Today you get to hear Max Newland read the Borges short story which is known variably by both the title "The Shape of the Sword" and "The Form of the Sword"!
Next week: Juliet and Katherine tackle It's Not Christmas Til Somebody Cries, Les Misérables, and The Form of the Sword altogether!
Art for I'll Be Pod for Castmas is done by Ryan Jensen.
Juliet and Katherine tackle the Carly Rae Jepsen tragicomic holiday single Its Not Christmas Til Somebody Cries alongside Victor Hugo's dramatic portrait of the structure of suffering and the human character, Les Misérables—discussing in turn both the popular musical and the overlong book.
Art for I'll Be Pod for Castmas is done by Ryan Jensen. Readings from the text are provided by Max Newland.
Transcript of this episode is available here. Next week, you'll hear Max Newland read the Borges short story The Form of the Sword before we dive into discussing it alongside both of our texts this month.
The thrilling conclusion of the Christmas in July podcast break-up, alongside a mailbag of letters about the Netflix sequel "The Princess Switch: Switched Again" through the lens of Jane Austen's final novel, Persuasion.
We recommend the Karen Savage version of the Persuasion audiobook, available on youtube, spotify, and: https://librivox.org/persuasion-by-jane-austen-4/
Find I'll Be Pod for Castmas four times a year on the Moonshot Podcast Network https://moonshotpods.com and https://cohost.org/christmas
Solidarity forever! Instead of discussing christmas specials this week, we get a discussion between Juliet and Riley Hopkins on the topic of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, and the following passage:
"Although the unproblematic unity of “women” is often invoked to construct a solidarity of identity, a split is introduced in the feminist subject by the distinction between sex and gender. Originally intended to dispute the biology-is-destiny formulation, the distinction between sex and gender serves the argument that whatever biological intractability sex appears to have, gender is culturally constructed: hence, gender is neither the causal result of sex nor as seemingly fixed as sex. The unity of the subject is thus already potentially contested by the distinction that permits of gender as a multiple interpretation of sex.
If gender is the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes, then a gender cannot be said to follow from a sex in any one way. Taken to its logical limit, the sex/gender distinction suggests a radical discontinuity between sexed bodies and culturally constructed genders. Assuming for the moment the stability of binary sex, it does not follow that the construction of “men” will accrue exclusively to the bodies of males or that “women” will interpret only female bodies. Further, even if the sexes appear to be unproblematically binary in their morphology and constitution (which will become a question), there is no reason to assume that genders ought also to remain as two. The presumption of a binary gender system implicitly retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or is otherwise restricted by it. When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one. This radical splitting of the gendered subject poses yet another set of problems.
Can we refer to a “given” sex or a “given” gender without first inquiring into how sex and/or gender is given, through what means? And what is “sex” anyway? Is it natural, anatomical, chromosomal, or hormonal, and how is a feminist critic to assess the scientific discourses which purport to establish such “facts” for us? Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a different history, or histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable construction? Are the ostensibly natural facts of sex discursively produced by various scientific discourses in the service of other political and social interests? If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.
It would make no sense, then, to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex (a juridical conception); gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.
At this juncture it is already clear that one way the internal stability and binary frame for sex is effectively secured is by casting the duality of sex in a prediscursive domain. This production of sex as the prediscursive ought to be understood as the effect of the apparatus of cultural construction designated by gender. How, then, does gender need to be reformulated to encompass the power relations that produce the effect of a prediscursive sex and so conceal that very operation of discursive production?"
This Christmas in July, Juliet and Katherine write plot-important letters to each other and discuss the Netflix sequel "The Princess Switch: Switched Again" alongside Jane Austen's final novel, Persuasion.
We recommend the Karen Savage version of the Persuasion audiobook, available on youtube, spotify, and: https://librivox.org/persuasion-by-jane-austen-4/
A transcript for these letters can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ln2Nnr3p8489I_lamMTacRM0bE7yd1xjaqSGD0pLyWo
Find I'll Be Pod for Castmas four times a year on the Moonshot Podcast Network https://moonshotpods.com and https://cohost.org/christmas
See you next week for the thrilling conclusion to this act!
