symbolpod

Groundhog Day of The Dead: A Forest of Symbols Holiday Special

Please join me as I ramble about my two favorite holiday stories: (after a brief prelude on Dickens' A Christmas Carol) the 1993 film Groundhog Day, and James Joyce's 1914 (long) short story, "The Dead."

Themes:

• Narcissism
• Purgatory
• Epiphany
• The Symbolism of Cold and Snow
• The Art of Happiness
• The Community of the Living and the Dead

Cormac McCarthy Novels, Worst to Best #4-1

Cormac McCarthy as a cosmic optimist.  

We Didn't Start the Fire (vers. 3)

Fall Out Boy has made a very cringe cover of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," the original itself already a piece of canonical cringe. But that's not what it sounded like to me at 8 years old, when it first became a massive hit. At the time, it was like reading Pynchon and DeLillo combined: a complex web of esoteric 20th-century lore I would have to spend years decoding. This was, of course, because I knew almost zero history yet. 

Plus, it was a list song, and I really lik...

Interplanetary Music: Foreverfloating

I'm working on "An Introduction to the Symbolism of Western Music or, The Harmony of the Spheres vs. the Emancipation of Dissonance." This playlist and commentary will serve as a nice preview.

1. Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space- Spiritualized
2. Clouds- The Stark Reality
3. Variations on Canon in D Major: 1) Fulness of Wind  2) French Catalogues- Brian Eno
4. Untitled 1- Love Cult
5. Rhubarb- Aphex Twin
6. Soliloquies for Lonely Suburbs- Jacques de Vill...

Cormac McCarthy Novels, Worst to Best: #8-5

Written in letters of blood and fire.

Cormac McCarthy Novels, Worst to Best #12-9

This is one of the best "bottom tier" book lists you'll find. 

R.I.P Cormac.

Mirrors: A Partial Reading List

I- Religion, Metaphysics

• Complete Works- Jorge-Luis Borges (entire series)
• The Bible: Genesis & Ezekiel
• On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead-Gershom Scholem

II- Myth, Literature, and Psychology

• "Narcissus and Echo" from Metamorphoses- Ovid
• On Narcissism- Sigmund Freud
• The Culture of Narcissism- Christopher Lasch
• The Picture of Dorian Gray- Oscar Wilde
• Through the Looking-Glass- Lewis Carroll
2023-09-10 18:34:20 +0000 UTC View Post

The Ghosts of Podcasts Present and Future

Let's make God laugh. 

Volume XII- Mirrors Part One: The Aleph

As Above, So Below

Against Interpretation: Reading & Commentary

Let's take a look at Susan Sontag's influential 1966 essay, "Against Interpretation." 

The Literary Object or, This Thing of Ours

Literature is not a subject of study but an object of study.--Northrop Frye

Whenever I have a good idea, I find somebody else has had it before, and expressed it better.

A few years back, I started to get annoyed by people constantly saying things like "love is just a chemical reaction," or that your body (or your self) was "really" just a collection of atoms. (A random collection, thrown together by the wind, it is implied.)

OK, so things are made of small...

Discussing Suttree on There Will Be Books

I was recently a guest on the podcast There Will Be Books to discuss Cormac McCarthy and what I think is his most underrated novel, Suttree. 

Forest of Symbols fans will probably be most interested in the discussion about the symbolism of the Tennessee River in the novel, which I compare with the river Styx, and is called in the book a cloaca maxima, wh...

In The Stacks: The Fermata

In the 1950's, the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet proposed a new type of novel. This phrase might sound redundant, since "novel" means "new," but not in French since they call the novel a roman or "romance." The nouveau roman was supposed to de-emphasize character development (with its attendant psychological assumptions) and plot, and would instead focus on the life of objects in the world.

This sounds rather avant-garde, and in Robbe-Grillet's execution...

In the Stacks: A Universal History of Iniquity

Apologies for taking so long to get this one out. Let's take a look at Borges first collection of prose fiction. 

Borges on Art of Darkness and Coming Attractions

I know it's been a slow couple months, and I want to thank everybody who's still here supporting me. (The House of Asterion has relocated twice this year, and it's labyrinth is stalked by a baby in teething agony.)

I recently joined the boys on the Art of Darkness Podcast to talk about the life and work of Jorge-Luis Borges. (If you're interested in seeing me show face...

Interplanetary Music: Kosmic Khaos (The Music of Uqbar)

Only the 1900 excavation of the Royal Palace of Knossos in Crete, which may have been the fabled ancient "labyrinth," and the discovery of the buried heresies in the gnostic codices at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945 rival the discovery of the cultural artefacts of the impossibly arcane civilization of Uqbar. We explore its fascinating musical features which have transformed the postmodern soundscape.

Playlist:

1. Heliocentric- Sun Ra

2. Imaginary Landscape- John Cage

3. Va...

The Chariot and the Passenger: Brad Kelly on Cormac McCarthy and Others

Author & podcaster Brad Kelly returns to talk Art of Darkness, the new McCarthy novels, the tarot in Blood Meridian, the Bung-Plug of the Void, and more.

In the Stacks: Books are Made Out of Books

Some recommended reading for McCarthy heads, or anyone interested in the minute details of literary influence. 

Vol. XI: Ice

For destruction, Ice is great.

"The Book Scorpion" by Aldous Asterion

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.—Yeats

I. Ex Libris

As if gazing down a corridor, observe

The great replete shelves repeat themselves

(as, I’m sure, their contents do) and note

How no red thread describes the arcane ark,

As if a minotaur would leap ex libris;

The Dewey-decimal editions of

The New Jerusalem might here be held,

But by my unerudite blunt mind belied:

O belated ghost, get lost in the gall...

"Snow" by Louis MacNeice

A short reading for a cold spell. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all patrons!

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

2022-12-25 01:24:11 +0000 UTC View Post

In the Stacks: Blood Meridian

Blood, Time, and the Cosmic Dance.