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A podcast about literature and culture

111: George Oppen

January 21, 2019 · by Roger · in Podcast

What does a modernist aesthetic of clarity and authenticity look like after 30 years of failed hopes? What can the words “Little Baby Ass” avail against the anti-poetic forces of capitalism and empire?

The Sometime Seminar discusses the wonderfully of-its-moment early work and wonderfully out-of-its-moment late work of modernist poet George Oppen.

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110: Becoming Freud

November 27, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

What’s this Freud guy’s deal, anyway? Can you write a narrative of Freud’s life in the light of Freud’s writings on life and narrative without being really annoying?

The Sometime Seminar discusses Becoming Freud (2014), an intellectual biography of the early life of Sigmund Freud by Adam Phillips.

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109: A Lover’s Discourse

October 29, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

Can you talk about love without being in love, and can you be in love without talking about it? Even if it’s impossible to construct a philosophy of love, can you cobble together philosophy, memoir, literary criticism, psychoanalysis and semiotics into something that looks kind of like a philosophy of love if you squint a little?

The Sometime Seminar discusses A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (Fragments d’un discours amoureux, 1977), a late work by the inimitable Roland Barthes.

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108: By Night in Chile

September 10, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

Gothic intensity, psychological acuity and historical horror bleed into one another in a story of literary ambition entangled with fascism.

The Sometime Seminar discusses By Night in Chile (2000/English translation 2003), a novella by Roberto Bolaño.

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107: Critique of Everyday Life vol. 3

August 27, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

Can a theoretical hodgepodge leaping enjoyably from sex to cybernetics to urban planning to the history of bathrooms answer the question “What the heck is everyday life, anyway?” And if not, is it okay to just put your feet up and enjoy the ride?

The Sometime Seminar discusses the third and final volume of The Critique of Everyday Life by Henri Lefebvre. For our discussion of the first two volumes, see Episode 106.

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106: Critique of Everyday Life vols. 1-2

August 7, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

What’s everyday life, and what isn’t? What’s the critique of everyday life, and what is it good for? What’s unorthodox Marxism, and what’s just…sociology?

The Sometime Seminar discusses the first two volumes of The Critique of Everyday Life by Henri Lefebvre. (Vol. 3 will be discussed in the next episode.)

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105: Dunsany

July 2, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

Dreamily plotless tales of journeys through fantastical lands? Amiably formulaic stories to tell in your London club over copious brandy? Get you an aristocratic dilettante who can do both.

The Sometime Seminar discusses the fantastical, and later not-so-fantastical, short fiction of Lord Dunsany, as collected in In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales.

Supplemental links: Ursula K. LeGuin’s review of the collection; Laura Miller reviews Dunsany’s career for The New Yorker

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104: Little, Big

May 10, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

What happens if you sprinkle late-19th-century-British fairy dust all over 20th-century upstate New York? What do you call it when a multi-generational family saga and a sweeping fate-of-the-world fantasy novel collide with 70s-style quote-unquote postmodernism? How many layers of meta-narrative reflection are you on?

The Sometime Seminar discusses Little, Big (1981) by John Crowley.

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103: Angel

April 9, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

It’s a fine-tuned realist novel…about an author of extravagant romantic novels. It’s middlebrow fiction…but extremely good. It’s Elizabeth Taylor…but not that Elizabeth Taylor.

The Sometime Seminar discusses Angel (1957) by Elizabeth Taylor.

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102: Tristram Shandy

February 1, 2018 · by Roger · in Podcast

Plans go awry, digressions abound and hobbyhorses gallop in all directions as The Sometime Seminar discusses Laurence Sterne’s seriously unserious comic novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767).

Supplemental links: Sigurd Burckhardt, “Tristram Shandy’s Law of Gravity” (ELH, Mar. 1961); Viktor Shklovsky’s “The Novel as Parody: Sterne’s Tristram Shandy“ (from Theory of Prose)

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