Juliet and Katherine discuss Frosty Returns (1992) using the lens of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Content warnings in this episode for frank discussions of Christianity and Climate Change.
A transcript of this episode is available at: https://otter.ai/u/bvlhQaK1lmBDAc9dQj2C_76RWjE .
Find I'll Be Pod for Castmas four times a year on the Moonshot Podcast Network https://moonshotpods.com and https://cohost.org/christmas . See you next July for Christmas in July!
Juliet and Katherine break down the classic novel Frankenstein through the lens of the christmas song Frosty the Snowman. Next episode, we'll tackle Frosty Returns (1992) using the lens of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein!
A transcript of this episode is available at: https://otter.ai/u/ogqbOVGK-Ii_7GQQaiCOq648h9w .
You probably know the song Frosty the Snowman, and can find Mary Shelley's Frankenstein wherever books are sold but also in a variety of ebook forms at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/84. Juliet also recommends the reading by Cori Samuel, which is available on Librivox and streaming at: https://youtu.be/Erory940xUg .
Find I'll Be Pod for Castmas four times a year on the Moonshot Podcast Network https://twitter.com/MoonshotPods and https://cohost.org/christmas .
You can find The Princess Switch streaming on Netflix, and Lady Audley's Secret wherever books are sold but also in a variety of ebook forms at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8954.
Find I'll Be Pod for Castmas four times a year on the Moonshot Podcast Network https://twitter.com/MoonshotPods and https://cohost.org/christmas
You can find The Princess Switch streaming on Netflix, and Lady Audley's Secret wherever books are sold but also in a variety of ebook forms at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8954.
Find I'll Be Pod for Castmas four times a year on the Moonshot Podcast Network https://twitter.com/MoonshotPods and https://cohost.org/christmas
"And yet, and yet . . . To deny temporal succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, appear to be acts of desperation and are secret consolations. Our destiny (unlike the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not terrifying because it is unreal; it is terrifying because it is irreversible and iron-bound. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges."
Freund, es ist auch genug. Im Fall du mehr willst lesen, So geh und werde selbst die Schrift und selbst das Wesen. [Friend, this is enough. Should you wish to read more, / Go and yourself become the writing, yourself the essence.]
I'll Be Pod for Castmas is on the Moonshot Podcast Network! https://linktr.ee/moonshotnetwork
If I am not mistaken, the heterogenous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This last fact is what is most significant: Kafka's idiosyncracy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The poem "Fears and Scruples" by Robert Browning prophesies the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now. The word "precursor" is indispensable to the vocabulary of criticism, but one must try to purify it from any connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. — Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka and his Precursors
Now I know what a fool I've been, but: if you kissed me now, I know you'd fool me again!
Last Christmas, I gave you my heart but the very next day, you gave it away.
This year, to save me from tears, I'll give it to someone special. — Carly Rae Jepsen, Last Christmas
Let us consider a life in which repetitions abound: my life, for instance. I never pass the Recoleta cemetery without remembering that my father, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents are buried there, as I shall be; then I remember that I have remembered the same thing many times before; I cannot stroll around the outskirts of my neighborhood in the solitude of night without thinking that night is pleasing to us because, like memory, it erases idle details; I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without reflecting how one loses only what one really never had; each time I cross one of the southside corners, I think of you, Helena; each time the air brings me the scent of eucalyptus I think of Adrogue in my childhood; each time I recall fragment of Heraclitus, "You cannot step into the same river twice," I admire his dialectical skill, for the facility with which we accept the first meaning ("The river is another") covertly imposes upon us the second meaning ("I am another") and gives us the illusion of having invented it. — Jorge Luis Borges, A New Refutation of Time
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march, so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language! Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries, glimpsed and lost to view, will have their time again. — Tom Stoppard's Arcadia