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18 July 2025 Episode 6.05 – Negotiating for Space: Compromise and Flag-Planting This is getting challenging. What are we to do with the Suffering Child question? And on which form of suffering do I plant my flag of resistance? Dostoevsky and Langston Hughes both offer clues. The complete reading of Dostoevsky’s “Rebellion” in The Brothers Karamazov : https://drive.google.co...

11 July 2025 Episode 6.04 – Reading: “Rebellion” from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov Still another famous writer has posed the Le Guin question, and he did it in one of Russia’s most famous novels, The Brothers Karamazov . This chapter precedes the more famous and discussed ‘The Grand Inquisitor.’  Here it is. The Complete Reading as pdf: https://driv...

4 July 2025 Episode 6.03 – Otium and The Moral Philosopher – William James Le Guin leans on an essay by William James, but what does that have to do with all our garden talk? It’s about our blind spots and our privilege. Here’s James’s argument and how it sets up a pragmatic popular ethic that may be worrisome. William James: “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral...

27 June 2025 Episode 5.18 Marvell’s Garden and Ours: Otium Speaking of links back to Andrew Marvell’s poetry– weren’t we? –we add a new concept into our repertoire which exposes some of our misapprehensions about nature, leisure, and work. And we read Marvell’s poem “The Garden” while we think green thoughts about it. Confused about our episode numbe...

20 June 2025 Episode 6.02 – “Vaster Than Empires” – Le Guin What does it mean to embrace “Other”? And how might we understand carpe diem if we truly had “world enough and time?” Le Guin shows us in her famous science fiction short story. New to Literary Nomads ? Check out episode 5.00 to find out what we’re all about: https://waywordsstudio.com...

13 June 2025 Episode 6.01 – Signpost: Pretty Gardens in Paint Where we’ve been and where we’re going, and we take a pause in a museum gallery, too! New to Literary Nomads ? Check out episode 5.00 to find out what we’re all about: https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/waywords_podcast/an-introduction-and-irony/ Listener Survey Available!  Please let me know what you thought of...

30 May 2025 Episode 6.00 – Trailer Looking ahead at Season 6: Ursula K. Le Guin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” and all the wrestling we do with dilemmas of ethics. New to Literary Nomads ? Check out episode 5.00 to find out what we’re all about: https://waywordsstudio.com/podcasts/waywords_podcast/an-introduction-and-irony/ Listener Survey Available! ...

23 May 2025 Episode 5.17 – What I Get Wrong We close out the journey with a needed reflection, a look at what I’ve been doing, how it fits our collective needs, and what we might see for changes ahead. I reflect on the integration of skills in language, the role of thinking skills, and why reading and interpretation cannot be about objective deliverables. Listener Survey Available!  Pl...

16 May 2025 Episode 5.16 – Writing Back 2: Getting Over Our Essay Anxiety It’s time for the end of our carpe diem journey, and we celebrate with a congratulatory essay! Hey, why so glum? We look at what has caused all this anxiety over the ostracized essay, rant against how traditional schooling has abused it, and offer some introductory ideas on how the best essays are essential to th...

9 May 2025 Episode 5.15 – Bellow Seizes Our Day Sure we can philosophize, but what happens when we put carpe diem to the test in the modern world of capital? We work through Saul Bellow’s approach to carpe diem , how his ironies may not all be what we expect them to be, what separates Seize the Day from other modernist American literature, and how he spins our ethical discussion on car...

2 May 2025 Episode 5.14 – Rilke and Carpe Don’t Rhyme Finding carpe diem in art and literature; abandoning “seize the day” and ending in uncertainty. What is required of us to find the power and meaning in art? in poetry? Is it related to carpe diem ? And does it give us any guidance in how to approach meaningful lives? In a continuation of our carpe diem talk last episode,...

