poems. Then we rant about the misuses of Roland Barthes' concept of the death of the author, the art of shit posting and anonymous social media accounts, as well as the wankiness of author Joshua Cohen and his thoughts on writing ...
Send us a text We're changing it up this episode, with Reuben conducting the first of our author interview series. Each season of the podcast we'll be doing a one-on-one, deep dive discussion with an author we think you should read. For the inaugural interview, we've chosen Michael Winkler, author of the "exploded novel," Grimmish. This is a daring, challenging, and odd book that narrativises the life of Italian-American boxer, Joe Grim, and his tour of Australia in 1908-1909. But it's also so m...
Send us a text Across three timezones, a quartet of homosexuals gather for a symposium on faggotry. Rio and Matt are joined by Zach Langley Chi Chi from I'm So Popular podcast and Josh from Evil Thespian podcast to talk Faggots, Larry Kramer's seminal book (yes very seminal, and urinal, and fecal). All four plunge into the pit of sexuality to sample the Dionysian extremities of gay sex, and ask important questions, such as: would contemporary gays benefit from a few more Nazi boot orgies? After ...
Send us a text This episode we're joined by an impromptu guest: Sydney drag queen, Aaron Manhattan, who found out we were doing Gore Vidal's gender adventure Myra Breckinridge and just had to come aboard. Join us as we plumb the uterine depths of womanhood and the fluidity of the sex roles with Myra. It's a freewheeling discussion about the novel and the film too, which stars the magical Mae West and the smoking hot Raquel Welch as our pan/bi/trans/hypersexual heroine who no man can possess! Sup...
Send us a text It's a literary hot topics episode, baby! We engage in some capital D Discourse, talking about how saying facts about poetry will get you sacked from your editing job, complaining about Sally Rooney's writing and complaining about complaints about Sally Rooney's writing, and the plague of Gay Sincerity. Poetry editor fired: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/barren-poetry-magazine-fires-editor-tweet/ Jessie Tu's Sally Rooney "review": https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/sure...
Send us a text It's been a while! That may or may not be because all three of your hosts are in Australia, which has been returning to its colonial roots as a draconian prison island. In this episode, Matt, Rio, and Reuben lament the endless lockdown situation in Australia, while ranging over a few things they've been reading, watching, playing, and noticing while they can't go outside. Links to a few things discussed: Angel Cop anime bad/great English dub: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZADmR...
Send us a text This week, Matt, Rio, and Reuben are joined by connoisseur of f**ked-up films, Alison Taylor, to discuss Georges Bataille's seminal (or perhaps that should be "urinal"?) pornographic opus, Story of the Eye, as well as Jörg Buttgereit's cinematic ode to necrophilia, Nekromantik. Support the show
Send us a text Rio and Matt talk Christos Tsiolkas' explosively gay novel, Loaded, and its film adaptation, Head On. They explain "wogs" for the international listeners, then discuss gays, immigration, Australian and Greek culture, and how formative this novel has been for a lot of Aussies of the..ahem...homosexualist persuasion. Support the show
Send us a text This episode, we're joined by River Page ( @gayliaronline on Twitter), contributing editor at Twink Revolution and Twitter enfant terrible . We chat about The Road to Wigan Pier , George Orwell's harrowing account of the plight of the poor and working class in northern English coal mining towns. We talk about the disconnect between the working class and the middle class socialists who want to "help," Orwell's fiction vs his nonfiction, identity vs class politics, the deep problems...
Send us a text Reuben and Matt are joined by Sina ( @KhanKuchek on Twitter) from the Trepidation podcast to talk about Michel Houellebecq's Submission and Michael Haneke's 2005 film, Caché. For once, they aren't drinking! Is this because they've converted to Islam and are extremely pious now? Or because it was too early in the morning? Topics and themes covered: multiculturalism, French identity, the decline of the West, Islam, the difference between religious texts and literature, and whether H...
Send us a text While smashing down a few bottles of soju, the lads discuss South Korean writer Han Kang's disturbing novel, The Vegetarian. Not only do they delve into this tale of violence and non-conformity, but somehow Australian triple threat Keiynan Lonsdale is brought into the discussion. Because this is a show that embraces the digression. Support the show...
Send us a text In the second part of our first episode, Reuben makes us read noted English wanker Will Self, Rio elevates things a little with the Grande Dame of Science Fiction, Ursula K LeGuin, then Matt sickens everyone with a notorious Chuck Palahniuk short story. Will Self's short story, "Prometheus" is featured in his collection, Liver . You can read LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" here . Chuck Palahniuk's "Guts" can be found here or in his collection, Haunted . Support the s...
Send us a text In the first part of the inaugural episode, we introduce ourselves and then throw some shade at Sally Rooney, before talking a bit about transgression in literature and the plan for the podcast. In part 2, we give the listeners a taste of our own tastes, each sharing a short story we think represents us. Support the show
