Reading in the Time of Monsters

We’re back! I took a little break. My friend Quentin — poet, musician, bartender, general man of letters and experience — comes on to talk about scifi legend Robert A. Heinlein. We get down to cases with the Heinlein Hero as a type, the hero of an individuality so profound that his creator eventually pushes him into some deeply unsettling sexual scenarios - not (just) to satisfy horniness, but to...

On this RITTOM we discuss the great and vile Louis-Ferdinand Celine! We here at RITTOM reject the cop-outs criticism deploys to avoid uncomfortable dealing with great artists who have done monstrous things. Celine was one of the greaters writers of his time and still highly readable today- Celine was a scabrous anti-semite, fascist, and self-serving liar. My friend and historian of France Drew Fla...

EDIT- I sent out a minorly glitchy version of this. But this one should be good. On this episode, I talk about what antifascism might add to critical perspective. People commonly treat the antifascist attitude to criticism as, basically, a limiting factor, that you’re not supposed to like or enjoy works by artists you might otherwise be in the streets protesting against. Maybe I’ll get more into t...

On this episode of RITTOM, we talk with Russian historian Kevin Murphy about his Deutscher Prize-winning book, “Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory.” Since the Russian Revolution and its descent into Stalinist tyranny, there’s been a great deal of debate of how and why things went the way it did. Much of the discussion focuses on major individual political ac...

This is a big one! One my literary heroes, John Dolan aka Gary Brecher aka The War Nerd comes onto RITTOM to discuss Rick Emerson’s “Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries” and the broader topic of literary forgery and fraud. You may have read some of Beatrice Sparks’ fabulisms in middle school, maybe even got assigned such dubious classics as...

On this episode of RITTOM, we talk about Chris Onstad’s great webcomic Achewood, an absurdist slice of life comic and “love letter to the English language.” Friend and fellow writer/organizer John Perich joins me to explain what Achewood is, why it’s a big deal, and how a webcomic about cats and stuffed animals says more about consumer culture, masculinity, and depression than a lot of works with...

Hello all! RITTOM has returned. I had the 11th most popular literature podcast among Irish listeners, and dammit, I will not let the people of Ireland down! In this episode, I discuss why I was gone for a while, the format going forward (unless I need to change it again!), and then, Malcolm Harris’ Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World , a marvelous work of history that is...

Hello all! In this episode of Reading in the Time of Monsters, we are joined by Quinn Slobodian, professor of the history of ideas at Wellesley College and author most recently of “Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy”. Quinn is one of the most incisive historians of the late twentieth century working, and here he cuts through stale debates about globaliz...

This one is was a Chieftain request! If you subscribe to Melendy Avenue Review at the Chieftain level, you, too, can request a book for me to review (within reason- needs to be in English, under 100,000 words, sourceable, etc). This one is a novel by Kremlin wire-puller Vladislav Surkov, and it proves that Putin’s goons can be just as pretentious, self-important, and bad at aping culture as any Iv...

We have our first guest! My friend Kit joins me to talk about R.F. Kuang’s 2022 novel, and likely big scifi/fantasy award nominee, “Babel.” Kuang’s fourth novel published before she turned 26 (she has another out this year), this historical fantasy tale of a young Chinese man drawn into the British imperial apparatus as a translator and maker of magic driven by translation has drawn rave reviews....

I thought I would break things up a little and talk about a book I like. More than — or maybe just along with — being a really funny novel that everyone from high schoolers on up read and enjoy, “A Confederacy of Dunces” says more about more “serious” matters than a lot of your supposedly serious literature, and more elegantly as well. While for the most part people either love the book or just ig...

This went from a reasonably straightforward review of a book I did not like — Patricia Lockwood’s 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This — to a whole… thing. A manifesto? In any event, an episode that was going to be me talking about how one lousy novel indicated some of the problems with contemporary English-language letters has turned into a longer spiel as I try to explain what I think is wron...

In this second episode, I introduce a feature we’ll see going forward: self-crit! I’m going to own the stuff I get wrong, according to my own lights, and refine my ideas that way. I talk about the criticism of the smog of discourse, and how it’s hard to nail down who you’re talking about it sometimes. The review here is of Peter Richardson’s Savage Journey: The Weird Road to Gonzo (2022). I’m a bi...

This is the first episode of Reading in the Age of Monsters podcast, a book criticism podcast. Let’s do some criticism that doesn’t suck. Mark Fisher wrote some criticism that didn’t suck, analyzing the culture of late capitalism with acuity. But his work and his image have been absorbed into a sphere of online discourse that fetishizes the depression, helplessness, and passivity Fisher knew well...