25 April 2025 Episode 5.13 – Carpe All Over the Place How far away are we from the original meaning of carpe diem? And does it matter? Looking back across our wanderings so far, it seems that our literature and culture has gotten fairly sloppy (or cavalier?) in its popular imagination of philosophy, perhaps dangerously so. We investigate those understandings, capturing several modern approac...

18 April 2025 Episode 5.12 – Star Trek : “World Enough and Time” Can some fan-fiction teach us more about carpe diem than a classic Roman poet? Let’s get over ourselves a bit and give this fan-produced Star Trek episode a chance. How we decide literary quality, how we work with allusion, and how we interpret contemporary texts are all fair game in this episode that finds so...

11 April 2025 Episode 5.11 – Not Horacing Around: Ode 1.11 Can an ancient Roman poet offer insight into carpe diem ?  Perhaps, but then again . . . Along the way, we talk about Catullus, Horace and his Odes, the translation of “seize the day” vs. “pluck” or “harvest,” a close analysis of Ode 1.11’s imagery and possible subtext, parallels between Hora...

4 April 2025 Episode 5.10  – Writing Back: Answering Marvell Writing back to authors and their works is essential to the literary culture; it also helps us answer our essential questions. Let’s do some of that, then! === Chapters 00:00  ERROR #5210b 05:10  Intro Theme 05:42  Matching Sabers 09:00  The Sport of Kings 13:02  What’s On Your Mind? Marvell Re-Ironied 19:19  The School...

7 March 2025 Episode 5.06  – What I Carry With Me What questions do we carry with us as we leave Marvell’s famous poem? === Chapters 00:00   Packing for the Trip 02:14   Opening Theme 02:52   Trails and Tools and Mail 08:38   Six Lousy Questions 09:31   1 What should I do about mortality? 11:49   2. What should I do with the Now? 13:43   3, What is the relationship between rhetoric and...

28 February 2025 Episode 5.05  – Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” – Part 4 Who is the speaker in this poem? Who the audience? Who the Marvell? The conclusion of our four part series. === Chapters 00:00   Marvell as Sculpture 02:37     – In the Museum 06:02   Opening Theme 06:42   Manyness 13:02   Constructed Speakers, Constructed Authors 14:04     – Failed...

21 February 2025 Episode 5.04  – Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” – Part 3 We trace Marvell’s poetry back to its roots. === Chapters 00:00   So Where Were We? 06:25   Opening Theme 07:01   Recaps & New Readings 13:42   T. S. Eliot & Textual History 20:02   Marvell’s History 25:03     – The Cavalier Poets 30:02     – A Political Poem? 32:...

14 February 2025 Episode 5.03  – Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” – Part 2 What did Marvell know and how did he use it? We look at the sexism in the poem and discover how this provocation is hardly unique in the carpe diem tradition. === Chapters 00:00   Theme 00:34   Intro and Recap 03:44   The Offensive Act – Feminism 16:29   Historicist Qualifiers 18:36   Back...

7 February 2025 Episode 5.02  – Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” – Part 1 What do we do with–how do we read–can we make us of–a classic and famous metaphysical poem which is also misogynistic? === Chapters 00:00   Intro 01:09   Interjection: Why This Episode? 01:55   Marvell and TS Eliot 04:46   Metaphysical Poetry 09:09   Reading: Marvell’s &#8...

  31 January 2025 5.01 Not My Text! Irony and Ducking Accountability https://waywordsstudio.com An application or two of that dramatic irony we talked about. Along the way, we consider who is accountable for the text: author, character, or reader, and how writers build a narrative distance in texts to allow irony and meaning to operate (and shirking a bit of accountability). Andrew Marvell’s...

  24 January 2025 An Introduction and Irony https://waywordsstudio.com What is Literary Nomads, anyway? And what does that have to do with Radiohead, Godzilla, professorial assault, and irony? Here is the “reboot” of the main podcast from Waywords Studio. I talk about what it’s all about, but via Johannes Brahms, Godzilla, Clair de Lune, Steve Hackman, Matthew Arnold, irony,...